Perry Rhodan Lemuria 1: Ark of the Stars (32 page)

"What are you planning?" asked Rhodan, who caught up with him seemingly without effort. His cell activator seemed to keep Rhodan totally fit; in contrast, the Naahk hobbled stiffly at the rear of the group.

"One of us has to get to the ship's stern."

"You?"

"Yes."

"And how will you manage that?"

"With wings."

Denetree stopped near a round hole in the ground. It had a diameter of about two meters. Through the grating that secured it against accidents came a warm if not particularly fragrant stream of air.

Hevror held his arm over the shaft, testing for the updraft. Yes, it could work. With a little luck, a push from his antigrav ... .

The Akonian dropped to his knees, opened the clasp on his bag, and took out the Akon-steel struts. Each individual strut was narrower than his little finger and weighed only a few grams, because it was hollow, like a bird's bones.

"Naahk!" he called to the Lemurian leader, who was the last to take his place in the ring of spectators closely watching Hevror's movements. "Naahk, how do I find the execution site?"

"It is at the stern in a former cargo hold—"

"I need a description from outside!"

Hevror had fully unfolded the struts and fit them together. He pulled a thin sheet of fabric from the bag.

"The hatch is marked in red. It—"

"Can it be seen from above? From the air?"

"I think ... yes."

While the Naahk described a series of landmarks for him, Hevror stretched the fabric over the struts, lifted the finished construction to examine it, then threw it on the ground to test its durability. It held. The wings were ready for use.

Now came the difficult part. Hevror's wings were intended to be worn over tightly fitting clothing or the naked body, which was Hevror's preferred method of flight. Despite its compact design, his protective suit got in the way. But he couldn't take it off: he needed the antigrav to give him his initial altitude.

Hevror slipped his arms through the arm loops, but he couldn't reach the rear fastenings with his suit on. The Akonian struggled for a moment, then felt a strong hand pulling on the fastenings for him. The Immortal had seen the problem, and together they managed to fasten the harness. The Akonian prayed that they would hold over the bulk of the suit. For the sake of Denetree's friends—and for his own. The "sky" of the outer deck might be relatively low, but it was high enough for him to fall to his death.

He nodded to the others. "Be right back!" he assured them with a grin and a confidence he didn't feel. He took a deep breath and leaped, his arms—the
wings
—stretched out to catch the rising stream of air from the shaft.

For a fraction of a second nothing happened, and he fell toward the grating. It wouldn't kill him, but he would look ridiculous. Then the antigrav kicked in, yanked him up, and failed again.

It was enough.

The experience of decades told Hevror that he had enough air under the wings. He began to circle in the warm air current as it fanned out. He climbed higher and higher. His companions, along with the Naahk's flabbergasted guardians, shrank to the size of toys. Hevror looked out over the strangest landscape he had seen since he had buckled the wings on his back for the first time. That had been a half century ago. On that same day, he had resigned his position with a minor government agency—a rank that generations of his family had been working toward—and turned his back on Drorah. Whenever someone expressed a sincere interest in his passion, he described his decision as having "flown out of the cage."

Since then, Hevror's wings had felt the winds of a hundred worlds. Hevror had looked down on buildings and ocean waves, on deserts of sand and ice, on endless plains and bottomless ravines. But nothing so far compared to the vista in the ark. It was gigantic and tiny at the same time.

Tiny in its physical dimensions. It was just a few kilometers long, not even half a kilometer in diameter, and housed a number of inhabitants that wouldn't have merited being termed a village on Drorah. If he applied himself, as he was doing now, he could fly through the ark's entire length in a few minutes.

And yet it was gigantic, too. Its dimensions dwarfed everything the Akonian shipyards produced using far superior technology. What an enormous effort! It was the physical expression of the indomitable will, the determination of the hundreds of thousands of people who must have worked on its construction. But where had that determination come from? Hevror could only speculate, and the answers eluded him like the haze-shrouded horizon of the outer deck.

