A Circus of Hells df-2 Read online

  “In short,” Flandry concluded, “as the proverb phrases it, he may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”

  He stubbed out the cigarette with a violent gesture and turned back to the girl, more in search of forgetfulness than anything else.

  Strangely, in view of the fellow-feeling she had just shown him, she did not respond. Her hands fended him off. The blue glance was troubled upon his. “Please, Nicky. I want to think…about what you’ve told me.”

  He respected her wish and relaxed in his seat, crossing shank over knee. “I daresay I can contain myself for a bit.” The sight of her mildened the harshness that had risen in him. He chuckled. “Be warned, it won’t be a long bit. You’re too delectable.”

  Her mouth twitched, but not in any smile. “I never realized such things mattered to you,” she said uncertainly.

  Having been raised to consider idealism gauche, he shrugged. “They’d better. I live in the Terran Empire.”

  “But if—” She leaned forward. “Do you seriously believe, Nicky, Wayland can make that big a difference?”

  “I like to believe it. Why do you ask? I can’t well imagine you giving a rusty horntoot about future generations.”

  “That’s what I mean. Suppose…Nicky, suppose, oh, something happens so Leon doesn’t get to exploit Wayland. So nobody does. How’d that affect us—you and me?”

  “Depends on our lifespans, I’d guess, among other items. Maybe we’d see no change. Or maybe, twenty-thirty years hence, we’d see the Empire retreat the way I was talking about.”

  “But that wouldn’t mean its end!”

  “No, no. Not at once. We could doubtless finish our lives in the style to which we want to become accustomed.” Flandry considered. “Or could we? Political repercussions at home…unrest leading to upheaval…well, I don’t know.”

  “We could always find ourselves a safe place. A nice offside colony planet—not so offside it’s primitive, but—”

  “Yes, probably.” Flandry scowled. “I don’t understand what’s gnawing you. We’ll report to Ammon and that will finish our part. Remember, he’s holding the rest of our pay.”

  She nodded. For a space they were both silent. The stars in the viewscreen made an aureole behind her gold head.

  Then craftiness came upon her, and she smiled and murmured: “It wouldn’t make any difference, would it, if somebody else on Irumclaw—somebody besides Leon—got Wayland. Would it?”

  “I guess not, if you mean one of his brother entrepreneurs.” Flandry’s unease waxed. “What’re you thinking of, wench? Trying to rake in more for yourself, by passing the secret on to a competitor? I wouldn’t recommend that. Bloody dripping dangerous.”

  “You—”

  “Emphatically not! I’ll squirrel away my money, and for the rest of my Irumclaw tour, you won’t believe what a good boy I’ll be. No more Old Town junkets whatsoever; wholesome on-base recreation and study of naval manuals. Fortunately, my Irumclaw tour is nearly done.”

  Flandry captured her hands in his. “I won’t even risk seeing you,” he declared. “Nor should you take any avoidable chances. The universe would be too poor without you.”

  Her lips pinched together. “If that’s how you feel—”

  “It is.” Flandry leered. “Fortunately, we’ve days and days before we arrive. Let’s use them, hm-m-m?”

  Her eyes dropped, and rose, and she was on his lap embracing him, warm, soft, smiling, pupils wide between the long lashes, and “Hm-m-m indeed,” she crooned.

  Thunder ended a dream. Nothingness.

  He woke, and wished he hadn’t. Someone had scooped out his skull to make room for the boat’s nuclear generator.

  No…He tried to roll over, and couldn’t.

  When he groaned, a hand lifted his head. Cool wetness touched his mouth. “Drink this,” Djana’s voice told him from far away.

  He got down a couple of tablets with the water, and could look around him. She stood by the bunk, staring down. As the stimpills took hold and the pain receded, her image grew less blurred, until he could identify the hardness that sat on her face. Craning his neck, he made out that he lay on his back with wrists and ankles wired—securely—to the bunkframe.

  “Feel better?” Her tone was flat.

  “I assume you gave me a jolt from your stun gun after I feel asleep,” he succeeded in croaking.

  “I’m sorry, Nicky.” Did her shell crack the tiniest bit, for that tiniest instant?

