Buck Rogers 2 - That Man on Beta (21 page)

Ardala, dressed in a voluptuous nightgown that would have served to tempt the most jaded of appetites, tossed restlessly in her huge, satin-sheeted bed. She was only partially wakeful, but some sound, some evidence of motion in the room penetrated her sleep-fogged senses.

She sat upright suddenly. There was someone in her bedchamber! She reached under an overstuffed pillow and drew out a tiny laser-pistol. She was wide awake now! “Stop where you are!” she snapped into the partial darkness. “I have my laser pointed right at—”

But a powerful hand crashed into her graceful wrist. She managed to retain her grasp on the pistol and squeeze off a blast, but the beam went far wide of the mark, burning an ugly scar into the fancywork of the wall.

“Ardala!” a manly voice exclaimed. “It’s me, look!”

The powerful hand kept its grip on her wrist. With his other hand the stranger reached through the murk and flicked on a room light. Ardala stared at the person who had invaded her room—apparently a woman, clad in a set of filmy, sexy garments.

“Who?” Ardala asked.

The stranger smiled.

The princess studied the smiling face. “Buck?” she stammered. “Buck? You’re
very
pretty!”

Buck lifted one hand self-consciously to the wig he had stolen. “Thanks, Ardala, but I don’t have time for compliments. Are you ready to go to Earth?”

“Yes,” Ardala replied. “Oh, yes. Look what I got for you. I was going to hunt you up and give it to you in the morning.”

She reached under her pillow again and brought out a gleaming, plexiglass rectangle.

Buck looked at the object, recognized it and smiled happily. “Theopolis!” he exclaimed. He reached for the computer and Ardala handed him its carrying strap.

“Theo, you old devil,” Buck said happily as he hung the strap around his neck. To Ardala, Buck said, “This is really great! This is going to simplify our escape a lot. I wanted to get Theo back and I didn’t know where he was. And I really didn’t want to face the computer council back on Earth without him.”

“We can sneak out of here and get a ship right now,” Ardala suggested. She climbed out of her bed and started toward the window.

“Not yet!” Buck stopped her. “We have to get to the main computer room first, and tap the big system for information on my family.”

“No,” Ardala demurred. “There isn’t time. We have to get off this planetoid and out of this whole sector of space, fast! Kane, or even my father, might be after us at any moment!”

“We’ll have to risk that,” Buck insisted, “I came here for something and I’m not leaving without it. This whole affair is the result of my search, and I won’t quit now!”

Reluctantly, Ardala yielded. Instead of climbing from her window, Buck insisted on their using the door to the main corridor. Ardala was astonished not to find a guard there. “What did you do,” she asked Buck, “kill him?”

“No,” the earthman said, swirling his feminine chiffon. “I seduced him. He thinks he’s keeping a rendezvous with me right now.”

They made their way through darkened corridors and deserted halls. As they went, Buck carried on a whispered conversation with Ardala. “You people haven’t been exactly honest with me about this antibody matter, have you?” Buck demanded.

Ardala played innocent for starters. “What do you mean?”

“I mean you don’t need them to save your race from extinction. You need them to conquer Gregoria!”

“Yes, that’s true,” Ardala conceded. “But it wasn’t my idea, Buck, you can believe me. It was all Kane’s idea, Kane’s and Von Norbert’s. I’m blameless!”

“Sure you are. And Mayor Daley was a Republican.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” Buck grumbled.

They continued onward. Most of the corridors were vacant at this hour of Villus Beta’s night. But not all! When Ardala and Buck, both of them in seductive female attire, passed Draconian guardsmen, the guards acted solicitous. They were respectful of the princess’ position as daughter of the emperor and heiress-apparent to the throne of Draconia. They were also men who appreciated a beautiful woman when they saw one—or thought they saw two!

Buck halted in the anteroom of the main computer center, grasped Ardala by the wrist again and pressed her against the wall. In the princess, instincts fought—she resented being manhandled, forced against her will to stop, go, do anything that she did not choose to do . . . but at the same time she enjoyed the contact and the implied interaction with Buck Rogers.

“What is it?” Ardala demanded in a low voice.

“There’s something else I have to get straight before we round this last corner—just in case we get zapped inside there.” He inclined his head toward the main computer room.

