The Dueling Machine sw-3 Read online

  Hector soon struck up an acquaintance with the men on duty. Despite the Star Watch emblem on his cover-alls, they seemed to accept him as a fellow-sufferer in the military system, rather than a potential enemy.

  “That’s the capital city,” one of them pointed out.

  Hector nodded, impressed. “Is that where they have the dueling machine?”

  “You mean the one at the Ministry of Intelligence?

  That’s over on the other side of the planet. I’ll show it to you when we swing over that way.”

  “Thanks,” Hector said. “I’d like to see it… very much.”

  Every morning Odal was taken from his underground suite of rooms to the enclosed courtyard of the Justice building for an hour of sunshine and exercise. Under the cold eyes of the guards he ran endless circles around the courtyard’s manicured grass, or did push-ups, knee-bends, sit-ups… anything to break the monotony and prevent the guards from seeing how miserable and lonely he really felt.

  Romis, he thought, is no fool. He won’t need me until all his plans are finished, until the actual moment to kill the Leader arrives. What could be better for him than to leave me here, and then offer the Watchman—at precisely the right moment—in trade for me? Spencer will have me shipped back to Kerak, too late to do anything but Romis’ bidding.

  There were stately, pungent trees lining the four sides of the courtyard, and in the middle a full, wide-spreading wonder with golden, stiff leaves that tinkled like glass chimes whenever a breeze wafted them. As Odal got up, puffing and hot, from a long set of push-ups, he saw Geri Dulaq sitting on the bench under that tree.

  He wiped his brow with a towel and, tossing it over his shoulder, walked slowly to her. He hadn’t noticed before how beautiful she was. Her face looked calm, but he could sense that she was working hard to keep control of herself.

  “Good morning,” he said evenly.

  She nodded but said nothing. Not even a smile or a frown. He gestured toward the bench, and when she nodded again, he sat down beside her.

  “You’re my second visitor,” said Odal.

  “I know,” Geri replied. “Professor Leoh told me about his visit to you. How you refused to try to help Hector.”

  Allowing himself a smile, Odal said, “I thought that’s what you’d be here for.”

  She turned to face him. “You can’t leave him in Kerak! If Kanus…”

  “Hector is with Romis. He’s safe enough.”

  “For how long?”

  “As long as any of us,” Odal said.

  “No,” Geri insisted. “He’s a prisoner, and he’s in danger.”

  “You actually love him?”

  Her eyes had the glint of tears in them. “Yes,” she said.

  Shaking his head in disbelief, Odal asked, “How can you love that bumbling, tongue-twisted…”

  “He’s stronger than you are!” Geri flashed. “And braver. He’d never willingly kill anyone, not even you. He let you live when everyone else on the planet—including me—would have shot you down.”

  Odal backed away involuntarily.

  “You owe your life to Hector,” she said.

  “And now I’m supposed to throw it away to save his.”

  “That’s right. That would be the decent thing to do. It’s what he’d do for you.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “Of course you do. You don’t know what decency is.”

  He looked at her, carefully this time, trying to fathom the emotions in her face, her voice.

  “Do you hate me?” Odal asked.

  Her mouth started to form a yes, but she hesitated. “I should; I have every reason to. I… I don’t know… I want to!”

  She got up from the bench and walked rapidly, head down, to the nearest exit from the courtyard. Odal watched her for a moment, then went after her. But the guards stopped him as he neared the door. Geri went on through and disappeared from his sight without ever turning back to look at him.

  “Cowards!” Romis spat. “Spineless, weak-kneed old women.”

  He was pacing the length of the bookshelf-lined study in his villa, slashing out words as cold and sharp as knife blades. Sitting next to the fireplace, holding an ornate glass in his hand, was the captain of the star ship in which Hector was being held.

  “They plot for months on end,” Romis muttered, more to himself than the captain. “They argue over the pettiest details for days. They slither around like snakes, trying to make certain that the plan is absolutely foolproof. But as soon as some danger arises, what do they do?”

