The Rings of Tantalus (14 page)

“What the hell do you think? When the glory boys have got back, I am going out to mop up. There can’t be more than ten or twelve of those things still operating.”

“Then we are safe,” said Indira. “Wait until daylight.’*

“We are not safe, and I don’t need daylight.”

Kwango executed a
marvellous
leap over the stockade before the last floodlight died. Khelad was less lucky. His hop wasn’t high enough. He hit the top of the stockade and fell flat. He was temporarily stunned.

Darkness prevailed.

“Now hear this,” radioed Conrad. “As of this moment, Lieutenant Smith has assumed command. I am going out to deal with the surviving attackers. It is my intention to pursue and destroy. In the event that I do not return, Lieutenant Smith will decide whether to continue or abandon the proving of Tantalus on the evaluations of

Mr. Kwango. Meanwhile the defence of the
Santa Maria
is top priority. Over and out.”

“James Conrad, you are a very stupid man!” stormed Indira.

“Yes, love. But that is hardly news.” Conrad moved quietly through the breach. It was now so dark that Lieutenant Smith didn’t even see him go.

But it was no longer dark to Conrad. It was a glowing world of brightness and blackness and strange, shimmering hues. Craters, still retaining the heat of bomb and mine explosions, looked like rippling bright pools. Fragments of hot metal glowed weirdly.

Conrad moved slowly, with great care and stealth. A few steps away from the breach, he turned and looked back. Indira was still there. The
tell-tale
glowing of her eyes and lips, even her breasts and her crutch radiated hazily through the darkness. Conrad devoutly hoped that the alien robots did not have infra-red circuits.

It was as if she had heard his thought, because abruptly she disappeared.

Conrad stood quite still, laser rifle ready and gazed intently around him. About fifty metres away a bright pattern moved. A bright pattern of fifteen variable stars. He watched them move for a moment or two. Then, mentally, he joined up the bright points just as when he was a child long ago he had joined up numbered dots in a puzzle book to make a picture. He made the picture. It was humanoid with a tail. The heat came from power source, and, presumably, limb motors. He lasered it accurately and flung himself flat. The monkey robot disintegrated instantly and noisily with a brief flash showing fragments
sp
outing into the air. He must have hit the power source.

The destruction triggered more movement. Two more sets of fifteen variable stars moved through the darkness towards the stockade.

Conrad lasered them both. Both fell apart. No explosion. No flash. They just fell apart.

Missed the power source, thought Conrad. It didn’t matter. The robots had been taken out. Their stars were fading in the now dewy grass.

He stayed still for several minutes. He could see no further movement. He decided to make his way—very slowly—round the entire stockade.

He took out one more robot before he had travelled fifty paces. As before, he lasered and dropped flat. Three lemons. He had hit the power source again.

The jackpot came about two hundred paces later. Five star-patterns manipulating something that glowed very brightly. Missile and launcher, perhaps. Conrad watched, fascinated, almost hypnotised. His brain was trying to make sense of the data; but it was all very confusing. He shook himself out of the trance. Range twenty metres —or was it thirty? Or was it forty? What the hell! Laser the bastards anyway.

He went for broke. He lasered the bright glow. There was the most
god almighty
explosion. Before he could hit the ground, James Conrad, D.S.S.C. and bar, Grand Cross of Gagarin, was lifted high by the shock wave and smashed down fifteen metres from where he had stood.

The party was over. He gave a great sigh, tried to stand up, felt arrows of pain everywhere, fell flat, tried desperately to remain conscious—and failed.

Phase Nine

WINNER TAKES ALL—-THE FINAL SCENARIO

Once more C
onrad
woke up In the sick bay. Once more he had his bio-arm strapped up; and, for a bonus, there was some needlework on his forehead, face and shoulder. He felt himself gingerly, felt what he could move comfortably and what he couldn’t. His neck hurt, his shoulder hurt, his face hurt and—goddammit—his bio-arm hurt abominably. He was a mess.

