The Chaos Weapon (3 page)

“Q.E.D.!” said the dark man after a long period of silence. His voice was one from which all trace of emotion had been carefully strained. “Rutter, are you still in touch with Marshal Hover?”

“In the middle of all that?” Rutter was incredulous. He looked bitterly across the altered landscape over which hung a low cloud of settling dust.

“Keep trying to make contact until you either get an answer or you can prove he’s dead. But primarily concentrate your resources on finding the man Hover was following. Unlikely as it may seem, there’s a very strong chance he’s still alive. If he’s who and what I think he is, he would have entered that situation very well prepared. And I want him, Captain. Knowing what he knows could be just about the most important imperative for the survival of the human race. Is that understood?”

“No,” said Rutter. “But that won’t interfere with the execution of your orders. We’ll call for disaster backup, then set one of the lab-ships down on the city itself. If any people are left down there in fragments larger than pieces of mince, we’ll fetch them back in plastic bags and you can sort the bits out later.”

A technician reported directly to Saraya. “Look, the cat’s coming back.” He pointed to the terrain scanner, which showed quite plainly the vehicle moving back over its original course. “It must have been waiting just out of range.”

“That means he too expects to find a very special
survivor,” said the strange dark man, wrapping his black cloak closer round his shoulders.

In the seconds before the maelstrom broke, Hover had come into clear sight of his quarry. The man had been kneeling before his bundle on the ground, tearing away the snow-packed netting which concealed a streamlined pod underneath. The apparatus was not familiar to the marshal, but its purpose rapidly became apparent. When the first subterranean shock pitched the ground as if it were the deck of a storm-tossed ship, the man had opened the pod and brought forth something that spread outward and upward like the blossoming of a great white flower. As the flower bloomed, the man stepped into its center; then the great petals closed around him to form a continuous cocoon that continued to expand until it formed a ball of some five meters diameter.

All at once the marshal understood. Although this contraption was of strange design, it had to be some form of space-disaster capsule. Out in the highway well clear of any buildings, the man was now encapsulated in a womb formed from a series of super-tough concentric balloons. Nothing but a massive crushing force could hurt him, and cradled against all shock he could encounter most of the stresses of a space disaster and still survive. Furthermore, because of its relative lightness and its spherical shape, the sphere was perfectly suited to ride free upon a fragmenting surface where a heavier structure would have been trapped and crushed.

Further consideration of the object was terminated by the necessity for the marshal to attempt to secure his own survival. Before he could decided upon a plan, the ground under his feet again reared crazily up beneath him. The pavement, not designed for such plasticity, shattered and split with a thousand fissures that opened and closed like hungry jaws, each with the capability of swallowing a man. Thrown heavily to the ground, Hover only narrowly missed death
when hurtling masonry split off from a nearby building and deluged on to the roadway at his side. Twisting round, he was attempting to assess the degree of his present danger, when another wave of underground movement proved likely to throw the remainder of the shattered building down on top of him.

“Help me, Talloth! I’m in danger!” His cry was directed to the insubstantial something that hovered over his shoulder.

“Do you believe in me?”

“Hell of a time you choose to ask questions. Don’t I share my existence with you? What do you want—blood?”

The ground reared and bucked beneath him like a crazed animal. The paving split wide, and before Hover could swing to avoid it, he rolled into a shifting, opening pit.

“Talloth …!”

With the passing of the earth-spasm, the sides of the pit began to close. Teetering above, on slowly buckling skeletons of steel, the entire line of buildings near him broke into catastrophic collapse. The falling rubble poured like a cascade of furious water to bury the spot where the marshal was already trapped in his narrowing grave.

“Tall …”

Time was arrested.

The whole universe seemed gripped by a mighty hand which forbade motion. Masonry descending from the sky froze into breathless immobility and ceased to tumble. The edges of the jagged pit into which Hover had fallen, were held apart. And, alone of all things present, only the marshal still had movement. Then time moved back in discrete quantum steps. He had fallen/was falling/would fall—was on ground he knew would break and finally had moved away from the potential chasm and out of the path of the deluge of falling bricks.

