Space 1999 #5 - Lunar Attack (4 page)

It spoke again, ‘Relax. Stand by for touch down.’

Koenig said incredulously, ‘Earthmen must have been here before.’

Judged to a centimetre, the Eagle came down feather light on a circular landing disk above a complex which had all the ear marks of a control centre. Koenig thumped his release stud and shrugged out of his straps. ‘This is it. We’ve arrived.’

‘I only hope we’re here to stay.’

He could have said that wherever she was, was a good place to be; but the host organisation was wasting no time. An elevator tube was rising to meet the hatch of the passenger module and Koenig pressed the opening button. As the hatch sliced away, there was a flood of brilliant light. Helena joined him on the sill. It was a moment of truth. His hand dropped to the butt of the laser on his belt. Together they stepped from the known world of the Eagle to the waiting cage.

The cage fell away, slowed to a halt, dissolved from around them, so that they appeared to walk out from a glowing area in the notional wall of a vaguely defined, circular chamber, full of shifting colour and moving light. Making an inner circle, six translucent columns slowly pulsed with brightening and dimming light sources. Crowded between them, were other columns, smaller and less intense and a host of dim shapes in constant movement. The whole chamber was in a flux of light and colour and change which seemed to simulate a kind of organic life, though to Helena Russell’s sensitive intuition it seemed also to be mechanical and in some strange way biologically dead.

Like any living organism, they tried to explore the environment and make sense of it. But when they met up at the centre, they were no nearer. It defied the data in their Earth based minds.

Helena said, ‘What do you make of it?’

‘Not much. Highly developed technology. It seems to have nothing in common with Earth type Hawks.’

It was still bugging him. They went together to a small column, seeing their own faces reflected back and flooded by the pulsing lights.

Koenig went on, ‘And still no communication. I wish someone would show a face, say a word—any goddamned thing.’

‘This could be a sort of cortex, a sort of brain.’

‘Why did they bring us here?’

‘Maybe they just wanted to take a closer look at us.’

‘That feeling’s mutual.’

He moved away to a major column and had both palms flat on its surface when it suddenly flushed brilliantly from base to tip and an electronic chatter filled the room. He recoiled and Helena was beside him holding his arm, suddenly afraid. There was action inside the pillar. Mist swirled, cleared, revealed the dark silhouette of a seated figure.

Helena, voice in a whisper, asked ‘Human?’

As if on cue, light strengthened inside the column and they had it clear. It was no bonus. The face was humanoid, but still as a death mask, pallid, with closed eyes and tightly pursed lips. It could have been smoothly chiselled out of an alabaster block.

Koenig said, ‘Human? Or some sort of trick manifestation. An elaborate mask?’ He went close again, ‘Can you speak to us?’

Helena said nervously, ‘The lights and colours. They could be a language we don’t understand.’

The eyes in the mask flicked open, fixing them with a stony stare. The lips writhed in an enigmatic smile, as though the owner relished the disadvantage they were in. A thin, cold voice seemed to speak into the inside of their heads. ‘Speak, Earthman. What is your case?’

For a brief count, Koenig was speechless with the calm insolence of it. Unprovoked aggression had killed his people and brought their hard-pressed base to a desolated ruin. If there was any case to answer it was for the column squatter.

‘Speak.’

Koenig clamped down on a rising tide of anger. He tried to keep his voice steady and factual. ‘You know we came from Earth planet?’

There was no reply. The face remained cold as a graven image. Indignation took over. Koenig went closer, ‘Why? Why did you attack us? Why?’

The figure was unmoved.

‘We’ve been transmitting messages for weeks. We wanted permission to make a landfall on your planet. You understand us. You speak our language. Why did you reply with war machines?’

Koenig spread his hands and turned to Helena. Her clear, gentle voice filled the silence.

‘If there’s some reason why you don’t want us here, we would understand. Some basic incompatibility, maybe? We’re peace-loving people and we’re not here by choice. We cannot control the course of our Moon platform. We
have
to find a place to live. But we don’t use force. All we want is peace.’

