Empire of Two Worlds Read online

  Minutes later the banner-bearer returned with a companion who strode haughtily before him, walking unconcernedly over the bodies of his dead soldiers. Unlike the banner-bearer, he wore a helmet with designs on it. I couldn’t make out from this distance. Stopping some yards in front of our foremost Jain, he stood with legs astride, thumbs hooked in a waist-belt.

  Meanwhile the Heshan had thankfully returned to the bunker. “Your turn now, Harmen,” Bec said, a hint of amusement in his voice. “Get out there and make yourself look like somebody big. Tell him we represent the powers of Klittmann, another world. Say we have no quarrel with the men of Merame and for that reason have not opposed their conquest of Rheatt. Say we expect the same respect from them. Then tell him that if he is merely a subordinate officer he must stay outside and talk to you, but if he is of exalted rank and a leader of his people he may come inside the bunker and speak to me. Make it clear that I won’t make agreements with an underling.”

  The alchemist looked at him for long, brooding moments, his long hair hanging lankly down his shoulders. If nothing else, I thought, he would make a strong impression on the Meramites by his appearance alone.

  But he had been brought a long way against his will. He had been involved in a lot of things he didn’t want to be involved in, and now Bec was making him carry out negotiations for him. He didn’t like it much.

  “Am I your messenger boy?” he said. “Your mummer?”

  “You’re not in a position to make choices,” Bec stated. “Get up there and do what I say.” He paused. “Maybe you are in a position to make choices, at that. See if you can make your own private deal with the Meramites. Maybe they’ll give you a big laboratory. But remember, Harmen: I’ve promised you a big laboratory, too. A real big one. You know what the game is, so serve my purpose.”

  Bec said all this in a flat, disinterested tone. He was obviously referring to private conversations the two had held. Reluctantly the alk heaved himself up out of the bunker.

  I watched him talking to the Meramite. The other was clearly taken aback by his appearance. The eye-shades probably convinced him that we were, indeed, something new and alien. Eventually Harmen pointed back to the bunker, addressing a question in a loud, gruff voice. The Meramite raised his voice, also, and a disdainful smile passed fleetingly across his lips. After a short altercation he followed Harmen towards the bunker.

  Bec signalled me to stay up with the nearside Jain, which put me sitting up over his head from where he sat in a padded chair in the recesses of the bunker. The Meramite bent his head and almost doubled up to enter. I heard funny little chinking sounds as he came on by me, then I couldn’t see him any more. I continued to keep a look-out, listening to the conversation going on behind me.

  The Meramite spoke Rheattic, but in a clipped, supercilious accent and in a voice that was incongruously high-pitched for someone of his size. All the Meramites, I found later, had that high-pitched, child’s voice.

  “I am Commander of the Rheattic Border Expeditionary Force,” he said. “I am here to speak with your leader.”

  There was a scraping noise as the Heshans drew up a bench for him to sit on. “My name is Becmath,” Bec drawled. “Sit down.”

  The other did so. “You claim to represent a foreign power. Not on Earth?”

  “No.”

  “Or Merame?”

  “No.”

  “Mars, then? Venus? I have never heard of any journeying from those worlds.”

  “We’re not from there either. We’re not from any world you can see in the sky. But enough of that. My quarrel with you is that you have destroyed this village, which I had taken for my own.”

  “When your messenger first came to us,” the other replied, “we had taken his claim to be a lie, a desperate subterfuge, and so we meted out heavier punishment than we might otherwise have done. We have reasons not to make our destruction of the country too complete, but we must subjugate. Now that we have seen the effects of your weapons, however, as well as your un-Rheattic appearance. … It is very dark in here, yet you cover your eyes. Light hurts you, perhaps?”

  “How would you like to have such weapons?” Bec said, ignoring the last question.

  “Oh, we will. We will.”

