The Star Hunters: A Star Kings Novel [The Two Thousand Centuries] Read online

  He burst into the communic room and it was Lua, the Lyran girl, who was talking fast into the mike of the long-range communic.

  Mason grabbed her, and reached with one hand and shut off all switches, and then swung Lua around to face him.

  She laughed in his face. “You're a bit too late. I got through to the squadron."

  She was not any longer the half-scared girl he had talked to that morning. The soft, timid look was all gone from her, and her face was as keen and ruthless as a beautiful sword-blade, and her eyes had nothing but mockery and contempt for him.

  Mason knew now, and he whispered her name.

  "V'rann.

  She laughed again. “Yes, Terran. I don't know your name, but when Brond Holl broke prison so providentially I suspected a Terran agent would show up here wearing his face. And you confirmed my suspicions this morning."

  The mockery in her eyes deepened. She was a secret agent and she had crowned her career with its greatest exploit, and in the blaze of her triumph neither the deaths of two men nor her own possible fate mattered one little bit to her.

  "You never thought that Orion's ace agent could be a woman, did you?” she taunted. “You suspected Fairlie, but not me. Why, man, Fairlie was only an underling obeying my orders. And bungling them, too—as he did when I sent him to kill you and Garr."

  Mason said slowly, “And Fayaman knew who you were, and was in on it with you."

  "Fayaman,” she said scornfully, was a fool. It was easy to win him over by promising that Orion would give him a kingdom here if we got Ryll Emrys. He actually believed it!"

  "You're happy, aren't you,” said Mason. “You know what you've maybe turned loose on the galaxy, and you're happy about it."

  "I know that it will make Orion supreme and nothing else matters!” she flashed.

  There came into the ship from outside a throb of racing motors, growing rapidly louder.

  "That'll be Garr and the rest,” Mason said. “You should have known the radar tower would hear your message, and call him."

  She shrugged. “I did know it. I never expected to get away. But of course I had to tell Fayaman I'd use a secret wave that wouldn't be heard. He believed that too."

  Mason's hands tightened on her arms, and she looked at him with cold amusement. He said grimly, “Don't be too happy, V'rann. That squadron of Orionid cruisers has quite a way to come. We may do something before they reach Ryll Emrys."

  The mockery left her face at that, and a sudden alarm and ruthless purpose shone from it.

  "Oh, no,” she said. “Whatever clever idea you have won't work, once I tell Garr and the others that Brond Holl is a Terran agent."

  The roar of motors was now loud outside, as the cars pulled up beside Fayaman's ship. There was a rush of feet below.

  "I was thinking of that,” said Mason.

  He drew back his fist and suddenly hit her on the chin, hard.

  V'rann's eyes glazed and she sagged against him and he lowered her to the floor. There was an angry, excited shouting and then Garr Atten, weapon in hand, came into the communic room with Hoxie and Shaa and a crowd of others behind him.

  Garr's face was terrible. He looked at the unconscious girl and then at Mason, and he said, “Radar tower called me about that message she got off. Then she's an Orionid spy?"

  Mason nodded. “Yes. And she pulled it off. Right now, the Orionid squadron that's been hiding in Dumbbell Nebula is on its way to that dead planet and Ryll Emrys. Fayaman told her at once."

  Garr's mighty shoulders sagged, and a dull look came over his face. He stood, the weapon in his hand hanging, limply. The outlaw captains looked from one to another with stricken eyes, and nobody spoke at all until old Hoxie's nasal voice broke the silence.

  "Then that's goodbye to our super-weapon and our star-kingdom."

  Mason went up to Garr Atten.

  He spoke to him and his voice had the lash of a whip.

  "It's maybe just as well,” said Mason. “The devil of a star-king you'd have made, when you give up this easily."

  Garr raised his massive head and a leaping flame of rage was in his tawny eyes. He half-raised his weapon, and then his expression changed and he looked at Mason with narrowed eyes.

  "We're nearer that dead planet than the Orionid cruisers are, by a long way,” said Mason. “We've almost as many armed ships here as they have. We could give them enough fight to hold them up while we take off Ryll Emrys and destroy his apparatus so they can't get it."

