Space 1999 #5 - Lunar Attack (5 page)

‘That depends on you.’

Koenig saw Carter’s armed Eagle move alongside and felt some satisfaction in the technical know-how that had made the rendezvous possible. Whatever the column squatting aliens might think,
homo sapiens
had come a long way. They were not finished yet.

There was a slight lurch as the ships came together and the boarding tube locked. Alan Carter’s voice came from the console, ‘Docking completed. Tube pressurised.’

Carter’s co-pilot hurried through and Koenig joined his chief pilot in the command module. As he shrugged into space gear, he said, ‘You fly her, Alan. Head for the planet. I’ll brief you as we go.’

The other Eagle veered off and they watched it pick up a course for Alpha. Carter wheeled away for the surface of the red planet.

Since Koenig’s flight out, it had taken on a new aspect. Rings of bright light were pulsing out like an animated diagram of a transmitting source. Carter said, ‘Looks like a defence screen, Commander.’

The Eagle fled on, nudged into the margin of the outermost ring and was suddenly engulfed in flashes of scarlet light. Both men snapped down their visors. The Eagle was labouring, slowed almost to a stop. Deceleration slammed them forward in their harness.

Carter jerked out, ‘Force fields. Close down main engines. Fire retros.’

Koenig flipped switches, called the score, ‘Full power, Alan. There’s no going back. Anti-gravity screens at maximum.’

The module was juddering violently as the motors tried to pull them free. The Eagle was slewed around as it tried to follow the resultant of the forces acting on it. On the console, there was a rash of red warning telltales. The motors were notching up a self-destructive scream and an alarm blared.

Shouting above the din, Alan Carter said, ‘We can’t do it, Commander. She’ll break up.’

‘We’ve got to do it.’

Smoke jetted from the overburdened console, vibrations set the superstructure in a ripple. Scarlet light probed like a spear through the module.

Carter yelled, ‘Eject. She’s breaking up.’

There was a percussive thud and the Eagle was scrap metal, tearing away from around them like a cellophane pack. Instantly the red lights cut and they were suddenly in utter silence two clumsy ballooning figures afloat in the vast nowhere of space.

Koenig called ‘Alan? Alan?’ and saw Carter spin slowly towards him. The visor was breached. Alan Carter was dead.

For Koenig it was the ultimate in loneliness. He had thought many times about what he would do in this or that crisis which might easily arrive in his profession. Meteor strike. Failure of any one of the fragile life support systems. Abandonment in space. To be alive and yet dead. Full of strength and sap and yet condemned. He could open a valve and make it quick or he could go for the full due. It was no option. Since man had no control of his destiny, he would show his contempt by endurance.

He looked down at the dials on his chest console. ‘Ninety-seven minutes of life and then no oxygen. Hallucination, a drift through dreams to real eternity.’

He looked around at the starmap and the vast emptiness, ‘Or just nothing. Oblivion. The ultimate negative. Poison and pain and yet more pain until . . . nothing.’

Drifting in a slow head over heels spin, he was tumbling into vacancy. ‘This body could be a piece to fit in a historical puzzle, a future archaeologist’s missing link. John Koenig, from Planet Earth, ninth and last Commander of Moonbase Alpha.’

He thought about that one, shaking his head slowly and a piece of ancient Earth wisdom flashed in Gothic script before his mind’s eye, ‘Vanity saith the Preacher, vanity. All is vanity.’

Still batting with human criteria and a hope for a landfall, Bergman was getting Eagles off the pads on Moonbase Alpha. Two at a time, they were rising phoenix-like, from the wreckage with a full complement of personnel.

In Main Mission, he had Morrow and Kano at their consoles with Sandra Benes as his adjutant at the command desk. He was satisfied that everything they could carry was loaded and away.

Paul Morrow said, ‘That’s it, Professor. The last Eagle is ready for lift off. They’re just waiting for us. You have three minutes.’

‘Thanks, Paul.’

Sandra pushed a red stud carrying a stylised pictograph of a human hand. She said, ‘Recording now.’

Sadly, Victor Bergman straightened up and spoke into the quiet room. ‘We are mankind. We came from Planet Earth. We built this base called Alpha to learn more about space. Human error blasted this Moon out of Earth’s orbit.’

