Land and Overland - Omnibus (105 page)

"Is somebody trying to make us feel welcome?" he said to Steenameert as he started forward, moving clumsily in his voluminous skysuit, hands still tied behind his back. As he and Steenameert reached the end of the corridor the aperture in the wall rolled back to give them clear access to a large and complicated enclosed space, a circular hall rimmed with stairs and galleries. Imposing though the alien cathedral might have been to Toller in his normal state of mind, its architectural vistas now flowed outwards in his vision, centring all of his attention on the small group of women who were running in his direction.

And foremost among them was the Countess Vantara!

"Toller!" she screamed, her beautiful features transformed into a mask of inhumanly enhanced desire. "Toller, my love! You came, you came, you came… I should have known it would be you!"

She hurled herself against him with such force that he was almost driven backwards. Her arms went around his neck and she kissed him with wet lips and urgently probing tongue. Toller was both thrilled and gratified, senses overwhelmed to the extent that he scarcely noticed the stockier form of Lieutenant Pertree moving behind him. The lieutenant began to untie his hands, while the three remaining members of the crew converged on Steenameert with similar intent. Vantara pushed Toller back to arm's length, still clasping his neck, and it was only then that her eyes began to take stock of the true situation.

"You're a prisoner!" she accused. "You have been captured, just like us!" She recoiled from Toller, her expression changing to one of disappointment and anger. "Did your ship also blunder into that strange reef?"

"No. I approached it in daylight and managed to get by. On reaching Prad and being told that your ship had failed to arrive, I immediately set out to find you."

"Where are your forces?"

Toller rubbed his newly freed wrists. "There are no forces—Baten is my only companion."

Vantara's jaw sagged as she shot an incredulous glance to her lieutenant. "You set out—a general commanding an army of one—to challenge an invader!"

"At that time I had no way of knowing there was an enemy presence," Toller said stiffly. "My only thought was of your safety. Besides, two men or a thousand—what difference would it have made?"

"Can this be the
real
Toller Maraquine who preaches defeatism, or is it an impostor conjured up by those foul beings who deny us our freedom?" Vantara turned away before Toller could protest and walked quickly towards the nearest stair.

First I'm too foolhardy
—
then I'm too timid,
Toller thought, feeling both wounded and baffled. In his confusion he stared at the three young women in ranker uniforms who were attending to Steenameert. They were helping him out of his cumbersome skysuit, and at the same time—their welcome to him apparently undiminished—were smiling and plying him with questions. Steenameert looked embarrassed but gratified.

"You must excuse my aristocratic commander," Lieutenant Pertree said, gazing up at Toller with a wry glint in her eye. "The terms of our detention here could hardly be described as onerous, but the countess—being of royal blood, and therefore possessing an exquisite degree of sensitivity—finds the life much more harrowing than would a commoner."

Toller was almost grateful for the flicker of anger which brought reality into sharp focus. "I remember you, lieutenant, and I see that you are as insubordinate and disloyal as ever."

Pertree sighed. "I remember you, captain, and I see that you are as besotted and calf-eyed as ever."

"Lieutenant, I will not tolerate that kind of…" Toller allowed the sentence to die, suddenly recalling that he had only permitted Steenameert to accompany him into the unknown on condition that they discard all the stultifying appurtenances of rank and class. He smiled apologetically and began ridding himself of the stifling swaddles of his skysuit.

"I'm sorry," he said. "The old ways die hard. I have heard your given name more than once, but confess to having forgotten it…"

"Jerene."

He smiled. "My name is Toller. May we pledge friendship and in consequence present a united front against the common enemy?" He had expected the sturdy lieutenant to appear mollified to some extent, and therefore he was surprised when a look of alarm manifested itself on her rounded features.

"It must be true," she breathed, suddenly losing her air of case-hardened composure. "You would never have spoken that way in normal circumstances. Tell me,
Toller,
have we been transported to another world? Are we lost forever? Is this prison on a strange planet millions of miles from Overland?"

