The Invaders Plan (12 page)

So clickety-clack, clank, we toured the long passages, wandered through huge, deserted halls and banged our way down filthy steps.

The dust was irritating to my nose and I sneezed repeatedly. I was getting a little tired – I am not one to do much exercising. "Look," I said, "we're going to be late and the Countess is going to rip our heads off. Surely you've had enough exercise for the day."

"Oh, I'm sorry," he said. "It's all just so interesting. Did you know these ancients had no metal tools? Nobody knows how they fashioned these chambers or even how they got rid of the rubble. We couldn't do it today unless we used disintegrators. Do you realize there are no seams? No joints. All just hollowed out with no decent tools." He clatter-clanked on for a while. "I wonder why the Voltarians thought they had to wipe those ancients out. They couldn't have been much of a menace." Oh, I thought, you and Lombar will never get along. Unless one wipes out the riffraff and excess baggage, one gets an awful lot of problems – problems like we have now. If we let every conquered people live, we would have even more trouble than we've got. Yes, I could imagine an argument between Lombar and Heller. It would end in a dead Heller! I'd better keep them separated if I was ever to get this Heller to Blito-P3!

Praise the Gods, we finally got to the armory. Heller walked on down the passage a ways, examining walls. I stepped up to the armory counterdoor and matched my identoplate to the lock. It swung open.

The old cretin that was custodian of the place came hobbling up to the counter, scowling and hostile. We don't get along. "What are you bothering me for today?" he rasped.

In the Apparatus we have a sign language we do when there's a chance of being overheard. Giving the armory clerk some nonsense cover talk, and with my back to Heller, I signalled for an 800-kilovolt blastick, specifying a dummy load. It was not much trouble for the old cretin – they ship blasticks with a dud cartridge in the chamber to protect the firing electrodes – but you'd thought I was asking for a battleship, the way he frowned and snarled. All he had to do was walk ten feet to a shelf and pick one off it, open it to be sure it had a dummy cartridge in it, hand it over and push my identoplate on the receipt. He did and slammed the upper door in my face. I had also wanted a stungun but his action seemed too final.

Heller was feeling the wall from high up to floor level. "Aha!" he said. "Ground level." It was my opening. I was about to do something that, had he been trained in espionage, he would have been alert to.

"How do you know?" I challenged.

"Half a degree," he said. "Temperature difference. The outside ground is right about here, just below waist level."

"Half a degree?" I scoffed. "Nobody can tell half a degree of temperature with his
hand."

"
Can't you?" he said, seeming much surprised. "The outside, at this time of day, is in sunlight; these walls are about three feet thick at this level. But the conduction of heat up here," and he reached way up, "is half a degree above floor level." I knew he would do it, the fool. He reached for my hand and made me pat the wall up high and then put my palm against a point close to the floor. "It's a matter of training," he said.

Yes, a matter of training. Naturally, I was overbalanced by the way he moved my hand; I stumbled against him. Using my other hand with an expert smoothness, all in a split second, I eased his blastick out of his boot top, shook the dud duplicate out of my sleeve and into the boot. I straightened up and, in doing so, put the live blastick in my breast pocket. He was now "armed" with a dud weapon. The pickpockets of the Apparatus are excellent teachers.

"I couldn't tell the difference," I said, "but then you're the expert at such things. Come along, we're late. The Countess will be furious!"

"All right," he said. "But just a moment. Let me finish this." I had no idea of what he was talking about. He put out his foot and for a moment of heart failure I thought he had detected the weapons switch. But no. He gave the floor a single hard kick. The magnet bars went CLANK! Then he clicked his heels together in the action that makes the metal draw up above the fiber ridges. Praise the Gods, that would be the end of all his clanking.

But we didn't move on. With a gesture that further detained me, he drew out a large sheet of paper and one of those constant-flow engineer pens. He put the paper on a smooth wall spot and began to draw.

His hand was moving so fast it was just a blur. I had never seen an engineer doing a field sketch before; I realized why their pens had to flow such volume. But I was too impatient to be very impressed.

