Buck Rogers 1 - Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (18 page)

“Listen to her, fella,” Buck urged. “She’s making sense. Take it easy. It really is okay.”

“I invited Captain Rogers to join me,” Ardala said.

Tigerman halted and turned a curious look upon the princess. Never before had a stranger appeared in the royal cabin, and his lifelong conditioning had been to kill, if need be to die, in defense of his mistress. But if she herself said that this earthman was an invited, if unexpected, guest, then it must be all right.

He returned to his place beside the royal launch-couch and curled up on the floor, for all the world like a thousand-pound housecat curled up by his mistress’ easy chair.

“This is state business,” Princess Ardala told her bodyguard. “As soon as we arrive you will escort us to the royal stateroom and post yourself in the corridor to see that we are not disturbed.”

“That’s right,” Buck agreed. “In the corridor.
Outside
the princess’ door.”

Tigerman lifted one tawny eyebrow and glared at Buck from out of one yellow slitted eye.

Meanwhile, behind the curtain in the launch’s galley, a cupboard door sprung open revealing the sanitary, stainless-steel interior of the storage area. In the midst of the racks and shelves of shipboard food supplies stood a three-foot-tall metal drone and, slung around his neck, lights flashing the colors of the spectrum, a super-advanced computer-brain.

With a quick glance around, the little quad scuttered out of the cupboard and stood in the middle of the galley.

“We’re almost there,” Dr. Theopolis’ soothing, low voice said. “Twiki, where you going now? I know that it was chilly there in the cupboard, but we have little choice, you know. Our orders were to stick close to Buck and keep him out of trouble. He may need us at any time. So back into the cupboard, let’s go. Twiki, I’m speaking to you!”

The quad shook his head and squealed.

“Oh, I know there are refrigeration coils in that cupboard,” Theopolis said. “It can’t be helped. After all, that’s how the Draconians preserve their food.”

Twiki hugged himself, opened another cupboard—this one not refrigerated—and withdrew a bottle from it. He opened the bottle and took a drink.

“All right,” Theopolis said. “It’s too bad there isn’t room for us in that cupboard. But a little Vinol will keep your circuits from freezing when we go back where we came from. All right now, I suppose we can take the bottle with us. Back into the cooler.”

Twiki edged back into the refrigerated cupboard, shivering, Theopolis around his neck, the Vinol bottle in his metal hand.

While the royal launch arrowed upward from earth, a brief conversation took place back in the Inner City. Its participants were Colonel Wilma Deering of the Third Force Intercept Squadron and the aged Dr. Huer, chairman of the Earth Directorate.

“Any word?” Wilma Deering fretted, hoping that Huer would have some information for her.

“I’m afraid not,” Huer replied. “We’ve searched the entire Intercept Squadron base and all adjacent sectors of the Inner City. Captain Rogers is simply nowhere to be found!”

“Oh, what did I expect?” Wilma asked bitterly. “What should I ever have expected from a primitive who came to us from half a thousand years in the past, before the great holocaust even took place?”

“Don’t blame yourself, child,” Huer said. “I shall go and see if there’s any word at all.” Huer left the room.

Alone, Wilma paced the room, fuming. Finally she picked up a miniature statuette that stood on a little pedestal all its own and hurled it furiously into what appeared to be a roaring fireplace. The fire and the fireplace were nothing but a TV simulation, and the impact of the heavy statuette shattered the screen into a million tinkling fragments.

“You are a spy, Buck Rogers!” Wilma almost shouted. “You were never anything but a double agent, and I know exactly where you’ve gone to now!”

Suddenly Wilma began to sob in a most un-colonel-like manner.

And aboard the flagship
Draconia
the royal launch had docked with absolute precision and its occupants debarked into the spacious landing bay of the great starship.

The Princess Ardala and Captain Buck Rogers made their way through corridors, past bowing guards and Draconian troopers, to the princess’ royal stateroom. They entered, accompanied by Ardala’s guardian Tigerman. The princess turned and commanded Tigerman with a single sharp word, “Out!”

The giant bodyguard growled menacingly at Buck but obeyed. Ardala reached and slammed the door behind him. She clicked a latch into place. “There. Now we will be undisturbed,” she gloated.