His listeners were stock still, trapped in their memories.

‘We have travelled the Universe in search of a place to live. Now we can no longer live here and we go to face an uncertain future on the Planet that has nearly destroyed us.’

He paused, searching for the right words and then went on firmly, ‘You, whoever you are, who find this empty vessel in Alpha, seek us out, if we still exist; come and teach us all you know. We have learned many things. But most of all we have learned that we still have much to learn.’

He leaned forward and pressed the stop. There was a whir as the recorder rewound itself. He walked purposefully for the hatch without a backward look.

The others followed. Morrow put his arm round Sandra’s shoulders. Kano with some instinct of prudent housekeeping turned out the lights.

Victor Bergman speaking for himself and remembering Koenig said, ‘Goodbye, Alpha.’

The armada of Eagles thundered away towards the red planet. Since leaving the base, Bergman had hardly spoken and was deep in thought.

Paul Morrow challenged him, ‘Are they worth a penny?’

‘I’m wondering . . . just wondering, if there’s any future for us at all.’

It was a fair comment and Morrow could add nothing to it. In the passenger modules, the Alphans were reading, playing chess, anything to take their minds off the landfall ahead. Sandra Benes, in a bridge four, was holding an opening two hearts, but kept the cards close to her chest, ‘What do you think Columbus thought he would find?’

Nobody wanted to guess. Her partner said, ‘For godsake, Sandra, make your call. I’m getting nervous.’

On the planet surface, a succession of golden suns were setting behind the towering control centre. Helena Russell in the hall of columns was getting to grips with alien philosophy.

‘You talk of life beyond death and yet all around is a world I can see and touch and feel.’

The male alien said, ‘What is around you now is a brain.’

She took her hand away from the small column she was touching and the female half of the act said, ‘Unlike your human brain, this will never die. It has been developed over generations and it grows more complex with each life that is lived in it.’

‘But why is there life and death if the brain is permanent?’

‘We
are not permanent. We are tenants of the brain for a span of a thousand years. The people of this planet feed the brain with life.’

‘And you defend them with Hawks and Superships like those on Planet Earth?’

Straight answers were hard to come by. The male alien seemed to be talking nonsense—‘We have no fighting machines of our own. Why should we? We have outgrown fear.’

‘Then where did they come from? The ones that destroyed Alpha?’

Again it was a dusty answer, ‘Mankind is full of fear.’

‘But you haven’t answered my question!’

‘Come fearlessly into our brain and learn.’

Strobe lights began to play inside Helena’s transparent cell. She was bathed in a rhythm that was utterly relaxing. Body and mind, she seemed to be part of the shifting light. His voice went on without source, without any sense that it was separate from her own consciousness.

‘Our world is in perfect balance. Differences have been resolved. Restless desires of individual flesh and communal ambition are fulfilled and accommodated. They are resolved as spiritual energy in this great combination of brains that makes up our harmonious world. We have no fear.’

The concept became meaningful. Mystics on Earth planet had hinted at it in their language of paradox. The cloud of unknowing. The stillness at the centre of the dance. She said, ‘It’s beautiful . . .’ then her attitude changed to bewilderment. A thin thread connecting her to another reality had tugged at some deep holdfast. She said, ‘John?’

She could see him, alone, floating against a wheeling backdrop of stars. She could see his face behind the visor. He was smiling. Suddenly anxious, she called out ‘John?’

There was no response. He was drifting away out of reach.

‘John!’

The female said, ‘He has faced death. He has conquered his fear.’

It could be true, but it was no barter for the man himself. She wanted him present to touch and hold. ‘John, come back!’

Awake to the world of sense and disenchanted with meditation, she turned on the male alien, ‘I want to bring him back. As he was. He’s a human being. I want him here and now. I am afraid of death. Even this dream death. I don’t want your world.’

‘If you bring him back, he will have to face the agony of his own fear.’

‘I want him as a human being. I want him as he is, with all his faults and fears.’

The female said coldly, ‘He would destroy us all.’

‘We are what we are.’

