Stardogs, page 2
Hans Wienan looked down on the alien world and was filled, not with wonderment and delight as were his fellows, but with chagrin. Why couldn’t this have happened a week ago when he’d had the dummy under his thumb? Here was the key to ultimate power. He had to grasp it. He turned on one of the ooh ing and ah ing crew. He selected a slight Indian girl, with whom the dummy had a vague friendship. “Go out there. Get her to come in. She’ll freeze if she stays out there.”
The girl looked at him with the faint disdainful curl to her lip which was, eventually, in another story, to get her killed. “Why should you care?” She turned away to the viewports again.
He grabbed her roughly by the shoulder. Turned her to face him, and snarled quietly into her frightened eyes. “Because, you fool, I’ll bet she is the only one who can control the creature. So, if she dies out there, we all die here. No way of getting home. Do you understand that?”
She nodded, silenced and frightened by the tiger that had slipped out from behind his normally smooth mask.
“Good. Now go.” He thrust her away.
Shaken, she turned and went to the suit-locker.
The captain walked over to the ship’s doctor and escorted that individual to his cubbyhole office.
From the Stardog’s back again, Joan looked regretfully back at the world they were leaving. She would have liked to go down there. To explore those ruins with her new friend. Sadly it could not be. For a Stardog to enter the gravity well was a one-way trip, the beloved one had explained, and anyway the doctor was in such pain… The poor man was grey-faced and writhing. She’d come back once she’d got Dr Da Silva home, she promised herself.
She had no idea that, back on Earth, the Stardog’s whisking away of the Gloria Mundi had already saved many lives. A thousand petty conflicts and greed-wars stalled as the news raced around the globe. Humanity stood united in fear, vengeful, and ready to strike, when the Stardog popped out of theta-space to another drop-point much closer to Earth, released the spaceship and began drifting away toward the Trojan point. The Stardog needed a rest. It must feed for a while on the unfiltered sunlight of space. Two interstellar crossings in such short order had taxed its energy reserves… Also, after surf, there was always a certain amount of nerve-net damage to be repaired.
Joan had been so busy with concerns for the welfare of others, that she’d yet to turn a thought to herself, when the space suited figure came jetting over from the Gloria Mundi. Given a choice of Homo sapiens’s thirty billion people Hans Wienan was still the one she least wanted to see. She studiously ignored the voice-text printout appearing along the upper margin of her suit vision-plate.
When he was face to face she could no longer ignore him. He knew how well she could lip-read. “Come in, Joan. I need you.”
“Go to hell, Hans. Leave me alone. You’re upsetting my Stardog.” Indeed the huge creature rippled, agitated.
It gave him the lever he needed. “Back on Earthside they’re in panic. There are enough nukes being loaded onto launch-rockets right now to blow this alien monster of yours into component atoms. Stop being stupid. Come in, co-operate, and I’ll see that no harm comes to it.”
No other argument could have swayed her. She didn’t realize that she was handing control of interstellar travel to one man. She didn’t realize that she had just set the standard by which Hans Wienan’s descendants would continue to control the Stardog riders… by threatening the well-being of their Stardogs. At first the methods were crude, such as a timed H-bomb attached to the beasts. As the Space Exploration and Development Control League, (later simply known as the Wienan League) took firmer control, this became refined. Each interstellar ship was fitted with special quarters for the rider and his or her League escort. The ships also had a torpedo tube aimed at the silicate lifeform. Research on material taken from the filaments of the Stardog had produced a nerve toxin which would work on the great beasts. Painfully and terminally.
In the mean while Hans began the search for more emo-telepaths. He found them too. Often they were also suffering from a disability. And if not… he found it enhanced their receptivity if they were given one.
Some people will do anything for power. Others will do their bidding for money.
Joan Cheng spent the rest of her life incommunicado, except for one brief escape. There was an accident. One of those stupid things caused by driving too fast in London’s thin slurry-rain. The driver, angry, got out. And failed to press central locking behind him. “You stupid bast…”
The man from the other car happened to be an amateur champion middle-heavyweight boxer. His car was only four hours old, and something he’d been saving for, for three years, so he could be forgiven for flattening Joan’s driver. The security men on either side of her surged out of the car. One didn’t even close his door. She was already around the corner before they noticed she’d gone.
The rain and the half-light of dusk favored her. But she wasn’t even sure which city she was in. Scared and without any form of plan she ran blindly. Then, out of the gloom loomed the neon RSPCA sign. Joan had always been a loyal supporter of the organization — it was their shelter that her dog had come from. It was natural for her to turn to them with her troubles. The officer at the desk had his feet on it and a cup of instant soup in hand. He had a nice smile.
“Evening Ma’am. What can I do to help you?” He’d leapt up, rather embarrassed by being caught with his feet up. Like most of the population of earth who had access to TV, he’d seen acres of footage about the Gloria Mundi and many pictures of the crew, when the ship had abruptly disappeared. After the ship’s return he’d seen acres of Hans Wienan, but none of the other crew members. He had an excellent memory for faces however. “I say, aren’t you one of the crew of the spaceship that met those alien monsters?”