Buck looked around him. The magnificent stateroom glowed with indirect lighting. The sumptuous, semibarbaric style of the Draconian Realm at its most self-indulgent was apparent, giving the room a romantically anachronistic suggestion of some regal chamber in the ziggurats of ancient Babylon or the palaces of Macchu Pichu.

“I bet that Tigerman would make a better pet if you’d have him fixed,” Buck wisecracked.

Ardala registered a smirk at the jibe, then moved behind her privacy screen. In a moment Buck saw the royal cloak flung over the top of the screen.

“Pour yourself a drink while I slip into something more comfortable,” Ardala’s voice came from the other side of the screen.

“Nothing has changed,” Buck muttered, “Five hundred and four years and they’re still slipping into something more comfortable. Oh well . . .”

He located the Vinol in an ornate side-cabinet near the princess’ bed, lifted the bottle from its place and poured two goblets of the sparkling liquid. From the waistband of his tunic he extracted the vial of headache pills that Theopolis and Twiki had fetched for him during the gala at the Grand Ballroom in the Palace of Mirrors. He removed several of the tiny tablets and dropped them carefully into one of the goblets. Each pill, as it struck the Vinol, blossomed into a miniature fountain of bubbles and foam, then subsided, leaving the Vinol appearing exactly as it had before.

“You’re in for a little surprise, Ardala,” Buck said.

From behind the screen Ardala called back, “You mustn’t peek, now, Captain.”

“Bear with me, Princess,” Buck replied. “You know, it’s been over five hundred years.”

“I hope I don’t disappoint then, all the more,” Ardala said. She swept from behind the screen wearing a boudoir gown the likes of which Buck had never even imagined. Her dress possessed the outward appearance of thoughtless casualness that Buck in his inner recesses knew must actually be the most studied purposefulness.

While he appreciated the effect of the gown, Buck was too preoccupied with his mission to be swept away by the beautiful temptations the princess offered.

Now came the hardest part. How to lead the lovely Ardala to drink the doctored Vinol before things got out of hand. Buck decided to play as straight as he could.

He gaped.

“Have you nothing to say?” Ardala demanded.

Buck made his voice sound as if he was profoundly affected by the performance. “I-uh. Princess Ardala, you don’t know what you can do to the weak heart of a man who’s five hundred twenty-eight years old!” He caught his breath. “Until this moment, I’d kind of forgotten what I’ve been missing since 1987.”

“Well then—I, too have a confession to make,” Ardala crooned.

Ardala moved slowly toward him. “It’s that—I hadn’t realized what
I’d
been missing, either! You’re different, Captain Rogers—different from the kind of men I’m accustomed to knowing.” Ardala’s voice had changed subtly. Now there was a note of pleading creeping into her silken tones.

“A princess of the realm pretty much has her way, you know. For a while that’s very pleasant, but after enough of it she wants a man who is—more manly. Like you. You’re arrogant. You flagrantly disregard orders, from me as well as from anyone else.”

Buck was sitting on the edge of Ardala’s bed, not by his own choice but because there was nowhere else to sit in the room. At that moment Buck felt sorry for the princess. Though young and beautiful, the awful power to which she was heiress made her a sad, lonely figure in this drama of interstellar politics and intrigue.

Ardala came and knelt in the exotic animal-fur rug beside the bed, placing her hands on his uniformed legs. She looked up into his face, emotion filling her features. “Buck Rogers,” she whispered passionately, “you are the kind of man who could unseat my father. You could place yourself on the throne of Draconia, with me at your side as Empress of the Realm.”

“You may not believe this,” Buck said, “but your father’s seat is the farthest thing from my mind at this moment, Ardala.”

“I brought you here for a reason,” the princess breathed.

“I was counting on it,” Buck countered.

“I want you at my side, Buck Rogers!”

Buck said nothing, stunned for a moment by her brazen declaration of intent.

“Consider it,” Ardala said seriously. “You don’t know what it’s like to be the daughter of Draco the Conqueror—with twenty-nine sisters nipping at your heels. With weaseling courtiers like that pig Kane clawing at you for power.

“But with a real man like you, Buck Rogers, I could sweep aside Kane and the others. I could defy my father, lead my own life. And think of our children! What a magnificent dynasty we would found!”

“Children? Dynasty? Aren’t we getting a little ahead of ourselves?” Buck asked.

“There isn’t much time,” Ardala said.

Buck’s brow wrinkled with concentration at that. Ardala, clearly, was on the verge of making an important revelation of some sort. He prompted her to continue.

