Kenneth Bulmer - Keys to the Dimensions 03, page 9
Redfern glared about. There had to be another weapon.
The Infalgon dropped down from their gauzy-winged flyers and leaped onto the battlements swinging their lances with precision. Gara’hec met them with stiff formal reactions. Redfern saw at a glance that the walking dead possessed not a tithe of the flexibility needed to fight these squat devils.
Goggled faces bore down. Harsh, scaled tunics covering gnarled limbs and bodies, heavily muscled, their foes jostled to get at the Gara’hec. Redfern fought the red panic that assailed him. He had no Springfield now.
Bare moments had elapsed since the beginning of the fight.
Gait was pushing Val and dragging Mina into a low doorway opening off a tower dominating this section of the battlements. Smoke hung in the air. Thick acid reeked where the Infalgon projectiles had struck. Gara’hec and a few Wizards fought the invaders, bodies black against the sunshine. Gait was cursing and Val was struggling.
“Get in, Val! Get under cover!”
“I’m not leaving! I can fight too!”
Gait stopped trying to push Val through the low opening. He pulled her out and pushed Mina through. Then he darted in himself and, with a little shock of disbelief, Redfern saw the heavy metal door, gem-encrusted, slam shut. For a space Val stood isolated, then she snatched up a fallen weapon, a strangely shaped construct with a flare-mouth and a reverse-curved stock. Dryness caught at Redfern’s throat. A pounding fear for the girl’s safety drove him forward.
“Val!”
She saw him.
Two enormously buzzing flyers swooped on her, their riders swinging their gnarled legs free and their lances swinging low, like long stingers. They had faces like cats, these creatures of Infalgon, feral-fierce and ferocious. Empty-handed, Redfern plunged on.
Val lifted the weapon. A paler beam of light than the strong emerald of the crystals flashed out. Where it touched the Infalgon it withered them. The flyers spun away, their gauzy wings beating a ragged buzz.
Then Redfern had scooped Val up and carried her forcibly backward hard up against the stones of the tower. Two balls of acid fell to smoke fumingly where they had been standing.
“Scobie! This is terrible!”
“Tony!” Redfern yelled. The youngster darted for them, leaping a fuming acid projectile. He loosed off a full clip from the carbine as he came. His face showed radiantly.
“Val! You’re all right—where’s Nyllee?”
“She went with Vivasjan. I refused to go—Gait—”
Tragedy crumbled her features.
“I know, Val. Don’t worry about Gait now. If we don’t find a safe hidey-hole ourselves, or fight back, we’re done for!”
A group of scarlet-clad Wizards with the pale-green beam weapons in their hands cleared a space along the battlements. More Gara’hec appeared. The noise continued to sound spectacularly. The Infalgon tumbled from their flyers as soon as they spanned the walls and charged into hand-to-hand combat. The whole city was ringed with fighting.
“What chance have we?” gasped Val.
Redfern could size the situation up better now. He still had no weapon; yet here in this momentarily isolated fragment of peace amid the larger battle, he could see the pattern.
“If we can stop them when they clear the walls, we can hold them.” Acid fumed closed by. “If they once occupy the walls, the whole city is lost.”
One thing Redfern established. The Infalgon fired their acid projectiles from stubby mortar-shaped weapons strapped to their mount’s harness. Redfern did not see one reload. Once they had fired, they relied on lance or sword. That, at the least, spelled a chance.
Staggering back from a merlon a Gara’hec stumbled toward them. A barbed lance protruded from his back; his body equally divided the shaft, yet he continued to fight, slashing his sword at the Infalgon who had speared him, cutting into leather and muscle. The Infalgon screamed. The muscular little creature swung his own sword in a clanging resonance.
Tony lifted his carbine and the bolt clicked empty.
Val palely beamed the Infalgon into withered death; but the Gara’hec, twisting as he fell, collapsed. The walking dead had at last been killed again.
Redfern leaped forward and scooped up the Infalgon’s sword. Longer and heavier than the short sword wielded by the Gara’hec, its straight blade balanced perfectly. All Redfern knew about swords was that they were no longer considered a part of a gentleman’s walking-out dress. He swished it through the air. He had felled trees before.