  “What’s the reason?”

  She told him about Rax, ending: “We’re already bound for the rendezvous. If I figured right, remembering what you taught me, it’s about forty or fifty light-years; and I set the pilot for top cruising hyperspeed, the way you said I ought to.”

  He was too groggy for the loss of his fortune to seem more than academic. But dismay struck through him like a blunt nail. “Four or five days! With me trussed up?”

  “I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I don’t dare give you a chance to grab me or—or anything—” She hesitated. “I’ll take care of you as best I can. Nothing personal in this. You know? It’s that million credits.”

  “What makes you think your unknown friends will honor their end of the deal?”

  “If Wayland’s what you say, a megacredit’s going to be a microbe to them. And I can keep on being useful till I leave them.” All at once, it was as if a sword spoke: “That payment will make me my own.”

  Flandry surrendered to his physical misery.

  Which passed. But was followed by the miseries of confinement. He couldn’t do most isometric exercises. The wires would have cut him. A few were possible; and he spent hours flexing what muscles he was able to; and Djana was fairly good about massaging him. Nonetheless he ached and tingled.

  Djana also kept her promise to give him a nurse’s attentions. Hers weren’t the best, for lack of training and equipment, but they served. And she read to him by the hour, over the intercom, from the bookreels he had along. She even offered to make love to him. On the third day he accepted.

  Otherwise little passed between them: the constraints were too many for conversation. They spent most of their time separately, toughing it out. Once he was over the initial shock and had disciplined himself, Flandry didn’t do badly at first. While no academician, he had many experiences, ideas, and stray pieces of information to play with. Toward the end, though, environmental impoverishment got to him and each hour became a desert century.

  When at last the detectors buzzed, he had to struggle out of semi-delirium to recognize what the noise was. When the outercom boomed with words, he blubbered for joy.

  But when hypervelocities were matched and phasing in was completed and airlocks were joined and the other crew came aboard, Djana screamed.

  Chapter XI

  The Merseians treated him correctly if coolly. He was unbound, conducted aboard their destroyer, checked by a physician experienced in dealing with foreign species, given a chance to clean and bestir himself. His effects were returned, with the natural exception of weapons. A cubbyhole was found and curtained off for him and the girl. Food was brought them, and the toilet facilities down the passage were explained for her benefit. A guard was posted, but committed no molestation. Prisoners could scarcely have been vouchsafed more on this class of warcraft; and the time in space would not be long.

  Djana kept keening. “I thought they were human, I thought they were human, only an-an-another damn gang—” She clung to him. “What’ll they do with us?”

  “I can’t say,” he replied with no measurable sympathy, “except that I don’t imagine they care to have us take home our story.”

  A story of an intelligence ring on Irumclaw, headed by that Rax—whose planet of origin is doubtless in the Roidhunate, not the Empire—and probably staffed by members of the local syndicates. Not to mention the fact that apparently there is a Merseian base in the wilderness, this close to our borders. A crawling went along his spine. Then too, when word ge
ts back to their headquarters, somebody may well want a personal interview with me.

  The destroyer grappled the spaceboat alongside and started off. Flandry tried to engage his guard in conversation, but the latter had orders to refrain. The one who brought dinner did agree to convey a request for him. Flandry was surprised when it was granted: that he might observe approach and landing. Though why not? To repeat, they won’t return me to blab what I’ve seen.

  Obviously the destination coordinates that Rax had given Djana meant the boat would be on a course bringing her within detection range of a picket ship; and any such wouldn’t go far from the base. Flandry got his summons in two or three hours. He left Djana knotted around her wretchedness—serves her right, the stupid slut!—and preceded his armed guide forward.

  The layout resembled that of a human vessel. Details varied, to allow for variations in size, shape, language, and culture. Yet it was the same enclosing metal narrowness, the same drone and vibration, the same warm oily-smelling gusts from ventilator grilles, the same duties to perform.