“Welcome home, Boss.”

There was a fuzzy black shape looming over him. He tried very hard to focus. Finally, he made it. He saw Kwango’s great, toothy smile.

“How long have I been out?” His voice sounded thin and reedy. Christ, thought Conrad, I am a bloody mess.

“Best part of two and a half days. Commander, you sure use up plasma at one hell of a rate. Anyone would think you were hooked on the stuff.” Kwango glanced at the drip feed by the side of the bed. “Haw, haw. I think I made a funny.”

Conrad tried to smile, felt a searing pain in his cheek, and hastily cancelled the gesture. The pain continued for a while and was followed by a nasty throbbing sensation. It was some seconds before he could speak.

“Kwango, do me a favour,” he said, moving his lips as little as possible and slurring the words. ”Don’t try to make any more funnies for a while. It hurts.”

“Sorry, Boss. I’m clever but stupid.”

“Where is Lieutenant Smith?”

“The temporary Commander,” said Kwango pointedly, “is about her duties of temporary commanding. Want me to call her?”

“No. Is the
Santa Maria
secure? Have the breaches been fixed? Have there been any more attacks?” Every word was painful to utter, and Conrad thoroughly detested the weak, old man’s voice that uttered them. But there were things he had to know.

Kwango said simply: “Rest easy, Boss. Everything is O.K. The war is over. Tantalus is ours for the taking.” Conrad was confused. He tried to digest the information, but it didn’t make much sense.

“Kwango, I want facts!” He managed to get a tone of command into the weak voice, but the effort cost him dearly. “I may be smashed up, but my brain still functions. What has been going on?”

Kwango sighed. “Boss, I got problems. You are full of holes that had to be sewn up, you lost a lot of blood, you’ve been through an adrenal crisis that would have killed anyone less stubborn—no offence, you bust your arm yet again, you’ve got tenosynovitis—so the good Lieutenant says, and for all I know you probably got morning sickness as well… Lieutenant Smith is a hard woman. She says if I say anything to upset you, excite you, exhaust you or make you anything less than relaxed and happy, she will use those lovely prosthetic legs of hers to stamp every bone in my body into agricultural fertiliser.”

“Kwango, you now have another problem,” said Conrad grimly. “If you don’t give me the information I require, I promise you that when I rise from this bed I will strangle you so slowly with my prosthetic arm that you will bitterly regret not being turned quickly into fertiliser.”

The big negro rolled his eyes. “O.K. Boss, take it easy. But if Lieutenant Smith does her thing, I’ll haunt you for ever… You want the whole story now, or the headlines first?”

“Headlines first. Then tell it like it was from the time I got hit by an earthquake.”

“Fasten your seat-belt, Commander. The bad news: Khelad is dead. The good news: there ain’t no ring system any more, there ain’t no monkey robots. And, incidentally, the computer says that derelict space vessel won’t rendezvous with Tantalus again for about one hundred and sixty-eight years.

“Now grab this on-the-spot report brought to you live by our special investigator on Tantalus. The night Commander James Conrad heroically faced unknown numbers of alien robots in a reckless attempt to ensure the safety of—”

“Kwango!”

“O.K. Commander. I forgot. Cool it… When you went out through the breach, we took up defensive positions. Lieutenant Smith went topside to see what she could see on the screen—which wasn’t too much. She got the flash when robots were being lasered, and knew you were still operating. Then came the big boom—and after that nothing but blackness. I thought of going out after you in the exo; but unless I used the exo’s floodlight, it wouldn’t have been much good. And if I did use the light, I’d have been a lovely target. Anyway, the Lieutenant smashed the idea, much to my relief. She said to wait thirty minutes before taking any further action.

