Empire of Two Worlds

Seven

There was a road leading out of Hesha, winding over the horizon between low hills. We made the journey in a Rheattic carriage driven by a light motor that burned some kind of oil. Towed behind us was a trailer carrying enough of it to see us through.

We had a Heshan guide, too, who was supposed to know the way to the Blue Space Valley. He said it was five days’ journey away. I asked him if he knew why we wanted to go there. He said no. I told him it was for the sake of my friend, who was very sick without the special drug he could get there. The guide looked very doleful and told me the concentrated drug could not be lawfully used.

While we travelled I wondered about a society completely swamped by a drug habit. Klittmann was riddled, of course, rotten with it, but only ever by a minority of people. Pop was a killer, raddling the body and distorting the mind. Blue Space, on the other hand, was comparatively mild in its effects. It seemed to induce a calm, fatalistic attitude in its users. The Rheattites had a fetish about beauty and beautiful things, and Blue Space seemed to open up their appreciation of them.

I thought to myself that maybe I would try it some time. A few doses couldn’t hurt me. But I pushed the thought from my mind; how often had I heard people say the same about pop, only to turn up as pathetic wrecks a few years later? Besides, the attractiveness and harmlessness of the Rheattites wasn’t going to stop Bec from putting the squeeze on them if he could. With my background and my associates it would be just as well not to become infected with their way of looking at things.

Only one incident in the outgoing journey is worth mentioning. We were crossing a flat, grassy plain. I heard a faint droning noise over our heads. Looking up, I saw something flying steadily across the sky from east to west.

At first I thought it was a bird, but its wings were stiff and it had a long metallic body. It could only be a machine. I got my repeater ready, but it made no attempt to attack us but merely flew on out of sight. Our guide told us not to worry; it was a Rheattic aircraft.

I wondered what else the green people had that we hadn’t seen.

We left the road just before reaching the valley, which made our guide become suspicious and want to know why. I told him to shut up and lead the way.

The carriage wouldn’t travel well over an unmade surface. We proceeded on foot and climbed up a steep slope, almost a mountain. It was covered in shale and nothing grew on it — something to do with the special qualities of the soil that allowed it alone to grow the Blue Space plants, I imagined. I thought of leaving our guide behind for the last stretch, but he might have lit out and caused us trouble. So I forced him down on his belly and we crawled the last few yards.

The slope ended abruptly and curved away on either side in a sharp ridge. Actually the valley wasn’t a valley at all; it was a crater made by the impact of a meteor some thousands of years before. The slope on the other side was just as steep as the one we had scrambled up, but the depression was more shallow. There was a break in the crater wall, facing north, which I could see clearly and which the Rheattites used as an entrance.

The whole of the crater floor was made into an orchard of small trees with impossibly luxurious, petal-like blossoms, all pink and red. There were no trees remotely like them in Hesha. As soon as we poked our heads over the rim of the crater we got a face full of the perfume from these blossoms that almost lifted us into the air. It was a sickly sweet smell, rising straight up like a convection current.

Tone breathed it in and let out a shuddering, happy sigh. His system, straining with need, had recognised its panacea.

I spent some minutes inspecting the valley closely, especially the entrance. A fair-sized road came through it and branched out all over the crater. Some buildings lined the crater walls; probably places for processing the dope, I thought.

What I took to be barracks were lodged just inside the entrance, on either side of the road. They weren’t very big, but I thought I’d better see what they had on the outside of the crater. Telling Tone and Heshan to stay put, I worked my way round. There were guards posted on the outside of the entrance, that was all. I was in time to see a couple of wagons leave the valley, turning to circle it by a road that left to the south.

According to what we had heard the valley was the producing and disseminating centre for a free public service, like protein was supposed to be (but wasn’t) back on Killibol. There was no need, in Rheattic eyes, for it to be heavily guarded; to my more predatory mind it was ludicrously vulnerable, especially in time of war. If I had been the Rheattic commander I would have stationed an army there.

The place wasn’t even very big. I judged the valley to be three miles in diameter. Bec was going to be pleased.

I slithered back to the others. “Let’s be on our way,” I said. “I think I’ve seen enough.”

“Aren’t we going in?” Tone asked pleadingly.

“Don’t be stupid, Tone,” I told him.