  The captain raised the glass to his lips.

  “They back down!” Romis shouted. “They place their own rotten little lives ahead of the welfare of the Kerak Worlds. They allow that monster to live, for fear that they might die.”

  The captain asked, “Well, what did you expect of them? You can’t force them to be brave. The army leaders, maybe. But they’ve all been arrested. Whole families. Your politician friends are scared out of their wits by Kor. It’s a wonder he hasn’t picked you up.”

  “He won’t,” Romis said, smiling strangely. “Not until he finds out where Odal is. He fears Odal’s return. He knows how well the assassin’s been trained.”

  “Well, you won’t be getting Odal back from Spencer unless you give up the Watchman. And once he goes, you can expect Spencer to hover over us like a vulture.”

  “Then what must I do? Kill Kanus myself?”

  “You can’t.” The captain shook his head.

  “Why not? You think I lack…”

  “My old friend, don’t lose sight of your objectives. Kanus is the monster, yes. But he’s surrounded by lesser monsters. If you try to kill him, you’ll be killed yourself.”

  “So?”

  “Then who will take over leadership of the government? One of Kanus’ underlings, of course. Would you like to see Greber in power? Or Kor?”

  Romis visibly shuddered. “Of course not.”

  “Then put the idea of personally performing the execution out of your head. It’s suicide.”

  “But Kanus must be stopped. I’m certain he means to attack Acquatainia before the month is out.” Romis walked over to the fireplace and stared into the flames. “I suppose we will have to ask for Odal’s return. Even if it means giving back the Watchman and having Spencer poised to invade us.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “What else can we do? If we can pull off the assassination quickly enough, we can keep Spencer out of Kerak. But if we hesitate much, longer, we’ll be at war with Acquatainia.”

  “We can beat the Acquatainians.”

  “I know,” Romis replied. “But once we do, Kanus will be so popular among the people that we wouldn’t dare touch him. And then the madman will attack the Terrans. That will pull the house down on all of us.”

  “Hmmm.”

  Romis turned to face the captain. “We must return the Watchman and get Odal back here. At once.”

  “Good,” said the captain. “Frankly, the Watchman has been a royal nuisance aboard my ship. He’s disrupting everything.”

  “How can one man disrupt an entire star ship?”

  The captain took a fast final gulp of his drink. “You don’t know this one man.”

  As the captain approached his star ship in his personal shuttle craft, he could sense something was wrong.

  It was nothing he could see, but the ship simply did not seem right. His worries were confirmed when the shuttle docked inside one of the giant star ship’s air locks. The emergency lights were on, and they were very dim at that. The outer hatch was cranked shut by two spacesuited deck hands, and it took nearly fifteen minutes to bring the lock up to normal air pressure, using the auxiliary air pumps.

  “What in the name of all the devils has happened here?” the captain stormed to a cringing junior officer as he stepped out of the shuttle.

  “It… it’s the power, sir. The power… shut off.”

  “Shut off?”

  The
officer swallowed nervously and replied, “Yessir. All at once… all through the ship… no power!”

  The captain fumed under his breath for a moment, then snapped, “Crank the inner hatch open and get me to the bridge.”

  The deck hands jumped to it, and in a few minutes the captain, junior officer, and lower ratings had deserted the air lock, leaving the shuttle empty and unguarded.

  Out of the pressurized control compartment at the far end of the lock stepped Hector, his thin face wary and serious, but not without the flickerings of a slightly self-satisfied smile.

  They should be finding the cause of the power failure in a minute or two, he said to himself. And as soon as the main lights go on, out I go.

  Hector tiptoed around the lock, making certain adjustments to the temporarily inert air pumps and hatch control unit. Then he climbed into the little shuttle, sealed its hatch, and studied the control panel. Not too tough… I think.

  It had been a ridiculously easy job to cause a power breakdown. All Hector had needed was a little time, so that the guards would begin to allow him to roam certain parts of the ship alone. He had spent long hours in the observation center, learning the layout of the mammoth ship and pinpointing his ultimate objective—the Ministry of Intelligence, where a dueling machine was.

