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

  Mason had seen star-ships in action before, and had served in one of them, but he had never seen anything like this. In here, where radar and target-trackers were useless, ships fought each other by visual contact in close combat, dodging through the swirling debris and attacking each other, and dodging and hitting again.

  The men of the Marches of Outer Space had had to dodge and hide in the drift more than once in their lives. They knew this kind of crazy flying better than any conventional navy could, and it was their one big advantage over the faster and more heavily armed Orionid ships. Out in open space the squadron of Orion would blow them to atoms before they could close the range, but here in the drift it was different.

  All around them deadly flares burst and died. Most missiles launched by either side missed and exploded against some chunk of debris, but here and there a ship vanished in a radiant halo. Mason saw two of the outlaw ships go like that, but five Orionids had gone and still the men of the Marches fought and dodged and fought again.

  Old Hoxie was yelling and swearing in a high, shrill voice, and he began to crow in triumph.

  "We're giving them a belly full! They wanted to fight in the drift and they're damned well getting more than they wanted—"

  Mason saw that it was true enough for now the Orionid cruisers were falling back, trying to withdraw from the drift but getting hit harder and harder. Then he heard the communic suddenly squawking.

  Garr Atten, who had been bellowing his orders into the intercom, turned and roared at Hoxie.

  "Shut up! I can't hear the communic and someone's calling—"

  Hoxie shut up and they heard the slurred, heavy voice of Shaa of Rigel shouting from his ship somewhere in the maze.

  "Garr, I've been trying to reach you! One of the Orion cruisers broke out of the fight and slipped away west through the drift. I've been fighting two others and couldn't turn to follow."

  Garr's dripping face flashed with alarm. He yelled into the mike, “Keep hammering them, you've got them on the run! But one has got through and I'm going after him!"

  He swung around to the pilot. The man had overheard and was already bringing the ship around fast. He zigzagged it through the drift until they broke into Devil's Channel again.

  Mason's eyes and Garr's clung to the radar screen. The channel was empty of blips.

  "That cruiser's on its way to Ryll Emrys’ planet!” Garr cried, “We've got to catch it."

  The ship streaked down the Channel westward, building up to milli-light-speeds on the highest scale of acceleration. But Mason knew that an Orionid navel cruiser was far faster, and it had a start, and had Janissar of Orion and V'rann won after all?

  They burst out of the Channel, and rushed through open space toward the dying red sun. The radar showed no ship anywhere and the agony on Garr's face deepened. And then as they raced closer, old Hoxie pointed a trembling hand and quavered,

  "Good God, look at that! Look—"

  They were all looking, and a cold awe and dread fell upon Mason as he saw a thing no man had ever seen before.

  The dun-colored planet that had been the innermost world had moved out of its orbit during all this time. It was riding majestically outward in a tangent, and would soon cut across the orbit of the second planet a little ahead of that second dead world.

  A secret of nature had been found by a questing mind, and a power had been unloosed, and now a man was charioteering a planet. And in front of Mason loomed the terrible foreshadowing of the things to come when that power should be loosed by the star-kings in galactic war.

  "They've already landed!” Garr was shouting. ‘Their ship will be near the tower—all batteries ready but for God's sake don't hit the tower!"

  They swooped past the icy second world toward the dun planet that had gone rogue. With a scream the atmosphere went past them as they decelerated, and then beneath them were the desert and the crumbling stones and the looming cone with its uplifted metal arms spraying forth the eerie radiance that controlled the movement of this world.

  An Orionid ship was trying to get off the ground a mile from the tower, trying to avoid getting caught flatfooted. It started to roll as it rose upward, to bring its missile-launching batteries into play in quick rotation. But it was too late, Garr's ship had already loosed its missiles and the Orionid cruiser was smothered in bursting flares. The flares died, and only bits of wreckage fell to the ground.

  They dropped fast to a landing near the tower, and Mason followed Garr as the big Hydran ran down to the airlock. He was shouting,

  "They'll have men in the tower—all hands out!"

  They burst out into the cold, searing air, and ran toward the tower. Up there on the flat top of the cone, in front of the glass-and-metal cube that was Ryll Emrys’ laboratory, uniformed men ran out and fired down at them.