Having Helena ignored was too much. Koenig’s anger flared out, ‘Answer, damn you! You want my case. It’s this. We came in peace. You waited without word and launched a surprise attack. Half our people are dead. Alpha is destroyed. You leave us without the means to live. Let us bring the survivors down here and see if we can get a better understanding between us.’

‘You cannot stay.’

Koenig was shouting, ‘Nor can we stay on Alpha.’

‘You have no place in space at all.’

‘Just like that! You deny us our future?’

‘You have no future. You carry within you the seeds of your own destruction. You are a contaminating organism, a fatal virus, a plague of fear.’

A burst of electronic gobbledegook sidetracked the listeners. A second column had come to life. The face in it was again inhuman and mask like, but recognisably female and the voice confirmed it. ‘Your presence on this planet would destroy a civilisation that has survived for billions of years.’

Helena said, ‘Is that your opinion of mankind? Are we no more to you than a virus?’

It was more than Koenig would take. Hand on the butt of his laser, he faced both masks and his voice was hard edged with challenge, ‘From the time we were blasted from Earth’s orbit, we have fought for survival. We
have
survived. How I don’t know. There’s no rational explanation. This I say, I have faith in the strength of the human spirit and a conviction of our destiny. Some force, God if you like, is in our corner.’

The male mask was unimpressed, ‘The death struggle of inferior species is often their finest hour. But the end is nevertheless, the end.’

‘I refuse to accept that we have no future.’

‘Extinction may come a little later. That is all,’

Lights in the column waned. The shadowy outlines remained.

Koenig drew Helena aside and spoke quietly close to her ear. ‘They’re weak. Physically, they’re limited.’

‘They have superior weaponry.’

‘Not that. Here in this room. Whatever all this equipment is, they depend on it for life support. It’s fragile.’

She could see the drift of his thinking and it worried her, ‘We came to convince them we could live in peace.’

‘They don’t accept that.’

‘So what do you mean? That we start a war down here as well?’

‘What’s to lose? They won’t persuade me to go back to certain death on Alpha.’

He had his laser out, thumbing over the stud for a killing beam.

‘John! Violence is no answer.’

But he was away from her, going for the column that housed the male. From behind it, the male alien stepped out, an elongated, El Greco figure in a shimmering transparent, hip length tabard. He was carrying a heavy-duty Earth pattern laser. Koenig took aim to fire, but he was a fraction late. The female of the species had left her own perch and had him in crossfire. As he fell, they both advanced towards him firing again and again in an overkill of destruction.

Helena Russell ran to him, knelt beside him. Her hair brushed over his burned and disfigured face.

Except for Helena’s sobbing there was silence in the columned chamber.

Away on Moonbase Alpha, Paul Morrow was bringing reserve Eagles to the remaining launch pads. Bergman found him at the command console.

‘Still no word from the Commander?’

‘No.’

‘Then I think we should make a start anyway.’

‘Launch pads one and five are operational. We can get the Eagles away. If that’s what we want to do.’

‘What else is there to do?’

Helena Russell was repeating over and over, ‘Why did you do it, John? Why?’

Thuds on the floor beside his body broke into her private world of grief and she looked up. The two aliens were standing over her and they had dropped their lasers to lie beside Koenig’s on the ground.

She was on her feet, drawing her own gun, saying hysterically, ‘Stay away . . . I’ll kill you!’

Impassive as ever, the male figure said, ‘Don’t be afraid, Doctor Russell. We can help you.’

She backed off, ‘Stay away!’

They walked slowly towards her and she retreated step by step until she felt the smooth fabric of a column at her back.

‘No closer—or I fire!’

They came on. The female said, ‘You will not kill us, Doctor Russell. The power of your weapon will be turned against you.’

They moved in, one on either side and her despairing scream melded with a burst of electronic clatter. There was a blinding flash of mind numbing light and, as it faded, she looked down at her body in bewilderment.

She was seeing the pillar from the inside. Clothed simply like the two aliens, she was sitting cross legged in a transparent case. Her second scream was lost in the hollow trunk. The aliens were back in their old places, watching her. But there was a change. Both were smiling.

‘Do not be afraid.’

‘In our world there can be no fear.’

Gentle lights strobed in Helena’s column and she felt peace invade her mind. In spite of herself, she was seeing the chamber in a new way. She could even look at Koenig’s body without grief.

