Buck Rogers 2 - That Man on Beta (22 page)

At the computer room this tactic had worked. At the spaceport, it failed. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I can’t unless I hear it from Mr. Kane himself, ma’am.”

Ardala seethed. “I will give you one more opportunity, soldier. You and your partner here step aside and let us pass, or you might as well turn in your uniforms and draw stoker-gang outfits right now.”

“I’m sorry, Your Highness. I can’t do it.”

Ardala drew back one arm, balled her fist and let fly at the guard.

He staggered back, more startled by the fact that the princess had actually taken a punch at him than he was by the stinging force of the blow itself. The second guard stood equally thunderstruck, uncertain whether to go to the aid of his companion or to give his attention to Princess Ardala.

As the two guards stood frozen in a moment of indecision, Buck Rogers launched himself through the air at the second of them. The guard had drawn his laser-pistol, but the force of Buck’s muscular body pounding against his chest sent the weapon clattering to the tarmac.

Ardala rushed to the skittering pistol and scrambled to grab it while the second guard grappled futilely with Buck and the first, recovered now from the princess’ blow to the jaw, drew his own laser-weapon and pointed it at Ardala.

“You dare aim a weapon at your princess?” Ardala screamed at him imperiously.

The guard, confused, turned instead to point his weapon at Buck. He would have fired off a bolt, but Buck and the second guard were locked in a struggle, rolling and thrashing about on the tarmac.

While the first guard stood pointing his laser at Buck and his foe, frantically striving to find an opening for a shot at the earthman, Princess Ardala calmly pointed the laser-pistol that she held at the first guard. She coolly squeezed the trigger. There was a flash of light as the guardsman took the laser bolt at point-blank range.

With a look of astonishment in his eyes, he sank slowly to the ground, his knees crumpling beneath him, his laser-pistol clattering from his hand.

Ardala advanced the few steps that separated them, picked up the guard’s weapon, and walked back to the place where Buck and the second guard were wrestling. For the moment Buck was on top, but the guard with a mighty heave threw the earthman off him and started to rise to his feet.

In that instant Ardala fired a second laser blast, sending the guard crashing back onto his skull and shoulders. He lay unmoving, a few yards from his equally stationary companion.

“Well now,” Ardala said to Buck, “that takes care of that. Here”—and she tossed him the second of the two laser-pistols. “I doubt that we’ll have any more trouble,” Ardala continued, “but if we do, we’ll not have to bandy words any longer!”

S E V E N T E E N

Chancellor Kane and Professor Von Norbert strode through the corridor leading to Buck Rogers’ private room. The inevitable had happened. They had awakened and discovered the blank telescreen connecting them—or, more accurately,
not
connecting them—with Buck’s quarters.

A guard, standing at attention outside the door to Buck’s room, snapped a proper salute to the chancellor and the professor at their approach.

“Everything all right, guard?” Kane demanded.

“Fine, sir, yes, sir.”

Kane strode past the trembling guard and shoved the door open. He looked inside and spotted Orell sitting disconsolately on the edge of Buck’s unmade bed.

“Where’s Rogers?” Kane demanded.

“I don’t know,” Orell wailed. “He was supposed to be visiting the princess but it’s been so long, I wonder if he’s ever going to come back here at all!”

“The princess?” Kane echoed.

“Yes,” Orell’s lower lip quivered, “you know, the
princess,
that beautiful, sexy Princess Ardala!”

Kane whirled furiously to confront the guard. “I thought you told me everything was all right here,” he roared furiously.

“Yes, sir,” the guard quavered, “it is. Er, isn’t it? Sir?”

“I’ll ‘sir’ you, you damned jackass! Rogers is gone!”

“But he can’t be, sir. I mean—he didn’t leave. I’d have seen him, sir.”

“You idiot! Come with me!” Guard in tow and Von Norbert trailing breathlessly behind, the burly Kane set off through the corridors toward Princess Ardala’s suite.

At the spaceport, Ardala and Buck raced across the field to the nearest ship. “Can you pilot that?” Ardala panted, pointing to a large, sleek rocket ship, a D-III.