“But you know what I want. Bec promised—”

“You’ll have to wait,” I said bluntly. “We have to report to Bec first. You’ll get your dope when we take the valley.”

Tone stared down at the heady blossoms. His face looked like he was going to cry.

“Come on, move it!” I said harshly. “You’ve held out this long, you can hold out a bit longer.” I turned to go.

We had been speaking Klittmann, but the Heshan had been watching our exchange closely. He stood up uncertainly on the loose shale.

“You come in secret and hide. You are not here for your friend. You mean some harm to Blue Space Valley.”

“Pack it in, will ya?” I glared from one to the other, surreptitiously loosening the strap that held my repeater on my back.

The Heshan backed away. “Let us go openly through the gate. I do not have to hide. I will go and tell them you are here.”

I had to give him a score for guts. He set off down the outer slope at a slithering run. I yelled for him to stop, and reached for my repeater.

But Tone had grabbed my elbow. “I’m sorry, Klein, I can’t go away now. Not when it’s so close. Just lemme—”

He broke off and scrambled over the lip of the crater. I made a grab for him but it was too late.

Cursing, I turned back to the Heshan, who was making good time down the slope now. If he made it to the entrance I would be in trouble. I took careful aim. My repeater hammered loudly. The Heshan took a tumble, the slugs knocking him yards further down the slope, and lay still.

I flung myself to the crater brim, thinking I might still be in time to stop Tone. For a moment or two the sun flashed straight into my eye-shades, dazzling me. Then I saw him. He wasn’t running or clambering but rolling down the inside slope, plunging helter-skelter towards those blossoms that he hoped would give him peace of mind.

Already he was a long way off. I threw a long burst from the repeater after him. The sound echoed across the valley. Then Tone was lost to sight beneath the pink and red blooms and I wasn’t sure if I had hit him.

I quickly discarded the idea of going after him. A lot of people down in the crater might already have heard my repeater going off. There were too many of them. The only thing I could do now was get back to Hesha.

Making the journey back alone was kind of lonely, a little frightening. I’d never been left alone in the middle of an Earth landscape before, seven days from my own people. But I made it without any trouble and gave Bec the news.

“So you think this valley is wide open?” he asked after I’d finished.

“Looks like it. Of course, they might have some way of sealing off the entrance that I didn’t see — a metal door or a rock fall. But I reckon we could be through before they have time to use it. The sloop could get over the wall of the crater in any case.”

“Hmm. Do you think Tone will talk if he’s still alive?”

“It’s hard to say. Not willingly, because he knows we’re going to turn up sooner or later and he doesn’t want us to have a score to settle. But if they hold the stuff out on him he’ll do anything.”

Bec nodded. “It’s a chance we’ll have to take. We have to move fast anyway. Things are happening.”

“Oh?” I had noticed that things didn’t seem quite the same in the village. The atmosphere was more subdued, more quiet.

“Somebody came to the village to say that the Meramites are moving this way. The locals are pretty scared. They’re asking us to fight the Meramites for them.” He chuckled.

“So how do we handle it?” I asked.

“The first thing is to move on Blue Space Valley to give us some property to bargain with. I guess I should really send you to do that job, but I want you to stay here with me. Give Grale and the others the low-down and they can sort it out.”

“It’s liable to get pretty hot around here, boss. After all we don’t know an awful lot about what these Moon guys can do.”

“We’ll play it by ear,” he said, unperturbed.

The sloop left the next day. I didn’t feel nearly so self-confident without it. Bec had given Harmen the option of leaving with the sloop or staying. He elected to stay and Bec conceived a plan for him to help us make contact.

“We might need an amount of bluff here,” he explained. “It won’t do for them to meet the boss straight away. We’ll use Harmen for a front man. You know the old ‘Organisation Routine’? You think you’ve met the top man, then suddenly you find out he’s not the top man and you find yourself faced with somebody he’s dirt to. It makes a good impression.”

He grinned sourly. “Besides, it might save us from getting our heads blown off.”

We prepared a bunker at the opposite end of the village to that which the Meramites were approaching. Bec posted lookouts. He told the villagers he would handle things for them, but that was only to secure their co-operation. I guess they were better off with Bec in charge, though. He told them not to resist but to surrender, sending out envoys to say that the village was in the hands of an alien power not of Rheatt.