The female said, ‘He was the victim of his own fear. Now you can share our power and make good your wish that he should live.’

As she ceased, Koenig’s eyelids flickered. His hands went to his face. It was unmarked. He was on his feet moving uncertainly towards the three pillars alive with light. Then he saw Helena. His horrified shout of ‘No!’ echoed round the vault.

Helena was smiling, holding out her arms in a mime for him to join her.

Again he shouted ‘No!’ and rushed forward as though to pluck her out with his bare hands. But before he reached the column, there was a brief flash and he was hurled back by an invisible barrier. From where he fell, he could see his laser and he scooped it up. As he came forward again, another flash had him reeling away.

It was obvious there was no way to reach her. The wall glowed, showing him the way they had come in. He would have to go another way to work. He said, ‘Helena!’ and it was both a cry of despair and an apology for leaving her. As the light engulfed him and he disappeared, she was still smiling in her transparent cage.

In her mind’s eye, she could see the elevator taking him to the surface and the Eagle lifting in a crash launch as he gunned the motors.

In Main Mission on the distant Moonbase, Paul Morrow broadcast on the general net. ‘All personnel should go to the Technical Section where the Eagles are now loading. Shut down of services in all dormitory areas will begin in fifteen minutes . . .’

At a bleep from her console Sandra broke In, ‘I have a contact, Paul.’

Kano identified the source, ‘It’s the Commander’s Eagle.’

There was a murmur all round and Koenig’s voice spoke into it, ‘Hello Alpha, hello Alpha. Do you copy?’

Voices stilled, waiting for his report.

Morrow answered, ‘Commander, we copy!’

Koenig’s face was on the screen, he said, ‘Paul. We could live on this planet. But we’re going to have a fight for a toehold.’

Reaction was mixed, it was good and bad news both. Paul Morrow called ‘Quiet, please.’

Koenig said, ‘Alan?’

Carter answered for himself, ‘Commander.’

‘I want you to bring out the last of the laser Eagles. Rendezvous at this position and I’ll transfer to your ship.’

‘Yes, sir!’—He was away at a run and Koenig called again, ‘Victor?’

‘Here, John.’

‘Evacuate Alpha as soon as Alan’s clear. I can’t guarantee what you’ll find when you get here, but at least . . .’ he could not bring himself to say that Alpha was a dead option.

‘It’s all right, John. Everyone knows the score. We’ll take a chance.’

‘Good. If I’m not around to guide you in, choose open ground and consolidate your position. I suppose I’ve seen the last of Alpha. Say goodbye for me.’

‘Say hello to the Planet for me!’

It was a poor jest, but the best Bergman could do. Carter’s Eagle came into vision on the screen. They were rolling.

In her column, Helena Russell was in a crossfire of sudden goodwill. Both aliens were smiling encouragement. But the fact of confinement was still there. She said, ‘Am I a prisoner?’

The male half of the duo said, ‘You are free to walk where your mind has the will to take you.’

Helena pressed her palms on the smooth walls. It sounded like so much double talk. She said, ‘Am I free to walk out of here?’

The female spoke, ‘If your mind can find a way.’

The male went on another tack, bringing her up to date, ‘John Koenig has taken your Eagle. He has called for reinforcements from Alpha. He believes he can rescue you and win space on this planet by force.’

‘Will he . . .’ Helena hesitated, ‘This may seem a strange question to ask you, but will he succeed?’

The answer was equivocal, ‘He is very much afraid we will stop him.’

‘And will you?’

‘No.’

‘Then I am not here as a hostage?’

‘You are here to observe the consequences.’

She felt she was being treated as an idiot child and there was anger in her voice as she asked, ‘Of what?’

The female answered her, ‘The Earthman’s concept of life is limited by his fear of death.’

Speaking alternately they elaborated, ‘Fear has stunted his mind. He cannot conceive of other forms of life.’

‘He clings with all his might to the life he knows.’

‘Fear is the illusion that fences him in.’

‘It will be your task, as a Doctor, to dismantle such fences.’

Helena looked at the male alien, ‘If I am to do that, I must first overcome my own fears. Tell me. Are we all going to die?’