Mission Earth Volume 1: The Invaders Plan

  PART THREE

  Chapter 3

  I opened the huge armored door to the training area and started to step inside.

  I was hit with a wall of sound!

  The first hall is a huge place of platforms and machines, full of shadows and dim recesses.

  The hall resounded with a curling, snapping, vicious sound! I tried to back up and get out but Heller was behind me coming in and he closed the door after him.

  When sound is too violent, it brings the illusion one is also being blinded and it took a moment to see what lay before me.

  An electric whip was making the racket. It was also flashing and leaving its sizzling curls of viciousness imprinted in the air.

  Five ugly brutes of the Apparatus, not of Spiteos, dressed in black work uniforms, were twisting and dodging and running this way and that, trying to escape that whip!

  Squarely in the middle of the great hall was the Countess Krak! Even as I looked, she brought the roaring whip far back and struck with it again, her jackboot hitting the stone floor like a cannon shot in her forward lunge, her pale hair flying like a thousand lashes.

  The whip laid a scorching welt across the face of the nearest. He writhed back. They weren’t attacking her, they were trying to escape. They were pleading and blubbering and one of them on the floor was screaming.

  It was an odd scene in that the five were not members of her section. They were part of the Apparatus exterior transport teams that brought freight to Spiteos. I looked around in the bad light, trying to understand what was going on. Just inside the escalator ramp, there was an enormous wild animal shipping case. Its front slides were up.

  The training areas always stank but I could detect, above the usual smell, the acrid tang of some beast. With a mounting premonition, I looked around hastily. Was there a wild animal in here? Where was it?

  I caught a flick of movement not fifteen feet to my right. There in the darkness, beside the instructor’s desk, eyes glowed!

  It was a lepertige!

  Instantly, I tried to get the Hells out of there!

  But Heller had closed the door behind us and was standing there, gazing into the room, blocking the way!

  I didn’t want to show panic. I fingered the blastick I had exchanged. Eight hundred kilovolts might just barely stop a lepertige.

  Once my eyes weren’t being blinded by the flashing whip, I could see the beast more plainly. It was sitting there, all nine hundred pounds of it, unfettered, perfectly free to demolish everyone in the place. Its black and orange mottled fur was matted. The fangs looked like daggers. There were drops of scarlet blood, fresh scarlet blood around its lower jaw. Good Gods, had the Countess just fed somebody to it?

  Fascinated with the blood, I eased to the side a trifle, the better to see. Did it have a corpse in front of it? No, no corpse, but there was blood.

  It moved and I flinched. But it had only lowered its head. It was licking its front paws! They were bleeding! Then I knew what had happened.

  Once in a long time, they capture a lepertige for exhibit. There had been a very few that had been trained to perform in cage acts, the trainer never going inside, for these lepertiges can tear someone’s head off with one swipe of a paw. But as a precaution, every trained one I had ever seen in shows had had its claws pulled out. Somebody in the last few days had yanked its claws.

  Yes, there was a trail of blood from the open shipping case to the platform. When it had started to move again, the gaping wounds had bled.

  It lifted its head. The eyes, as big as dinner plates, are luminous. Some say they can see in pitch-black night. It was, thank the Devils, paying no attention to me. It was looking at the chaos that was going on in the middle of the hall.

  The worst of the whipping was that the Countess Krak was showing not one slightest, faintest trace of emotion. That was the most chilling thing about her. She was never angry, never sad, she never smiled. And for all the emotion she showed in whipping these exterior Apparatus brutes, she might just as well have been eating dinner.

  There was no way to get away from her. When they sought to hide behind the electric machines or boxes she used the whip to drag them back into the open and struck them anew.

  Four were down now. Prostrate. The fifth sought refuge in the animal box. The whip snaked around his legs and he was hauled into the open. The lash sizzled again and struck. I saw then that it must be set at lowest intensity—the most vicious setting that hurts the worst. The fellow screamed and tried to curl into himself on the floor.

