Starquest: Scourge of the Spaceways, page 26
The tread-marks of the machines began to fill in. The highway grew smudged. The wind whirled particles into the night sky. The stars were swept from sight.
Now there was no road, no way to mark the way. Athos carried no compass, for this world had no magnetic field.
Clouds of snow pelted their faces, blinding them. Athos lost sight of first one man, then the next. From time to time, a trudging figure would reappear beside him or behind, merely a suggested silhouette in the swirls of windblown snow.
Behind, the noise of the oncoming storm of cryogenic rain grew louder. Across the miles, the hissing mutter of sheets of rain drumming on snow was like the sound of the sea, like the tide coming in. Every now and again, a flicker of lightning would pass through the clouds. In the flare, the men could see each other again, and regroup. The direction the momentary shadows leaped and flickered from their feet was their direction of march. Counting the heartbeats between the flare and the shock of thunder told how many miles behind the pursuing storm came.
On they went.
In his soul, Athos was colder even than his hands and feet. He had misjudged, and his men would pay for it with their lives. Athos knew how far men could travel under ordinary conditions in a forced march. There were records of men marching nonstop, night and day, for a week, and covering four or five hundred miles. And this planet had a lighter gravity than standard, and the march should have been easier. But it was not.
He led them all to death.
A time came when his men were parted from him by the endless howl of the wind, the blinding darkness of driving snow.
Athos kept on. There was nothing else to do. He would go a hundred steps between each rest. Time passed, or perhaps it did not. Then he would go ten steps between each rest. Then he rested between each step.
Then he fell, and could not rise again. The wind blew a thin blanket of snow over him, which grew thicker. He found it was surprisingly warm under here, slowly being buried alive.
2. Figures in the Fog
Athos saw manlike silhouettes trudging back toward him through the driven snow. His heart grew warm with lazy pleasure. Tisquantum would not let him down! The heroic barbarian had returned through the snow to save him!
But then the images blurred and slid, and Athos realized his eyelids were shut. He could not open them, and he realized they were frozen shut. Then they opened, and he realized it was fatigue making it so hard to open his eyes.
He lifted his face from the snow. He saw a bulbous shape approaching in the swirls and shadows of the lightless snowfog. The dark outline swam and moved oddly in his view, but that could have been due to the fatigue of his eyes.
Of course! Arbogast was his grandfather, or near enough, whose sharp senses could penetrate any snowstorm, any gloom. The selfish Spider had forgotten the traditional heartlessness of his race, had learned the gift of pity, and come to save him!
That image vanished also when he blinked, and turned into a mound of snow accumulating atop a fragment of rock.
When Athos started to imagine the figure of a shrine maiden in silvery robes, and carrying a longbow taller than herself, he merely gritted his teeth and shooed her from his vision. She was not here. Even if she were, what could she do? Tell him to stand? He knew. Tell him his oath called? The words were in his ears. Tell him the stars were watching? He knew they were high above, cold, distant, gazing down. The discomfort of being stared at so rudely by these cruel stars was all that was keeping him awake. He would have preferred to die in private.
Wind was blowing in his face, sharp as a knife blade. In the starlight, the white streamers of snow, the white expanse of barren land, seemed no more real that that these tricks of vision.
No one was coming to save him. It would have been easier just to close his eyes and let the warmth carry him away.
But the black badge was still in his boot, beneath his heel. The locket containing a face more dear than life itself was in his other boot, beneath his other heel.
When he stood, he found, to his surprise, those two things somehow held him up. He did not kneel again. He did not fall.
The breathing mask he had been using was gone. It had fallen in the snow when he collapsed, and been buried.
From beneath his coat, he drew out another mask. It came to life, edges curling, and formed a ferocious lion-face of a one-eyed patriarch in an eyepatch. Athos held it up. Both his hands trembled with fatigue.
This monstrous thing was not alive, but it did not seem to be a machine either. He could not believe it was a ghost. But it had been made or brought to life to serve a spirit of retribution. Perhaps it was a spirit of retribution. Perhaps he would never know.
