The Days of Glory Page 16

  They did not see the Beast ships as’ they came in on the blind side of the planet. They did not hear the muted roar of the space-drive motors as the Beast fleet settled several miles away. They never suspected the presence of the invaders as the Beasts crept—waist deep in water or sliding through the grass—into their camp and infiltrated completely. They never knew until the Beasts opened fire and attacked at half a dozen places at once.

  Starbird began to scream for the Humans to lift, but the cry was already being carried away across the swamp. It was not a matter of putting up any resistance. The Humans were in a hopeless position. The Beasts had done the impossible and crossed miles of jungle, silently, under cover of mist-filled darkness. The light they fought by was the light of the Human encampments—the light which the Humans desperately needed in order to make a fast lift-off. It was expensive light because it cost hundreds of lives.

  Ships rose in bunches from positions that were not under attack—among them the ships of Alexander Blackstar and Christopher Rainstar. The Beast lords led their forces against widely different parts of the sprawling Human camp. They fought in tight groups which moved quickly despite their tiredness after a long and laborious trek through the most difficult of country.

  Richard Stormwind and his Ursides forced deeper and faster than any other contingent. They were irresistible as they swept through ragged lines of Humans to strike at the center of the camp where he hoped to find Black-star. But he failed and found only Starbird and Starflare, struggling desperately to hold off the Beasts who were in the trees and in the shallow water, in every direction, and seemingly invincible. As the Humans ran desperately for their ships and lifted, one by one, Stormwind led his men out of cover and into the savage fire that was covering the Human retreat. Ursides died, but Humans dropped like flies. Ship after ship took off, but there were always bodies heaped on the ground that they left behind. Many ships never lifted at all.

  Thick wet mist and evil-smelling smoke belched from the islands like a pall. All the Human lights were killed, and there was the sound of the last ships that would ever leave Alph lifting from the swamp. Just like that, it was all over. The Beasts lit their own torches, and wandered around inspecting the damage they had inflicted.

  The Beasts began the long walk back to their ships.

  Stormwind lingered longer than most, making absolutely sure diat Blackstar was nowhere to be found. Alone in the mist and the smoke, he looked at the bodies of the Humans, and was gratified to find nothing. He wanted to kill Black-star himself, and to know that he was doing it.

  A tall figure moved, somewhere to his right. Stormwind brought up his gun, but did not fire. The figure did not come forward to be identified, but remained half-hidden in the smoke and fog.

  “Who are you?” growled Stormwind.

  “Blackstar will land, alone, at the House of Stars in less than half an hour,” said the stranger. “You can catch him if you take one of the ships tire Humans have left behind.”

  Stormwind stepped forward quickly to identify the man, but the other stepped back into the mist and was gone into the trees. Stormwind paused, thinking not so much about what the stranger had told him, but of the oddly musical voice he had used. Stormwind had never heard a voice like that before.

  But there was not time to pause long. He did not know how the man had known that Blackstar would leave the fleet again to visit his father. He did not care. Had he not been so inflamed by anger and the consuming need to find and kill Blackstar, he would probably have ignored what the stranger had said. But he was not thinking straight. He was hardly thinking at all.

  He yelled loudly for his second-in-command and for any other Ursides who might be still hanging around, waiting for their leader. Having quickly assembled a crew, he appropriated a ship and set off for Home.

  SHOCK TACTICS

  Blackstar’s ship moved slowly through the sky of Home, on its girdle motors. It had landed with most of the fleet, in the steppes halfway round the world, and waited while the latecomers drifted in in twos and threes. The fleet had been severely hit, but it was not quite dead yet.

  Blackstar had been tom between talking to Starbird and talking to his father, and had decided on the latter. He still looked to his father for guidance and was still unaware that Starcastle had none to offer.