  Mason felt that it was a desperate gamble, but if it succeeded he might be able still to get Ryll Emrys away from the Marches and suppress a secret that could rip the galaxy asunder.

  But Garr Atten was no puppet to be manipulated by any man. His moment of shock and dismay had passed.

  "We can do better than that,” he said. “Devil's Channel is the only way through the drift to that planet. We can hold them in there long enough for Ryll Emrys to use his apparatus and move the whole planet out of there, hide it deeper in the cluster where they'll never find it."

  His voice suddenly blared loud. “You've all been spoiling for action. Here's your chance for a belly full of it. If we hit that squadron hard, we save the thing that'll someday make the Marches a free kingdom. How about it?"

  There was no doubt about it at all, among the human and humanoid captains of the Marches. Their voices rang fierce and instant affirmation.

  "All right, get your crews together on the double,” said Garr. “I want every ship off here in an hour. Get going!"

  They got going, with a rush of trampling feet and a yelping like wolves let loose to run.

  Hoxie looked down at the unconscious V'rann and said, “How about this devil's wench? She's mighty pretty, but so's a snake."

  "Time enough to deal with her when we get back—if we do,” said Garr. “This ship can't go anywhere with its airlock blasted. Lock her up in a cabin and put a guard outside it."

  * * * *

  Mason felt a relief when he saw V'rann, still out cold, tossed into a bunk in—a windowless cabin, and the metal door locked upon her. She might come to later and yell her head off about Brond Holl being a Terran agent, but by that time they'd be gone and the decision would be coming up.

  Very quickly the whole starport swarmed with cars and trucks and running men and humanoids, and motley women screeching with excitement and fear. Lights flared, and voices bawled orders through talkers, and then finally the takeoff sirens let go in frantic warning and Garr Atten's ship led the way up off the planet.

  Mason was in the control room with Garr. So was old Hoxie, his face gleaming with vulturine happiness at the prospect of a fight. But there was no happiness in Mason. The chances of beating back a naval squadron did not seem good to him, and even if they did it the power of Ryll Emrys would swiftly become known and would be a prize that half the star-kings in the galaxy would grab for.

  Twenty-three ships rose up into the green glare of Quroon and swung sharply away. Mason knew there were more ships than that in the Orionid squadron and they were faster and better armed. But he could see no apprehension at all in the grim, battered face of Garr Atten, as he stared through the scanner-window.

  They were going deeper into the cluster, and a wild glare beat upon them from the close-packed hive of suns. Across the peacock glory of the swarming stars there trailed mighty nebulosities, cosmic folds as vast as the mantle of God, and the constant patchy blurring and streaking of the radar screen showed heavy drift in many places. But the hardy captains of the Marches kept building speed, flying headlong now toward the star-mark of a triplet of glaring white suns.

  They raced past that triple glory and then turned sharply toward a region of drift so dense that it made ordinary shoals look like clear space. Mason could visually catch the constant sparkling of scintillations all across the firmament, and he knew he saw a wilderness of great and small chunks of debris catching and winking back the starblaze as they danced and rolled and tumbled in the void.


  "It's a little bit fast for Devil's Channel,” said Hoxie, and Garr spoke back to him without turning.

  "Don't worry. My pilot knows the Channel. I've been in here a good many times."

  Mason hoped the pilot knew. All around them the space between the close-clustered suns was webbed thick with the winking points of light and the radar screen showed only one passage, a narrow, winding gut, through the blur of the drift.

  The ship rushed on, and on the screen showed the blips that were the other ships of their little fleet, running equally fast behind them.

  "We've beat the Orionids here,” said Garr. “Now to set it up."

  He had given his orders before they left Quroon, and the ships behind now acted upon them. They decelerated, and started moving toward the drift around them. They were to stop and hover by the drift, where Orionid radar could not spot them, and ambush the squadron when it came through.