Athos fitted it to his face. The familiar, uncanny sensations of his flesh being bound to the inside surface were numb and distant, less than normal, but the fiery feeling of unnatural energy seeping into bones and bloodstream was greater, more painful.
Hot fires in his heart pulsed outward. Explosions of pain traveled up and down his limbs. Burning pain should have been torture, but it was not icy numbness. It was glorious.
Arms raised, he threw back his head and roared. The mask amplified his voice, changing it, so that it rang like a bronze bell, a dirge from a dark cosmos.
As if in answer, the lightning flared behind him, igniting the horizon like a bombardment of e-rays. The shadow of a pirate hunter in his tricorn hat, plumes like flame, leaped from his feet, flickering black against the white fog, amplified and enormous. Red flame was to each side of the black shadow where the light passed through the scarlet holographic coat.
The crash and roar of thunder followed closely behind. Too closely. The deadly downpour was at hand.
He ran.
3. The Ancient Mariner Across the Ice
Athos found all his senses sharpened when the Deathmask was bonded to his face. It was not like wearing night vision goggles or amplifying earpieces: the whole front surface of the mask absorbed both electromagnetic and Kirlian energy, physical and mystical, on many levels, and fed the information directly into the visual centers of his brain, the auditory nerve of his ear.
In this cold and hellish landscape, with wind-blown snow obscuring all vision, spying out men dressed in white, layered in insulation material to smother thermal signals, was impossible. The yowling wind wiped footprints away, and cloaked any sound.
But sight and sound were not the only senses amplified by the eerie alchemy of the mask. Airborne molecules touching the mask face were analyzed, and the information was projected into his sensorium as scent-cues. No bloodhound could wish for a keener nose. The smell of the ghastly blubber with which the savages had carefully anointed them stung his nostrils, unmistakable.
He ran through the miles, swift as a jackrabbit on the snow, and the lash of the wind, the gnawing teeth of cold, lost all grip on him.
But the fangs of fear took their place, biting at the back of his mind. The deathmask demanded a terrible price for its use: muscular damage and internal bruising, a period of total exhaustion.
So it was when Athos was in peak condition. Now? He was already exhausted, pushed past exhaustion, his bodily reserves utterly drained. From where was he now getting this surge of superhuman strength, enabling him to race at more than human speed, when he should not have been able to stand? And what would happen when the rush of power proffered by the mask ran out, and the artificial boost collapsed?
The illusionary plumes and glowing coat were bright as red flames, a torch in the night. Any eyes watching the northern no man's land would spot him moving across the cold, white, featureless backdrop. He did not know what sort of energy source brought the mask to life, but he did know normal scanners or spy-rays had never been able to detect the deathmask, whether worn on his face or hidden under his coat.
But it was vain to fret. On he sped, heart exploding with power, intoxicated by the new-found vitality pouring through his limbs like a flood of fire.
He fell into a dreamlike state as he ran, a strange sense of being disconnected from the world, but being driven ever onward. Perhaps he lost consciousness, but, if so, the deathmask continued to stimulate his nerves and move his limbs in a flowing race of motion.
There was no day and no night, only darkness and snow and wind. A time came when the wind grew less.
When Athos came to himself again, startled, he was loping effortlessly across broken and tilted slabs of ice, leaping from peak to slippery peak. The land was not flat here, but shattered and cratered as if from bombardments long decades past.
Looking over his right shoulder, he saw the stormfront of the oncoming cryonic rain was merely a smudge on the distant horizon. The murmur of the downpour had been reduced to a whisper. The insane, inhuman power of the deathmask had given his exhausted legs the energy needed to outdistance the slowly oncoming menace.
Looking to his left, in an ice canyon, he saw the tread-marks of the land barges.
His eyes, made superhuman by the mask, could see a heat source behind a snowbank to his left, along with the radiation signature of an atomic engine, and the metallic radar-echoes of a tall, rectangular armored vehicle squatting motionless on the floor of the ice canyon.
