James Schmiz - The Witches of Karres

Now it appeared there had been mistakes made in planning it. Alerted to substitute for the synergizer only until that unit resumed functioning, the emergency director had taken action to perpetuate the emergency which left it in charge. The synergizer was very nearly indestructible. But Moander had placed it in a torpedolike vehicle and set the vehicle on a course which should plunge it into a great star near the point where the giant ship had emerged here. Free of its more powerful rival, Moander could not be controlled by any method available to the Lyrd-Hyrier.

“We know the synergizer was not destroyed at that time,” Cheel’s thoughts told the captain. “Apparently the vehicle was deflected from its course towards the star, presumably by the synergizer’s own action. But it has not returned and we have never found out where it went. Recently, there was a report—”

The thought halted. The captain was producing a mental image of Olimy’s mysterious crystalloid…

“ That is it! ” Cheel’s recognition of the object came almost as a shriek. “Where have you seen it?”

His excitement jumbled communication briefly; then he steadied. The Lyrd Hyrier had received reports through a spy system they’d been able to maintain in various sections of Manaret that Moander’s Nuris had picked up the long-lost trail of the synergizer. Only hours old was the information that a witch ship transporting the instrument had eluded an attempt to force it and its cargo into a sun, and had disappeared.

The captain acknowledged the ship was his own. Temporarily the synergizer was safe.

The alien golden-green eyes were smoky with agitation. A view of a great dim hall, walls tapestried with massed instrument banks, appeared in the captain’s mind. “The central instrument room — it is under our control still. Once there, in its own place, the synergizer is all-powerful! Away from it, it can do little…” The picture flicked out. Cheel’s thoughts hurried on. A long time ago they had picked up fragmentary messages directed at Manaret by others of their kind from the dimensions of reality out of which they had been thrown. A vast machinery had been constructed there which would pluck the giant ship back from wherever it had gone the instant it was restored to operational condition under the synergizer’s direction. All problems would be solved in that moment!

But there was no method known to the Lyrd-Hyrier, Cheel admitted, of bringing a material object through Moander’s outer defenses of Manaret. The synergizer was many things more than it appeared to be, but it was in part material. And Manaret’s defenses were being strengthened constantly. “The Nuris again are weaving new patterns of energy among the dead suns which surround us here on all sides…” Of late, Moander evidently had found means of disrupting mental exchanges between the Lyrd-Hyrier and some telepathic witches of Karres. They had recently become unable to establish contact with Karres.

It seemed a large “But…” “Any chance your friends eventually might send something like a relief ship here which could handle Moander?” the captain inquired.

“Impossible!” View of madly spinning blurs of energies, knotting and exploding… “There is no dimensional interface between us — there is a twisting plunge through chaos! We were there; we were here. In a million lifetimes that precise moment of whirling shift could not be deliberately duplicated. They cannot come here! They must draw the ship back there … and they can do that only when its total pattern of forces is intact and matches the pattern they have powered to attract it.”

Which required the synergizer…

If they could get it to Karres -

“How vulnerable is Moander to an outside attack?”

“Its defenses are those of Manaret.” Cheel, formidable individual though he appeared to be, was allowing discouragement to tinge his thoughts, now that his excitement had abated somewhat. “Additionally…”

View of a massive structure with down-sloping sides affixed to a flat surface of similarly massive look. “Moander’s stronghold on the outer shell of Manaret,” Cheel’s thought said. “Every defense known both to the science of the Great People and to the science of your kind on the worlds the Nuris have studied appears incorporated in it. And deep within it is Moander. The monster, for all its powers, is wary. All active operating controls of the ship are linked through the stronghold, and from it Moander scans your universe through its Nuris.”

“It has us in a death-grip, and is preparing to close its grip on your kind. If we — and you — are to escape, then haste is very necessary! For the Nuris have built new breeding vats and are entering them in great numbers. It is their time…”

“Breeding vats?” interjected the captain.

The Nuris — pliable and expendable slaves of whoever or whatever was in a position to command them — were bred at long intervals in the quantities required by their masters. Such a period had begun, and it was evident that Moander planned now to multiply the Nuri hordes at his disposal a hundredfold.

“In themselves the Worm People are nothing,” said Cheel’s thought. “But they are Moander’s instruments. As the swarms grow, so grows the enemy’s power. If Moander is not defeated before the worms have bred, our defenses will be overwhelmed… and your worlds, too, will die in a great Nuri plague to come.”

“Restore the synergizer to its place in the central instrument room, or break Moander’s stronghold and Moander — those are the only solutions now. And we cannot tell you how to do either—”

The thought-flow was cut off as Cheel and the great chamber suddenly blurred and vanished. The captain’s wraith-shape drifted again in featureless grayness.

He relled vatch, faintly at first, then definitely.

I HEARD ALL, the vatch-voice came roaring about him out of the grayness. A MOST BEAUTIFUL PROBLEM!… WAIT HERE A LITTLE NOW, GREAT PLAYER OF GREAT GAMES!

Its presence faded. At least there was nothing to rell any more. The captain drifted, or the grayness drifted.

A beautiful problem! Something new to entertain the vatch, from the vatch’s point of view… But a very terrible and urgent problem for everyone else concerned, if the Cheel creature had told the truth.

What could he do about it? Nothing, of course, until the vatch returned to get him out of this whatever-it-was, and back into his body and the rest of it.

And there probably would be very little he actually could do then, the captain thought. Because whatever he tried, the vatch would be looking over his shoulder, and the vatch definitely would want the game played its way. Which might happen to be a very bad way again for everyone else involved. There was no counting on the vatch.

How could you act independently of an entity which not only was able to turn you inside out when it felt like it but was also continuously reading your mind? He thought of the Nuri lock Goth had taught him to construct…

If there were something like a vatch lock now -

The thought checked. In the grayness before him there’d appeared a spark of bright fire. It stayed still for an instant, then quiveringly began to move, horizontally from left to right. It left a trail behind it — a twisted, flickering line of fire as bright as itself. It was -

Awful fright shot through him. Stop that! he thought.

The spark stopped. The line of fire remained where it was, quivering and brilliant. It looked very much like one of the linear sections of the patterns that had turned into the Nuri lock.

But this was a far heavier line — not a line at all really but a bar of living fire! Klatha fire, he thought… It had stopped where it was only because he’d checked it.