“I can pilot anything on this field!” Buck snapped. “I don’t mean to sound conceited, but I’ve done a lot of test-piloting—flying a new ship is nothing to me. If I can’t handle it, it hasn’t come off the line yet!”

They clambered through the hatch, made their way to the bridge of the powerful craft. Ardala pointed to the control panel of the ship. It was studded with hundreds of dials and levers, screens, knobs, and switches. “How do you feel now?” she asked Buck. “Are you still so sure of yourself?”

Buck’s eyes gleamed happily. They contained an expression, as he let them rove over the instrument panel of the spaceship, that Ardala had longed to see in them when Buck looked at her.

“Am I ever,” Buck said. “Can
you
run this thing?” he asked the princess, impishly.

“I hire people to do things like that,” she replied.

“Well then,” Buck grinned, “you just hired me.” He sat down in the pilot’s seat, began to study the controls. “Of course,” he muttered with just a trifle less confidence in his voice, “it’ll take me a little while to figure out what some of these gadgets and doohickies are
for,
but I’ll get the hang of it pretty soon.”

He ran his hand through his hair. “I think so, anyhow,” he added.

Suddenly lights sprang into full, glaring life all around the ship. Their glare penetrated the thick, polarizing viewports of the cruiser, blinding Buck and Ardala. They both rubbed their eyes, slowly regaining their sight.

Emergency sirens wailed. Squads of mounted soldiers roared across the tarmac in groundcars and armored personnel carriers. Other squads followed on foot, dog-trotting to reach the ship as quickly as possible.

Kane, in an emergency command post set up at the edge of the field, roared commands to Draconian officers who jumped to obey, sending enlisted personnel scurrying off in all directions.

Inside the spaceship, Ardala said, “They’ve found us out, Buck. There’s no more time to study. If you think you can fly this ship, get us out of here right now. Otherwise they’ve got us stopped.”

Buck swung toward her, the boxlike Theopolis still nestled against his chest. “What then?” Buck asked. “If they get us now, what happens?”

“I don’t know what happens to
you
,” Ardala said. “But as for me. I tell Draco and Kane that you kidnapped me at laser-point and forced me onto this ship at the risk of my life!”

“Okay,” Buck acknowledged, “that’s just what I wanted to know. Hang on, Ardala, ’cause—as we used to say back when I was a kid—here goes nothing!”

He set the control levers by the time-honored method of Kentucky windage, leaned his full weight into the main firing stud, and prayed.

Slowly, majestically, the heavy ship lifted away from the tarmac. Her exhaust flames spread like a sheet of fire, turning squads of Draconian troops and vehicles into smoking, charred black cinder.

Then, with a sudden rush of acceleration, the ship seemed to leap away from the inverted wedge of Villus Beta. She balanced there in the planetoid’s sky, a shining bird with a glowing, wavering, fiery tail. Then there was another burst of acceleration, and the ship disappeared into the night of deep space.

The emergency command post that Kane had set up at the edge of the Villus Beta spaceport had become, in effect, a War Room. The chancellor, Professor Von Norbert, the commander of the Villus Beta detachment of the Draconian Guards, all huddled. Kane was clearly in charge—Von Norbert served to answer questions of a scientific nature, the guard commander took orders from Kane and passed them on to the weapons squads under his control.

“Use the beams,” Kane gritted. “Quickly, before that ship goes into star-warp, before it’s out of our range.”

“Are you sure he has the princess aboard with him?” Von Norbert asked uncertainly.

“Yes.” Kane didn’t equivocate.

“But we didn’t actually see her climb into the ship. Maybe . . .”

“She’s with him, you old fool. Stop dithering!” Kane commanded.

“But—but you can’t shoot their ship down if she’s aboard,” the guard commander protested.

“Why not?”

“The princess! She’s . . . she’ll be . . .”

Kane roared with laughter. He turned to the guard commander. “Do as I told you, man, or I’ll throw you out and get someone who will! Turn loose all batteries against that ship before it gets away from us.”