  But the crew were big, green-skinned, hairless, spined and tailed. Their outfits were black, of foreign cut and drape, belts holding war knives. They practiced rituals and deferences—a gesture, a word, a stepping aside—with the smoothness of centuried tradition. The glimpses of something personal, a picture or souvenir, showed a taste more austere and abstract than was likely in a human spacehand. The body odors that filled this crowded air were sharper and, somehow, drier than man’s. The dark eyes that followed him had no whites.

  Broch—approximately, Second Mate—Tryntaf the Tall greeted him in the chartroom. “You are entitled to the courtesies, Lieutenant. True, you are under arrest for violation of ensovereigned space; but our realms are not at war.”

  “I thank the broch,” Flandry said in his best Eriau, complete with salute of gratitude. He refrained from adding that, among other provisions, the Covenant of Alfzar enjoined both powers from claiming territory in the buffer zone. Surely here, as on Starkad and elsewhere, a “mutual assistance pact” had been negotiated with an amenable, or cowed, community of autochthons.

  He was more interested in what he saw. Belike he looked on his deathplace.

  The viewport displayed the usual stars, so many as to be chaos to the untrained perception. Flandry had learned the tricks—strain out the less bright through your lashes; find your everywhere-visible markers, like the Magellanic Clouds; estimate by its magnitude the distance of the nearest giant, Betelgeuse. He soon found that he didn’t need them for a guess at where he was. Early in the game he’d gotten Djana to recite those coordinates for him and stored them in his memory; and the sun disc he saw was of a type uncommon enough, compared to the red dwarf majority, that only one or two would exist in any given neighborhood.

  The star was, in fact, akin to Mimir—somewhat less massive and radiant, but of the same furious whiteness, with the same boiling spots and leaping prominences. It must be a great deal older, though, for it had no surrounding nebulosity. At its distance, it showed about a third again the angular diameter of Sol seen from Terra.

  “F5,” Tryntaf said, “mass 1.34, luminosity 3.06, radius 1.25.” The standard to which he referred was, in reality, his home sun, Koiych; but Flandry recalculated the values in Solar terms with drilled-in ease. “We call it Siekh. The planet we are bound for we call Talwin.”

  “Ah.” The man nodded. “And what more heroes of your Civil Wars have you honored?”

  Tryntaf threw him a sharp glance. Damn, I forgot again, he thought. Always make the opposition underestimate you. “I am surprised at your knowledge of our history before the Roidhunate, Lieutenant,” the Merseian said. “But then, considering that our pickets were ordered to watch for a Terran scout, the pilot must be of special interest.”

  “Oh, well,” Flandry said modestly.

  “To answer your question, few bodies here are worth naming. Swarms of asteroids, yes, but just four true planets, the smallest believed to be a mere escaped satellite. Orbits are wildly skewed and eccentric. Our astronomers theorize that early in the life of this system, another star passed through, disrupting the normal configuration.”

  Flandry studied the world growing before him. The ship had switched from hyperdrive to sublight under gravs—so few KPS as to support the idea of many large meteoroids. (They posed no hazard to a vessel which could detect them in plenty of time to dodge, or could simply let them bounce off a forcefield; but they would jeopardize the career of a skipper who thus inelegantly wasted power.) Talwin’s crescent, blinding white, blurred along the edges, indicated that, like Venus, it was entirely clouded over. But it was not altogether featureless; spots and bands of red could be seen.

  “Looks none too promising,” he remarked. “Aren’t we almighty close to the sun?”

  “The planet is,” Tryntaf said. “It is late summer—everywhere; there is hardly any axial tilt—and temperatures remain fierce. Dress lightly before you disembark, Lieutenant! At periastron, Talwin comes within 0.87 astronomical units of Siekh; but apastron is at a full 2.62 a.u.”

  Flandry whistled. “That’s as eccentric as I can remember ever hearing of in a planet, if not more. Uh…about one-half, right?” He saw a chance to appear less than a genius. “How can you survive? I mean, a good big axial tilt would protect one hemisphere, at least, from the worst effects of orbital extremes. But this ball, well, any life it may have has got to be unlike yours or mine.”

  “Wrong,” was Tryntafs foreseeable reply. “Atmosphere and hydrosphere moderate the climate to a degree; likewise location. Those markings you see are of biological origin, spores carried into the uppermost air. Photosynthesis maintains a breathable oxynitrogen mixture.”

