Robert Silverberg - Citadel of Darkness

The wavering green lines of the mass detector told me that there was a planet ahead where no planet ought to be, and my skin started to crawl. I checked the star-guide a second time, running down the tight-packed printed columns with deliberate care.

Karen’s soft hand brushed lightly across my shoulder, and I glanced up. “The guide doesn’t say anything about planets in this sector of space,” I told her.

“Have you checked the coordinates?”

I nodded grimly. “I’ve checked everything. There’s a planet out ahead, approximately two light-months from us. And you know what it has to be.”

Her fingers dug tightly into my neckmuscles.

“It can’t be anything else. There’s no star within sight, none supposed to be here, and yet the mass detector’s popping like sixty. The only answer is a wandering sunless world—and there’s only one of those.”

“It’s Lanargon,” she said simply. “Lanargon. The marauder world.”

I turned away and busied myself over the control panel. My fingers flew lightly over the computer levers, and microrelays clicked and buzzed behind the green plexilite screen.

After a moment, Karen said, “What are you doing?”

“Setting up a landing orbit,” I told her without looking up. “As long as we’re here, we might as well investigate. We can’t pass up a chance like this.”

I expected opposition, but I was surprised. All she said was, “How soon before we land?” No nervousness, no hesitation. She looked a lot cooler than I felt as I went about the job of preparing for our landing on Lanargon, the galaxy’s most dreaded—and most mysterious—planet.

It was in the year 3159 that the Terran colony on Faubia III was wiped out by armed attack, and word came to the universe that war was with us again. The worlds of mankind looked at each other in suspicion and fear. Five centuries of galactic amity had brought about the feeling that armed strife was a buried relic of antiquity—and then, without warning, came the attack on Faubia III.

There were universal denials. A year later, Metagol II was sacked by unknown invaders, and later the same year Vescalor IX, the universe’s greatest source of antivirotic drugs, was conquered.

The circumstances were the same each time. An army of tall men in black spacesuits would descend suddenly upon the unsuspecting planet, destroying its capital, seize control of the planet’s leaders, and carry off plunder. Then, mysteriously as they came, they would depart, always taking many prisoners with them.

The attacks continued. The marauders struck seemingly at random here and there across the face of the galaxy. Trantor was hit in 3163, Vornak IV three years after that. In 3175, Earth itself was subjected to a raid.

The universe recoiled in terror. The Multiworld Federation searched desperately for the answer—and found it. It made us no more comfortable to learn that the marauders were aliens from some far island universe who rode their sunless planet like a giant spaceship, who had crossed the great gulf of space that separated their galaxy from ours and now, under cloak of their virtual invisibility, travelled through our group of worlds, burning, pillaging, and looting as they went.

We were helpless against an invader we could not see. And now, possibly for the first time, someone had taken Lanargon by surprise. The marauder world had crossed our orbit as we returned to Earth from Rigel VI, and it lay squarely in our path, wrapped in its cloak of darkness out there in the eternal black of space.

I watched its bulk grow on the mass detector, and wiped away a trickle of perspiration that had started to crawl down my forehead. Two people—a man and a woman—against a world of the deadliest killers ever known.

As an Earthman, as a member of the Multiworld Federation, it was my duty to aid in Lanargon’s destruction. And I had an idea for doing it.

I locked the ship into automatic, watched the computer buzz twice to confirm that it had taken control, and got up. Karen was still standing behind me. Her face was pale and drawn; all the color seemed to have left it, though her eyes glowed with courage.

She reached out and took my hand as I stepped away from the controls. I folded her hand in both of mine, and squeezed.

“It has to be done, doesn’t it” she asked softly.

I nodded, thinking of the home that awaited us on Earth, the friends, the children. Heroes don’t have to be born; sometimes they’re made by a trajectory-line charted between two worlds.

“It has to be done,” I said. I drew her close. For all I knew, it was going to be the last time.

Our ship taxied in slowly, spiralling around Lanargon in ever-narrowing circles. I could see it plainly now from the viewport, a rough, ugly-looking, barren world, boasting not even the drifts of snow that would be a frozen atmosphere. Lanargon was just a ball of rock, seen dimly in the starlight. Great leaping mountains sprang up like dragon’s teeth from the rocky plains beneath. There was no sign of life. None.

I glanced over at Karen, who was strapped securely in her acceleration cradle at my side. She was smiling.

“We’ll be there soon,” I said.

“Good. This suspense is starting to get me. I’d like to get down there and get it over with—whatever it is we’re going to do.”

“I’ve got bad news for you, if you’re in a hurry,” I said. “We may need months before we get through.”

“Why? What will happen?”

“We’re going to tell the universe about Lanargon,” I said. “Where it is, where it may be going, how to come get it. We’re in a pretty empty part of space, though. Even by subradio, it may take weeks before we get within range of some other world.”

“You mean we’re going to stay on Lanargon until you make radio contact with some other planet?”

I nodded. “We’re going to turn ourselves into living signal buoys. We’re going to ride on Lanargon like fleas on a gorilla’s back for a while. I hope they don’t notice us, and just keep on moving until they come close enough to some inhabited planet for us to get out an SOS.”

“And then?”

“Then we get out of here as fast as we can, and wait for the Multiworld Fleet to home in on the coordinates we’ve given and blast Lanargon to the fate it so thoroughly deserves,” I said. “The only problem is staying unfound long enough to give the message. At the moment, we’re well out of range of anyone who could pick it up.”

I leaned back and moistened my dry lips. “Hold tight, kid. We’re almost there.”

Within the hour, we had approached Lanargon’s surface and were hovering no more than a hundred miles above, moving into the final stage of our landing. Minutes later, our ship dropped gently down and touched ground.

I was the first one up, and was half into my spacesuit before Karen had climbed out of her acceleration cradle. She followed me into the airlock when she was ready, and together we stepped outside.

It was a dead world. Perhaps it once had had a sun and an atmosphere and the warmth of life, but now it was but the corpse of a planet—inhabited, who know where, by the merciless aliens who had terrorized the universe.

“It’s—its the most horrible place I’ve ever seen,” Karen said, as we stood together at the base of the ship, looking around at the planet that would be our hone until we made contact with some inhabited world.

“That’s the only word for it,” I agreed. I almost shivered, though I was fully protected from the cold by my spacesuit. We could see—dimly, by the faint glow of the sprinkling of stars above—a few miles of the planet’s surface, and it was hardly a cheering sight. Lanargon was a slagheap, a vast desert of twisted lava forced into tortured convolutions, of ageless rocks and jutting mountains, stony and bleak.