Barrington Bayley - Empire of Two Worlds

“Did you have to do it this way?” I said, still surly.

“Why not, it’s as good as any other. Don’t tell me you’re going to fold up like a sack of water?” He gazed at me curiously. “It’s a funny thing, you get guys who are brave in the face of bullets, grenades, cops, anything you can name, but they haven’t got what it takes when something hits them in the gut like this. Don’t tell me you’re one of those hollow men. I hope I know character better than that.”

“I can take it.”

“I thought so.” Bec was silent for a moment. Then he cocked his head, looking at me slyly. “Tell you what I’ll do, Klein. You can have the woman back. Go on, take her. Only you’ll be out of it, like you just said. You’ll have quit. You’ll live out your life here in Rheatt and nobody will bother you. I’ll do the job on my own. Nothing can stop me now, anyway.”

I gave a deep sigh. “You know me better than that.”

“I think so.”

For a moment he looked at me with what might have been sympathy. I remembered Gelbore, the girl on the raft with us. I wondered when Bec was going to stop making emotional demands of me.

I didn’t try to see Palramara after that. Bec, however, continued visiting her regularly.

I had just woken up when the gentle tone sounded. Becmath’s face came up in monochrome on the television screen, which was muted to suit Klittmann eyes.

He was frowning. “Can you get over here, Klein? There’s something needs attending to straight away.”

“I’ll be with you,” I said, and the image faded.

I dressed quickly, wondering what was up. I hadn’t seen Bec in the flesh for over half a year.

We’d been in operation now for something like four years. Everything had gone fairly smoothly, barring a few wrinkles here and there. The production lines were now turning out weapons, aircraft, and a modified version of the sloop. About fifty per cent of everything we made went to Merame, as well as masses of other manufactured goods and raw materials.

Rheatt was still garrisoned by Rotrox troops, but everything was quiet and their numbers grew less every year. Bec had recruited an élite organisation from among Rheattite youngsters who had never taken Blue Space, given them training in arms, concocted an ideology and indoctrinated them with it. They were contemptuous of the life styles of their parents and looked on Bec almost as a god.

Bec had done all this without so far arousing the opposition of the Council of the Rotrox. He had even persuaded them to put off their conquests of other Earth nations and continents until sufficient stocks of the new weapons had been built up.

The fact that Rheatt was running like a well-oiled machine was due entirely to Bec’s master-planning, with a little help from me and the boys. It didn’t alter the fact that we, the new masters of this country, were essentially mobsters and still thought and acted like mobsters.

We must have seemed strange, remote figures to the Rheattite population. Once things settled down we had become recluse, living in green towers dotted about the landscape. Grale and Hassmann shared a tower, otherwise each of us had had his own tower built, lacking windows and completely cut off from the outside world, where we each lived according to his own propensities. Reeth had designed the inside of his dwelling himself and had covered the walls with paintings of naked Killibollian women he had somehow got a local artist to paint from imagination. He had a different Rheattite woman every day. Tone the Taker’s place was simply a den where he kept himself in a permanently drugged condition. Harmen, apart from his private dwelling, also staffed an alchemical laboratory with about twenty Rheattite assistants. Currently, so I heard, he was trying to get a nuclear reactor built.

I had purposefully built my own tower without too much luxury. Unlike the others, who had nothing but leisure on their hands, there was still plenty for me to do. I was Bec’s liaison for the armaments programme and for training the League of Rheatt, as the youth organisation was called. Bec himself never went out now, and every day he called me on the screen for conferences and instructions.

Dressed and armed, I checked the outside. Bright light filtered through the screen of cloth I used to do this, momentarily lighting up the interior with a green glow. I judged it was mid-afternoon, took the elevator down and put on my dark goggles while I drove over to Bec’s tower.

The elevator took me in automatically. Bec was seated in a deep soft chair, a glass of hwura, an intoxicating beverage, in his hand. In Klittmann he had smoked a lot of weed, but now we couldn’t get that he drank hwura instead.

Bec was almost surrounded by television screens and piles of documents and written reports.

“Hello, Klein,” he said. “I think somebody’s trying to do a takeover. Come and look at this.”

Several of the screens were alive. Only as I crossed the room did I see the one he was watching. It showed a number of Rotrox leaning over something. When one of them moved I could see that what they were leaning over was Tone the Taker. He was lying on his back on a couch, his features vacant. Their voices came over, blurred and indistinguishable. I strained my ears but could make out nothing.

“They’ve been trying to get Tone to tell them where the gateway to Killibol is,” Bec supplied.

“Has he told them?”

“No, but only because he’s too blocked to know what’s going on. When he needs another shot he’ll start to come round and then he’ll tell them anything.”

“Why do they want to know? Is Imnitrin trying to bypass us?”

Bec shook his head. “I don’t think so. I’ve been hearing vague rumblings for some time. There’s always been a small caucus on Merame that resented our influence and our reconstituting the Rheattic nation instead of destroying it completely. Evidently this is an action group. Their idea will be to seize the gateway, probe beyond it, and if it looks good try to gain enough support for a wholly Rotrox invasion. At the same time they’ll want us shouldered out.”

I stared at the scene. One of the Rotrox was shaking Tone. “Isn’t that somewhat rebellious? Could they pull it off? What would the Council think?”

Bec moved uneasily. “It’s a funny thing about the Rotrox. I’ve noticed that an idea or an argument can be in the air for years without anything happening. The Council might even veto it. But if somebody takes some action on their own and it begins to look as if it’s moving, they get interested. Consequently I don’t want these zealots poking into our business. Especially, I don’t want them poking around on Killibol.”

“Why not? They’d simply find a dead world.”

“That’s why it would be so bad. They could convince the Council that I’ve been lying to them. The Rotrox are expecting all kinds of loot out of Killibol.”

There was one other question I wanted to ask.

“Have you got all our towers bugged?”

“Between you and me — no. Only Tone’s and Harmen’s. I figured that would only be sensible.”

“It looks like you were right. What do you want me to do about this?”

“Take a squad over there and don’t leave anybody alive.”

“Isn’t that a bit drastic?” I asked. “The Rotrox might not like that.”

“I’ll square it. They’re not squeamish about expending their young bloods. I’ll make it look like they came in shooting and Tone’s bodyguard defended him. That might convince the action caucus that we’re more solidly entrenched than they thought we were.”

“Right.”

As I turned to go, Bec added: “By the way, when I said leave nobody alive I meant nobody. And that goes for Tone, too.”