  They were all down now.

  The Countess Krak stood up, straight and tall amongst them. No emotion. She was not even breathing hard.

  She kicked the foreman of the transport crew in the side. He cringed, scuttling sideways on the floor.

  In a totally emotionless voice she said, “When you get back to base, give this message to your boss: tell him that if he ever again sends me a maimed animal, I will train one to find him and kill him and turn it loose. Understand the message. Never maim an animal and expect I will accept it. You are still alive. Take your crew and get out of here!”

  The foreman booted his roustabouts to their feet and without a single glance at her they fled down the escalator, leaving only charred bits of their uniforms behind them.

  The Countess Krak took a pocket call disk from her shabby coat and said something into it. Then she threw the electric whip in the general direction of the whip rack on the other side of the room.

  With no change of expression whatever, she walked at a normal pace straight at that wild, freshly captured lepertige!

  She pointed her finger at it. It sat and looked at her. With one snap it could have taken off her arm. But she just pointed with one hand at its face and then put out her other hand, palm up.

  It lifted its maimed paw and laid all thirty or so pounds of it on her extended palm! She looked at the wounds left when the claws had been pulled out by the roots.

  Her own crew was pouring out of a side door. They were the usual fortress scum, greasy, filthy, stripped to the waist, a dozen of them. They stayed way back. They were not going to go near a lepertige, no indeed.

  The Countess Krak put down the paw. Her finger was still pointing at the beast’s face and she moved to one side of it. With her other hand she pointed at the box.

  With a funny moan, the lepertige stood up on all fours. It was a bit taller than her shoulder. It began to limp across the room. With one finger pointing at it and the other at the case, she went along with the beast. It got into the box.

  Instantly her crew was all motion. They slammed the front of the box shut. It was already on a dolly and they were ready to move it but had their eyes fixed on her for instructions.

  “Put him in a warm cage,” she said in an even voice. “Get one of Crobe’s assistants to make a culture and, if possible, regrow those claws. And none of you tease that animal as it will now be even harder to train. Do you understand?”

  The mangy crew bobbed their heads emphatically. She snapped her fingers and they sped the shipping case onto the down escalator and were gone.

  PART THREE

  Chapter 4

  The place stank of stale sweat, decayed blood and ozone, the hallmarks of the Apparatus. Coils of smoke from the whip and bits of burning cloth stood in the air. The patches of greenish light held ugly secrets back in the shadows.

  The Countess Krak walked sedately to the desk and platform by the door.

  Heller moved. His eyes were interestedly gazing at all the vast array of machines in the room, machines made to generate shock and inflict twists and tortures.

  The Countess saw me. Her eyes were emotionless. As she stepped up on the nearby platform, she opened her mouth to say something. I knew in advance what it would be. We were more than an hour late for Heller’s training appointment. I was about to get my hide taken off, all without emotion, one layer at a time.

  But she stopped. Her eyes were on Jettero Heller.

&nbs
p; Squinting a trifle to see better, Heller was walking down along the wall, away from us. He was peering at the first machine. It was a squat brute, coated with decay. If a person were put in it, his brains could be fried in varying and precisely calculated degrees. Heller did something to a latch on the side of it and lifted the cover of its circuit section, exposing a dusty array of boards and components. He started poking into its guts and must have disconnected something as he held up a loose wire end and began to examine it.

  I chilled like ice. Fooling about with equipment here was not something one did. I looked quickly at the Countess Krak. She was just standing there, watching him. There was no expression on her face at all. There never was. This female was as beautiful as a goddess on the altar of a church, but every bit as cold as that carved stone. More so. I held my breath. I didn’t know what she would do to handle this violation of her area. I suspected the worst.