The Akonian continued to fly in circles. The toy-size figures beneath him were now gesticulating, pointing in the direction of the stern with frantic movements. They were afraid that he had lost himself in the rapture of flight and was now flying in circles without a thought for his actual mission.

"Hevror!" he heard Solina's voice call from his suit's acoustic field. "By all the stinking glowfish of Shaghomin, what are you doing up there?"

Hevror was surprised that their comm units were functioning within the ark. He turned his comm unit off without replying. They weren't flyers and wouldn't understand. Hevror needed all the altitude he could get, because altitude meant distance and speed.

He spiraled further upward until his wings almost scratched the underside of the sky. As he was about to go into a dive, he thought he saw a face in a space helmet.

The Akonian circled once more, but the face was gone. Perhaps he had only imagined it. The light, whose source he could still not locate, grew slowly weaker. Night was falling on the ark.

Hevror pulled in his arms, abruptly ending his circling movement. Then, spreading his wings again to control his angle of descent, he dove toward his goal. He was running a big risk. He didn't know if he could hold up to the stress of the speed and direction. His concern wasn't for his wings: the Akon steel and the sheeting would have tolerated many times the stress. No, Hevror was worried about his own body. His arms could break. If that happened, he would lose control over his wings and fall to his death like Malit Balak, the inventor of the wings. His death made Malit a legend, and with one catastrophe catapulted flying from lunacy to a way of life. Hevror wondered what would happen to him if he failed now. The Akonian doubted any monument would be erected to his memory.

The desperate Lemurian woman, the Naahk, the Tenoy, Perry Rhodan and the others fell quickly behind him. Like an arrow, Hevror shot over the outer deck toward the haze, to the place where people would die if he came too late.

The description that the Naahk had given him proved accurate. Hevror corrected his course by slightly bending his arms, a bit of precision work that had taken him long years of training.

When he had almost used up his altitude, the red hatch, his destination, emerged from the haze. The stern that must have towered before him remained hidden.

The Akonian came down hard, stumbling before he shook off the numbness from landing so abruptly. Then he pulled the quick-release latch and slipped out of the wings, leaving them behind—a painfully difficult thing for him to do. A flyer never left his wings behind: they had borne him into the heavens! He ran to the hatch. It was locked. A touch screen shone dully at eye level next to it. Hevror hit it with his fist. Nothing better occurred to him. He had no ability to finesse computers. He only knew that they
never
did what he wanted them to.

This one did.

The hatch slid to the side. Hevror ran through. A large, empty cargo hold opened up before him. At the back wall stood half a dozen armed guards, and at a distance of a few paces, a slender man wearing some sort of one-colored suit. He seemed to be looking at the floor.

"Stop! You must stop!" Hevror ta Gosz cried and ran toward the group. The guardians raised their weapons and aimed at him, but Hevror continued to run, as though still propelled by the force of the dive that had brought him here.

"Stop ... please!"

The guardians didn't fire. When Hevror stopped in front of them, the man in the suit raised his head.

Hevror read the answer in his eyes even before he saw the display screen built into the wall. It showed the area of space just beyond the stern of the star ark—and the corpses frozen into grotesque positions.

The man's eyes seemed to be sunk deep in their sockets. Tears ran down his cheeks.

Hevror had come too late.

The Akonian activated his comm unit. "Solina?"

"Yes?" came the immediate answer.

"They ... they're dead."

"They ... they're dead."

Denetree froze when she heard Hevror's translated words. Then, as though in slow motion, she buried her face in her hands and wept. Her knees gave way. She sank to the ground.

"Denetree!"

Solina started toward the Lemurian woman to comfort her—but an exclamation shifted her attention.

"Up there!"

The Akonian looked up and saw soldiers raining down from the sky.

They weren't like Hevror. They weren't flying. Hevror swam through the air, played with it, made himself its toy ball, put himself in the power of the elementary forces. The soldiers cut through the air as though it didn't exist, propelled by the overwhelming force of their pulse drives.