“What is it?” Ardala asked her question a second time.

“I want to know about this business of raising people in five years. My would-be boyfriend asked if I was a regular woman or one of the five-year specials. What’s that all about?”

“There’s a new set of hormones that Professor Von Norbert invented. They speed up the growth and maturity processes.”

“Then—if I father children for Draconia, children with those vital antibodies in their bloodstreams—they’ll be all grown up in five years? In five years they’ll be troopers going into combat against the Gregorians?”

“That’s right!”

“And what about those girls they sent to me—Grenda, Blorim, Orell. They’re only five years old?”

“Yes and no,” Ardala temporized. “They’re five the same way you’re five hundred. They have all of the development and maturity of grown women—but they got it in five years.”

Buck rubbed his chin with his free hand, pondering. “Okay, you’ve got a point there, Ardala. Okay. Let’s get on with this.”

They turned the corner and strode into the computer room itself.

Two guards, uniforms sparkling and neat, weapons at the ready, stood at the door. At the approach of outsiders they were immediately on the alert, but as soon as they recognized the Princess Ardala they dropped their hostility and snapped to a crisp salute. Buck still in wig, makeup, and women’s clothing, hung back so he could be seen but would not draw attention away from Ardala.

“My Princess!” the senior of the two guards blurted. “May we be of service to Your Highness?”

“Yes,” Ardala commanded coolly, “you may let us pass.”

“I’m sorry, Your Highness. We are allowed to admit no one without authorization.”

Ardala nodded. “Very proper of you. Very well, I hereby grant you authorization to let us pass.” She looked over her shoulder at Buck, intoned imperiously, “Come along, I will need your assistance.”

Ardala and Buck strode past the two guards, who stood aside with their weapons returned to their holsters. As they were almost into the computer room the second guard gathered all of his courage and ordered them to halt again. “I beg pardon, Your Highness, but I’m sure you wouldn’t want us to disobey our orders. Mr. Kane and Professor Von Norbert ordered us to let no one pass who wasn’t on the list they gave us. I don’t believe that your name is on it, Your Highness.”

“Mr. Kane and the professor work for me,” Ardala said sharply.

“Yes, of course, Your Highness.”

“Very well. I am adding my name to the list, effective now.”

“Very well, Your Highness, if you put it that way. Your name will be on the list. But, er, I’m afraid that your lady-in-waiting will have to remain outside.”

“My lady-in-waiting is my closest friend and assistant. She goes where I go. But if it will help your conscience to rest easier, put her name on the list, too. It’s—Bussy Exer.”

“Yes, Your Highness.” Again the guard stood aside, and this time Ardala and Buck entered the computer room. Behind them, the automatic atmosphere-seal doors hissed softly shut.

“Wow!” Buck exclaimed. “You brought that off beautifully, Ardala! Thanks!” He embraced her. From Buck’s side, the embrace was one of friendship and gratitude. From Ardala’s, it was—something else!

Buck slipped from Ardala’s arms and slid into the operator’s chair at the main control console of the computer bank. He keyed in a series of commands through the typewriterlike device that held center position at the desk-type console. The computer’s indicator panels sprang to life, reels of tape whirred, readout screens glowed eerily.

“Hurry,” Ardala urged. “That guard is going to decide to cover his tracks sooner or later by checking our story out with Kane. Once that happens we’re in the soup!”

“I’m going as fast as I can. Is there any faster way to work with this piece of iron?”

Ardala leaned past Buck, flipped several control knobs on the console. She pressed the input-mode button for
oral,
held her hand to the pattern-reader, said, “On oral. Princess Ardala. Go ahead.” She turned to Buck. “Put your hand where I held mine.”

He complied.

“Captain Buck Rogers,” the computer’s electronic voice intoned, “pilot, Inner City, Earth. Though you sure don’t look it today! Proceed.”

Buck gave a startled exclamation at the machine’s unexpected comment. Then he turned serious. “I want access to your data-banks. I need all available genealogical information on my family.”

“Please be specific in your inquiry,” the electronic voice responded.

“I want everything you have.”

“Buck,” Ardala interrupted the dialogue, “we don’t have time to argue all night with a computer. And even if we did, we surely won’t have time for a whole long readout.”