  The small missiles burst amid them like brilliant, dancing will-of-the-wisps, and men went down in scorched heaps. Mason had his own gun out and shot upward and so did others. And Orionids fell, up there.

  "No shooting!” yelled Garr Atten, in an agony of apprehension. “If Ryll and his machines are destroyed, we've lost everything!"

  They went on up in a run. The airlock door of the cube-shaped laboratory had already been forced open by the men of Orion and now they could not close it. Garr and Mason and their followers went in with a rush.

  * * * *

  The great room was strewn with bodies. The men who had worked for Ryll Emrys here lay dead about it, and they had not been killed by missiles but by the knives and metal bars that were held by the uniformed Orionids in the room.

  "No shooting!” Garr shouted again as they closed in.

  Mason had seen that in a far corner of the room an Orionid officer was stooping over Ryll Emrys, who sat in a corner and did not move.

  Trying to reach him, Mason slugged with the barrel of his gun, and felt the blade of a knife graze like hot iron along his shoulder.

  The room, the very focus and shrine of the most super-modern science of the galaxy, was being fought in with the most primitive of weapons because neither outlaws nor Orionids dared take the chance of destroying the things around them.

  Mason glimpsed Garr going down as a metal bar cracked across the side of his head. The officer had left Ryll Emrys and was running into the melee, shouting to his men, and without a leader the outlaws were wavering.

  Mason levelled his weapon. He was the one man of them who was not afraid of destroying the machines around them, who wanted those machines destroyed before they tore the galaxy in twain. He shot, and shot.

  His tiny missiles sent dancing death-stars amid the Orionids, and the uniformed men, unable to stand before the weapon and forbidden to reply to it in kind, broke and ran for the door.

  Mason started out after them and then he saw the Orionids had their hands raised in surrender.

  "Take them to the ship and tie them up,” Mason told Garr's men. “There comes Hoxie—he'll take charge."

  He ran back into the laboratory. He bent first over Garr Atten. The Hydran's skull was tough or he would have been a dead man. He would be unconscious for a while, but Mason thought he would come out of it.

  He ran on to Ryll Emrys. Ryll was conscious, and looked up at him with a fixed, shadowed gaze. He had a deep knife-wound in his breast, and it had been this wound that the Orionid officer had been trying to bandage when the fight started.

  "When they came in and killed my men,” Ryll whispered to Mason, “I ran into the fight. They didn't want to kill me. But you have."

  Mason knew they had, for with that wound Ryll Emrys could not live. He thought that the scientist had deliberately sought death as a way out of his problem.

  "Is Garr dead?” whispered the scientist.

  "No,” said Mason. “He got a bad blow, but he'll be all right."

  "He was my friend,” said Ryll Emrys. “I brought him only trouble. And now he will take and use this thing I built, and in the end it will bring him and all the galaxy de
struction and disaster."

  Mason bent lower. “Listen, Ryll. You don't have to worry about that. I'm going to do my best to destroy this whole installation. I'm a Terran agent, and the Terran Empire doesn't want this thing loose either."

  Hope flared up in Ryll Emrys’ darkening gaze, like a dying flame. “If you do that, you'll prevent me leaving a terrible legacy to men! For the secret will die with me, if the apparatus is totally d—"

  He broke off, and then said, “No, you could not destroy it utterly. Even from fragments, men might piece it together again. But I can annihilate it completely. Take me to the control panel."

  Mason lifted and supported the man, and felt him dying in his grasp as he helped him to the great panel of incomprehensible controls and meters. Yet a fierce purpose nerved Ryll Emrys, and one by one he named the controls and told Mason how to change their settings.

  He was silent then, sagging in Mason's grasp but still watching the great banks of indicators. Finally he whispered, ‘It's done. This world will not now cross in front of the second planet. It is on a collision course. Take Garr and leave quickly."

  Mason carried him to a chair. But Ryll Emrys was already dead.

  He went over to Garr and got the massive figure of the unconscious Hydran on his shoulder. Staggering from the weight, and with the air rasping his lungs more and more, he went out of the room of death into the sad red daylight.

  Hoxie and two of Garr's men were coming up the side of the cone toward him. The two men took Garr, and Hoxie asked, “Ryll Emrys?"

  "Dead,” said Mason. “And we'll all be if we don't get off soon. Ryll set the controls to put this planet on collision course."