  Blackstar’s fingers ran lightly over the control panel, making slight adjustments to their course. They were over the desert now, and the House of Stars would be in sight within moments. He was in no hurry and was giving only cursory attention to what he was doing. He was busy thinking about what the end could possibly be. He now knew that there was absolutely no chance of a Human victory in the war, but he also feared that Starbird would not give up. He suspected that his brother might adopt Eagleheart’s ploy and call for reinforcements, and that was one thing that he would go to any lengths to prevent.

  “There’s another ship on the screens,” said Bellsong.

  Blackstar glanced up. “Beast?”

  “No, Human.”

  “Coming from the steppes?”

  “No. From space. Probably a belated arrival from Alph.”

  Blackstar looked at the side screen where the tiny dot was just visible. “He’s coming closer. He’s nowhere near the steppes.”

  “He’s coming fast, too,” said Bellsong in puzzled tones.

  Blackstar followed the ship with his eyes as it hurtled from the sky and levelled out. It was incredibly low—far too low to be in omega-drive.

  “He’s mad!” exclaimed Bellsong. “He’s going to crash. He’s much too close!”

  As Bellsong started speaking, the thought leaped rapidly to Blackstar’s brain: “That’s what Slavesdream did.” Then, while Bellsong was still saying what he had to say, Black-star jerked the control lever which determined the inclination of the girdle motors, and the ship lurched drunkenly sideways and downwards.

  It was too late.

  SITTING DUCK

  Richard Stormwind came in for the kill. His eyes were cold and steady. His heartbeat was rapid and excited, but he was in complete control. He knew exactly what he was doing, and determination guided his hands in the most difficult maneuver he had ever attempted.

  He hurled the ship toward the giant red blur of Home and pulled steadily back. He was well within the atmosphere, lower even than Slavesdream had been in the skies of Kamak before he lost control.

  He knew that if he made a mistake, moved any of the controls a thousandth of an inch too far or a thousandth of a second too late, he would have crashed before he got a chance to rectify his mistake. He was well below light-speed, but he was travelling far faster than the space-drive motors could manage.

  Suddenly, just visible as a dim dot in the red haze, Blackstar’s ship was in his sights. It seemed to hang there absolutely stationary. It was a sitting duck for all of a second.

  “Hit him,” breathed Stormwind, his hands holding the ship rock steady and absolutely safe.

  The control gunner had had Blackstar’s ship practically lined up before it appeared. He reacted with lightning speed and fired as Stormwind spoke, releasing just one shot while the ship was within his sight. Then they were past and Stormwind was bringing the ship’s nose up to climb in a long, shallow arc out into space. He switched into space-drive and curled round in a long, smooth curve to head back the way he had come.

  Blackstar was totally lost in the red half of the screen. Even with the added clarity of normal space, Stormwind could not see the pale dot. Had it been a Beast ship that he commanded, he might have been able to see something; but, on the desensitized screen, there was nothing.

  He dived in closer, heading for the desert where Black-star had been flying his ship toward the House of Stars. He eagerly searched the area, but there was nothing. He got closer and closer until he could see the House of Stars like a great blister and could make out individual rock formations in the desert.

  “His screen must be downl” exulted Stormwind. “You
hit him!”

  “There he is,” said the gunner, his calm eyes beating Stormwind’s anxious ones by an instant. The ship was red and not white: its screen was indeed down. But whether it had crashed or merely landed he was not able to discern. From this height he could not see any signs of severe damage.

  There was another ship nearby, although neither Stormwind nor Blackstar had known it. Its occupants had watched Blackstar’s slow progress across the desert, and Storm-wind’s furious attack. They had not seen it because its omega-energy shield was totally different from those mounted on Beast and Human ships, and it did not register on their screens.

  Its occupants were Heljanita’s toys, who had come to see what their creator had accomplished.

  DYING DUCK

  Blackstar’s ship tumbled off the supporting cushion of its girdle motors. The shot had clipped the head of the vessel and shattered the bow section.

  Blackstar himself was hurled back from the controls as the screen and the wall in which it was set folded inwards and cracked down the center. The control panel itself held, but flashes of electric blue and steadily leaking fused plastic clearly testified that it was no longer of any use.