Her frightened face crumpled. She lip-read the words, but did not hear the admiring tone. “They’re not MONSTERS!” she shouted. “They’re gentle, wonderful animals. And they’re being abused terribly. And you don’t even CARE!” she sobbed.
“I…I am sorry. I don’t really know anything about it. Look… tell me.”
She needed no more invitation. She poured out the story of threats to the Stardogs, of Hans Wienan’s hand-picked scientists’ deliberate attempts to cause pain to the huge creatures. If they could hurt the Stardogs, they could use some kind of whip or spur to direct the beasts, instead of relying on Joan and the few like her that Hans had located to coax the dogs to fly between the stars.
She was still talking when seven suave men arrived. “Good evening Sir.” The leader of the party produced an embossed plastic card. It identified him as James Johnstone, London Sector Chief of European Union Security. “This woman has escaped from our High Security Unit. She’s… a danger to the public. Has she said much to you?”
The RSPCA officer thought fast, warned by the fear in her eyes. “No. She only just got here, you know. She was gabbling about star-travel and missing her dog. I thought she was deranged or something. I was trying to calm her down so I could ‘phone the police. What was she on about?”
The security agent smiled, “Confidentially, Sir, she’s as nutty as a fruit-cake. But…” he tapped his nose and winked, “highly placed relatives, you know.”
They led Joan away. As soon as they were out of sight the officer immediately ‘phoned his superior and passed on the gist of what she had said to him. That worthy might have taken no further notice if the desk-officer had not been coolly, clinically and effectively assassinated less than an hour later.
Thus the RSPCA became aware that the Space Exploration and Development Control League, the darling of governments and the opener of the starways to the human race, were actually conducting terrible and painful experiments on the Stardogs, attempting to find ways of controlling the beasts without the use of emo-telepathic riders. They also learned that Stardogs were not the alien and unfeeling sheets of silica they were being portrayed as, but sensitive and gentle creatures. Typically, Joan Cheng had not complained of her lot, nor of that of the other emotionally sensitive telepath riders Hans Wienan’s minions had recruited. That the undercover RSPCA agents had to discover for themselves.
It was soon forcibly borne upon the good people of this and allied animal rights groups, that overt protest was terminal, and that public sympathy was heavily against them. The militant and lunatic fringe groups of animal rights activists and almost irreparably damaged public faith in them. They were - outside of the work with pets and shelter issues, lacking in credibility or popular support.
But they did not abandon Stardogs or their riders. They were forced to move this project underground, but it went on, slowly, carefully. It was to take centuries.
Of Joan Cheng’s fate, little more is known, except that she disappeared in deep space with a Stardog. Perhaps she did finally escape.
This story rises from these deep roots. Parts of the story surfaced nearly 500 years later when man had colonized the whole of the corpse of the Denaari Empire, except the Denaari-Motherworld, a place to which the Stardogs could not, would not, return. It was a period of relative stability, but also of increasing hardship for the great mass of humanity.
CHAPTER 1
RIDERS AND NUMBER THREE’S
“Given the right conditions any human can become dangerous. After all, you can hammer in nails with a banana, if you dip the banana into liquid nitrogen first.”
Obliterating a Prince: Nicola Para-Machiavelli
The little girl crawled, shivering, toward the only source of warmth in the shed next to the building. It was just below zero in here, yet the child was only wearing soiled undergarments. She was still bleeding from the lash-wounds on her back. The chained sled-dogs were huge and hungry. The child gave a brief frightened gasp of fear at the sight of the dark gleaming eyes in the fur mountain. The dogs growled, and then abruptly were stilled.
For no obvious reason she seemed reassured, and crawled forward. The dog and the bitch called her forward with anxious little whines. If it had not been for the chains they would have pulled her in. The bitch growled at her mate who was trying to sniff the child, and began to lick the wounds clean. Soon the girl was asleep, her thin arms wrapped around the bitch’s neck. This child, who had cried herself to sleep most of her remembered life, slept now with a smile on her gaunt-boned face.
In the confines of a city, buildings go upwards, because there is no room to grow sideways. New technology must be evolved to allow them to do so. In the open spaces of the country buildings spread out. Methods of building remain the same generation after generation. In a similar fashion, now that the discovery of the Stardogs had freed mankind from the confines of Earth, and given them the vastness of the old Denaari Empire, social and technological evolution had stopped too. In some places it went backwards.
Here, on Prala 4, it had gone a long way backwards. Prala 4 had a high water-content for a Denaari world, but it was bitterly cold: the water was frozen; the air dry most of the time. What little human settlement there was ringed the equator, where water in liquid form could sometimes be found.
This hidden building was two thousand miles north of that. Even for Prala 4 what happened here was socially unacceptable. It was just as well that even the summer-time hunters didn’t venture that far north.
In the warm observation room the white-coated Chief Psychologist looked through the double-glazed one-way glass at the sleeping child. She nodded in satisfaction. “We’ve got one.”
“I’ll bring her in then,” said her assistant. He stood a hulking 6’ 4” and his odor was thick and rank. It was he who administered the abuse. He enjoyed his work. He headed for the door.