In a few moments, he flipped the paper at me and put the pen away.

I was looking at a complete, fully measured sketch of the above-ground interior of Spiteos! The distances, floor heights and now, even the ground level were marked in! And it was all beautifully done, almost as good as you get from a draftsman after a week of work.

"Give it to your boss," said Heller. "I doubt it's ever been surveyed before. Archeological curiosity."

"Hey," I said, "how can you be so sure of these measurements? You didn't have any tape?"

"Echo-sounding," he said and lifted his foot. "Sound travels at a certain speed. When you make a sound where you are, you can mark the length of time it takes to echo back ..."

"Nobody can measure fractions of seconds that fast," I protested, annoyed.

"Maybe not, but my watch can." Then I realized that while he was sketching, his watch had been close to his ear; it must have recorded and converted every one of those louder skip-pops he'd made.

Marvelous enough. Highly skilled. But it annoyed the Devils out of me. He was clever, true, to map the place. He could have used it to sabotage the fortress or escape. But after all that work, he had simply tossed it at me and told me to give it "to the boss," not only giving himself away but also threatening trouble for myself!

He simply did not belong in this game. He understood nothing whatever about internal politics either.

"Just a minute," he said. And he stepped close to me. "One of those false-skin patches has come loose." He reached to my face and adjusted it. "Whoever put you through the grinder did a pretty good job of it. Does that hurt?" I seethed inwardly. "Nobody put me through the grinder," I lied automatically. "It was an airbus collision."

"First time I ever knew an airbus had knuckles," he laughed. "You ought to enter that vehicle in the planetary fisticuffs tournament." He adjusted another false-skin patch. "Was it your boss?" I might have felt angry but I didn't. The thought of Lombar being handed this sketch of Spiteos came back. What if this Heller took a notion to survey the
below-
ground levels of this secret fortress? The labyrinth which penetrated a mile deep! The fifty thousand more or less falsely imprisoned souls in their cages, the unburied dead! The torture chambers! He'd seen a tiny portion of what lay below but not . . .

With a wave of apprehension I wondered if Heller had noticed the passageway to the
hangar,
the below-ground parking place that held Lombar's personal warship, specially equipped, illegally armed with enough firepower to blow Voltar's defenses into dust.

Had he seen that some of the rooms we had passed through were fully readied
storerooms?
Ledges cleaned and waiting for their priceless "goods"? Empty enough just now, but within a few months . . .

Oh, if Lombar knew I'd been letting Heller survey this, he would not use knuckles!

The pain of another false-skin patch being moved jolted me out of it. "No!" I yelled, "Lombar didn't hit me!" I shoved Heller violently away from me.

"I'm sorry I hurt you. The patches were coming off with your sweat." And he did look contrite. "It's been a long, hot walk." But that wasn't what was making me sweat. It was realizing I'd been criminally negligent in not grasping that he had been surveying and knowing what
that
could bring down upon me.

Heller was so stupid, so without guile. I very much began to doubt I'd get him off this planet before he fouled up utterly. He could get us
both
killed!

And thinking of being killed reminded me we had kept the Countess waiting for over an hour. And you weren't late when you had an instruction appointment with the Countess Krak. Not if you wanted to survive, that is.

I pushed him down the passageway toward the training rooms. Being Heller's handler was enough to reduce life expectancy just from worry alone!

I opened the huge armored door to the training area and started to step inside.

I was hit with a wall of sound!

The first hall is a huge place of platforms and machines, full of shadows and dim recesses.

The hall resounded with a curling, snapping, vicious sound! I tried to back up and get out but Heller was behind me coming in and he closed the door after him.

When sound is too violent, it brings the illusion one is also being blinded and it took a moment to see what lay before me.

An electric whip was making the racket. It was also flashing and leaving its sizzling curls of viciousness imprinted in the air.