“Wait a minute, Kane.” It was the professor pleading now. “We can’t destroy that ship. We
need
Buck Rogers. The whole Betan project . . . the whole Gregorian campaign . . .”

“I don’t care,” Kane shouted him down. “That man Rogers has defied me, he’s thwarted me, he’s taken the princess from me for the last time. And for the last time, commander—fire those batteries and do it now!!!”

“We made it, Buck!” Ardala leaned over the pilot seat of the stolen cruiser, put her arms around Buck Rogers’ neck and squeezed affectionately. His hands were occupied on the controls of the ship as Ardala planted a big, juicy kiss on his cheek.

“I thought you were ready to turn me in, Ardala,” Buck said in annoyance.

“But that was only if they caught us,” Ardala explained. “If we got caught anyhow, why should I get in trouble? You’re a very strange man, Captain Rogers.

“And we didn’t get caught!” She stood up again and danced gaily around the cabin. “We made it! We’re free! We’re—”

Her ecstatic exclamations were interrupted by the flash and crackle of a full battery of laser bolts as they zapped past the cruiser and disappeared into the void.

“Whoa!” Buck Rogers exclaimed. “Looks as if we aren’t so clean away from Villus Beta after all!” He’d tossed aside his stolen wig, wiped off the feminine makeup that he’d worn. In place of the filmy Draconian harem-clothes he’d used to escape, he now wore a proper space-pilot’s attire looted from the ship’s stores in the past few minutes.

“They must be crazy!” Ardala exclaimed. “Or—maybe they don’t know that I’m aboard!”

Another volley of bolts zipped past the ship. This time the ship was grazed by the edge of the volley. It shuddered, its hull glowing briefly with the raw, raging energy of the bolts.

Buck was knocked sideways by the charge that reached his hands through the controls of the ship.

Ardala ran to the pilots’ seats, jumped into the co-pilot’s chair and swiftly righted the spaceship before it could go into a helpless—and possibly fatal—tumble through space.

With a gasp Buck recovered himself. “Maybe they’re firing at us because they
do
know you’re aboard, Ardala!”

“Never mind that. Quick, which control gets us into warp?”

Buck reached, set a dial, flicked a toggle and leaned on an activator stud.

Nothing happened!

“What’s the matter?” Ardala demanded. “Hurry—before they really get hold of us with a bolt!”

Buck broke out into a sweat. He reached, reset all the ship’s warp controls to neutral, took a test reading, reset them again to plunge the ship into that strange region between normal space and null-existence, leaned hard on the activator, grunting with effort as if he could nudge the ship into warp-space by sheer expenditure of will power.

Still nothing happened.

“Sorry, Princess,” Buck told Ardala, “I’m afraid that near-miss was much too near and not enough of a miss. They got our warp-generator with the power-surge. We can still fly this thing like an old-fashioned chemical rocket ship, but warp is out for us.”

“No!” Ardala screeched. “No! Oh, that Kane! I’ll have him and his cronies killed forty times over for this!”

“How?” Buck asked. “From your sanctuary on Earth? With me?”

There was the crackle and flash of another volley of laser bolts. This time they passed even closer to the ship. The glow of the power-surge lighted up the whole cabin, turning Buck and Ardala nearly into glowing neon statues of themselves. When the surge passed, Buck and Ardala crumpled to the floor of the ship. The lights dimmed within the cabin as the ship’s power systems began to fail.

On Villus Beta, Kane and his cronies—as Ardala would have called them—followed the wild effects of their one-sided war through electronic telescopes. When the second blast grazed the speeding ship Professor Von Norbert exclaimed in anguish.

“You’ll have to answer to Draco himself for this, Kane! Don’t you see—you’re as crazy as Draco’s crazy daughter! You’re both so caught up in your dreams of vengeance that you can’t see the facts.

“Please, Kane—call off this attack. You’re going to be responsible for killing the emperor’s daughter—and for losing the whole Gregorian campaign! Think of having to face Draco after all that!”

Kane held his head in his hands. His hatred and rage were no less than ever, but the hysterical violence of the moment had gradually faded away, and he was able to exercise his wily powers of deduction once again.