  Bellsong dived from his seat and lay flat on the floor, his hands protecting his head. The other gunners stayed by their seats but ducked their heads low between their knees, huddled into tight tangles of limbs.

  As the ship turned over, Blackstar slid back across the floor from where he had been thrown toward the pool of molten plastic widening on the floor. To save himself from injury he twisted and braced himself against Bellsong’s seat with one leg. He tried to scramble to his feet, but at the same moment the gravity adjustment apparatus gave up and the broken control screen suddenly became down as the gravity of Home became effective within the ship. Blackstar hooked his leg round Bellsong’s chair to steady himself and caught the rear-screen gunner as he fell from the “ceiling.”

  He felt the ship turning over again, and the helpless men spilt from their seats began to slide back again. Only Black-star and the man he supported were secured in any way. When the ship hit the ground with a terrific impact, Black-star was the only one in a position which gave him any chance of surviving. When the jar of the impact shook him it forced him to let go of the rear-screen gunner, who joined his companions in the mangled wreckage of the lower cabins and omega-drive apparatus.

  Suddenly everything was still, and Blackstar looked down into the chaos beneath him. The three back screens were completely ripped away, and the heavy metal of the omega-drive unit had forced its way clean through all the lower cabin bulkheads and into the control room. The lower third of the ship must be completely concertinaed. He could see only three of the battered corpses which must be somewhere in the mess of jagged metal. All three were flooding blood on the metal, and hung like inadequately stuffed dolls on the tom remains of the rear screen. Blackstar owed the fact that he had not been dislodged or crushed to the fact that the last backflip which the ship had done enabled the girdle motors to get in some slight retardation before the crash and thus had saved the ship from being totally destroyed.

  He unwound himself and squeezed through the crack in the control screen up onto the other side of the control screen wall, so that he would at least have something to support him while he looked for a way out. He was inside the room in which the computer and the ship’s sensory apparatus was housed. All he could see were strange metal structures, that meant absolutely nothing to him, and webs of wire and plastic. There was no hopeful crack of daylight in the walls, although the effects of Storm-wind’s shot were clearly visible.

  As he inched his body upwards toward the next bulkhead, he felt the ship settle a few inches at one side. He realized that the ship was unstably balanced on its smashed tail section. He stopped while he wondered how far he could go and whether his movement might cause the ship to be completely upset. Eventually he continued his climb.

  The complex framework of metal made his climb relatively easy, and he reached the next bulkhead without much difficulty. It was buckled and split in one or two places. He tried the access hatch, but turning the handle had no effect.

  He balanced himself on the computer frame and worked his way to the nearest split in the wall, some yards to the side. He reached it safely and gripped the edge of the tear. It was just wide enough to allow him to get through; but as he swung himself laboriously up and over the rim, his fingers were cut by the sharp metal and his chest and thighs were grazed when he hauled his body through.

  But he had achieved his object. A few feet away was a yawning gap in the skin of the spaceship. He crawled along the wall and peered out over the rim of the crack.

  The ground was not very far beneath him, but too far to jump with safety. He let himself down from the edge of the gaping hole and climbed down six feet until he decided that it was safe to leap. He looked down and carefully selected what he thought to be the best spot to land among the shards of the tail section. He contrived to land where he had intended; but his legs would not support him, and he collapsed to the ground.

  He looked up just in time to see the upright carcass of his ship begin its fall.

  For one desperate moment he thought that it would fall on top of him. He shrank away but lacked the strength or the will power necessary to get up and out of the way. Luckily it was not necessary. When he heard the impact he opened his eyes again and saw that the body of the spaceship had missed him by several feet.

  There was a harsh rattle as the contents of the ship subsided, and then everything was still. Blackstar lay back and breathed gently. He could feel blood leaking from a score of minor wounds, and the muscles of his legs and back, whose strength had saved him, were complaining bitterly.