Then Talloth, the brown, leathery, symbiotic god who lived on Hover’s shoulder, relaxed his grip on
time’s insistent progress. For a few furious seconds the rate of movement around them seemed to multiply, with crevices opening and closing like snapping jaws and whole walls dropping from the sky. The accelerated heaving of the ground produced shocks which threw the stumbling marshal up into the air. But he landed on his back and waited doggedly while the universe wound slowly down to normal pace.

As time came back to its accepted rate, Hover sat up to find himself in a landscape altered beyond all recognition. Edel was a heap of pulverized ruins, the massive scarp had all but disappeared, and fully a third of the former territory was in the process of being covered by the detritus of an avalanche of such proportions that any search for survivors in the areas would be futile.

Shaking the fragments of his recent experience from his head, Hover attempted to explore his own situation. He was severely bruised, and his right leg was extremely painful when he attempted to stand. He reckoned, however, that no bones had been broken. The equipment packs at his waist and chest had survived intact. But when he examined the sad state of his communications set, flattened as if by hammer blows, he realized how narrowly Talloth had timed his escape.

“Thanks, pal,” he muttered to the quivering insubstantiality on his shoulder. “But you cut that one remarkably fine.”

“If you have criticisms,” said Talloth, “I can always arrange to put you back and leave you there.”

“Forget it!” Hover was searching the scene for signs of the white bubble into which his quarry had retreated. Initially finding no sign, he considered that it must have somehow become crushed and buried. Then he noticed a whiter patch on the earth-mixed snow and found the open and deflated bubble abandoned and empty. Nearby, a youth lay dead from what appeared to be a deliberate head-wound. Of his quarry there was no sign at all.

This situation raised
problems. There was virtually no way in which the individual he was seeking could be distinguished from the scattered survivors who occupied the shattered scene. His only hope was to continue toward what he judged to have been the Chaos Omega epicenter in the hope that something could be found to explain what had brought the man to Edel in the first place.

The buildings of the Monai Space Confederation had been built on a vast structural raft. At first sight, the buildings themselves appeared relatively undamaged, until one considered that not a single wall could now consist of more than broken fragments adhering to a buckled frame. Beyond these, an older building had suffered almost complete collapse as the outer walls had shattered, though the strength of the reinforced floors had remained. A fallen sign told him that here an interspace trading station had been located, and it was a leap of intuition that made Hover decided he was now probably looking for two men instead of one.

He turned back then, trying to follow the route by which he had entered Edel. The way was mainly destroyed, and many detours were necessary where the roads had been obliterated by piles of rubble. Remembering Saraya’s injunction about the importance of his mission he had to force himself to harden his heart and to ignore the screams of people trapped in the wreckage or the pleas of those trying to attempt a rescue. Sometimes the resolve was painfully difficult to maintain as anguished reproaches followed his departing steps. But the mandate of Override Authority which had been impressed upon him necessarily outranked all other considerations.

Finally he came to the end of the city ruins and stood on the edge of the plain. Even here the scene was nearly unrecognizable. The once supreme flatness of the great wasteland was now ridged and broken as if a giant had raked it with a careless harrow. He waited, alert and expectant, examining every shadow of a slowly closing dusk. One of the lab-ships took off
from the plateau and passed overhead on a high trajectory that took it well behind him into the center of Edel. He noted the fact without particular concern. His own gamble was that the man he was looking for had come into Edel to collect someone else. Whether or not the attempt had been successful, that man at least would attempt to leave again, probably by the same route he had used to enter. Hover was maintaining a staunch position with the intention of making that escape impossible.

Before long he had evidence that his intuition had been correct. Although he could see nothing, he could hear the complaint of a snow-cat’s engine as it strained over the ridged terrain. It was making for a point well to the left of his present position, and he moved rapidly to effect an interception, drawing the safety rings from his weapons’ pouches as he ran through the closing darkness. His fingers selected a shock pellet, and he slipped it into a projector as soon as he saw the dim outline of the cat heading in from the plain.