The plopping of acid projectiles had grown noticeably less now. The stream of gauzy-winged flyers had slackened. Now a whole series of vicious individual combats began around the walls of Senchuria.
At this point in the battle the borrowed weapons from other cultures gave the advantage to the Wizards. The Gara’hec were able to form little clumps and shoot down the Infalgon as they charged up to close quarters. Now Redfern spotted crystals lazily drifting over the walls and beaming down the cat-faced aliens.
He hefted the sword and jumped in. He felt the overpowering need to release the tensions in him, to prove in however a foolish and adolescent way that he was capable of standing by his friends.
The sword swung like a butcher’s cleaver. Taller than the Infalgon, he could lean in and cut them up, if he was careful not to let them slide in to close quarters. Tony, his carbine shot empty, fought alongside Redfern with a snatched up sword. They cleared a space and then, joined by Gara’hec and Wizards, they cleaned up their section of the battlements. Redfern could feel horror and shame at this wholesale destruction of another life form, however inimical; but right now, with that life form trying to degut him, he could not afford the luxury of abnegation.
Tony let rip a great shout.
Like Diana fresh from the hunt, Nyllee, a smoking Springfield in her left hand and a bloodied dagger in her right, her white gown ripped and splashed with red stains, ran fleetly toward them. Her face showed a strange exultation. Redfern wondered, in that moment of release, what sports they played on Nyllee’s world of Narlingha.
As Tony and Nyllee assured each other that neither was hurt, Redfern glanced at Val. Her chest heaved. She looked haggard. She tried to smile bravely for him and produced a lopsided grimace.
“We won, then, Scobie.”
“Seems like it.”
A Wizard who had been constantly at Vivasjan’s side until the joining of the battle and who now swung his green-beam weapon from a hand that shook, walked across; from his grave face Redfern guessed at once, with a jolt of dismay, that the news was not good.
“We have won the opening skirmish,” the Wizard said in a low voice. “But you forget the war machines. Soon they will crawl over the sea of grass. Then the battle will begin.”
“Oh, no!” said Scobie Redfern, shattered.
Val laughed hysterically.
Tony kissed Nyllee firmly and put her from him.
“But we can still beat them! Arlan himself would not allow us to perish after all this!”
“But the hatred projectors!” Redfern gripped Val’s shoulders hard, quietening her. “No one could get past them!”
The Wizard nodded; but there was no confidence in him now.
“The Infalgon are creatures of similar character to our own faithful Gara’hec. Yet you saw the difference.”
“Quicker,” nodded Redfern. “Tougher, smarter on the uptake. So?”
“So the beings who created them may also be immune to our emotion projectors. We will try all emotions on them: hatred, fear, remorse, even love. We shall try to beat them back. But this is the day we of Senchuria have long feared—the day of reckoning, when an army comes against us immune to our emotion defenses.”
Tony’s sword clanged on the stone. “We’ll fight!” he said, angrily and unhappily. He hadn’t liked what the Wizard said.
Nyllee didn’t cling to him now. She was carefully and curiously inspecting one of the Wizard’s green-beam projectors. She hadn’t any concern, any worries, it seemed, over the blood splashed over her body and arms.
“Sure, Ton’,” she said, flicking over an intensity control on the projector. “Sure, we’ll fight ‘em.”
Abruptly, treacherously, mockingly belying all the brave words and deeds, Scobie Redfern knew it had all gone wrong, gone sour, that they were flapping their lips, that the end was truly coming and nothing they could do would halt it or deflect it by a millimeter.
A gathering noise of many people jostled his mind away from decisions he could not make. He looked down into the city. A vast crowd of people slowly moved toward the walls. People began to climb up. They wore bits of armor, scarlet robes, brown and black and blue robes. Many carried beam projectors, others rifles and tommy guns, and others cone weapons and weapons of a nature unknown to Redfern. They moved with a steady and yet somehow reluctant gait, like newly lectured children on their way to a hated tea party.
“Everyone of Senchuria will fight.” The Wizard spoke his rote words as though aware of their futility.