  I really don’t think Heller had seen her come to the platform by the door. The light was bad in the place and he seemed fascinated with the machines. Strung out along the walls, they were a brutal display. He went to the next one, a thing of twisted arms and bulky gears: it was a tendon stretcher and, while one might have said it could be used for acrobats or contortionists, it really was a product of torture chambers. He pulled his finger along the seat and gazed at the grime on his hand. He pulled out one of those star-shaped red cloths engineers are always using as cleaning rags and wiped his finger.

  The next machine had small fluid tanks all around it and was a tangle of tubes and holding straps. Its purpose was to alternately freeze and roast a body, to deliver temperature shocks and rid it of excess fat, but it too belonged in torture chambers. He opened one of the tanks and looked in. He shook his head and moved on.

  Countess Krak’s head was turning to follow his progress and, from where I stood, I could no longer see her eyes. I had no faintest idea of what she would do. It had been violently proven three times in the past two years that she could and would kill.

  Heller was looking over the next machine. It was a maze of electrodes that could be applied to different parts of a strapped-down body. There was a sort of projector screen. The hapless being strapped to it could be shocked with high voltage and shown pictures at the same time. Heller popped open the cover of the transformers and peered into the circuits. He got out a little pinpoint light and looked deeper. He didn’t even bother to replace the cover and walked on.

  The Countess Krak stood there, turning slowly, watching.

  The next device had huge ear cups that clamped down upon a victim’s head. It delivered blasting waves of sound when it was turned on. The sound would go on and off. I knew of it and these other machines because of their counterparts in interrogation rooms. They might be called “training machines” but the agony they could deliver was acute. Heller fiddled with a couple of its switches, shrugged, and then passed on.

  There were more machines, one that stabbed with light, another that bathed a whole body in raw electricity, others I did not know. But Heller had lost interest.

  The Countess Krak hadn’t. She had pivoted until I could only see her back. There was a chair on the platform beside her and she placed her hand on its tall back. I thought maybe she was going to throw it but she just stood there.

  Heller, oblivious of any audience or threat, idled over to the raised exercise platform at the extreme end of the room. His attention had gone off machines but was now on athletics. A big, hundred-pound bag, used by acrobats to practice hefting bodies, lay in his path. He idly picked it up and made it spin rapidly, holding it up on top of one fingertip. He let it drop and looked about.

  There were some rings suspended on long ropes that met in the center of the vast hall. One of the rings had been hung on a peg at the extreme end of the room. Heller jumped up and disengaged it and, in the same motion, holding to it, swung from there toward us in a long, graceful arc. He obviously thought it easier than just walking back.

  When he was about thirty feet from us, coming fast, he did a body flip, a full spin by one arm. It was perfectly timed.

  Ten feet away he let go. He landed gracefully on his toes and halted standing, three feet in front of Countess Krak.

  He saw her. He stood up very erect. It was as if somebody had turned on a light inside him.

  “HelLO!” he said. “Hello, hello, HELLO! What is a beautiful creature like you doing in a place like this?”

  I almost died. Every spacer in every nightclub on every one of a thousand planets has said just that to every prostitute for thousands of years. It is the corniest cliché in any tongue. It is an outright sexual pass! And she had killed men for even reaching toward her. I said to myself, goodbye Heller, goodbye mission! I gripped the blastick.

  For seconds she did not move. Then, abruptly, like her legs had given way, she sat down in the chair, turned half away from him.

  She just sat there. Her eyes were fixed on a spot a yard in front of her feet. In a low, strained voice, not looking at him, just looking at that spot, she said, “You should not talk to me.” There was a silence. She seemed to sink lower in the chair, tense, indrawn. “I am not worthy of you.” It was just a monotonous mutter. “I am rotten. I am vile. I am not fit for you to talk to.”

  She took a long painful breath. She sat there rigid and then she said in a kind of wail, “That is the first friendly thing anyone has said to me in three years!”

  And then she began to cry! Heller was plainly very distressed. He knelt down beside her and reached for her hand. I thought, oh, no, no, no, don’t touch her! She has killed for less.

  But she didn’t move. She just sat there, chin sunk on her chest, crying!