Crouching low, he fired, and the dim tracer told him his aim had been sufficient. Instantly he turned away to protect his ears, as the compression wave gave him a stinging slap across the shoulders. The softness of the broken ground and the picosecond duration of the pulse made it unlikely that the noise would have been detectable at any great distance. Nonetheless the cat slowed to an untidy halt as its stunned driver relinquished control. Instantly Hover was at the cat’s door hatch, making a swift entry and securing the stunned occupant against quick reentry into the game by sticking a self-adhesive drugpatch anaesthetic inconspicuously behind the sleeper’s ear. Then he turned on the headlights to create a visual signal and leaped again out into the darkness.

He traced a great circle to prevent himself from entering into the radius of the lights, then finally pressed up against a rough bank waiting to see what his trap would draw. He did not have long to wait. Soon a dark figure streaked from cover and ran
straight toward the cat. From the mode of the man’s approach it seemed doubtful that he realized anything was amiss with the driver. So he scrambled overtly through the hatch door. Hover managed to project a gas pellet precisely through the opening before it could be closed. He counted twenty slowly to allow for the dispersal of the short-lived knockout gas, then drew out another anaesthetic drugpatch and went to secure his second prisoner.

That was his biggest mistake. Somebody leaped out from the darkness and with incredibly strong hands dealt the marshal a series of well-placed blows that even through his warm-suit crippled his limbs with a numbing paralysis. Conscious, shocked, yet virtually unable to move, the marshal toppled like a log. He was rolled into the beam from the headlights by an expert foot while his attacker peered down to establish his identity.

“A space-marshal, indeed! Even so, you’re way out of your league, I think. Don’t try to join the game until you can give it a name and understand the rules. Give that message to Saraya. Tell him Kasdeya sent it.”

After a short delay the cat started up again. Swinging to face its new direction, the tracked vehicle was hastily reversed. Hover was actually glad of the creeping numbness from the blows. He felt virtually nothing of the pain as the tracks crushed both his legs. On his shoulder, Talloth flickered uncertainly, not finding it necessary to intervene because the marshal’s wound was unlikely to be fatal.

“
WHAT do you
see across the valley, Roamer?”

“Two men repairing damage from the storm.”

The Terran Institute for the Study of Chaos Phenomena was more generally known as ChaosCenter. Knowing of the Institute’s reputation, Space-Marshal Jym Wildheit was full of curiosity as he entered the wide glass portals of the administration block and registered his presence at the desk. Not the least of his interests was why he had been summoned here from half the galaxy away.

“Watch carefully, and describe the detail.”

“The hammer falls on the bright-green shingles, out of phase with the sound. I can roughly work out the distance from the intervals.”

As he entered the lecture suite it was suddenly obvious why the security had been so strict. This was probably the first time all twelve space-marshals had ever gathered together on one planet. Now in the room were the full dozen, men whose duties were to safeguard civilization over the vast sprawl of the galactic empires. These were the legendary untouchables of space, whose authority outranked planetary governors and kings and whose powers were feared by tyrants and space-pirates alike. Considering their influence in the galaxy, it was reassuring to Wildheit to note his comrades still remained quite ordinary men. In fact Marshal Hover’s electric carriage, which had to serve him until his cloned replacement legs had been cultured, underscored the mortal fragility of which they were all only too aware.

“Close your eyes, little one. What see you now?”

“I see small pulses of entropic change. Muscles drive the hammer: the nail
responds; a little order comes out of chaos: entropy falls; the universe winds back.”

There was one other man in the room, a stranger to Wildheit. Dressed entirely in black, his style of flowing cloak proclaimed him to be from some far outworld. He acknowledged none of those who entered, but sat hunched, his knuckles supporting his chin, directly under the great portrait of Bron the Warlord, founder of the Federation. His dark eyes were constantly questing, as if searching for answers to something to which no one was able to supply even the questions.