  Appalled, Hoxie looked skyward.

  And up there in the sky the second planet gleamed like a brightening moon.

  The old Terran yelled with terror in his voice. “Hurry, then!"

  * * * *

  A half hour later their ship rose up fast and raced away from a planet that was moving doom ward.

  Mason and Hoxie and others of the crew looked down at the dun-brown planet that now was moving on a changed tangential path, toward the second planet.

  Shaa's voice came from the cornmunic. “Garr, we sent the last of the Orionids flying! Only six of them left—but we lost five."

  Mason answered. “Garr's out of action, but he'll come round soon. Brond Holl speaking. Join us, but don't go near that planet."

  The ships drew together, and poised in space, and the men in them looked down in an awed silence as the dun-colored world and the brighter one slowly converged.

  The two planets met.

  Burst asunder, riven and shattered, they reeled in a fiery, unstable mass. And then the mass slowly broke into crumbling fragments, and soon a great new swarm of cosmic debris moved in a new orbit around the dying sun, and two lifeless worlds had perished.

  And Ryll Emrys and his secret had perished, and Mason hoped it was forever. But the strongest trait of the sons of Adam was the insatiable curiosity that had taken them from old Earth to the stars. Would that curiosity unlock again someday the door just closed?

  Old Hoxie sighed. “Well, that's that. And we might as well all go home."

  As the outlaw ships flew back through the Channel, and out of the drift toward Quroon, Mason locked himself into the communic room. He sent coded messages far away, and presently the answers came.

  By the time he came out of there, they were running down on Quroon. Hoxie told him, “Garr's come out of it."

  Mason went and found Garr Atten sitting in his cabin, a bandage around his head and a stony look on his face. He looked up at Mason and said, “So Ryll and his work are gone. And our chance for a free kingdom with him. Well, we did our best."

  Mason told him, “I said before that you give up too easily, Garr. There's still a chance—just a chance, mind you—that we'll see the Kingdom of the Marches set up after all."

  Garr Atten said sourly, “It's nice of you to try to cheer me up, Brond, but don't be a damn fool."

  "Listen, Garr,” said Mason.

  "Orion may not be at all convinced that Ryll's secret has really perished. They're extremely likely to move in and try to take the whole Marches by forced annexation, to find out. If they do, the border starlings will declare war at once, to stop them."

  Garr nodded. “It's liable to happen so. And precious little comfort for us there'll be in that."

  "I've been talking with some Terran Empire officials,” Mason said. “They agree with me that a crisis like that can be averted, if an independent kingdom is set up in the Marches. Terra would recognize such a kingdom and guarantee its frontiers—and neither Janissar of Orion or the lesser star-kings would dare bother the Marches then."

  Garr Atten had listened with growing amazement, and now he got to his feet.

  "They're going to decide fast back at Sol, and they'll let me know as soon as the Council has met,” concluded Mason.

  "They'll let you know! You've been talking to the Terran Empire officials!” burst out Garr. “Why, you're—"

  "I'm not Brond Holl, Garr,” said Mason. “I'm a Terran agent."

  * * * *

  Only three days later the word came to Quroon. It came to Mason, waiting in the communic room of Garr's ship. He went out of the ship at once and drove through the green blazing sunlight to Quroon City, and walked into the big drinking-place where Garr and his remaining captains waited.

  Garr would not ask the question, but Hoxie said eagerly, “Well, what's the word?"

  Mason smiled. “Two hours ago, by formal Council vote, the Terran Empire recognized the new Kingdom of the Marches of Outer Space. As soon as the usual plebiscite here indicates that the people here want it so, Garr Atten will be recognized as lawful sovereign."

  He got no farther than that, for the roar that went up from the outlaw captains drowned his voice.

  Mason thought of the first time he had seen Garr Atten, dreaming of kingship in this tavern drinking-room, and of how a man's dreams could come true in strange ways.

  Later, Mason said to Garr, “I'll be leaving soon—I want my own face back. But what about V'rann?"

  Garr raised his voice for them all to hear and said sternly, “We'll have laws here now, and people will obey them. She instigated attempted murder and she'll do a sentence for it in prison here before she goes back to Orion."

  Hoxie groaned. “That's it—that's the last straw. A prison here at Quroon!

  THE END

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