"Yes." Toller saw that the three other women had begun listening intently to his words. "How could you fail to know such things?"

"Night came upon us when we were two hours below the datum plane," Jerene said in a small, reflective voice. "It was decided that we would continue at reduced speed through the hours of darkness and carry out the inversion manoeuvre at first light…"

She went on to describe how the crew, most of them sleeping, had been thrown into a panic by a great shuddering groan from the balloon. It had been accompanied by the sound of the four acceleration struts breaking and ripping into the material of the envelope. Almost at once choking billows of miglign gas had spewed downwards around the crew from the balloon mouth as the flimsy structure collapsed inwards. Finally, to add to the terror and confusion, the gondola had coasted into the writhing folds of the ruined envelope and had been swallowed by them.

It had taken fear-protracted minutes for the bewildered astronauts to fight clear of the wreckage. Enough light was being reflected from Land for them to make the incredible discovery that their ship had collided with a crystalline barricade which appeared to span the horizons like a dull-glowing frozen sea. And only furlongs away—wonder piled upon wonder—had been the outline of a fantastic castle, exotic and enigmatic, silhouetted against the silvered cosmos.

Somehow they had managed to retrieve enough personal propulsion units to enable them to fly to the castle. Somehow they had managed to locate a door in its metallic surface.

They had entered, and—
somehow
—had found themselves, with no perceptible lapse of time, prisoners in a grey-and-yellow cathedral…

"It is much as I suspected," Toller said when the lieutenant had finished. "Something told me that she … that all of you were still alive."

"But what
happened
to us?"

"The Dussarrans employ a gas which quickly renders those who breathe it insensible. It must have—"

"We deduced that much for ourselves," Jerene interrupted, "but what happened after that? We have been told that we were magically transported to another world, but we have only the monsters' word for that. We believe we are somewhere inside the castle. It is true that we have normal weight—as though standing on solid ground—but that could be more magic."

Toller shook his head. "I'm sorry, but what you have been told is true. Our captors have the ability to travel through the space between the stars at the speed of thought. You have indeed been transported, in the blink of an eye, to their home world of Dussarra."

His words drew cries of mingled concern and disbelief from the listening women. A tall, snub-nosed blonde in the uniform of a skycorporal laughed and whispered something to the woman next to her. It came to Toller that the lessons in cosmology and galactic history that he and Steenameert had received from Divivvidiv had brought about fundamental changes in their inner selves, separating them from the rest of their kind. He got a slight but uncomfortable insight into how he, while steeped in ignorance, must have appeared to Divivvidiv.

"How do
you
know that all the humbug about being magicked through the heavens is true?" Jerene challenged. "You have to go by what you have been told, just like the rest of us."

"Far from it!" Toller replied, beginning to divest himself of his own skysuit. "When Baten and I entered the castle, as you call it, we took its corpse-faced master prisoner at swordpoint. And we brought him here as a hostage in a good Kolcorronian ship—therefore we can testify that all of us, at this very moment, are millions of miles away from Overland. We are on the home planet of the invaders."

Jerene's eyes widened and as she gazed up at Toller her face became tinged with pink. "You did all that for:…" She glanced towards the stair by which Vantara had departed the company. "You took one of those ancient ships from the Defence Group … and flew it to another world … all because…"

"We bagged and parachuted all the way to the ground with our prisoner," Steenameert put in, breaking a lengthy silence. "It was only then that the cursed scarecrows overwhelmed our senses and blinded us to the forces which lay in ambush. Had it been a fair and honourable contest things would have been very different. We would have walked in here with our hostage—who would have been quaking and in fear of his life because of the blade that lay across his throat—and then we would have bartered him for your freedom."

"I must report this to the captain." Jerene had become slightly breathless, and the pupils of her eyes seemed to have distended as they hunted over Toller's face. "She should be apprised of all the facts."