There were hundreds of them. Solina turned her head and saw small dots everywhere racing toward the ground in standard loose formations that denied an opponent an easy target.

But no one fired. The Naahk's guardians cried out in fear when they saw the soldiers, then the first of them lost his nerve, threw down his weapon and ran off. The rest quickly followed his example. The soldiers let them flee.

The band of guardians was not their objective.

The soldiers landed. A dozen of them surrounded the group of Akonians, Terrans and Lemurians; a second dozen braked their fall over the ground and floated above the group.

Their antigrav units operated flawlessly, and as was shown by the shining, transparent field that surrounded each soldier, so did their defense-shield projectors.

How can that be?
Solina asked herself.
Why does their equipment work and not ours? What—

"Takhan, we have them!" one of the soldiers reported into his acoustic field. Solina didn't hear a reply, but the soldier must have received an answer because he signalled his comrades to keep their weapons held ready. The soldiers belonged to her people, but they seemed ready to deal with anyone taking what they could interpret as a hostile action. A few moments later, Solina heard a humming. She turned her head cautiously and saw two more dots racing toward her.

The dots expanded and landed near the group. They were officers. One of them was short and burly and wore more rank symbols on the chest of his battle suit than Solina had ever seen in one place before. The second was of average build and had thick, black hair combed smoothly away from his forehead. His symbols of rank Solina could interpret; she knew them from the departure of the
Las-Toór,
when Jere von Baloy had worn his uniform for the first and only time. He was a maphan, the commander of a ship.

The two men were unarmed, a demonstration of their power. If they had a notion to use force, their soldiers would take care of it.

The brawny man bowed slightly. "Takhan Gartor von Taklir, Commander of the Seventh Fleet. I see that my instinct has not betrayed me!" He stepped in front of Rhodan and saluted. "It is an honor to meet you in person, Perry Rhodan."

"Thank you." The Immortal accepted the admiral's expression of respect with the reserved composure of a man who had experienced similar situations a thousand times before. "And to what do we owe the honor of your visit?"

"Duty, what else? I wish I had the opportunity to chat with you, but that is impossible. Your very presence aboard this ship demonstrates the urgency of my mission." Takhan von Taklir drew himself up. "I declare this ship to be the property of Akon."

"How so?"

"Evaluation of the hyperdetection data from the
Las-Toór
and the
Palenque
will document that our ship detected this vessel first. Hence it falls under Akonian jurisdiction. Its inhabitants—" he bowed in the direction of the Naahk "—will naturally enjoy the care and protection of the Akonian Empire. We will ensure that they suffer no harm."

Solina listened to the admiral's statements with her mouth hanging open.
No!
she wanted to scream.
You can't do that!
She knew that if the military confiscated the ark, she would never set foot on it again. She would die of old age before they allowed access to an insignificant historian of doubtful loyalty to the Empire.

But Solina said nothing. She'd dealt with people in uniforms often enough in her life to know that it would only hurt her. People in uniforms loved to shout at others, and couldn't stand it when the tables were turned. If she protested now, she herself would destroy any slight chance that still remained for her to explore this treasure.

Rhodan seemed to have been thinking along the same lines. With remarkable calm, he said, "With all due respect, Takhan, I doubt that your version of events would stand up in court."

"We'll see about that. We are of course ready to appear before an independent court of law. I am certain that, assuming willingness to cooperate on both sides, we can have a judgment within a few years. Until then, this ship will remain in Akonian custody. Its inhabitants urgently require our assistance. As we stand here talking, a repair team has already begun installing a supplementary air supply system. The existing system is so worn out that it could break down at any moment. And I don't have to explain what that would mean, do I?"

No one said anything.

"I see we understand each other." He turned to the Akonian ship commander, who had followed his statements with an absent look as though his thoughts were somewhere else. "Achab, escort our Terran guests to the teleporter. Their ship is already waiting to take them out of Akonian territory. I assume that your violation of the frontier occurred unknowingly, so I will waive the penalties that are normally deemed appropriate in such cases."