  The Meramite’s answer came as a surprise. I heard a choking gasp. Turning round, I saw the visitor sitting across from me, his knees drawn up, his thin lips bunched up in a smile that seemed to distort his flat, gigantic face. It was a smile of complacent triumph. Bec, Harmen and the two Heshans were folding up and falling to the floor.

  At the same time something sharp thrilled in my nostrils and throat. My nerves tingled. I tried to move, but couldn’t. The Meramite had released some sort of gas into the bunker, a gas which left him unaffected.

  My last thought as I passed out was that we had been outmanoeuvred. The Meramites knew some angles, too. We had been taken.

  Eight

  High-pitched voices. Mingled background noises. Chinking sounds coming from all round.

  I opened my eyes to find myself trussed up and lying on the ground. Painfully I forced myself to a sitting position. Becmath and Harmen were already awake nearby, sitting upright with their hands tied behind their backs. Harmen, as so often, had withdrawn into himself, his head bowed. Bec grimaced as he saw I was conscious.

  “I guess Hesha was harder to hang on to than it was to take,” he said.

  My head cleared quickly. We were in one of the big meadows outside Hesha. Meramite troop carriers were parked all round us. The grey, lank soldiery went about their business with a peculiar loping gait, tending machines I hadn’t seen before, or merely stood around.

  It seemed that the chinky sounds happened every time they walked. For the first time I noticed that they wore on their arms and legs a kind of open harness made of metal rods. As they moved the rods worked in a piston-like action. This puzzled me, but I didn’t stop to think about it at the time.

  Smoke from the burning village blew over the scene. I coughed, then looked up to see the Meramite officer who had slipped us the knock-out gas standing over us.

  I stared into his flat, grey face: thin lips, large, heavy jaw, wide vacant cheeks, oddly flat grey eyes that were without any trace of humour or expression, as if no mind lay behind them.

  Suddenly the alk raised his head. “So this is what you understand by a flag of truce,” he said accusingly.

  The Meramite’s lips curved in the faintest sneer. “Subterfuge is a weapon. We did not have to use it. We could have summoned heavier equipment to blast you out. But we wished to capture your weaponry undamaged.”

  He paused, then continued: “We have searched the village for others of your kind, but found none. Despite that, the villagers have not been slow to talk. They say you have other forces which left a few days ago. Where did they go?”

  “You’ll be hearing from them,” Bec said. His voice sounded faraway and unreal.

  For the first time I began to feel a loss of confidence in Bec. He looked like an insignificant, squat figure alongside the looming Meramite. The other listened to his answer, stared as if he didn’t understand, then glanced over his shoulder. Following his glance, I saw something approaching from the distance, sailing low above the ground. It was a big cylinder, part silver and part copper in colour, bevelled at either end and finished off in flattened points.

  “You will be taken to our main camp on the central plain of Rheatt,” our captor told us. “There your answers will be made more meaningful — you may even meet the persons of exalted rank you desire. I pity you. Merame has only one use for prisoners.”

  The cylinder settled on the grass. “Here comes your transport. Now we shall see how you can be of service to the Rotrox.”

  Cold, clammy hands lifted us and carried us into the cylinder. We sat on a metal deck, leaning against the curved walls, guarded by the gigantic soldiers. I felt the machine lift into the air with a slight droning sound.

  “What do we do now?” I said h
oarsely to Bec.

  He shifted uneasily. “It all depends on whether the boys got to Blue Space Valley in time. If the Meramites got there first. …” He shrugged.

  We seemed to fly for quite a while. About halfway through the journey our guards opened a hatch in the floor and gazed through it with interest, smiling. One glanced at me, speaking to his companions in a strange language. What he said seemed to please them. He came across and dragged me nearer the hatch, so that I, too, could see through it.

  We were passing leisurely over a level plain. Through it wound a seemingly endless column of wretched Rheattites strung together by chains. Many of them appeared to be dead or unconscious but were still dragged along helplessly by their fellows. The column was policed by Meramites riding smaller versions of the circular transport platforms. Shouts, screams and the sharp crack of whips floated up to us. I saw upturned green faces watching our passage. On either side of me the guards uttered cruel, humourless chuckles.