“But there are old people there!” protested Val.
“Why don’t you rejuvenate them, as you did us?”
“The rejuvenation process has been used for many generations,” said the Wizard. “An individual may be restored to youth only a certain number of times; after that the baffled forces of nature will not be denied. Some of those people are thousands of years old.”
A whiff of that idea tendriled in Redfern’s mind.
“You have a strange and yet somehow chaste culture here,” breathed Val. She caught Redfern’s arm. “And it will all be destroyed! Oh, Scobie! Isn’t there anything we can do to help?”
Redfern still considered himself badly treated by the Wizards, although he had come to grasp their reasons. They were a gravely polite people, lying about Earthly science and geriatrics and EEG’s when their own rejuvenation process must be as far removed from any Earthly geriatric medicine as a heart-transplant from a tonsilectomy. He felt that even by their own strict, perhaps harsh, standards of business and barter, he would owe them nothing after the fight. They must feel forced to use life to the full, with rejuvenation and after that the Gara’hec to look forward to; they must have a respect for life to wish to prolong it so.
All this life, this desperate striving to maintain enough people to make life worth living, all their art and science and skills—all would be wiped out. Of that Redfern felt absolutely sure. He wondered why he felt as sorry as he did, considering his experience with that emotion-milker on his head. Now he knew where that changed emotion would be used: against the mechanical war machines of the Irifalgon. Would be used—unavailingly.
Redfern looked at Val. She stared back at him, swallowing, her eyelids blinking rapidly, her face held back and her neck compressed, waiting.
The feeling of being trapped snapped down on Scobie Redfern with steel-spring jaws.
Paradoxically, that sensation affected him more powerfully now—here on the sunshine-soaked battlements of the city of the Wizards of Senchuria with a beautiful girl pleading with him—than ever it had when he had lain, a slave prisoner, on the straw of the jewel mines in Irunium.
Pressures. Forces. Great powers working on him. These, always, had been the enemy for Scobie Redfern.
Vivasjan had climbed slowly up to the wall and Val and the other Wizard were talking eagerly to him. Tony and Nyllee joined in. They grew more and more excited.
Then Val pulled Redfern’s arm.
“You’ve sulked long enough, Scobie! Listen: there is a way to beat the Infalgon…”
“I know.” Redfern had made his decision. “We’ll stand and fight. All of us. If we lose, we lose. We—”
“No, Scobie!” shouted Val, her face alive with her news. “Vivasjan knows where there is a great weapon. Only, whoever fetches it is likely to get killed doing it!”
XI
Kiss or kill.
Redfern remembered that, the way he’d promised himself to handle any opposition according to the way it acted.
Well, what should he do now?
He knew damn well what he ought to have done long before he allowed himself to be cajoled into this eerie cavern with its stalactites and its breath of evil and its gloomy recesses. The darkness pressed in closely. The beam from their flashlights carved pencil-thin slivers of light in all that great bulk of dark. Oh, yes, Scobie Redfern told himself, sliding down shivering into an icy underground stream, he knew what he ought to have done.
He ought to have grabbed Val and told her to find a new nodal point to take them to another, kinder dimension. She could have brought along her friends, too. If he’d insisted, they could have been back in New York, right now, eating that juicy steak with all the trimmings and drinking a cup of steaming coffee— His mouth salivated and he spat and cursed.
“Quiet, Scobie!” Val nudged him in the ribs, ungently.
They’d been outfitted and had gone to the nodal point, the Gateway, within the city of the Wizards, and Val had put them all through: Tony, Nyllee, Val and Redfern. And now here they were in another world creeping through a terror-haunted series of caverns seeking another Portal to the next world.
“Is it much further?” Tony whispered sibilantly.
“I can sense it ahead. Keep quiet. Vivasjan said there were… things… in here.”
Nyllee said something coarse about frog’s bowels.
The Wizards had no Porteurs of their own, the mutant strain never having showed itself in their race, and they didn’t altogether approve of them. Val had quite shocked them. But Vivasjan had said: “In a world called Narangon, whose people are the inveterate and bitter foes of the Infalgon, there are weapons to destroy the war machines. We know of them; but no trader has ever offered them to us. Now we have need of them.”