She snorted. In this task you curbed all feelings. But she could not entirely curb her dislike for this… animal. “If you don’t take a trank-gun with you those dogs’ll kill you, you fool. She’s an emotional telepath, and she has bonded with them.”
The big man shrugged. “I’m not scared of dogs. But I don’t want ‘em hurting the merchandise.”
He successfully tranked the two dogs. Although the bigger male managed to snap the chain in his efforts to reach the man, the tranquilliser was fairly fast and powerful. However, what he was unprepared for was the child’s furious berserker attack on him. It was not desperation or fear. This man had attacked her friends, her loved ones. Hurt them. While she could, she would defend them with her life, while there was breath in her small body. The Chief Psychologist was obliged to send another two men out to rescue her thug and tranquillize the child too.
They brought the child whose name had once been Celine in. In to warmth and food. And hell. Pain. And remorseless, endless conditioning. Electroshock, and taped repetition. Over and over and over again.
“Those damned dogs are loose again.” The thug was scared of them now.
“That’s the third time this week. Can’t you confine them properly?” The hidden facility’s heavy door had been designed by the imperial labs to withstand armour-piercing weapons. It still vibrated with the furious impact of two 150 pound dogs flinging themselves remorselessly at it.
“They keep breaking their chains. Pulled the staple clean out of the wood last time.”
The chief psychologist pursed her grim little mouth. “Shoot them then. She’s drawing strength from their presence anyway.”
“But they’re expensive…”
“I said: shoot them. Do you dare question me?”
The child was shut deep inside that secure building. She couldn’t have heard a thing. Yet she screamed. A terrible, heartbroken tearing scream. The rare and valuble resource that the Emperor’s security chief had personally ordered them to find and train lay in fetal ball and wept.
“Get up. Get up off the floor and stop crying or I’ll send Hans in here.”
But Celine didn’t even seem to hear this dreadful threat. She wept on with racking, shuddering sobs. For days the chief psychologist was afraid she would die, and they would have to start all over again. But the regimen of conditioning and electroshock had continued. And somehow the shell of the child survived.
By the time the little girl was seven, she was ready. Celine was gone. The new name they gave her was Una. She was conditioned to respond to a complex sequence of hand-signals, to reply “Fudge” and then, if the number ‘662’ was given in response to this, to become a zombie-slave obeying the trigger-man to the death.
After this she was given to a very harsh pair of Imperial Security agents, who set up ‘home’ with their ‘daughter’ on another planet. The agent-minders put her carefully in the way of the League recruiters. It was a job. When they’d done it with this child, they went and did it again. Twenty-three times.
The League recruiters….
Liton Bergersson’s life story was typical of many of the riderfolk. Born on a tough outworld, he’d lost his father young. He could dimly remember the roundness of him. And the big hands throwing him up into the air. And the warmth of the laughter. Then his father, his rock, had been drowned in flash flood, while trying to rescue a friend. His pretty mother had remarried a very different kind of man. Allen Khama had been all spareness and angles. Not one of them was soft. Liton’s mother was his second wife. He had certain expectations of a wife and of the boy. When these were not fulfilled he had a bull-whip. Liton’s gentle mother had not flourished under this treatment. She died in childbirth less than a year later.
Allen Khama was a wealthy man. He found himself a third wife more in his own mold. She was never physically cruel to the boy, but her weapons of degradation and the erosion of his fragile ego were subtle and continuous. A slight child in the midst of robust half-brothers who reflected their new mother’s attitudes, he developed a stutter, and numbered the big Zebu cattle on the station as his only friends. In a way being found by the Wienan League recruiters had almost been a relief. He’d been eight at the time, a typical age for recruitment. Too young to realize that he ought to run and run fast.
He remembered the last bellowing of the big Zebu bulls still. He had been surgically deafened soon after that and then entered the solitary hell that was riderschool. These schools were in remote areas. But he still wondered about the citizens who walked past the barred windows. How did they justify ignoring these places? It wasn’t all bleakness however. There were books. And then there had been the glorious meeting with his Stardog. Lit was the first to admit he was besotted with Shahjah. The big beast was old, though. Starskipping was no longer a thing of ease or joy to her, but an effort. An effort she made happily for him. Something he was terrified of her doing.
It was no use him telling of his fears to the pampered League executioner that rode with them. The League cared only for the effective carrying of loads. So Liton was as obstructionist and stupid as he could be. It discouraged their use of Shahjah, to some extent.
Then there were the other riders. Communication between riders was actively made difficult. But the League was too mean to provide individual bathing facilities for the riders. So it was that Lit found himself lip reading a message from an older rider, on his first embarrassed naked encounter in the showers. It had shocked him rigid. It was not an indecent proposal. The man was offering to get a message to any kin, should he so desire. There had been no one in his case. The big Zebu’s he’d known and loved would have been slaughtered by now. But despite the League’s best effort to isolate the riders there was contact with outside. And a slow conspiracy to shake off the cruel hand of the League festered. But they had to be slow and careful. Otherwise the Stardogs would suffer.