  “Uh-h-h…diseases?” No, wait, now you’re acting too stupid. True, what’s safe for a Merseian isn’t necessarily so for a man. We may have extraordinarily similar biochemistries, but still, we’ve fewer bugs in common that are dangerous to us than we have with our respective domestic animals. By the same token, though, a world as different as Talwin isn’t going to breed anything that’ll affect us…at least, nothing that’ll produce any syndrome modern medicine can’t easily slap down. Tryntaf knows I know that much. The thought had flashed through Flandry in part of a second. “I mean allergens and other poisons.”

  “Some. They cause no serious trouble. The bioform is basically akin to ours, L-amino proteins in water solution. Deviations are frequent, of course. But you or I could survive awhile on native foods, if we chose them with care. Over an extended period we would need dietary supplements. They have been compounded for emergency use.”

  Flandry decided that Tryntaf lacked any sense of humor. Most Merseians had one, sometimes gusty, sometimes cruel, often incomprehensible to men. He had in his turn baffled various of them when he visited their planet; even after he put a joke into their equivalents, they did not see why it should be funny that one diner said, “Bon appétit” and the other said, “Ginsberg.”

  Sure. They differ, same as us. My life could depend on the personality of the commandant down there. Will I be able to recognize any chance he might give me?

  He sought to probe his companion, but was soon left alone on grounds of work to do, except for the close-mouthed rating who tail-sat by the door.

  Watching the view took his mind partly off his troubles. He could pick up visual clues that a layman would be blind to, identify what they represented, and conclude what the larger pattern must be.

  Talwin had no moon—maybe once, but not after the invader star had virtually wrecked this system. Flandry did see two relay satellites glint, in positions indicating they belonged to a synchronous triad. If the Merseians had installed no more than that, they had a barebones base here. It was what you’d expect at the end of this long a communications line: a watchpost, a depot, a first-stage receiving station for reports from border-planet agents like Rax.

  Aside from their boss, those latter wouldn’t have been told Siekh’s coordinat
es, or of its very existence. They’d have courier torpedoes stashed away in the hinterland, target preset and clues to the target removed. Given elementary precautions, no Imperial loyalist was likely to observe the departure of one. Replenishment would be more of a problem, dependent on smuggling, but not overly difficult when the Terran service was undermanned and lax. Conveyance of fresh orders to the agents was no problem at all; who noticed what mail or what visitors drifted into Rax’s dope shop?

  The value of Talwin was obvious. Besides surveillance, it allowed closer contact with spies than would otherwise be possible. Flandry wondered if his own corps ran an analogous operation out Roidhunate way. Probably not. The Merseians were too vigilant, the human government too inert, its wealthier citizens too opposed to pungling up the cost of positive action.

  Flandry shook himself, as if physically to cast off apprehension and melancholy, and concentrated on what he saw.

  Clearances given and path computed, the destroyer dropped in a spiral that took her around the planet. Presumably her track was designed to avoid storms. Cooler air, moving equatorward from the poles, must turn summer into a “monsoon” season. Considering input energy, atmospheric pressure (which Tryntaf had mentioned was twenty percent greater than Terran), and rotation period (a shade over eighteen hours, he had said), weather surely got more violent here than ever at Home; and a long, thin, massive object like a destroyer was more vulnerable to wind than you might think.

  Water vapor rose high before condensing into clouds. Passing over dayside below those upper layers, Flandry got a broad view.

  A trifle smaller (equatorial diameter 0.97) and less dense than Terra, Talwin in this era had but a single continent. Roughly wedge-shaped, it reached from the north-pole area with its narrow end almost on the equator. Otherwise the land consisted of islands. While multitudinous, in the main they were thinly scattered.

  Flandry guessed that the formation and melting of huge icecaps in the course of the twice-Terran year disturbed isostatic balance. Likewise, the flooding and great rainstorms of summer, the freezing of winter, would speed erosion and hence the redistribution of mass. Tectony must proceed at a furious rate; earthquake, vulcanism, the sinking of old land and the rising of new, must be geologically common occurrences.