He had reckoned without the Meramites’ way of doing things, however. Hesha was only a small village to them, an outpost of a nation they had already conquered, and they believed in a policy of punishment-in-advance. From the hillside we watched the approach of the Meramite column, sending up a cloud of dust. The Meramites were riding on wheeled platforms, circular in shape, carrying about twenty men apiece. They stopped not far outside the village and we saw our messengers deliver their news. We saw them slaughter those messengers and then roll forward mercilessly.

“Get to the bunker,” Bec said in clipped tones. “This isn’t going to be so easy.”

A withering fire swept the village, starting fires here and there. The Meramite soldiery carried lance-like poles that fired gouts of hot metal. You could just about see them when they shot from the tip of the lance, streaking out like a line of light. They didn’t seem to be very accurate, but they didn’t have to be in the circumstances.

We made it to the bunker through clouds of smoke. It was a well-set-up position at the end of the main street, backed up by solid brick buildings. Its upper parts, jutting up above the road, had a step-like construction, one block being set more forward than the other, and into these two blocks we had set the Jains. The arrangement gave absolute command of the street ahead of us and good control over the environs, each gun being able to cover the other from attack from any side.

Bec thrust guns into the hands of Harmen and two Heshans we had trained to use repeaters. We nestled down behind the Jains, peering through the firing slits in their shields.

“Here they come!” yelled Bec. “Let ’em have it!”

The Meramite carrier platforms appeared at the other end of the wide street. We saw big grey figures, considerably bigger than the Rheattites, arrogantly directing their glowing lances this way and that, indulging in the arbitrary destruction we later came to expect of them.

We let them get well into the street before letting loose. They scarcely knew what had hit them. Deadly though their hot-lead poles were, they just weren’t in the same class as a pair of good Jains, the most effective, withering machine-guns ever designed. An almost solid sheet of lead ripped down the length of the street, the racket reverberating between the walls of the houses with a noise like ten thousand rivet-guns. We put in a mixture of explosive and spin-bullets, too. You can do a variety of such mixtures on a Jain gun, say one explosive, one spin to every ten straight. If a spin-bullet hits you it more or less turns you into a jelly.

Our blast lasted only seconds. We had to watch the ammo. But the Meramites were wiped out, their riding platforms leaning crazily.

“That’ll show them they’re up against something,” Bec grinned.

Three times they tried to send men down the street, with the same result. We were beginning to conclude that the Meramites weren’t too bright, or else weren’t very skilled in war. By now the village was blazing merrily. We could hear screams and the zip-zip of the hot-lead poles. I wondered if they treated every village this way or if it was only us they were after.

A few times they tried to infiltrate in from the sides but couldn’t get at us until our ammunition ran out, and we had enough to last for a while. However, this wasn’t quite as Bec had planned it, as far as I knew. We were bound to run out eventually.

I looked across at him. “Still planning on contact?”

“Sure.”

“Mind telling me how?”

Bec’s goggles scanned the street. “Leave it for a while. They’ll start thinking things out themselves pretty soon.”

This time he was right. There was another movement at the far end of the street. A tall, broad Meramite was waving a banner.

We held our fire as he strode nearer with an odd, jerky gait. He held the banner aloft on a tall pole. It depicted a man hanging upside down, suspended by his feet.

“It is a flag of truce,” one of the Heshans told us. “They want to talk.”

“Good,” said Bec. He climbed down from his Jain and relieved the Heshan of his repeater. “Get out there and tell him a representative of the Great Powers of Klittmann will speak to one of equal rank, if such an officer will present himself.”

“Hey, Bec,” I said, speaking Klittmann. “You know what they did to the last Heshans we sent out.”

“Sure, but it’s different now. Out you go, man.”

He gave the Heshan a hefty shove to help him on his way. The poor guy was so scared he was shaking, but he climbed out and bravely walked towards the Meramite with the banner.

The two of them looked strange together. Rheattites tended to be slightly taller than we are, but the invaders from the Moon were taller still. They averaged seven to eight foot. But they looked kind of lank and weak, thyroidal. They made me wonder how they managed to stand up. Later I found it wasn’t so easy for them.

Their skins were slate-grey and so were their uniforms. Their broad chests were crisscrossed with black straps that made them look sinister and powerful. The truce-maker didn’t kill our Heshan, as I had half-expected, but listened while the green-skinned man, staring up at him like a child, delivered our message. Nodding curtly, he turned and walked away.