  Heller just knelt there, holding her hand.

  I waited for something else to happen. Nothing did. After a while I wandered over to the hypnohelmets rack and fiddled around. These helmets produce a field that throws the subject into a hypnotic trance; recorded slides are fed through a slot and the hypnotized person can be speed-trained in various scholastic subjects. I had learned English, Italian and Turkish in one.

  Heller was still kneeling beside her on the platform. The tears were making her breast pretty wet, so still holding onto her hand, he used his right to get out his redstar engineer’s rag and put it into her free hand. But she didn’t wipe away any tears with it. She just pushed it against her mouth to muffle the shuddering sobs which were tearing her apart. This was getting nowhere, I thought. The day was burning up and we were getting nothing done. But I didn’t dare go near them.

  I got out a communications disk and whispered into it, ordering a couple guards to be posted outside the door. I eased myself out into the passageway and when the guards arrived I told them not to let Heller escape and then took myself down to the cellular labs. I didn’t see Crobe around but I didn’t want him anyway. I got one of the assistants to handle my face: he bathed the various contusions, put some of the skin cell culture on them from my private bottle—cultures have to be matched to the individual—and then put on new skin patches. I looked better now. With all the sweating I was doing, I hoped this lot would last.

  I went back to the training rooms.

  Heller was still kneeling beside her on the platform and she was still dabbing her mouth with the redstar engineer’s rag. She was still crying!

  What a ruined day! Nothing accomplished at all! I knew where the language files were. After all, my old section itself had made the Earth ones. For some reason there are lots of recorded language courses on Blito-P3: they sell them commercially there; all one has to do is duplicate their playing heads with a proper sort of current and then, interspersing the words with Standard Voltarian, copy them onto recording strips. They print lots of children’s schoolbooks and so one can also learn to read and write rather quickly. Raht and Terb, the best Voltarian operatives there, had also done some of their own recordings of the accents. We had cubic yards of Earth languages and materials for instruction. It always amused me that t
he recordings and books of Blito-P3 bore dire warnings of penalties for copying and promised that some group known as the “FBI” would arrest any offender! Well, good luck to them. I sorted through the cabinet labeled:

  Blito-P3

  There was nothing whatever different about the scene on the platform so I took my time.

  As near as I could make out, the geographic sections for what we call “zone of operations” would be, in Heller’s case, three locales: Virginia, Washington, DC, and New York City. He would not be spending much time in Turkey—Gods forbid. I could find a “Virginia accent” but I could not find any reference to a “Washington, DC accent,” so I skipped it. Then I got all tangled up with the “New York accents” because there seemed to be a lot of them. I finally found a note. It said:

  Ivy League accent is that of the upper classes of the New England section of the United States.

  I looked at a map and saw that New York might be on the fringe of “New England” and guessed it would have to do. My own English had been learned with “commercial heterogenic accent” which included the skill of working out accents. But I didn’t think Heller would have time for that. I chose “Virginia” and “Ivy League.”

  The tableau on the platform seemed to be less tense. They weren’t talking. She wasn’t crying as much. The redstar engineer’s rag was sopping. I wondered what she was trying to pull. It crossed my mind that maybe I ought to alert Lombar in case this female was laying some deep-seated conspiracy to escape. But I actually couldn’t figure out what she was up to. If she was conspiring, she would be talking. And she wasn’t. It was such common knowledge that the Countess Krak was dangerous that this just might be another facet of it. There’s no understanding females anyway.

  Finally she spoke. It was in a very low voice. She had stopped sobbing. “I’ll be all right now.”

  And Heller whispered, “Are you sure?”

  She nodded her head. She began to dry off her face with the redstar engineer’s rag.

  Well! I might be able to salvage some of this day after all. I beckoned to Heller and he came over. I knew how to operate these hypnohelmets. If the training section wasn’t going to help, I would simply do it all myself. That’s common enough in the Apparatus, made up as it is of loonies and crazies and criminals in general.