Five ugly brutes of the Apparatus, not of Spiteos, dressed in black work uniforms, were twisting and dodging and running this way and that, trying to escape that whip!

Squarely in the middle of the great hall was the Countess Krak! Even as I looked, she brought the roaring whip far back and struck with it again, her jackboot hitting the stone floor like a cannon shot in her forward lunge, her pale hair flying like a thousand lashes.

The whip laid a scorching welt across the face of the nearest. He writhed back. They weren't attacking her, they were trying to escape. They were pleading and blubbering and one of them on the floor was screaming.

It was an odd scene in that the five were not members of her section. They were part of the Apparatus exterior transport teams that brought freight to Spiteos. I looked around in the bad light, trying to understand what was going on. Just inside the escalator ramp, there was an enormous wild animal shipping case. Its front slides were up.

The training areas always stank but I could detect, above the usual smell, the acrid tang of some beast. With a mounting premonition, I looked around hastily. Was there a wild animal in here? Where was it?

I caught a flick of movement not fifteen feet to my right. There in the darkness, beside the instructor's desk, eyes glowed!

It was a lepertige!

Instantly, I tried to get the Hells out of there!

But Heller had closed the door behind us and was standing there, gazing into the room, blocking the way!

I didn't want to show panic. I fingered the blastick I had exchanged. Eight hundred kilovolts might just barely stop a lepertige.

Once my eyes weren't being blinded by the flashing whip, I could see the beast more plainly. It was sitting there, all nine hundred pounds of it, unfettered, perfectly free to demolish everyone in the place. Its black and orange mottled fur was matted. The fangs looked like daggers. There were drops of scarlet blood,
fresh
scarlet blood around its lower jaw. Good Gods, had the Countess just fed somebody to it?

Fascinated with the blood, I eased to the side a trifle, the better to see. Did it have a corpse in front of it? No, no corpse, but there was blood.

It moved and I flinched. But it had only lowered its head. It was licking its front paws! They were bleeding! Then I knew what had happened.

Once in a long time, they capture a lepertige for exhibit. There had been a very few that had been trained to perform in cage acts, the trainer never going inside, for these lepertiges can tear someone's head off with one swipe of a paw. But as a precaution, every trained one I had ever seen in shows had had its claws pulled out. Somebody in the last few days had yanked its claws.

Yes, there was a trail of blood from the open shipping case to the platform. When it had started to move again, the gaping wounds had bled.

It lifted its head. The eyes, as big as dinner plates, are luminous. Some say they can see in pitch black night. It was, thank the Devils, paying no attention to me. It was looking at the chaos that was going on in the middle of the hall.

The worst of the whipping was that the Countess Krak was showing not one slightest, faintest trace of emotion. That was the most chilling thing about her. She was never angry, never sad, she never smiled. And for all the emotion she showed in whipping these exterior Apparatus brutes, she might just as well have been eating dinner.

There was no way to get away from her. When they sought to hide behind the electric machines or boxes she used the whip to drag them back into the open and struck them anew.

Four were down now. Prostrate. The fifth sought refuge in the animal box. The whip snaked around his legs and he was hauled into the open. The lash sizzled again and struck. I saw then that it must be set at lowest intensity – the most vicious setting that hurts the worst. The fellow screamed and tried to curl into himself on the floor.

They were all down now.

The Countess Krak stood up, straight and tall amongst them. No emotion. She was not even breathing hard.

She kicked the foreman of the transport crew in the side. He cringed, scuttling sideways on the floor.

In a totally emotionless voice she said, "When you get back to base, give this message to your boss: tell him that if he ever again sends me a maimed animal, I will train one to find him and kill him and turn it loose. Understand the message. Never maim an animal and expect I will accept it. You are still alive. Take your crew and get out of here!" The foreman booted his roustabouts to their feet and without a single glance at her they fled down the escalator, leaving only charred bits of their uniforms behind them.

The Countess Krak took a pocket call disc from her shabby coat and said something into it. Then she threw the electric whip in the general direction of the whip rack on the other side of the room.