Return To Kaldak

Chapter 14

Blade's day was so normal that he began to hope he'd guessed right. Baliza wanted the whole night's episode swept under the rug. He certainly would have, in her place.

He was coming off the firing range when Kabo stopped him. «Voros, the School Commander wants you in his quarters.» Kabo both looked and sounded unhappy.

«Any idea what he wants?»

Kabo looked even more unhappy. «Yes, but-well, will you forgive me if I say I don't want to get my dong caught in the gears along with yours?»

Blade grinned. «If it's about how I spent last night-or rather, didn't spend part of it, I don't blame you. Don't worry. The ax is still a long way from my neck. It shouldn't be too hard to jump aside.»

Kabo made a gesture for averting bad luck. «I hope you're right.»

So did Blade. He wasn't as optimistic as he'd tried to sound as he walked to the Commander's quarters. If Baliza was really going to make a fuss, he would need fast footwork and a very nimble tongue.

The School Commander was sitting behind his desk, wearing dusty fatigues and a bad-tempered expression. Blade saluted.

«Good evening, sir.»

«What's good about it? Never mind. You've put your foot in it. Now tell me how you're going to get it out.»

The explanation was brief and to the point. Baliza was charging him with attempted rape. He'd fled after she threatened to scream, but-

«What did you say, Voros?»

«Nothing, sir.» Or at least nothing printable.

The commander went on. Actual rape meant mandatory truth-seeing and confinement in the meantime. Attempted rape meant a choice of confinement or truth-seeing.

«If I was in your position, I'd go under the truthseer. I won't call Baliza a liar, but I'd like to get your story, too. Then it's possible we might get Baliza under the truth-seer as well. Not likely-she's the Sky Master's daughter, even if she did take Bairam's side when he was thrown off the Council. However, Geyrna has forgiven her, so no one dares not listen to her even if they don't like her. A lot don't like her, though, and if your story doesn't support hers-«

The Commander rambled on for a while, repeating things Blade understood the first time. He would have been impatient, but obviously the Commander was trying to talk out his own nervousness over the situation.

Blade saw two choices. He could give his oath to go under the truth-seer, then do it within a day or two at most. Or he could go to prison, and wait in a cell for his trial. If he did the second, he wouldn't be able to leave Kaldak without escaping from prison. That would attract attention, to say the least. Also, he might wind up under the truth-seer anyway-and he had to avoid that at all costs.

The Dimension X secret really had been at stake last night, but he hadn't realized it. Oh, well, hindsight was always twenty-twenty. What to do now?

Swear an oath to go under the truth-seer, then run. Kaldak was now much too hot to hold him.

But-run where?

He would be safe enough in the wilderness which still covered much of this Dimension. Uncomfortable, but safe. He would be slightly more comfortable but somewhat less safe among the Tribes, who were in any case a long way off. The same thing went for Monitor Bekror and his estate. The Monitor was surly and independent-minded toward Kaldak. He still might not be ready to hide a fugitive accused by the Sky Master's own daughter.

That left Doimar. The border wasn't far, nor was it that heavily patrolled-at least on the Kaldakan side. If Blade pretended to be a defector from Kaldak, he might learn a few of Doimar's secrets. He might not learn enough to wreck Doimar's war plans, as he had last time. He might not even learn enough to win back his position in Kaldak-which didn't really matter, since he wasn't going to be in this Dimension forever. He could still leave the information in safe hands before he returned Home.

In Doimar, he would be out of reach of Baliza and the truth-seers. The rival city had no such devices. They were said to have telepaths, but that was only a rumor and Blade was willing to take his chances with them. He'd resisted the telepathy of the Wizard of Rentoro, whose mind had been powerful enough to transport him from Renaissance Italy into Dimension X.

Blade became aware that the School Commander was looking expectantly at him.

«Well?»

«Sorry, sir. I'll go under the truth-seer.»

«And you give your word of honor not to leave Kaldak before then?»

«Yes, sir.» He'd told larger lies to protect smaller secrets.

«Very good. Dismissed-and good luck.»

«Thank you, sir.»

Shortly after midnight, Blade left Kaldak. A week later, he was across the border into Doimar.