Minutes later the banner-bearer returned with a companion who strode haughtily before him, walking unconcernedly over the bodies of his dead soldiers. Unlike the banner-bearer, he wore a helmet with designs on it. I couldn’t make out from this distance. Stopping some yards in front of our foremost Jain, he stood with legs astride, thumbs hooked in a waist-belt.

Meanwhile the Heshan had thankfully returned to the bunker. “Your turn now, Harmen,” Bec said, a hint of amusement in his voice. “Get out there and make yourself look like somebody big. Tell him we represent the powers of Klittmann, another world. Say we have no quarrel with the men of Merame and for that reason have not opposed their conquest of Rheatt. Say we expect the same respect from them. Then tell him that if he is merely a subordinate officer he must stay outside and talk to you, but if he is of exalted rank and a leader of his people he may come inside the bunker and speak to me. Make it clear that I won’t make agreements with an underling.”

The alchemist looked at him for long, brooding moments, his long hair hanging lankly down his shoulders. If nothing else, I thought, he would make a strong impression on the Meramites by his appearance alone.

But he had been brought a long way against his will. He had been involved in a lot of things he didn’t want to be involved in, and now Bec was making him carry out negotiations for him. He didn’t like it much.

“Am I your messenger boy?” he said. “Your mummer?”

“You’re not in a position to make choices,” Bec stated. “Get up there and do what I say.” He paused. “Maybe you are in a position to make choices, at that. See if you can make your own private deal with the Meramites. Maybe they’ll give you a big laboratory. But remember, Harmen: I’ve promised you a big laboratory, too. A real big one. You know what the game is, so serve my purpose.”

Bec said all this in a flat, disinterested tone. He was obviously referring to private conversations the two had held. Reluctantly the alk heaved himself up out of the bunker.

I watched him talking to the Meramite. The other was clearly taken aback by his appearance. The eye-shades probably convinced him that we were, indeed, something new and alien. Eventually Harmen pointed back to the bunker, addressing a question in a loud, gruff voice. The Meramite raised his voice, also, and a disdainful smile passed fleetingly across his lips. After a short altercation he followed Harmen towards the bunker.

Bec signalled me to stay up with the nearside Jain, which put me sitting up over his head from where he sat in a padded chair in the recesses of the bunker. The Meramite bent his head and almost doubled up to enter. I heard funny little chinking sounds as he came on by me, then I couldn’t see him any more. I continued to keep a look-out, listening to the conversation going on behind me.

The Meramite spoke Rheattic, but in a clipped, supercilious accent and in a voice that was incongruously high-pitched for someone of his size. All the Meramites, I found later, had that high-pitched, child’s voice.

“I am Commander of the Rheattic Border Expeditionary Force,” he said. “I am here to speak with your leader.”

There was a scraping noise as the Heshans drew up a bench for him to sit on. “My name is Becmath,” Bec drawled. “Sit down.”

The other did so. “You claim to represent a foreign power. Not on Earth?”

“No.”

“Or Merame?”

“No.”

“Mars, then? Venus? I have never heard of any journeying from those worlds.”

“We’re not from there either. We’re not from any world you can see in the sky. But enough of that. My quarrel with you is that you have destroyed this village, which I had taken for my own.”

“When your messenger first came to us,” the other replied, “we had taken his claim to be a lie, a desperate subterfuge, and so we meted out heavier punishment than we might otherwise have done. We have reasons not to make our destruction of the country too complete, but we must subjugate. Now that we have seen the effects of your weapons, however, as well as your un-Rheattic appearance…. It is very dark in here, yet you cover your eyes. Light hurts you, perhaps?”

“How would you like to have such weapons?” Bec said, ignoring the last question.

“Oh, we will. We will.”

The Meramite’s answer came as a surprise. I heard a choking gasp. Turning round, I saw the visitor sitting across from me, his knees drawn up, his thin lips bunched up in a smile that seemed to distort his flat, gigantic face. It was a smile of complacent triumph. Bec, Harmen and the two Heshans were folding up and falling to the floor.

At the same time something sharp thrilled in my nostrils and throat. My nerves tingled. I tried to move, but couldn’t. The Meramite had released some sort of gas into the bunker, a gas which left him unaffected.

My last thought as I passed out was that we had been outmanoeuvred. The Meramites knew some angles, too. We had been taken.