Barrington Bayley - Empire of Two Worlds

I paused. “Is that necessary?” I said. “He is one of us.”

“He’s the only weak link in the chain and I want him out of the way. They wouldn’t dare to try this on any of the others. I seem to remember you missed Tone once before. Now’s your chance to make up for it.”

Tone’s tower was nearly two hundred miles away. I rustled up a well-armed squad of ten young Rheattites and we commandeered a fast aircraft from a nearby airfield. It could do well over four hundred miles per hour fully loaded, and we weren’t long in getting there.

Bec had told me he had counted five Rotrox in the tower, but there could well have been more. Also, they might have heard the noise of the motor as we approached. I studied the tower from behind a grove of trees, reflecting on how well that type of building was suited to withstand an assault.

However long you looked at it there was only one thing to do and that was to go in through the main entrance at ground level. By now it was evening; the sun was below the horizon and I could dispense with my eye filters. Cool, fresh perfumes drifted across the ground from the trees, grass and flowers. The squad knew its business; I gave the command and across the open ground we went, my men moving quick and lithe in their cat-suit uniforms.

We made it to the base of the tower and found the elevator empty and intact. I left three men outside and the rest of us surged upward in the confined space. In those few seconds, I knew, we were extremely vulnerable. I stopped the elevator two floors below Tone’s living quarters.

We piled out into dark, silent and empty rooms. Tone had built the fat tower much larger than his requirements. Probably without even knowing it. I led the way up staircases until we came to the occupied storey which was lit and furnished.

The first spacious room we went through, though unoccupied, bore evidence of Tone’s hobby. The furnishings were streamlined and sparse. The whole room was in blue (Earth sky-blue) and the walls were taken up with giant television screens which crawled with eye-dizzying patterns in various shades of blue.

A murmur of clipped, high-pitched Rotrox voices came from the next room. I signalled the Rheattites to move quietly. We crossed the floor to the wide doors with their hand-carved friezes. I kicked it open and we burst through.

The scene was more or less as I had seen it on the television screen in Bec’s tower. The Rotrox stood around the supine Tone, talking among themselves and waiting for him to recover consciousness sufficiently to put himself in their power.

Our repeaters blasted out without warning. The Rotrox had time to turn, to reach for their weapons, then they were skittering across the room under the impact of a hail of lead, tumbling over the furniture.

In seconds the deafening violence was over. I checked the bodies to make sure they were dead. From what I could see, Tone hadn’t been touched, I decided I had better do the next part of the job alone.

“Get back downstairs and wait for me at the base of the tower,” I ordered. They left. I looked close at Tone. His eyes were closed.

Then it struck me. There were four dead Rotrox in the room. Bec had mentioned five. There had to be another one somewhere in the tower.

There was another door at the opposite end of the room. I sidled to it, eased it open, and slipped inside. It was another blue room. In the one or two seconds that I cased it the fifth Rotrox entered by a door to my right.

We saw each other in the same moment. In his hand he had one of the short-bladed swords the Rotrox usually carried. Apparently he had no firearm. I brought up my repeater and nipped back the trigger.

And the repeater jammed.

Mentally I cursed. The repeater was Rheatt-made — despite all our efforts Rheattite workmanship still didn’t measure up to the home version. My mind leaped immediately to the handgun in my inside holster and to the guns the dead Rotrox had carried in the other room, but there was no time to do anything about either. The Rotrox came at me in a flash, sword extended, and I had just a split second to save my life.

His limbs chink-chinked as he sprang at me. Four years ago it had taken me quite a while to find out what the movable rod-like arrangement was on Rotrox legs and arms. Merame is only one-sixth the size of Earth or Killibol and its gravity is correspondingly less. The silvery rods and pistons were assists: motorised extra muscles without which the Rotrox could scarcely stand up in Earth’s heavy gravity.

I hurled myself aside, just managing to dodge his sword thrust. As his grinning grey face swept past me I took my repeater by the barrel and swung the stock at his nearside calf, smashing the rod arrangement where it junctioned with the ankle. There was a tinkling noise. The Rotrox fell heavily to the floor as his leg collapsed under him. He floundered there, trying to raise himself with his arms and his good leg. That gave me the moment I needed to draw my handgun and shoot him through the head.

I listened for any further sound in the building. There was none. I went back to where Tone lay on the couch. His eyes were open, now. He looked up at me, his pupils huge.

“They wanted information,” he said dreamily, his voice faint. “I held back. I’ve been awake for some time.”

The gun was still in my hand. When he saw it there, the way it was pointing, he seemed to guess what was going to happen.

“I’m a risk, aren’t I?” he said, struggling to a half-sitting position. “I’m not in control of myself.”

“We have to protect ourselves,” I said stonily.

“Sure.” He stared, glazed, up into my face. “Shoot me, Klein. Go on, shoot me. Then I’ll be free, floating in Blue Space forever.”

I levelled the gun. Suddenly his face twisted wryly.

“Becmath’s hatchet-man!”

The blast sounded incongruously loud. The slug made a neat hole in his face and blew a chunk out of the back of his skull. He jerked back on to the couch, dead before he even knew it.

Quickly and efficiently I went through the other rooms to make sure there was no one else and then rejoined the squad. I wondered if Bec, watching in his tower two hundred miles away, had picked up Tone’s last remark.

The planet Earth spins in a space filled with brilliant light. The atmosphere glows with the brightness of it. On that planet, the country of Rheatt is like one vast jewel glowing with colours, a big bowl of green grass and heady scents from the drooping trees.

Sometimes, from within my tower, I would peep at the spectacle of the setting or rising sun throwing vivid colours across the sky. Alien though it was, I could see the beauty of it.

Nine years had passed since we had first broken through the gateway from Killibol. Nine years in which we, the masters of Rheatt, had lurked invisibly in our sealed towers, rarely seen by the natives or by each other. Rheatt answered to our commands because we had organised it that way. Millions of Rheattites worked on Merame in Rotrox workshops or as household slaves. Down on Earth they manned the factories that, slowly but surely, had been turning out the weapons to equip an army. The muscles and nerves of the new order in Rheatt were supplied by a military-style élite that had never known Blue Space. They had been trained by us personally. They had their own kind of toughness, even of brutality, and they were in awe of the white men who had achieved all this.

There were still Rotrox in Rheatt, too, stalking about with their habitual arrogance, sometimes with the traditional molten metal-spewing lances, but more often with the repeaters and handguns that we had given them. They were respected by the Rheattic élite, but not admired.