This Fortress World (15 page)

I went quickly back into the sunshine and started across the field toward the tall ships. There was still a chance, a small one, but a chance.

The ships had insignia painted on them, high up toward the nose, but they were blistered, weathered, and indecipherable. The sun was getting low in the sky now, and the shiny ships reflected the white light dazzlingly into my eyes. I was in the long shadows before I saw anything.

The ship I had seen unloading deposited a final bale. On the truck a man unshackled the chain and waved a weary arm at the dark hole high in the side of the ship. Weaving snakily, the chain climbed into the air and disappeared. The hole closed. The man climbed down from the truck.

I went up to him. "Where's the Phoenix?"

He jerked his thumb across the field, yawned tiredly, and climbed into the cab of the truck. It rolled away toward the distant warehouse.

I looked the way he had pointed. I saw it now, half a mile farther across the field. Trucks streamed toward it as they had streamed away from this one. I followed them, hungry, tired, and a feeling in the pit of my stomach that was neither one. It was fear, and I had lived with it for a long time. I couldn't remember when I hadn't been afraid.

As I drew closer to the ship I saw that the blur of paint on the nose was a sun or a fire. Something was rising out of it, something with wings. The trucks passed me. I trudged on.

At the ship the goods were flowing up. The ship opened a giant mouth, and the bales and boxes vanished into it. I watched, silent. One man directed the operation with shouted orders and gestures, and he stood occasionally with folded arms when everything was moving smoothly. He was dressed in a black-and-silver uniform, but it had been new a long time ago. The black was a dirty gray; the silver was only a little brighter.

I moved closer to him. "Keep awake, there!' he shouted. 'Keep those trucks moving!"

"Two thousand chronors for a passage," I said softly.

He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. "Go to the office."

"This is for you. No one else needs to know."

"And throw the ship out of balance?" he said, snorting. "Are you crazy? Hey, you!" he yelled. "The machinery goes first!"

A truck pulled out of line and waited.

"Make it legal," I said. "Sign me on as a crewman."

"Where's your card?"

"What card?" I asked warily.

"Your guild card, stupid. You can't get a berth without a card."

"Not even as an apprentice?"

He snorted again. "Apprentices spend six years on the ground before they get into space."

"Three thousand chronors," I said.

He looked at me narrowly. "Cash?"

"Cash."

The sun had gone down. His features were indistinct in the twilight. "Done."

I reached toward my waist.

"Not here, stupid. Get over by the truck. On the other side from the ship."

I slipped around the ship like a shadow in deeper shadows. The trucks had stopped coming. There were three waiting to be unloaded, and the drivers were gathered by the last one, talking. I slipped between the rear of one truck and the front of another and knelt beside the one being unloaded, my heart beating madly in my chest. Was it really happening? Was I really to get on board the ship?

"All right, Tom." It was the voice I knew. It came from the other side of the truck. "I'll spell you for a minute. I want to ride this load and check on the stowage."

Feet scuffling toward the rear of the truck, splatting on the ground. Other feet climbing. I stood up, caught the side of the truck, leaped, swinging my body, and rolled over the edge as the spaceman reached the top. He stood there, not looking at me, staring up along the dangling chain toward the black opening in the ship. There were no heads looking down.

The chain was attached to a load of boxes. He motioned to me impatiently. One box remained to be loaded, and there was a gap where it should go. I crawled into the space and heard the box lowered on top of me. It was a tight squeeze; I couldn't take a full breath. Out of one end of the hole I was in I could see the darkening sky. Directly over the place where the sun had gone down, the sky was still a light blue. It reminded me of the color of a flash gun bolt. I shivered. Feet clumped up on the load, stood over my body.

"Hoist!"

The load jerked and began a slow climb. The world swayed, spun gently. I looked far out over the field. At the fence the lights came on, turning around me like a tremendous wheel. I went up and up; breathless, tingling.

We stopped and swung back and forth in short arcs. Then we began to move sideways. Slowly the world disappeared until it was only a circle of dark blue surrounded by darkness. We dropped a few feet. The swaying stopped. Feet jumped off the load. The chain rattled.