  An hour ago, he had taken one of his customary strolls from his quarters to the communications center. His guards, after seeing Hector safely seated among a dozen Kerak technicians, relaxed. Hector waited a while, then casually sauntered over to the stairwell that led down to the switching equipment, on the deck below.

  Hector nearly fouled his plan completely by missing the second rung on the metal ladder and plummeting to the deck below. For a long moment he lay on his face, trying to look invisible, or at least dead. Finally he risked a peep up the ladder. No one was coming after him; they hadn’t noticed. He was safe, for a few minutes.

  He quickly found what he wanted: the leads from the main power plants and the communications antennas. He pulled one of the printed circuit elements from a stand-by console and used it to form a bridge between the power lead connectors and the antenna circuit. While the rules of physics claimed that what he was attempting was impossible, Hector knew from a previous experience on a Star Watch ship (he still shuddered at the memory) exactly what this “accidental” misconnection would do.

  It took about fifteen seconds for the power plants to pump all their energy into the short circuit. The effect was a quiet one: no sparks, no smoke, no explosion. All that happened was that all the lights and motors aboard the ship went off simultaneously. The emergency systems turned on immediately, of course. But in the dim auxiliary lighting, and the confusion of the surprised, bewildered, angry men, it was fairly simple for Hector to make his way along a carefully preplanned route to the main air lock.

  Now he sat in the captain’s shuttle, waiting for the power to return. The main lights flickered briefly, then turned on to full brightness. The air-lock pumps hummed to life, the outer hatch slid open. Hector nudged the throttle and the shuttle edged out of the air lock and away from the orbiting ship.

  The Kerak captain needed about ten minutes to piece together all the information: the deliberate misconnection in the switching equipment; Hector’s disappearance; and, finally, the unauthorized departure of his personal shuttle.

  “He’s escaped,” the captain mumbled. “Escaped. When we were just about to send him back.”

  “What shall we do, sir? If the planetary patrols detect the ship, he won’t be able to identify himself satisfactorily. They’ll blast him!”

  The captain’s eyes lit up at the thought. But then, “No. If we lose him, the whole Star Watch will pour into Kerak.” He thought for a moment, then told his aides, “Have our communications men send out a flight plan to the planetary patrol. Tell them that my shuttle and an auxiliary boat are bringing a contingent of men and officers to the Ministry of Intelligence. And get one of the boats ready for immediate departure. Take your best men. This mess is going to get worse before it gets better.”

  8

  Odal paced his windowless room endlessly: from the wall screen, around the lounge, past the guarded door to the outside hall, to the bedroom doorway, back again. And again, and again, across the thick carpeting.

  He was trying to use his mind as a dispassionate computer, to weigh and count and calculate a hundred different factors. But each factor was different, imponderable, non-numerical. And any one of them could determine the length of Odal’s life span.

  Kanus, Kor, Romis, Hector, and Geri.

  If I returned to Kerak, would Kanus restore me to my full honors? I hold the key to teleportation, to a devastating new way to invade and conquer a nation. Or has Kanus found other psychic talents? Would he regard me as a traitor or a spy? Or worst of all, a failure?

  Kor. Odal could report everything he knew about Romis’ plot to kill the Leader. Which wasn’t much. Kor probably already had that much information and more.

  What about Romis? Is he still bent on overthrowing the Leader? Does he still want an assassin?

  And the Watchman, that bumbling fool. But a teleporter, and probably as full talented as Odal himself. I can impress Leoh and Spencer by rescuing him. It would be risky, but if I do it… it will impress the girl, too.

  The girl. Geri Dulaq. Yes, Geri. She has every reason to hate me, and yet there is something other than hate in her eyes. Fear? Anger? They say that hate is very close to love.

  The view screen chimed, snapping Odal from his chain of thought and pacing. He clapped his hands and the wall dissolved, revealing the bulky form of Leoh sitting at his desk in the dueling machine building. The machine itself was partially visible through the open doorway behind the Professor.

