Buck Rogers 1 - Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (22 page)

Another vicious kick from Kane’s heavy boot and the door flew open, crashing back against the bulkhead inside the stateroom and sending a decorative coat-of-arms tumbling noisily to the floor. Kane and the guard-trooper pounded into the room, halting in shock at the sight that they beheld.

The Princess Ardala was sitting bolt upright in her fur-covered bed. Her negligee was pulled halfway over her head, her long hair hung in disarray around her face and she was screaming at the top of her lungs.

Beside her in the bed, frantically struggling to escape the entangling folds of satin sheets and thick fur comforters was the princess’ usual bodyguard, Tigerman. His catlike face held an expression of confusion and alarm, and his throat was giving forth a series of sounds that neither Kane nor the soldier had ever heard before, sounds that sounded like a combination whimper of fear and howl of despair and confusion.

“What—” Kane exclaimed as he tried desperately to assimilate the unprecedented scene before him. The Princess Ardala was not known in the Draconian Realm for extreme social fastidiousness, but bedding down with Tigerman was something beyond even the reach of Draconia’s court gossip.

“What’s going on?” Kane managed on the second attempt. Then, as he got a better grip on himself, he demanded angrily, “Your highness—are you out of your mind? What of the legitimacy of the royal line?”

“Take him away!” Ardala screamed. “How dare you suggest that I—that we—that a princess royal of Draconia would ever—!”

“The facts, Ardala—” Kane shouted excitedly.

“Execute that—that—animal!” Ardala ordered the guardsman. “Do it right here and now! Use your laser pistol!”

“No,” Kane ordered the soldier coolly. “Place him under arrest and hold him in solitary confinement until I can question him.”

“What!” Ardala shrieked. “Kane, you countermand my order?”

“Under the circumstances, princess, yes, I do!”

Tigerman, finally free of the entangling bedclothes, growled angrily and lunged toward Kane.

Kane raised his laser pistol and sent a single bolt of pure energy surging across the narrow space that divided him from the mutated animal. The courtier stepped coolly aside as Tigerman, stunned and paralyzed by the force of the laser beam, clattered to the floor inches from the man’s heavy, polished boots. With a laugh and a sneer, Kane spurned Tigerman with the toe of one boot, turning the heavy body over onto its back.

“Drag this animal away,” Kane instructed the guard-trooper. “Put him in irons. Let him communicate with no one, and don’t bother to exert too much effort on his happiness or comfort. I’ll issue further instructions later, as to what to do to expunge the stain he has placed on the royal escutcheon of the House of Draco!”

The guard saluted and stepped into the corridor to summon several more uniformed troopers. They dragged the body of the still helpless Tigerman away, and Kane slammed the stateroom door shut behind them.

“Well, well, well,” Kane’s words almost oozed from his mouth once he and Ardala were alone, “so the little princess has taken to playing with pussycats in the royal bedroom. Or should I say, only tomcats need apply?”

“You’ve some explaining to do, Kane!” the princess snapped angrily.

“
I
have?” Kane echoed incredulously. “
I
have explaining to do? You are the one with the peculiar taste in bed partners, my princess. Besides, I’ve been busy tending to the business of his majesty, the Emperor Draco. And I can tell you that his majesty will be less than delighted when he hears of the goings-on aboard the royal flagship.

“Aside from your highness’ eccentric little love exploits, there’s been a traitor planted aboard this ship. Two of my guards have been assaulted, and with all due respect to your highness,” and Kane made a mocking, exaggerated bow, “I am frankly more concerned over the presence of a saboteur than over your highness’ odd sexual appetite.”

“Traitor? Saboteur? What would I know of that?” Ardala demanded.

“I suppose nothing, Ardala. You’ve obviously been otherwise occupied.”

“I’ll deal with your insolence later, Kane. This little scene has not at all the meaning that your filthy little mind assigns to it. I was somehow tricked. Drugged, probably. I passed out in my bed, and when I awoke it was to find Tigerman beside me, apparently as puzzled and distressed by the whole matter as I was.”

“A very convincing tale,” Kane cooed. “Of course, her highness’ word is above reproach, just like the virtue of Caesar’s wife. Hah!”

“Meanwhile,” Ardala commanded Kane, “you will give the order to launch our attack on Earth. At once!”

“I think not,” Kane countered. “We can’t attack until your father’s forces arrive to support us.”

“Oh, Kane, you’re as much of a spineless weakling as any of my twenty-nine sisters’ weakling husbands. Of course we don’t need my father. We have overwhelming strength even without him, we have the element of surprise, and we have our own influence boring from within the Inner City to weaken their defenses.”

“It’s too dangerous,” Kane shook his head, “too risky. Let’s wait for the emperor.”

“You gutless fool,” Ardala scorned him. “Do you want to be the conqueror of Earth—or do you want to be an underling in the army of the conqueror? If we go ahead, you and I can be sitting together on the throne of Earth by the time Draco heaves his fat carcass into view.
We
can be, you and I, Kane.

“But if you don’t have the nerve to come along in the attack, why, I’ll go ahead and do it myself. And sit alone on the throne of a conquered world!”

Pacing back and forth on the richly furred floor of Ardala’s chamber, Kane frowned in concentration. The strain he was under was obvious. His forehead burst into sweat. His hands trembled and he clenched his fists to make them stop.

“All right!” he exclaimed. “All right, Ardala! I concede your point. We will attack.”

“At once,” she pressed him.

“Yes, very well. At once.”

“A good decision, Kane.” She rose to her imposing height, the exposure of her body as ignored as if she were clad in full military array instead of a filmy wisp of negligee. “Now, get out of here and go issue your commands. I wish to be alone while I dress.”