"I'll take care of this one."

Feet walked away. The box was lifted off. I saw the face of the officer, lined and heavily tanned. He gestured me back. I slid out of the hole, backwards, and lowered my feet gently to the floor. Metal struck lightly against metal. In a moment the officer knelt beside me, fastening wire ropes to cleats in the deck.

"The money," he whispered.

I opened the belt at my waist and counted out thirty coins into his hand. He held them up to make certain that they were one hundred chronor pieces. They were. He grunted and slipped them into a pocket. He started to leave. I grabbed his arm.

"Where do I stay?" I whispered.

He jerked his head back toward the stacks of boxes. Before I could say anything more he pulled himself loose and disappeared around the nearest stack.

I stared in the direction he had pointed. The stacks of boxes stretched interminably. I looked up. The ceiling was low, and the stacks reached almost to the top. I started moving back silently. There was barely enough room for me to slip through sideways. Once I caught my foot on a cable and almost stumbled but I grabbed the edge of a box and pulled myself up.

The stacks grew steadily darker. Behind me chains clanked, boxes thumped, motors whirred. I hadn't found anything like a place in which I could survive a trip through space. And then the noises stopped. I halted to listen. Another motor began, a more powerful one. Slowly the darkness deepened until, with a final clank, night fell, deepest night without a glimmer of light. Footsteps faded in the distance. Something else clanked, and I was in silence as complete as the night.

Fear coursed icily through my veins. This wasn't the way it was supposed to be.

I took a few steps more, almost running, tripping over wires. And suddenly I was in a space where there were no boxes. There was nothing. I felt my way back to the narrow aisle and then slowly along the stack. It turned a right angle. Half a dozen steps brought me to another right angle. Half a dozen steps. Another right angle. When I came back to the aisle, I had a mental picture of the empty space. It was a square, half a dozen paces to a side.

I knelt down to feel the floor. It was smooth and warm, almost hot. I felt all over the floor, crawling on my hands and knees. There had to be more than this. A room wasn't enough. I needed food and light, one almost as bad as the other. I felt a scream growing inside me.

Something small and cylindrical rolled under my hand. I searched around for it, found it, and investigated it carefully. There was a button on the side. I pushed it in. Light sprang out of one end, disclosing a dusty floor and a cubicle walled in with boxes. They stared at me blankly, all except one. It gaped blackly.

I flashed the light into it. There were dozens of sealed, plastic flasks and stacks of small boxes. I tore open one of the boxes and shook the contents out into my hand. Four dry biscuits and eight colored pellets.

I ate the biscuits first. Then I put one of the brown pellets in my mouth and let it dissolve. It had a rich, meaty flavor. Two others were the same. The others were different. A light yellow one tasted like fresh fruit.

After the food was gone I broke the seal on a flask and squeezed the water into my mouth. I felt contented, almost happy. In a few minutes, or half an hour, or an hour, this ship would be lifting, pushing itself away from the stubbornly resisting world below, breaking through thinning air into the blackness of space, and I would be here, snug, wellfed, waiting for the moment when I would slip out into the purer air and the cleaner soil of another world. MacLeod. I wondered if it would be better or worse. I hoped it would be better, but it didn't matter, really. It would be a new world, where I could make a new start. That was enough.

I turned off the flashlight. It isn't so bad being in total darkness when you know you can have light if you want it. It's when there's no help for it that the dark closes in like something alive, clutching at your throat. There was no way of knowing how long the power for the light would last. I would save it.

The darkness was warm and friendly. A little too warm, really. It made me drowsy. The heat from the floor beneath me worked up into my body…

Somewhere, far off, something whirred. Later, light poured through my eyelids, redly. Something fumbled at my chest, shook my sleeve, and withdrew. I pried my eyes open.

The light was blinding. There was a white spot of it; I couldn't see anything else.

"Who is it?" I asked sleepily.

Somebody chuckled.

The chase was over. I had run until I couldn't run any more. That chuckle was all that was necessary to end my flight when freedom was a few minutes away.