  “I thought you should know,” Leoh said without preliminaries, his wrinkled face downcast with worry, “that Hector has apparently escaped from Romis’ hands. We received a message from one of Romis’ friends in the Kerak embassy that he’s disappeared.”

  Odal stood absolutely still in the middle of the room. “Disappeared? What do you mean?”

  Shrugging, Leoh replied, “According to our information, Hector was being kept aboard an orbiting star ship. He somehow got off the ship in a shuttle craft, presumably heading for the Kerak dueling machine. The same one you escaped from. That’s all we know.”

  “That machine is in Kor’s Ministry of Intelligence,” Odal heard himself saying calmly. But his mind was racing: Kor, Hector, Romis, Geri. “He’s walking straight into the fire.”

  “You’re the only one who can help him now,” Leoh said.

  Geri. The look on her face. Her voice: “You wouldn’t know what decency is.”

  “Very well,” said Odal. “I’ll try.”

  He had expected to feel either an excitement at the thought of pleasing Geri, or a new burden of fear at the prospect of returning to Kor’s hands. Instead he felt neither. Nothing. His emotions seemed turned off-or, perhaps, they were merely waiting for something to happen.

  It was late at night when Odal, closely guarded, arrived at the dueling machine. He was wearing black from his throat to his boots, and looked like a grim shadow against the antiseptic white of the chamber.

  Leoh met him at the control desk. The Acquatainian guards stood back.

  “I’m sorry it took so long to get you here. Every minute’s delay could mean Hector’s life. And yours.”

  Odal smiled tightly at the afterthought.

  The old man continued, “I had to talk to Martine for two whole hours before he’d permit your release. And I roused Sir Harold from his sleep. He was less than happy.”

  “If I recall the time differential correctly,” Odal said, “it’s nearly dawn at Kor’s headquarters. An ideal time to arrive.”

  “But is their dueling machine on?” Leoh asked. “We can’t make the jump unless the machine on the receiving end is under power.”

  Odal thought a moment. “It might be. When Kor was… experimenting
with me, they used the machine early each morning. It was always turned up to full power when I arrived for the day’s testing. They probably turn it on at dawn as a matter of routine.”

  “There’s one way to find out,” said Leoh, gesturing to the dueling machine.

  Odal nodded. The moment had come. He was returning to Kerak. To what fate? Death or glory? To which allegiance? Kor or Romis? Kill Hector or save him?

  And the picture he held in his mind as they adjusted the neurocontacts and left him in the dueling machine’s booth was the picture of Geri’s face. He tried to imagine how she would look smiling.

  It was late at night, dark and wind swept, when Hector skidded the stolen shuttle craft to a bone-rattling stop deep in a ravine a few kilometers from the Intelligence Ministry.

  He had come in low and fast, hoping to avoid detection by Kerak scanners. Now, as he stood atop the dented shuttle craft, feeling the wind, hearing its keening through the dark trees in the ravine, he focused his gaze on the beetling towers of the Intelligence building, silhouetted darkly atop a hill against the star-bright sky.

  Looks like an ancient castle, Hector thought, without knowing that it was.

  He ducked back through the hatch into the equipment storage racks, pulled out a jet belt, and squirmed into it. Then he went forward to the pilot’s compartment and turned off all the power on the ship.

  Might need her again, in case I can’t get to the dueling machine.

  It took him ten minutes to grope his way back to the hatch in darkness. Ten minutes, three shin-barkings, and one head-banging of near concussion magnitude. But finally Hector stood outside the hatch once more. He took a deep breath, faced the Intelligence building, and touched the control stud of the jet belt.

  In the quiet night, the noise was shattering. Hector’s ears rang as he flew, squinting into the stinging wind, toward the castle. Maybe this isn’t the best way to sneak up on them, he suspected. But now the battlements were looming before him, racing up fast. Cutting power, he tumbled down and hit hard, sprawling on the squared-off top of the tallest tower.