  Then they thought of a new sport. One grabbed me by the legs and another under the armpits, and I was swung out over the open hatch. The breeze tugged at me. They jigged me up and down, pretending to let go. I closed my eyes. I didn’t think a couple of rank and file klugs would have the nerve to murder a prisoner in their charge, but I didn’t know much about how Meramites behave. I was scared.

  I felt a lurch, for a split second felt myself sailing through the air, then fell roughly to the deck again. The guards sniggered.

  “Take it easy, Klein,” Bec murmured. “We’ll have our turn.”

  The people of Rheatt didn’t build cities. Their civilisation was more dispersed, more rural. They did have centres of loose concentration, however — what would pass for cities for them. We flew over the main one and were able to see something of it through the open hatch.

  It was like a vast park stretching beyond the horizon in all directions. There were broad walks, gardens and groves. The buildings were few and scattered, and consisted mostly of tall, delicate green towers.

  The scene would have been a really pretty one had it not been for the fact that the Meramites had chosen to set up their main camp there. A maze of continuous, low corridor-like buildings sprawled across the park and snaked between the green towers, rather like a system of tunnels built above the ground. Their colour was grey, the same as everything else about the Meramites.

  I was beginning to realise that we from Killibol had more in common with the Meramites than with the people of Rheatt. Like us, they had a distaste for the open. They were city dwellers, ruthless, smart and practical. If anything, they were several degrees more vicious. I hoped this meant that they had a streak of stupidity in their make-up, the kind that Bec would know how to take advantage of.

  The flying cylinder slanted down and came to rest. We were manhandled on to one of the circular vehicles and wheeled into the corridor complex. These corridors reminded me of endless barracks. They were lit by a strange whitish illumination, quite unlike the light outside. Uniformed Meramites stared at us in puzzlement as we were carried along.

  The angles at which some of the corridors branched off at the intersections told me that the invaders had also been busy digging underground. They also, maybe, hid away from the sun.

  We were thrown into a darkened room and lay there for a short while. I asked Bec if he had any ideas. He said just to keep cool, to take my cue from him, and if left on my own not to say anything even if they got rough. I asked Harmen if he had any ideas. The alk just grunted.

  The door opened and they dragged away Bec. Shortly afterwards the door opened again.

  “Which one is Klein?” the tall figure in the doorway said in his boyish voice.

  “I am,” I said, and immediately was jerked to my feet and the ropes binding them cut. “I’ll be seeing you,” I said to Harmen, “I hope.”

  They led me down a sloping passage and into a large, fairly luxurious room. Bec was there, without his eye-shades and with his eyes tightly closed against the glare. His jacket and shirt had been ripped off. Blood ran down his side from where a torturer’s instruments had been at work. The torturer stood on one side of the room, the bloody pincers still in his hands.

  But he was only a bit player in the scene. Bec faced an even larger than average Meramite who sat behind a table on which were laid devices that were strange to me. I guessed immediately that he was a big shot. Behind him stood two more companions, themselves of high rank judging by their insignia, but who stood respectfully at attention.

  Bec’s face was drawn, but he had evidently managed to control the pain. His blind face turned towards me.

  “Is that you, Klein?” he asked, speaking Klittmann.

  “That’s right, Bec,” I answered.

  “I want you to meet Chief Imnitrin, grand commander of the invasion forces and one of the big chiefs up on Merame. I insisted on having you here so you would know what was going on.” To the Meramite, in Rheattite, he said: “Now we can talk. But first the covers for my eyes.”

  Chief Imnitrin nodded. The torturer stepped forward and placed the goggles in Bec’s hands. He fumbled them over his eyes and looked around himself slowly. The torturer, meanwhile, was applying some kind of tape-like stuff to the wounds he had caused. The bleeding stopped.