Nimbly he slid and skipped down the canyon wall. At the bottom was a wide, well-trod path painted with pools of frost and ice. The rock was printed with years of tread marks. This was the northern highway. High snowbanks and canyon walls had hidden it from view when Athos stood at the peak of the mountain pass, now many miles behind. He had been too ready to lose hope then. The land barges had not been as far ahead as he had feared.
He jogged forward. His body felt strange, as prickles of needle-pains and flushes of hot and cold chased each other through the inside of his body. A shivering would enter his muscles, tiny uncontrolled twitches, but then a numbness would flow through him, followed by a flash of heat. He did not stumble nor topple when this happened. Some magnetic web of forces in his bones or sheathing his legs would prop him upright and keep him going. Then the twitching would start again.
Had he been in a clearer state of mind, fear would have frozen him, for it felt like his muscle cells were disintegrating, and part of his nervous system were failing. But the endless inhuman energy kept pouring through him. He would not stop.
The canyon-highway here was not straight, but made wide, slow curves to avoid chasms or peaks of ice or rock. In two places, the canyon walls leaned over the edge, and the dim stars were a narrow river of darkness above. In one place, the walls met overhead, forming a tunnel through the ice. The tread marks kept on. Athos followed them.
Dim reflections of starlight, visible only through the face of the deathmask, reflected from the icy walls. The mouth of the tunnel was ahead, around a curve.
He could see the radar-echo of a land-barge ahead, blocking the tunnel mouth. He wondered why it was stalled. A shoulder of the tunnel wall blocked the huge machine from his direct view, and, fortunately, blocked any direct view of him.
The holographic coat and costume he seemed to wear, woven of powerful force fields the deathmask wrapped around his limbs, moving as he moved, shed a blood-red light. In the utter blackness, the scarlet shine splashed from the icy walls and roof, bright as a red alert lantern.
He concentrated. The red light seeping from his illusionary garb dimmed and went dark. The energy-images of gold buttons adorning his coat turned sooty black. The peacock plumes turned black as raven feathers.
A dark garb would have stood out against a snowy landscape, but in a tunnel, it did not matter.
Only then did he realize what was wrong. He could see the reflections from the starlight trickling in through the tunnel mouth. Why were there no reflections from the searchlights, lamps, headlights and running lights of the land barge?
He rounded the turn, and came into view of the huge, armored land barge. It was dark and motionless.
A spiderweb cloaked the tunnel mouth, and more webs coated the windscreens of the operator's cabin. Strands and cables of the stuff were wound around the gears and axles of the treads, fouling them.
Athos crept forward, wondering at what he saw. Despite what it seemed, all the strands of this elaborate webwork had been easily snapped by the forward motion of the machine. Which meant the spiderweb had not actually halted it. It had been a feint, a distraction. But a distraction for what?
He saw the motionless hulk of a robot in a frozen pool of lubricants and core-coolant, then a second one a pace away, head-down in the snow. A puncture in the mechanical man's lower torso told the story. A spearman hidden between the treads had risen and struck from below at the robots while they had been occupied clearing the cabin windshields of webbing.
Athos was not sure if it were sad or funny. A human would have been wary if asked to emerge into subarctic darkness to clear an inexplicable, monstrous spiderweb. But a robot? A positronic brain would not be programmed to expect ambush in an environment where logic said nothing could be alive. In this land, after curfew, even microbes died.
He scented no blood stains. His men must be inside.
Energy claws jutting from his knuckles and boots allowed him to scamper up the armored hull of the land barge as easily as a cat scurrying up a tree. But extending the claws apparently drained some last reserve of the deathmask's power, for now his muscles began twitching and burning and did not stop.
He was still able to force his body to move, however, puppet-like, because the mask could move the sleeves and leggings of the force-field costume wrapping him.