  But Garr Atten's ship did not decelerate. It raced on down the channel at full speed, until it came out of the drift and into open space. Close ahead glowed the dying red fires of an ancient star, and around it swung eleven dim planets. Their pilot cut speed now, and swung in toward the dun-colored world that was innermost.

  Peering down as they swept in for landing, Mason saw an arid, lifeless landscape. There was nothing but sand and eroded rock and an atmosphere whose winds lifted the dust in little whirls and eddies. Then he saw scattered piles of red stone too symmetrical to be natural.

  "There hasn't been any life on any of this system's worlds for a long time,” muttered Garr Atten. “But there was life on this one long ago. Humanoid, to judge from the ruins."

  The ship raced down to a landing. A bitterly cold breath rushed in upon them when the airlock was cracked open.

  "Not you, we have to move too fast,” said Garr when Hoxie made to follow them.

  Mason followed the Hydran out onto brown sandy ground, and looked across a vista of infinite desolation. The dying sun peered down upon them and the little winds whimpered and fretted, and the piles of crumbled stone lay in the sad red light like forgotten tombstones.

  "This way,” said Garr.

  He led the way, and as they tramped around the ship Mason saw a quarter-mile away in the ruins the loom of a massive truncated cone of red stone. It was massive as a pyramid of old Earth, and carved steps led up to the flat top. On that top rose an incongruously modern square structure of bright metal and glass, and upward and outward from all around it glistening limbs of metal reached in every direction skyward like arms raised in prayer.

  "Is that it?” said Mason, unable even yet to believe wholly.

  "That's it,” said Garr. “And hurry!"

  There was more than one reason to hurry, Mason found out swiftly. The cold, thin air was so poor in oxygen that his nose and throat and lungs began to sear and burn.

  "It's why we had to build that airproof lab up there for Ryll and the men I gave him to work with him,” said Garr, coughing.

  They climbed the steps, up the side of the mighty cone of stone, and reached the airlock door of the metal-and-glass cube. They had been noted, and the airlock was open, and quickly they went through it.

  There was a great, quiet room that was the interior of the whole cube. Around it towered glittering machines that to Mason's eyes looked unfamiliar, and also very puny and small. There was no reactor for power, though he guessed that was in the cone beneath them somewhere. But even though he knew that this thing operated by the simple projection of some radiation that neutralized the force called gravitation, it did not seem to him that these little machines could ever move a world.

  There were a half-dozen men here waiting for them, and they were of many races, but the foremost of them had the pinkness of an Orionid. And Ryll Emrys did not look like a man who could move a world. He was thin and small and middle-aged, a man who looked as though he had borne a weight too big for him for too long a time and had been crushed by it. There were fear and an old pain in his deep eyes.

  "What is it, Garr?” he cried, his voice shrill. “You weren't to come back so soon—has something gone wrong? Tell me!"

  Garr told him. And it seemed to Mason that he saw the foreshadowing of cosmic catastrophe in the agony that came into Ryll Emrys’ eyes.

  "I knew it would be so,” he whispered, when Garr had finished. “I knew they would hunt until they found me, and that some day the thing I foolishly made would be let loose in war."

  "They haven't got you yet, and they haven't got this," said Garr forcefully, striking his fist against one of the shining machines. “You can move this planet, Ryll. Move it! Take it away from here, deeper into the cluster, while we stop that squadron."

  Ryll Emrys looked at him with haunted eyes. “It'll do no good. The kings of the galaxy will never rest until they have this secret."

  "We can stop them from getting it,” Garr said. “That's in the future. Right now you must move the planet away from here, in case some of the Orionids get by us. You're space-proof in here, and leaving the sun won't bother you."

  Ryll Emrys turned away from them, and walked past his staring, silent assistants, and then came back. His face was tragic but he spoke calmly.

  "I brought those ships into the Marches to destroy you, Garr. Whatever you want, I'll do. I'll take the planet away."

  "Take it fast!” said Garr. “We'll be back later—if we're alive."

  He turned and Mason followed him out into the bitter, rasping air again. They ran down the side of the great cone, and toward the ship.