A week after that, he was in prison in a research laboratory far from the city, waiting to be used as an experimental subject.

Blade stared at the wall and tried to shut the moans of the dying woman in the far corner of the cell out of his mind.

The cracks on the wall stared back.

This was one of the times when the cracks took the shape of a gigantic rabbit with a single huge eye set between its ears. If Blade concentrated on this rabbit long enough, it began to seem about to say something to him.

If he'd thought it would tell him how to get out of here, he would have listened. However, it hadn't said anything yet. He'd learned more from the surly guards and even from the woman, although she'd been half-mad with pain and fever the first day she was in the cell with Blade.

After a while Blade knelt beside the woman's sodden pallet and sponged her off again. She looked like a concentration camp victim, her naked body gaunt and covered with the oozing sores of the fever with which she'd been infected.

When he'd finished sponging her, Blade dropped the foul-smelling cloth into the waste can and held a cup of water to her lips. She swallowed it, more by reflex than anything else, and gripped Blade's free hand in both of hers. She still had the strength to grip painfully hard. Blade put down the cup and let her hold on until suddenly she was slimy with sweat again. The attack of fever was breaking.

At last the woman turned on her side with a little whimper and fell peacefully asleep. Blade sat cross-legged beside the pallet and gritted his teeth. He didn't know the woman's name, where she came from or why she'd been sent here. She might even be a criminal. He still knew that if he had to go on much longer watching her die by inches, he was going to go berserk. He would start tearing guards apart with his bare hands, killing them until he was killed himself.

That would be foolish, of course.

The guards were an unpleasant lot, but hardly essential to Doimar's war effort. He could kill a hundred of them without setting back Doimar's plan of conquest by a single day. Better to wait until he could take out a few of the key Seekers-those who made up Doimar's scientific elite.

However, even if he killed Seekers, he would die here in Doimar. What he'd learned would die with him. He might gain Kaldak some time, but if they didn't learn the danger they faced, would they be able to put it to good use?

Blade doubted it. Kaldak was nearly a democracy; Doimar was nearly a dictatorship. A democracy can catch up with a dictatorship in war if it has the time. If Blade's theory about Doimar's plans was correct, Kaldak wouldn't have the time.

In plain English, the Doimari were planning to bombard Kaldak with ballistic missiles, carrying warheads loaded with deadly germs. Possibly other things as well (nerve gas, nuclear weapons, radioactive dust?), but germs for certain.

The Doimari wouldn't have been at all happy to find out how easily Blade learned their secret. The night they brought him to the research complex, he'd seen an unmistakable gantry crane on the horizon. He'd heard the equally unmistakable sound of large rockets being fired several times. (And now he understood the secret of the Doimari base he'd surprised. It was a ranging and tracking station for the missiles; the craters around it were from test missiles or warheads.)

Blade had been brought to this cell in the research complex to act as a guinea pig in the test for new strains of deadly germs. He found this out from the guards who'd brought the woman in and had wondered out loud if she would infect him.

«Probably,» said one. «Does it matter?»

«I don't bet either way. I've heard they're ready with Culture S, so they may not need any more tests.»

«Maybe. But this one-he looks like a fighter. Suppose they want to find out how long he can handle a weapon with S in him? That's something could mean your arse and mine when the Day comes.»

«All right. But we'd better shout the first thing he shows any sores.»

«He'll shout loud enough. You ever heard anyone in first stage?»

«No.»

«You don't want to, either.»

The guards went out, and the last piece of the Doimari puzzle fell into place for Blade.

Although Blade's deductions would have surprised the Doimari, they wouldn't have surprised J. He knew that Blade was an exceptionally keen observer, even by the standards of a profession whose members had to be rather sharper than the average if they were to live long enough to draw their pensions or even justify much of their not too generous salaries. Blade treasured a remark passed on to him by a friend who'd overheard J say, «Richard is in a class by himself awake. He's fairly good sound asleep. And frankly, I wouldn't care to reveal any secrets in the same room as his corpse.»

Unfortunately the Doimari weren't being hospitable to «defectors» from Kaldak. Of course Blade couldn't have known that. He'd had to run, and even though getting captured and put into the Doimari research complex hadn't kept him from figuring out what they were up to, it would probably keep him from doing any vital damage. It would almost certainly keep him from getting a warning to Kaldak. That could make his trip just as useless as if he'd been shot dead the minute he stepped across the frontier!