A swipe of the claws parted the latch of an entry hatch. It sprang open with a hiss. He was almost blinded by the sudden glare from within; but these were no more than chemical emergency lights outlining exits, and the red and amber alerts glittering from the skullboxes of a squad of robots.
At the same moment as he blinked, before he knew what he had done, Athos flung himself headlong down the hatch. The five robots in the unlit corridor below, in the same eyeblink of time raised their weapons and fired. These were free robots, not controlled by any code which would have required a warning be issued before opening fire. Each was a he, not an it. And each was a killer incapable of remorse.
His catlike reflexes were quicker than the threat-processing speed of the machine men, for the blaster fire flashed over Athos' head, roaring and flaring, and passing through the hatch to splash against the tunnel roof outside.
In midair, as he somersaulted, he swung, decapitating a robot with his energy claws jutting from his gloves. The headless robot jerked and collapsed, still firing. The line of ricochets in the narrow corridor stitched into a second robot in a spray of sparks and a splash of plasma, piercing and igniting the energy cells of the machine man's heart. The second robot collapsed in a tangle, smoke pouring from every joint. Meanwhile Athos, landing in a crouch, eviscerated a third robot, damaging but not destroying the iron gunman. The third robot flourished his blaster, but could not rotate his torso to bring the weapon to bear.
The remaining two robots were preparing to descend a ladder to a lower area. The rearmost one had placed a boot on the top step of the ladder. Their torsos were operating. Both rotated with swift mechanical precision, and opened fire on Athos, but instead struck the wounded robot behind which he crouched.
One of the stray blasts from the killer robots clipped his arm. The woven force fields forming his illusionary sleeve were sturdy enough to save him from dismemberment, incineration, or broken bones, but the force of the superheated plasma exploding sledgehammered him to his knees.
Red-sighted with pain and anger, head pounding, Athos impaled the wounded robot ahead of him. Using this wounded robot as an impromptu shield, Athos rushed the nearer of the two attackers. In the narrow corridor, the nearer mechanical gunman blocked the aim of the farther one. Bolts rebounded from the wounded unit Athos held before him, tearing chunks of molten metal from the robot's frame. The wounded unit uttered a woebegone drone of sound, a high pitched shriek that ended in a low-pitched sigh, and the final alert light of his skullbox flickered black. Athos thrust the hulk of the dead robot into the breastplate of the nearer attacker, closed his fist, and extended his claws to their maximum extent. The tips of the buzzing white-hot force, sharp enough to cut molecular bonds, passed through the whole midsection of the luckless robot and out the other side. A sweep of his arm bisected the machine man.
The final robot had evidently had a well-tuned self preservation program. He turned and ran.
Perhaps Athos had a less well-tuned sense of self preservation. Perhaps it was the deathmask influencing his thought. Perhaps it was mad rage, born of weariness and pain. But he leaped headlong down the ladder after the fugitive, heedless of where or how he might land.
It was a moment of acrobatic grace and devastation. He spun in, raking the fleeing robot with energy claws projecting from both fists and one boot. The luckless wight was dismembered of both legs, then decapitated, then disemboweled. Energy claws projecting from his rear boot penetrated the top step, thickened and clung. Athos caught himself with his other foot, knee bent, in the posture of an overextended lunge. He swept his fists away from each other in a grand gesture, throwing the sputtering sections of the bisected torso to either side in a spray of sparks.
Blinking, dazed, and sickened, he laughed aloud. Many hours had he spent during basic in physical training, over and over again, climbing rockfaces and vaulting pommel horses. The gymnastic exercises had been so difficult then.
The laughter choked as he wobbled. His rear boot cut through the step. He fell awkwardly. His mask clanged against the bottom stair, and the blow to his face benumbed his jaw with shocking pain. His vision swam.
His head was pounding, while his arms and legs seemed to be floating. That he might die from an overuse of the power of the deathmask when he was beyond exhaustion was a real danger. He must remove it at first opportunity — preferably, with a fully-stocked medical emergency response crew at hand.
