Alexander Kazantsev - The Destruction of Faena

Hatred, horror and the hopelessness of his position drove Kutsi further on. The results of a shock wave are freakish. In one place, he stumbled on the cross-section of a rocky hill with window openings and shapeless patches. When he went closer, Kutsi saw a pile of scrap iron driven into a wall.

In front of him he saw the wreckage of a steamcar that had been passing that way at the time of the explosion.

Nearby, on the fused stone, shone patches vaguely suggestive of Faetians.

Kutsi shuddered: “The white shadows of passers-by!” The pedestrians themselves had been vapourised by the incredible heat, but their shadows had been imprinted by the exploding star right there on the wall where the outlines, the mangled images of those who not long ago had been living human beings now showed up as lighter, less fused areas on the wall…

Kutsi could not bear it any longer. He ran back. His foot struck a stone that rolled over the slag of the roadway. A smashed jar of something edible! He picked it up. It proved to be carbon inside. The unprecedented heat had coked the contents, converting it into a black, coagulated mass.

Kutsi wanted to get to the central quarters of the city. But he already knew what he was going to see there: shadows on the walls, if the stones had not been piled into shapeless heaps, and endless ramparts of rubble…

Then Kutsi made a decision. What he had been through had clouded his mind. Not a single Faetian in possession of his faculties would have decided on the crazy plan that hatched out in Kutsi’s inflamed brain.

Kutsi knew that he was doomed: the deadly radiation had long since penetrated his body. It would soon begin to make itself felt. There was very little time left. He had no hope of survival whatever! Nor had he any desire to live among the dead.

However, he considered himself under obligation to do his last duty.

With his characteristic determination, he went back across the heaps of rubble to the Great Shore where, not so long ago, a sea wave had brought Ave and Mada together.

The further away he was from the site of the explosion, the more hope there was of finding something to eat. A house lizard with charred skin was lying under a wall just like the bodies of the Nepts. The affectionate, quick-moving, nimble lizard had, of course, been a general favourite of the dead couple.

Kutsi laughed bitterly. The Supreme Officer of the Blood Guard had met him on the ship and had called him a carrion-eater. Had it occurred to the man that he would prove to be right?

Only at night did Kutsi reach the Temple of Eternity, or rather the mountain of stones lying where it had once stood. If his “hump” had been the cause of the explosion, then it might be possible to find a way into the underground by way of the crater.

Kutsi was certain that the electric power system had been put out of action and that the automatic doors would not be working.

He proved right in one respect and wrong in the other.

Only in the morning did he manage to find the way into the deep corridor where the explosion had occurred. The gallery was less cluttered with stones than everything else around, since the gases had shot out of it as from a gun-barrel.

Kutsi’s frenzied will-power helped him to dig out the entrance into the underground where he had been “killed” by Yar Alt.

His old self again, Kutsi made his way like a spy along the walls, lighting his path with a pocket torch. But suddenly a bright light came on of its own accord. Kutsi Merc was overjoyed at this, but he was also frightened by it. If the supply to the underground rooms was still working, he would not be able to get through the closed walls. Yar Jupi was still alive. He was still sending disintegration torpedoes against Danjab. Kutsi Merc had no right to retreat.

A blank wall rose up in front of him. When Kutsi had crawled outside from there, the walls had been divided, which meant that this must be another route leading to the Dictator’s underground Lair.

Kutsi Merc tried in vain to separate the walls, driving into a chink a piece of metal he had picked out on the surface.

Beads of cold sweat started up on his brow. He could not back out, he simply could not do it! He fixed a glare full of hatred at the spiral ornament on the accursed wall.

The wall divided.

Kutsi was well versed in the technology of automatic machines that could memorise the brain biocurrents. He instantly realised that they had been programmed to a particularly strong character trait of the chosen Faetians. For Yar Jupi himself, whom all automatic machines had, of course, to obey, the predominant characteristic was hatred. It was answered by the “blood doors”, which were also tuned to Mada’s kindly nature and that of her nanny. But Kutsi’s hatred now was evidently not inferior to that of the Dictator himself. And so the automatic machines of the Lair went into action.

Kutsi ran along the illuminated corridor. Each time the wall barred his way, Kutsi’s glare of hatred opened it.

After a steep downward slope, the corridor made a turn, emerging into a spacious apartment reminiscent of a palace hall with a vaulted ceiling. There was no furniture in it except for a huge cupboard with shining vertical slits.

Two enormous robots with cubic heads and articulated tentacles came rushing straight at him.

Kutsi guessed that he must have reached his goal. The Dictator’s bunker!

Hatred made Kutsi Merc invincible. He rushed at the robots, ordering them to follow him. And the robots obeyed, programmed to respond to the Dictator’s principal emotion.

Kutsi Merc stopped before the secretary-box, not admitting to himself that it might refuse to obey him.

“Open the study door!” he commanded, fixing his gaze on the machine’s glowing slits.

The machinery of the Faetians was so sophisticated that it detected their moods. This height of development had its vulnerable side.

The secretary-box, manufactured in Dan-jab, was simply a machine always obedient to the will of its owner, the Dictator of Powermania. It now recognised this will in Kutsi and obeyed it.

The door to Yar Jupi’s study opened.

Yar Jupi jumped up from the table and stared in terror at the burly stranger with a wrestler’s neck and a sneer on his face.

“Who are you?” shouted the Dictator, shaking from head to foot.

“Your judge,” replied Kutsi coldly, advancing on him.

If Yar Jupi had not been in such a panic fear of living Faetians and had not kept them at a distance, Kutsi’s plan would not have worked. But this time Kutsi was face to face with the Dictator in person.

“Robots! Security robots!” yelled Yar Jupi in a voice hoarse with terror.

The robots ran in, ready for action.

“Tie his hands together!”

It was not Yar Jupi, but Kutsi who gave the order in a voice full of hatred.

Yar Jupi raged, screamed and ordered the robots to obey him, but his brain was radiating terror, not the hatred so familiar to the robots.

The robots unthinkingly bound the Dictator’s hands.

“You are the greatest criminal of all time!” announced Kutsi Merc, standing before the helpless Dictator. He considered himself the only one who had survived to act on behalf of all the victims. “I bear within me the hatred of all the victims of your criminal doctrine, whose goal you made destruction and whose meaning was hatred. But there is a hatred greater than yours. I bring that hatred down on you in the name of the history of Reason!”

“I pray you for mercy,” whined the Dictator. “Not many are left alive on Faena. I shall work humbly, like the last roundhead; I shall acknowledge the Doctrine of Justice, I shall grow flowers. Just look at the beauty I have raised. Let us go to the niche, let us savour the fragrance of those blossoms together.”