“It was a long thirty minutes. The screen dark, and nothing but silence. Finally, I tried again to persuade her to let me take an exo. She didn’t buy it. Then Khelad came up with a more persuasive idea. Said he had good night vision and was used to operating in the dark. Didn’t say how or where he had gained this useful experience. Just volunteered to go out and snoop around. Nobody thought of anything better. So he went—with a blacked coverall, a laser rifle and a head lamp. We had pin-pointed exactly where the big bang was. So he went straight to it, snaking on his belly through the grass. Didn’t meet no opposition. Snooped about some more. Eventually bumped into you, more dead than alive, and brought you in.

“Bastard Arab rapist that he was, I could have kissed that boy. A strange character, that Ahmed. Very droll. He said to Ruth: ‘Have I at last done something that you will not despise?’
Very
droll… Anyway, the good Lieutenant took one look at you and saw that she was going to have a hell of a fight, cheating the Devil. So she put me in command and whisked you off to Intensive Care…

“Boss, you were a one-man disaster area. You were covered in blood and you looked like you had been taking a joyride in a garbage reducer. I bet Lieutenant Smith one booze ration you wouldn’t last six hours.”

“You didn’t have any booze ration to bet,” said Conrad thickly.

Kwango shrugged. “I know that, Boss. You know that. But women are very stupid. She just slapped my face— hard enough to rattle the marbles—then marched off and worked on you like a whirlwind… Desired effect. I am a very cunning chess player… Well, came the dawn. And you were still alive—against all the odds. And we had not been attacked again—against all the odds.

“At first light, I sent Khelad out in an exo. He had some talent for using an exo, despite being an Arab. He found nothing but fragments of knocked-out robots. All was sweetness and
tranquillity
. After a time, I went out to take a look from ground level. Commander, I got the big surprise. Some of the robots only had one arm, some didn’t have any tails, and a couple only had one leg each.”

“So?” said Conrad. “They were lasered or
¹
blown off by mines.”

“That is the point, Boss. They weren’t. The stumps were covered with that regenerative bio-skin that got Ruth all excited. It was easy to tell which robots were damaged by us. The joints were smashed, the bio-skin ripped, and all the engineering and wiring was exposed… I counted fifty-seven wrecked robots, including sixteen of the incomplete ones. There must have been at least another ten utterly fragmented. All of which, Commander, led to some very interesting thoughts.”

“So it would seem,” said Conrad thoughtfully, oblivious of his pain. “If they had to throw incomplete robots at us, they must have scraped the bottom of the barrel. Right?”

“Right. The robots that couldn’t function efficiently would at least be useful as distractions—targets for our fire while the others mounted the attack. It was the end sequence in a game of military poker. Cards face down, winner takes all.”

“Still no people,” mused Conrad.

“Boss, there never were any people,” said Kwango. “Like I said, there were only the robots stacked against us—and the rings. And now both are busted. And while you been sleeping off your excesses, I did a survey from the chopper and only found seventeen ecstasy trees in one thousand square kilometres. So they present no problem. We can burn them if we want to, and Ruth is also developing a chemical poison… For the rest of the planetary cycle, we can be tourists. By the time the first colonists come through—”

“Cut the lullaby and get on with the briefing,” said Conrad. Talking was a great effort. “How was Khelad taken out?”

“It goes like this,” went on Kwango. “After I’d looked over the smashed robots, the conclusion was obvious. No people, no repair facilities. Whatever that goddam ring system might be, it was just like an old-fashioned clock, running down and with no-one to rewind it… After I’d told Lieutenant Smith the score, Khelad and I got her permission to go take a look. We used exos and we carried lasers. Also, Ahmed had knocked up some potent plastic explosive in case we needed to blast our way in.

“We went to the place where Alexei and I found that trapdoor set in the ground. I figured it was maybe an underground entrance to the rings. I figured right.

“There were no handles, so we couldn’t pull the door open. We tried lasering it, but we didn’t win. Ahmed unharnessed from his exo and placed the explosive with a thirty-second detonator. Then we stood back and waited for de big boom. The door blew. When the dust had settled, Ahmed with a big grin on his face, claimed the right of first entering.”