“We’re close,” whispered Val.
They crept over a huge boulder that must have fallen from the roof long ago. At the far side, fitfully illuminated by their flashes and a straggly phosphorescent moss, they halted. They huddled close to the stone as Val again cast around, sensing. Her closed eyes and rapt face fascinated Redfern.
They had entered this cavern from the vaults of the Wizard’s castle and now they sought the next gateway on their macabre journey through the dimensions.
A sound slithered over the loose gravel to their rear.
Tony swung his flash. Nyllee mentioned frog’s eyeballs and yanked out her beam weapon. Redfern felt the gorge rise in him. He yanked out his own green-beam weapon. Val still stood, seeking through the insubstantial medium for the next nodal point.
Over them all reared the scaled trunk of a gigantic snake. The wedge-shaped head arched over them, the long tongue flickering, the black-rimmed mouth open and four curved fangs glittering chips of light back from the humans’ flashlights. The reptile’s eyes blazed yellow as that enormous head swayed back and forth. Its scaly coils writhed away as it looped forward. Their chill glitter hypnotized with sheer size, as the yellow eyes with fury.
“By sweet Arlan!” breathed Tony shakily.
The cruel wedge-shaped head darted forward. As large as a bubble-car, the head and mouth could engulf a human in a single bite. Redfern experienced a shocked vision of Val’s arms and legs protruding like sticks on each side of that flat mouth. Nyllee fired. The pale green beam sheared through the scale and skin. Bones suddenly thrust through ripped away flesh. Smoke coiled. The smell of charred meat hung in the cavern. Redfern fired.
The head of the snake slashed on past them. But now it sprang and bounded and leaped without a body. Like a football it bounced into the cavern darkness. The body went mad. Scaled coils writhed and looped, thrashed and smashed. Rock was pulverized. Dust flew. At last the sinuous length shivered and subsided. A tremor or two rolled along the flanks; then the snake was dead.
“What a monster!” said Nyllee with approval. “I’d like his head for a trophy.”
Val opened her eyes. “We go on,” she said. She did not look at the snake. Quietly, continually looking about them, they picked their way forward over boulders and shale and gravel until they reached a little stream bed.
“Here,” said Val, simply.
They stood together, arms about each other, weapons ready, as Val told them to prepare for the transit. With no fuss and only a miniscule shudder they were through.
The trickling stream bed of the cavern had changed instantaneously into a wide and rolling river of turbid brown water. Floating logs and debris twisted and tumbled down the river. The humans stood on a crumbling bank with trees and llianas drooping to collapse into the flood. Earth fell to trickle away, and then to subside in clumps. A tree toppled and fell with a showering crash as they watched.
“Flood,” said Nyllee as though imparting information. She looked around alertly.
“Where to now, Val?” asked Redfern.
“I’m a little confused,” she said. “It’s all… new…”
He had to remind himself that this Porteuring business was weird and strange to Val no less than—and probably more than—to him. She was a brave little kid, at that. She had a toughness of fiber closer-woven than Nyllee’s coarse courage.
“Vivasjan knew of the route, Val,” Redfern said with a breezy confidence he hoped she would not pierce for the sham it was. “What was the next Gate he told us?”
“One more dimension to Narangon, I think…”
The bank crumbled again with the sliding displacement of a scoop-shaped hunk of earth. The party of dimension-travelers moved back. Redfern checked that their heavy packs were still safely closed and their weapons handy—including the long Infalgon sword he had retained—and then he said grimly to Val: “Right, Val. Let’s hit that next Gate.”
A few yards upstream Val nodded. “Here.”
They went through in a compact bunch. Again, despite his previous experiences, Redfern could not fail to be aware of the strangeness of stepping from one world into another, of passing through walls and barriers invisible yet stronger than beryl-steel, of knowing that all around him lay the familiar streets of New York, the mines of Irunium, the city of the Wizards of Senchuria—and who knew how many more uncountable multi-dimensions?