Buck thought. “Wait a minute, then.” He addressed the computer input again. “Are you compatible with a compuvisor? Can you feed data directly into his storage bank so I can get it back out later?” Buck held Theopolis against the computer console’s pattern-reader. The small computer’s indicator panel lights all came on.

There was a moment of tense silence, then the big computer said, “Yes. Compuvisor model one-four-eight-zero is compatible with my output format. Data-transfer procedure initiated—
now
!”

The main computer’s indicator panels flashed, then lights flicked off one by one as the information was fed through a direct computer-to-computer linkage into Dr. Theopolis. In less than a minute the big computer’s indicator panel was dark. The synthesized voice announced that the transfer was complete.

“Right,” Dr. Theopolis confirmed, “I’ve got it all. Say, that’s a nice computer there. I really enjoyed chatting with him.”

“So you
can
still talk,” Buck scolded Theopolis.

“Yes, but not to strange women,” Theopolis replied.

“Thanks,” said Buck.

“Let’s get out of here,” Ardala urged. “If you’ve got what you want, you can play quiz with that toy later on.”

“Toy!” Theopolis protested.

“A term of royal affection,” Ardala soothed him.

“Well, that’s better, then.”

“Okay,” said Buck, “let’s go. Say good-bye to your big playmate, Theopolis, and we’ll head for the spaceport.” He gave Theo a moment to commune with the big machine, then flicked the giant computer’s master switch off and climbed from the operator’s chair.

Buck and Ardala—with Theopolis still hung around Buck’s neck—set out a second time through the hallways and chambers of Villus Beta. This time they were headed for the spaceport by the most direct possible route. Time after time they passed Draconian guardsmen, and each time the princess brazened out any challenge by citing her royal credentials and threatening any recalcitrant guard with reassignment to the stoker gang.

They didn’t know where Wilma Deering was. Buck and Ardala both had witnessed her blastoff in the captured starfighter, but they had to assume that she would return all the way to Earth and then gather a rescue force from among her own command. They didn’t know about the Ellis Plan; they didn’t know that the Inner City defense squadron was already speeding at top star-warp acceleration toward Villus Beta.

Nor did they know the whereabouts of Kane and Professor Von Norbert. The partners in—if not crime, then something hardly distinguishable from it—had long since dozed in front of the telescreen trained on Buck’s private room. They didn’t know that Buck had found their second monitor camera, or that the last of Buck’s five-year-old “girlfriends,” the voluptuous Orell, still sat impatiently on Buck’s bed, awaiting his return from his rendezvous with the Princess Ardala.

But the professor and the courtier Kane might awaken at any moment, and once they did, a certain sequence of events must follow as inevitably as the chain reaction that follows the attainment of critical mass in an imploding nuclear device.

They would see the blank telescreen. They would suspect that Buck had discovered and disabled the second monitor camera. They would hurry to his room to confirm that he was present.

Instead of Buck and a voluptuous mating-partner, they would find the impatient Orell sitting alone on Buck’s bed. They would question her and Orell would tell them that Buck had gone to a meeting with the Princess Ardala—or at least that one of the princess’ maids had told them as much.

So the chain of events would develop, link by inevitable link.

Kane and Von Norbert would next head for Ardala’s private suite of chambers. They would find her missing, sound a local alarm, learn from the guards that she and a companion had consulted the central computer facility and left.

And then they would sound a general alarm—if they hadn’t done so earlier in their sequence of inevitable events.

Buck and Ardala stepped out of the mouth of the elevator tube at the entrance to the Villus Beta spaceport.

They were met by a team of Draconian guardsmen.

“Princess!” one of the Draconians exclaimed. “We didn’t expect to see Your Highness here.”

“Well, here I am!” Ardala snapped. “I’ve no time to chat. Let my maid and myself pass at once.”

“But I have my orders, ma’am,” the guard insisted. “No one may pass without the express authorization of Chancellor Kane.”

Ardala tried to use the line which had got herself and Buck past the guards at the computer center. “Kane is
my
chancellor,” she announced imperiously. “He can give commands only by my authority, and I have the authority to override those commands as well. I order you to let us pass.”