  Within minutes, the ship swung sharply up and away. And looking back, Mason saw that now the great arms of metal that reached skyward from the cone were alive with a throbbing radiance that wove a net of almost invisible light far out across the dead planet.

  "I don't see it moving any,” muttered Hoxie.

  "It will,” said Garr. “It's already falling toward the one direction in which gravitation isn't neutralized. Slowly, at first, like any falling thing. But building speed every second—"

  The ship raced toward the wide, winking haze of the drift, and into the narrow Channel. Now Garr spoke an order, and their speed lessened rapidly until they were hardly moving.

  Cautiously, the pilot edged the ship toward the drift. And presently the craft was right beside the mighty field of tiny to massive chunks of debris that wheeled forever here. To the radar of oncoming ships, their craft could not be distinguished from the drift.

  They waited, as the ships of the captains of the Marches were waiting all along the sides of the Channel.

  It seemed to Mason that they waited for several eternities, before the pilot silently pointed to the big radar screen.

  Garr Atten, his face as expressionless as bronze, nodded. He picked up the mike that would take his voice to the communic room and from it to all his other ships. He said, “Hit them."

  CHAPTER VII

  THEY HIT THEM. From all the outlaw ships clinging along the edges of the drift, the faster-than-light missiles sped up the Channel toward the oncoming Orionid squadron.

  Mason, staring tensely that way with Garr and old Hoxie, glimpsed a far crackling of sudden little points of white light that shone out briefly against the winking haze of the drift, and then were gone.

  "By Heaven, we got a quarter of ‘em!” yelled Hoxie, his voice cracking.

  In the radar screen, a half dozen of the oncoming blips that were the cruisers of Orion had suddenly vanished. The other blips were slowing down in the channel, starting to turn and swing into as dispersed formation as was possible.

  Mason thought that the Orionid commander had been coming too slowly. At high speed he might have run the squadron through the gauntlet of outlaw ships, and taken his losses, but his cautious slowness in navigating the Channel had worked against him.

  "Keep firing, and work toward them along the edge of the drift!” Garr shouted into his mike. “Press up the Channel!"

  The Orionids were at a bad disadvantage. They wer
e out in the open space of the Channel where radar could easily spot them, while the outlaw ships were hard to separate by radar from the blurred jumble of the drift.

  Two more of the Orionid ships vanished in distant flares. Then suddenly, on the radar, the blips ceased forming up in the Channel, and instead moved fast toward the jumbled blur that was the drift.

  "They're going to try to break past us through the drift!” Mason warned.

  Garr nodded grimly. “They'll wish they hadn't. So will some of us. But we know more about flying the drift than they do."

  He spoke sharply into his mike. Streaking down and across Devil's Channel came the ships of the Marches, and with Garr's ship leading a loose formation they left the-Channel and plunged into the drift.

  By ordinary star-ship standards both outlaws and Orionids were now moving at a mere crawl, the tiniest fraction of light-speed. No higher speed was possible in the drift. Yet even so, the sight that met Mason's eyes as he peered through the windows was appalling.

  Jagged hunks of metal and stone and nameless cosmic debris as big as houses rushed past them, and swarms of smaller particles that ranged down from pebbles to sandgrains. The pilot played his controls like a frenetic musician, dancing the ship this way and that through the whirling maze. The radar was a useless blur and alarm signals kept screaming of imminent danger like hysterical old women. And still Garr's ship pressed forward, with the other captains of the Marches following, to intercept the Orionid cruisers that were trying to shortcut through this maze.

  A long metal bulk loomed up ahead, running toward them through the rivers of stone, and Garr yelled coordinates into the intercom and the missiles leaped from the launchers below. But the Orionid cruiser had seen them, it veered simultaneously in evasive action.

  It veered regardless of the drift that was more deadly than any missile, and a rolling, tumbling swarm of jagged stone slashed through it and sent it reeling away, a twisted wreck.

  "Grab onto them and pound them!” Garr bellowed into the mike, and the long ships of the Marches leaped through the deadly labyrinth like hounds through a jungle.