"She believes us still to be in our own weightless zone!" Toller sighed with relief and smiled as he realized why Vantara's attitude towards him had shifted so rapidly. "It was only natural that she should have expected me to arrive at the head of an armada. It was only natural that she should have felt a certain disappointment."

"Yes, but had she been a little less impatient…" Steenameert abandoned his comment and lowered his head.

Toller glared at him. "What are you saying, Baten?"

"Nothing! Nothing at all!"

"Sir?" The tall blonde stepped forward as she addressed Toller. "Can you tell us how long we have been here?"

"Why? Can't you count the days?"

"There is no day or night within this dome. The light never changes."

Toller, who had been trying to reconcile himself to the idea of being imprisoned for a long time, found the prospect of living in continuous even light strangely depressing. "I would say you have been here some twenty-five days. But what about your meals? Do they not mark the days?"

"Meals!"
the blonde gave a wry smile. "Each cell has a basket which the monsters constantly replenish with cubes of… Well, each of us has a different opinion about what we are forced to eat."

"Spiced bluehorn hoof," another tall woman—a swarthy, brown-eyed skyprivate—suggested in aggrieved tones.

"Spiced bluehorn
shit"
the remaining flier put in with an exaggerated scowl, bringing snorts of amusement from her companions. She had cropped brown hair which made an ill match for her conventionally pretty face.

"These are Tradlo, Mistekka and Arvand," Jerene said, indicating the three rankers in turn. "And, as you will have noticed, they have already forgotten how to conduct themselves in the presence of an officer."

"Rank no longer means anything to me." Toller nodded an informal greeting to the women. "Speak as you will; do as you will."

"In that case…" Arvand shimmied to Steenameert's side, clasped his arm and gave him a warm smile. "It is difficult to sleep in a lonely bed—don't you agree?"

"Not fair!" the blonde Tradlo cried, disconcerting Steenameert further by gripping his other arm. "All rations must be shared equally!"

Toller had an urge to move off in pursuit of Vantara, but it was obvious from Jerene's manner that she was eager to go on speaking to him. He acquiesced when she turned away from the others, implicitly creating a space in which they could converse discreetly about matters of consequence.

"Toller, I am sorry that I have shown a tendency to make little of you," she began hesitantly. "You always seemed to bluster so much … and there was that sword … You made it so obvious that you longed to emulate your grandfather that—the logic of it now escapes me—all who met you assumed your ambitions to be in vain.

"But for anyone to do what you have done … for you to have flown one of those antiquated wooden barrels through the black deeps of space to another world … for you simply to
be
here…

"All I can say is that Vantara is the luckiest woman in all of history, and that you will have no need,
ever again,
to stand in the shadow of your grandfather. There can never be any doubt that you and he were peers."

Toller blinked to ease a sudden smarting in his eyes. "I value what you say, but all I did…"

"Tell me something." Jerene switched to a tone of practicality rather sooner than Toller might have liked. "Have the monsters cast a spell over us? How is it that we can hear what they say, even when they are not in our presence, even when there is no sound? Is it magic?"

"There is no magic," Toller explained, again aware of the gulf which had opened between him and his kind. "It is the Dussarran way. They have progressed far beyond the need for shaping words with their mouths. They speak mind-to-mind, no matter how great the distance involved. Have these things not been explained to you?"

"Not a word. We are animals in a zoo as far as they are concerned."

"I suppose I received my education because the scarecrow I dealt with was buying time, preserving his life." Toller looked around the galleried dome with distaste. "When do the Dussarrans communicate with you?"

"There is one who seems to be known as the Director," Jerene replied. "He will speak to us for hours at a time—always asking questions about our lives on Overland, about our families, about our food, farming methods, the differences between men's clothing and women's clothing… Nothing is too trivial for him.

"Then there is another one—possibly a female—who gives us our orders."

"What manner of orders?"

Jerene shrugged. "When to leave our cells and come down here to the main floor … that sort of thing. We stay here while the food and water is being replenished up there by one of the monsters."