Helena was on her feet with the flimsy tabard in a swirl. She screamed, ‘John!’

In the unimaginable distance, Koenig heard her voice echo inside his head. Vanity or not, he had not done with his world. There was a tie that would anchor his spirit while any life lasted. Hands outstretched, he called, ‘Helena!’

He was accelerating. His body was hurling itself at the great disk of the red planet. Confusion was compounded on confusion. He was in a maelstrom of red light and out of it, a bright thread was separating a brilliant channel to surge along to a glowing light, which he suddenly recognised as the entrance wall of the planet’s control centre. Her scream sounded again in his ears and she was there in her transparent cage, slim and beautiful and wanting him.

His space suit had dissolved away. He was dressed as he had been when they arrived. Laser in hand, he stalked from the outlying columns until the aliens were in clear view and fired until the charge ran out.

The pay off was out of all proportion to the act. Explosive force hurled him to the shaking ground. A crescendo of lightning strikes and thunderous explosions rocked the foundations. Thick clouds of sulphurous smoke, laced with scarlet tongues of flame filled the air. The building was disintegrating, folding in on itself and the only begetter of the action, dazed and shaken, was clinging to the ground overwhelmed by the violence he had unleashed.

For Koenig, there was sudden bitter truth in the saying, ‘Each man kills the thing he loves.’

He had meant to save her and she was at the heart of the inferno. Crawling unsteadily on hands and knees, he went for the place where he had seen her. Another vast detonation hurled him aside and he hauled himself forward again, slowly and painfully, in a space which was without shape or form, where there was nothing but noise and smoke and wreckage and his own conscious will to find her. He called, ‘Helena! Helena!’ and was brought to a stop by a heap of scorched and blackened rubble. A hand protraded from the heap. He had found her.

Koenig worked like a raving madman, clawing at the wreck, hurling burnt out trash aside until she was clear to see, still and composed, unmarked, with eyelashes lying in perfect arcs on her pale skin. He was on his knees, hands cupping her face, eyes full of tears. The waste of it choked his mind. It was the last, ultimate turn of the screw.

Her eyes had been open for some seconds before he realised it was so. All logic was long gone. He accepted it, lifted her out of her blackened tomb and held her. Tactile clues convinced him that against all expectation they were still firmly on the quick side of the line that marked out the quick from the dead.

Her hands homed comfortably on the back of his head, lips were anemone soft, an open O. They were alive and there was more to it than squatting inside a transparent column for high level conversation.

Around them, the surface of the red planet was going into spasm. They clung together, surrounded by a reign of destructive terror as all the arsenals of all the worlds unleashed a spectacular of manmade engines of war in headlong action against the planet and against each other.

When silence came, it was sudden and total. Koenig drew Helena to her feet and they stood hand in hand on a mound of smoking rubbish to look out on a scene which was mind-bending, the outside limit of utter desolation.

Wisps of grey smoke drifted past them. As far as the distant horizons, the once smiling face of the red planet was a charred and hideous nightmare of churned rock and twisted débris.

Koenig looked at Helena and took his commlock from his belt. She knew what he would do and knew that it had to be.

As he called the Eagle fleet, she looked out over the rain they had made.

Koenig called, ‘Paul?’

In the command module of the hurrying Eagle, battered and dishevelled, Koenig appeared on the TV screen. Victor Bergman, Sandra and Kano crowded behind the pilot squab to hear the message. It was not good and their faces drained of all the hope and optimism that the trip had generated.

Koenig said, ‘Turn around, Paul. If you’re going to die, you might as well die on Alpha.’

As the words left his mouth, the world erupted in a cosmic cataclysm. Time slowed, became meaningless. Koenig felt himself spinning through a whirling, screaming void
. . .

Main Mission was tense. Every operator was watching the big screen. No slouch at picking up vibrations, John Koenig knew for a truth, that his command to Carter to fire warning shots was unpopular. Every last one of the operations team believed he had taken a losing gamble that, would cost them dear.

Carter’s Eagles had come round in a fantastic turn but the three Hawks, arrowing in to Moonbase Alpha were drawing away. They would be impossible to catch and Kano was calling the time that remained for the intercepting Eagles to make a strike.