I knew that laugh. It was Sabatini.

|
Go to Table of Contents
|

There was no point in struggling. My gun was gone, and the knife in my sleeve was gone. Sabatini wasn't alone.

I was jerked to my feet. My jacket was stripped off. My hands were tied behind me. I accepted everything numbly. I was an automaton, without life of my own, without hope or fear or thought. I waited for them to cut off my feet.

Sabatini was chuckling again. "The old hot box. They never learn."

I waited. They led me out through the narrow lanes between the stacks. When I stumbled in the darkness, they jerked me up.

They're waiting until they get me out where they can carry me,
I thought. But when we came out in the little cleared space in front of the open cargo door, they stopped me, but they didn't cut off my feet. Besides Sabatini there was a big one and a little one. In the dim starlight coming through the door, I saw that they were all dressed in real uniforms, orange and blue. It should have meant something to me, but it didn't.

"You caught him," someone said, vast relief in his voice. Silver gleamed dully, but I didn't recognize him. He was older than my venal friend. "Thank God! You'd never think, to look at him, that he had the Plague."

"At this stage," said Sabatini, "it hardly shows."

"What I can't figure out," the voice said, "is how he got in there."

"You can't?" Sabatini said. He sounded amused.

"We will always be grateful to the Emperor," the voice went on hurriedly. "You've saved us months of delay in quarantine and maybe even our lives."

"The Emperor lives to serve his people," Sabatini said dryly. "Now, if you will operate the hoist, we'll take this man where he can't contaminate anyone."

Silver shrank back farther into the darkness. "Of course," he gasped.

I edged toward the doorway, but a hand reached out to hold me back. A motor whirred softly. Chains rattled. A platform edged out into the starlight. Before it cleared the ship, Sabatini stepped onto it. One of his men handed me out to him. He held tightly to my arm with one hand, to the chain with the other. The other two mercenaries got on.

The platform swung out into the night air, swaying gently. It fell through the darkness, slowed, and thudded softly to the pavement. As soon as the Agents stepped off, pulling me after them, the platform swayed back up.

Across the field new lights sprang up. Someone shouted. The voice carried far through the night. A truck motor roared into life. Without haste but without wasting any time or motion, Sabatini pushed me to an orange-and-blue helicopter, through the door, and into a back seat. I sagged, unutterably weary of everything.

One of the mercenaries got in the back with me. He was a little man with a dark face and eyes that held glittering reflections of the distant lights. The other one who looked big and soft and laughed a lot climbed into the front with Sabatini. More motors roared, but they were a long way off. Lights began to string out across the field. Others probed the sky with searching fingers.

The helicopter motor coughed and was silent, coughed again and began muttering to itself. Vanes sighed above me. The helicopter lifted a few feet from the ground and moved sideways, drifting across the field.

A powerful light bored through the darkness above our heads and was reflected brilliantly from the hull of the Phoenix. The helicopter drifted on, rising a little higher. The lights around the distant buildings slid away.

In a few minutes we were close to the fence. It was a straight, bright line under us. And we left it behind, and it left us in darkness. We drifted on.

No one said anything. My mind had begun to work again, not quickly, not well, but at least it began to think. I wondered what Sabatini and his men were doing in Imperial uniforms. I wondered why there had been excitement at the port. I wondered why we fled through the night. But it didn't really matter.

Sabatini chuckled. "The old hot box. You haven't thanked me, Dane. I saved you from certain death." He chuckled again, and the big, soft one laughed.

I didn't move; I didn't say anything. Sabatini turned around in the seat to stare at me through the darkness; his nose was a monstrous black shadow. "You know where they put you in that ship, don't you? Right over the motors. When the ship took off you'd have been cooked, inside and out. They've played that game for a long time, those spacers. I didn't think anyone still fell for it." He chuckled again, this time at humanity's eternal credulity.

I didn't answer. I was cold inside.
You'd have to trust someone, sometime,
I heard Laurie saying.
You'd be sure to trust the wrong person.
But there hadn't been any choice. It was the space officer or no one. What did it matter whether I died there in the ship or in Sabatini's hands? It would have been better to have died in the Phoenix, hoping for life, dreaming of another world.