Blade went over to his own pallet and lay down on it. It looked as if this trip to Dimension X was going to end in the same sort of confusion and frustration as it began. The only trouble was, he was probably going to end along with it.

It was time to get his own sleep, while the woman was between bouts of fever. It seemed to help her if he was sitting beside her. If he could do nothing else, he could try to see she didn't die alone. There were worse ways of spending his own last days.

Blade was awakened by the cell door crashing open. Four guards with drawn pistols tramped in. The pistols weren't lasers but heavy revolvers, with as much stopping power as a Home Dimension Magnum. They could disable a man even if they didn't hit him in a vital spot.

«Up!» snapped one guard. Blade rose swiftly. He wanted to appear frightened and submissive, to make the guards less alert.

Another guard bent over the dying woman and shook his head. «She won't last the day.» He drew his revolver and shot the woman in the head. At least it was a more merciful death than being left alone in her last delirium.

The four guards made a square around Blade and marched into the corridor. Blade realized they were probably taking him somewhere else to experiment on him. Down the whitewashed corridor to an elevator, up what seemed like three or four floors, then out into another corridor. This one was brightly lit and hummed with activity behind closed doors of polished metal. It reminded Blade rather of the main corridor in the Project's Complex One.

At the end of the corridor a door led out onto a metal-railed balcony. Beyond the railing a cliff dropped off more than three hundred feet, to the plain where the missile station lay. Blade recognized the gantry, saw assembly buildings, radar stations, and warehouses, as well as humped shapes which might be blockhouses or fuel tanks. He also saw brightly polished construction robots at work on a number of what looked like missile silos.

In daylight, it was easy to see this wasn't just a research facility. It was also Doimar's main missile base. When the «Day» came, the germ warheads would be launched from those silos. And a fat lot of good this knowledge was likely to do Richard Blade!

The guards hustled Blade along the terrace toward the door at the far end. As they did, he thought he heard someone calling his name, so faint and far off he couldn't be sure he'd even heard anything aloud. Who would be calling him here? Nobody. He decided he was imagining things. Then as they reached the door the call came again.

This time Blade was sure he'd heard it, but not aloud. He'd heard it in his mind.

Who in this Dimension would be calling him mentally, even if they knew his name?

Cheeky?

Blade nearly said it out loud. Then he nearly said «Impossible,» normally an obscene word in his vocabulary. Instead he thought his name as strongly as he could, while also holding a mental image of himself as he'd been in Home Dimension.

The reply came. It was a reply, no mistake about it. But it still might, just might, be a Doimari telepath.

Cheeky.

He thought the feather-monkey's name just as hard as his own, and projected Cheeky's image as clearly as he'd projected his own. Two of the guards looked at him suspiciously while the other two fumbled with the door.

Then suddenly pandemonium broke loose. An explosion roared above. Blade heard glass smash and saw smoke gush out of a window carved in the cliff two stories above the terrace. Then a small shape sailed out the window.

Even at a distance Blade recognized Cheeky. He held his breath as the feather-monkey slid a good way down the cliff. Even Cheeky might not be able to find a firm grip, and it would be just too much to lose him now!

But Cheeky's fingers and toes were as sure as ever. He stopped his slide and began to crawl like a fly along the face of the cliff toward the terrace.

One of the guards followed Blade's eyes and saw Cheeky. He raised his pistol and sighted on the feather-monkey. To do this he had to turn his back on Blade. He seemed confident that the other three guards were enough to keep Blade out of trouble.

That was his last mistake. As his finger tightened on the trigger, Blade caught him by the hair with one hand and chopped him across the throat with the other. The guard died choking and Blade caught his pistol as it dropped from limp fingers. Blade put his back against the wall and covered the other three guards.

A moment later Cheeky reached the railing, balanced on it, then made a flying leap clear across the terrace onto Blade's shoulder. He was yeeping hysterically with joy and excitement. His thoughts were so jumbled that Blade didn't even try to follow them.

He also didn't try to understand how this miracle of Cheeky's return had come about. For now, it was enough that Cheeky was back.