  His thoughts were not of gratitude for being alive. Nor was he regretting the death of his companions. He was simply wondering why a Human ship should risk such madness to shoot him down and trying to dispel a suspicion that the man who had done it was Richard Storm-wind.

  Eventually he raised himself to his knees and looked around, his eyes searching the sky for the Beast ship. But he did not see it; it was already down, obscured from his sight by the wreckage of his own ship.

  THE DESERT

  The desert is the long-dead corpse of what was once a healthy, living land. Twenty thousand years ago it was a great forest. Ten thousand years ago it was a great civilization. Now the skeleton of the latter is hardly visible as traces in the yellow dust. There are echoes of the former in the stunted bushes which grow in lonely patches here and there, and the occasional treelike cactus.

  From high above, the lines which once were roads can still be faintly distinguished, and here and there are the scars left by buildings. But ten thousand years is too long for ghosts to survive, and a man lost in the desert will find nothing to remind him—unless the twinkling dome of the House of Stars can be seen on the horizon.

  If the wind were to blow away the sand, there would perhaps be bones underneath which could say what the desert once was. But they are buried too deeply now ever to be exposed. They are from a forgotten age—an age of horror that lingers on only in the half-instinctive urge to keep it forgotten.

  The House of Stars and its desolate garden represent a different order, a new way. And in the desert there is to be bom yet another new way to replace that one. Its conception is when Stormwind kills Blackstar, its parturition when Eagleheart destroys the House of Stars.

  And another ten thousand years is begun.

  REVENGE FOR THE DEATH OF A SHADOW

  Richard Stormwind looked down from the hatch of his borrowed spaceship, out over the dark earth and yellow sand. In the far distance he could just see the pinprick of light that was the dome of the House of Stars. A gentle wind plucked at his clothing.

  He looked dispassionately at the wreck of Blackstar’s ship, which lay a quarter of a mile away. He could see no sign of life, but the damage was not all that extensive and he hoped that he might yet find Blackst
ar alive. Stormwind wanted to administer the final touch himself.

  With half a dozen of the Ursides he had hastily collected to make a crew, he walked casually over to the other Human ship. He paused to run his eyes along its length, assessing the extent of the internal damage from the scars and rips in the hull. There was absolutely no sign of movement. Slowly, the Beasts moved round to the other side of the wreck.

  There they found Alexander Blackstar, sitting on the sand, with his back supported by a sheared-off part of the omega-drive motors. There was blood on his hands and on his face. His eyes were closed, but he was conscious and breathing evenly. He opened his eyes when Storm-wind caused his shadow to fall across his face.

  “Get up,” said Stormwind.

  Blackstar remained where he was. He displayed the palms of his hands, with blood still leaking sluggishly from the long slashes made by the jagged metal edges of the gap he had climbed through.

  “I have no weapon,” he said.

  “I’ll give you one,” said Stormwind. “I want to kill you.”

  “Why? I can’t do you any harm.”

  “Because of Slavesdream of Vespa.”

  “The man I killed on Karnak?”

  Stormwind nodded.

  “He was a friend of yours?”

  “You didn’t even know him,” Stormwind stated emotionlessly.

  Blackstar made no answer, and inspected his hands. Flexing them to display them to Stormwind had resulted in increased blood flow, and the deep cuts were painful. “I can’t use a sword or a gun,” he said.

  Stormwind moved away, and the sun shone into Black-star’s eyes again, so that he had to turn his head aside. When he turned back again, Stormwind was saying something to one of his companions. The man turned away and went round Blackstar’s ship on the way to Stormwind’s.

  The high lord came slowly to his feet, and walked unsteadily toward Stormwind. As the Ursides saw him walk they relaxed visibly. He was not an inspiring sight, suffering from exhaustion, hurt and dirty. He looked into Storm-wind’s grey eyes, then let his own eyes fall to scan all of Stormwind’s light, strong body. He looked back at the handsome, dark-skinned face whose eyes still stared at him contemptuously and apparently full of hatred.