T E N

The communications bridge of the
Draconia
was bathed at all times in an overwhelming, gloomy murk. The darkness was no accident of poor star-ship design or construction. It was a deliberate and planned aspect of the starship’s architecture, for in this room the dim red lights of dials and the green and yellow tracers of ’scope surfaces were monitored constantly by some of the most highly trained communications engineers and technicians of the Draconian realm.

They needed the darkness to give maximum visibility to their screens and dials and dimly flashing lights, and their skill was so highly prized by the Draconian officer corps that they were required to undergo a special hour-long period of accustomization to the darkness before the beginning of each of their shifts, and a similar period of reacclimatization to normal lighting at the end.

The room beeped and hummed and chattered to itself as messages came from every part of the giant ship and from every remote spacecraft and planet with which it was in contact, to be read out, translated, processed, stored, manipulated, retrieved, recoded, and retransmitted to its assigned destination.

Communications shifts were long, and in exchange for their sacrifices, commo crews were pampered by the ship’s quartermaster. No other duty station received catered meals while at their assignments! The chief communications console operator sat with his eyes glued to a red tracer screen, muffled earphones clapped to the sides of his head. An empty food tray stood forgotten on top of his console, nearly full containers of condiments and spices resting among the emptied dishes of roast Betelgeusan swamp hen and iced Plorusian slug-jell.

The console operator’s seat was located on one side of the big, desklike contrivance. The other side of the console was an area of simple darkness and no particular purpose except to provide access to service panels for maintenance work on the console when it was taken off-line.

From this darkness a small, metallic hand rose, felt silently and unnoticed among the condiments and spices on the meal-service tray, finally found the shaker of ground black pepper. A small, rounded, metallic head rose over the edge of the console. A pair of artificial optical sensing devices focussed on the console operator.

The hand swivelled on an electronically powered and computer-circuit-guided arc, lifted the pepper shaker and sent a small cloud of pepper-grounds, invisible in the murkily lit communications room, floating toward the operator. The metallic hand silently placed the pepper shaker back on the meal-service tray. The head and the hand both disappeared back into the shadows on the service-area side of the communications console.

The operator’s concentration on his screens and the hums and carrier tones in his earphones was interrupted. He found his eyes beginning to itch, then to burn and water. The images of the screens and tracer beams before him swam and wobbled through the tears. His nose began to itch, too, and a terrific sneeze drowned out the signals in his earphones. He sneezed again, then again.

He pulled off his headset, rubbed his burning eyes with smooth knuckles uncalloused by other than mental labor over the years. He scribbled a note on his log, jotting down the chronometer reading of the moment, as best he could make it out through his running tears, wrote next to it, in a disorganized scrawl,
Temporary relief, personal needs,
and his initials.

He headed for the nearest lavatory to get some running water and rinse the mysterious irritant from his eyes and nose.

As soon as the technician was out of range, Twiki scuttled around the end of the console and hopped up onto the operator’s stool. At his height of three feet, the quad was as tall as the operator was when seated on the stool.

“Quick now, as we planned,” the rich voice of Dr. Theopolis sounded. But it sounded in a tone little above a whisper so it was inaudible to the other technicians in the room over the hum and clicks and chatter of the scientific instruments, and just as Twiki and Theopolis, protected by the murk and gloom of the commo bridge, would be virtually invisible except to someone approaching close to the temporarily vacated console.

Twiki, using his astonishing deft and fast-moving mechanical hands, began setting switches and adjusting tuner-knobs on the console. Theopolis said again, in his low tone, “Good work, Twiki. Now set me down close to the microphone so I won’t have to talk any louder than this.”

The drone carefully removed Theopolis from around his neck and set the box of flashing lights down on the console’s surface. He reached and adjusted a directional microphone so that it was as close to Theopolis as he could get it, and pointed directly at his voder-circuit.

“Earth Directorate Emergency Channel,” Theopolis said into the microphone. His voice was pitched low but its tone was incredibly urgent. “Earth Directorate Emergency Channel. Top priority, Computer Council, Inner City—Rating A-A-A-Zero-One. Urgent!”

A thousand miles below the flagship
Draconia
’s synchronous orbit, the Earth Directorate Communications Center—by a cosmic irony, the virtual duplicate of the commo bridge of the
Draconia
—was also kept in 24-hour operation. Normal commercial and administrative messages could wait for regular business hours, but the emergency channel was kept open at all times, and the technicians monitoring it were on duty in unbroken rotating shifts.

The duty officer at the central communications console picked up the covert transmission from the
Draconia
and responded to it at once. “Computer Counsellor Theopolis and Quad Twiki, you are cleared for immediate transmission on emergency channel. Please proceed.” Turning aside to a smartly uniformed cadet-orderly, the duty officer snapped, “Get on the low-frequency local console. Shoot off a message to Colonel Deering and make it fast!” The cadet leaped to comply with his instructions.

Even before Theopolis could initiate his message there was a beeping from the low-frequency console and the cadet called to the duty officer, “Colonel Deering on line, sir.”

“Dr. Theopolis, Colonel Deering,” the commo officer said, “I’m patching you both through now so you can exchange information via my console without delays. On line!”

He snapped a red toggle switch and the circuit hummed into life.

“This is Dr. Theopolis, ex-officio representative of the Council of Computers,” the rich voice said softly.

“Yes, doctor,” Wilma replied. “This is Colonel Deering. Where are you? How did you get on the emergency channel?”

“I’m on board the flagship
Draconia.
I followed Captain Rogers as you ordered, Colonel. Now hear this: the
Draconia
is not—repeat,
not
an unarmed vessel! She’s filled with bombers and she’s about to launch a full-scale attack on the Inner City!”

“But how—” Wilma gasped. “Where did they come from? I was there. I personally inspected the landing bay and found it empty!”