Kwango shrugged. “Hell, Boss, the man had done good works. He brought you back alive, and he’d just blown the door. Anyway, I let him go. Sad mistake. Ten seconds after he went down t
he passage, there was one god a
lmighty
blast and he came hurtling back like the daring young man in the circus cannon. He went up high and hit the deck hard. He was D.O.A., Boss—what was left of him. Before I could take a good look at him—which was not something I wanted greatly—the entire ring system blew… I was lucky to still be in my exo. Fifty kilo chunks of debris came raining out of the sky. I got flattened by the blast; and when I woke up, I had to dig my way out of a pile of debris.”

“Booby-trap,” said Conrad.

“Yes, Commander.”

“The infallible Kwango goofed.’*

“Yes, Commander.”

“Kwango, you are too bloody clever.”

“Yes, Commander.”

Conrad was sweating with pain and exhaustion. The sweat began to trickle down into his eye. “Wipe my forehead, man—and be careful of the needlework. Then get on with your report.”

“Yes, sir.” Kwango dabbed gently with some cotton wool. “I’ll make it fast, Boss, because you don’t look too good. After that, I call the Lieutenant. O.K.?”

“No.”

“Then I call her now.”

“Kwango, I gave you an order!”

“As of now, you don’t give orders. You are just a bust-up piece of wreckage, Commander, sir, that the Lieutenant snatched back from the Devil with some very fancy surgery. But so you won’t bust a blood vessel and ruin her work, I’ll give it to you fast.

“The ring system was a town, Boss. But not like you and me think of a town. One of the rings was a sort of museum/art gallery.
Artefacts
, pictures on the wall. AH that stuff. This I found out when I poked in the ruins and started to put a few bits and pieces together. Another of the rings was a vast dormitory, and another was a complex of lab/workshops. Then there was a ring where they lived and ate and maybe had some fun. And there was part of a ring where they reared kids and educated them. The last ring was, I think, the power house. But I’m not too sure.

“Boss, these people were very anthropomorphic. That is why the robots had prehensile tails. They were made to look exactly like their masters.

“Now comes the big joke. These tailed people had a very sophisticated culture. I don’t know too much about physics; but their metals and plastics are way ahead of ours. They had a written and recorded language which our computer is now working on. But, most important, they told their history in pictures. I poked about in the wreckage of the art gallery long enough to put some of it together—enough, I think.

“The joke is this; Commander. The ring system was a refugee camp. And how do you like that?”

“A refugee camp?” Conrad was incredulous. “What the devil do you mean?”

“Political refugees. They came to Tantalus to establish first a settlement—the rings—then most likely a new civilisation. On their own planet, they were second class citizens. Haven’t yet figured out where their planet is. Their star maps are different from ours, so it’s got to be a heap of light-years away. The computer is working on that, too.

“Anyway, Boss, this is the final scenario. Hundreds of years ago—it’s got to be hundreds because of the rate of oxidisation of their metals—these people came to Tantalus and used the materials of their space ship to begin the ring system. The ring shape seems to have some symbolic value for them—maybe something like the Christian halo. But, somehow, they were followed by the bad boys in that king-size derelict egg upstairs. There was a shoot-out. Nobody won. The surviving robots must have had some kind of programme built into their circuits to maintain the rings for, maybe, a second coming.

“That’s why they got uptight when we came out of the sky. We were not what the robots expected. Maybe they figured we were the enemy, so they tried to take us out.”

Conrad was exhausted, but his brain still functioned— after a fashion. “How the hell was my chopper knocked out?”

Kwango shrugged. “Can’t say, Boss. But those people surely had a good defence system, otherwise they couldn’t have blasted the super egg. Maybe it was winding down. Maybe you should have been
vaporised
. I just don’t know… We’ll have to wait till some bright boys from Terra figure out all the details… You want the cream of the joke, Commander?”