Ardala removed one of her hands from Buck’s shoulders and reached for a glass of Vinol. Perhaps she felt the need of a drink, perhaps it was some new pose, perhaps the gesture was just a play for time while she planned out her next move and her next sentence. Whatever the case, her move gave Buck the opportunity he’d awaited.

Buck held a glass toward the princess, carefully ascertaining that it was the one containing the Vinol he had doctored with the tablets from the little bottle in his tunic.

“We have to be very careful,” Ardala said.

“We do?” Buck echoed. “Why? Careful of what?”

Ardala sipped carefully from her glass. “Our timing is not what I would have preferred.”

Buck grinned wryly. “Like I said, nothing ever changes.”

Ardala leaned forward, pressing her lips warmly onto Buck’s. “Why couldn’t I have met you sooner?” she asked passionately.

Buck shook his head. “We have plenty of time left—don’t we?”

She pressed forward, kissed him again, more fervently than before. She struggled to her feet, drained her glass at a single breath and threw it across the room against the wall where it shattered with a crash and fell to the floor in a pile of tinkling fragments.

She whirled and stumbled back to the bed. She tumbled onto the massed furs there, sprawling face-down amidst the deep-piled luxurious pelts. “What—what am I doing?” she asked drunkenly.

“Never mind that,” Buck soothed her. “You’re doing everything just fine. Believe me, I’d tell you if you weren’t.”

She lifted her head, turned to face Buck. He watched her with calm detachment. Her movements were slower, less perfectly coordinated, as she tried to encircle him in her arms.

“I barely know you,” Ardala crooned, “how could I have become so desperate? So—”

Buck interrupted her, leaning over and pushing her gently but firmly back down onto the bed.

Ardala looked blearily at Buck. Her eyes were glazed, her breath coming in short gasps. She struggled to speak. “Buck, I feel so—I don’t know. It’s pleasant too, but—but—”

“That’s funny,” Buck said. “I feel bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”

“You’re not used to this bed,” Ardala said.

“It’s a very nice bed,” Buck returned. “But not so unusual that I can see.”

“No, you don’t understand,” Ardala went on. “It’s computerized. It has an electronic mattress. It has sensors that attune its firmness to every contour of the body.”

“Back in the old days, machines knew their places,” Buck commented sardonically.

“No, our way is more efficient,” Ardala quarreled.

“Such things require a human touch,” Buck insisted.

Ardala tried to push herself upright, slipped back. “Oh, Buck, I’m so drowsy. Won’t you turn off the lights so I can rest.”

Buck reached for a control switch and darkened the stateroom. He reached for Ardala and she responded in a half-awake, half-asleep languor. “Buck, Buck,” she breathed.

“What
is
it?”

“If you’re a spy, Buck, you know I’ll have to have you killed. I’d hate to do that. You’re so nice, Buck. But I
will
have you killed if you’re a spy.”

“Now that,” commented Buck as he rolled over in the great fur-covered bed, “is some of the nicest pillowtalk I’ve ever heard, Ardala.”

He reached for her once more and in the darkness he could feel her going limp and slack. The doctored Vinol had taken its toll. Princess Ardala lay sound asleep across the great fur-covered mattress. Even though she was far beyond awakening by a mere sound, Buck instinctively moved with a minimum of noise or disturbance as he climbed quickly from the bed.

And in another section of the
Draconia
Kane sat in the command seat gazing down at the Inner City of earth. The
Draconia
was in a synchronous orbit above the shimmering dome, revolving freely over the earth, falling freely in a sense, yet moving so that its twenty-four-hour revolution about the earth matched the planet’s twenty-four-hour period of rotation. The effect was as if the ship were anchored in space directly above the Inner City.

“Look at them down there. Sleeping! The fools will never know what hit them.”

The Inner City itself, beneath its shimmering protective dome, resembled a sea of diamonds laid out on a jeweler’s cloth of blackest velvet.

In the starship, a technician addressed himself to Kane. “Stand by to receive classified transmission from the armada,” the technician stated. “Carrier wave is activated and preliminary image pattern is forming, sir.”

Kane jumped from the command seat as if it had suddenly grown white hot. In the seat he had vacated, the gross form of the Emperor Draco, resplendent in the decorated uniform of the Supreme Commander of Draconian Realm Armed Forces, shimmered into being.