  Imnitrin looked at me. “Your leader withstands pain and does not answer our questions. We Rotrox respect men who withstand pain. Of course, it has not yet been proved of you.”

  “It’s just their way of breaking the ice, Klein,” Bec told me grimly. “Just a shaking of hands, as it were. I don’t think they’ll start on you.”

  For a moment my mind went back to Klittmann. I remembered a small room back of the garages where we wound a wire round some guy and jolted the electricity in. It was just a way of getting information. Mob men like us were not strangers to torture.

  As I contrasted that scene with the one before my eyes I realised that there was a difference. In Klittmann we were purely direct and masculine: it was all technique. There was something frighteningly eerie, almost effeminate, about these big ungainly Meramites. I formed the impression that they probably had all kinds of fetishes and incomprehensible pleasures.

  “You are here to speak with me,” Imnitrin rebuked sharply, “not to converse with one another. You mentioned advantages in our meeting. Speak forth. Tell me from where you come.”

  “I am also full of curiosity about you,” Bec replied brashly. “I presume you have reasons for invading Rheatt. Let us talk of those.”

  Imnitrin shrugged, as if it was a foolish question whose answer was already known. “Is it not obvious? The Rotrox tribe, having conquered all nations and sectors of Merame, determines to extend its empire to Earth. We shall gain slaves, much wealth, natural resources not found on Merame. Soon many nations of Earth will feel the boot of Rotrox.”

  “And you thought Rheatt would make an ideal bridgehead, didn’t you? A soft people, easily subdued. But it hasn’t gone quite according to plan, has it?”

  The other frowned slightly, “The Rheattites are not well practised in war, it is true … but you are mistaken to call them soft. Have you found them so? Perhaps with your weapons… But in a border village you will not have encountered the fighting men of Rheatt, the airmen and the infantry. These we enjoyed the sport of crushing. Furthermore the battle is not yet won. Extra forces mass beyond Rheatt’s borders. A great fight is ahead. Nothing, however, can withstand the might of Rotrox.”

  “Sure, you win all the battles,” Bec said, chuckling in spite of his pain, “but what about afterwards? An empire’s no good if you can’t make any use of it, is it?”

  The Meramite stood up and chinked round the table, looming over Bec. “You speak insolently, yet with knowledge.” For a moment he leaned threateningly over Bec, as if he would reach out and squash him with one huge hand. Then he stood back pensively.

  “It is as you say. Some disease seems to afflict the Rheattites once they are conquered. Their spirits are broken. The
y cannot be made to work. They merely lie around and die, no matter how much we beat them.”

  “And you really don’t know why?” Bec asked, seemingly amused.

  Imnitrin shrugged. “Their spirits are broken.”

  Bec uttered a short, sharp laugh. “I thought so!” Turning to me, he said in Klittmann: “These people are pretty ham-fisted, Klein. They don’t do their research properly — they don’t even know about Blue Space.”

  Turning back to Imnitrin, he went on: “I can make the Rheattites into useful slaves for you. I can help you win that last battle. As it’s their last effort the Rheattites will put their all into it. Who knows, you might even lose — without our help.”

  “How will you do this?” the other demanded suspiciously. “With new weapons? New torments for the Rheattite slaves?”

  “Nothing so crude. The Rheattites are dependent on a drug they take. If they can’t get it they fall to pieces. When you conquer a region the people inside have their supply cut off. You’ve seen what happens.”

  Imnitrin looked sharply at his officers, then back at Bec. “You speak truly? Or shall I call for more torturers?”

  “I’m telling you the truth,” Bec said firmly. His voice rose. “How is it you don’t already know this? Did you not enquire why the Rheattites seemed to become ill?”

  “Our task is conquest, not to enquire after the health of slaves,” Imnitrin sneered mincingly. “If there is truth in your explanation, we shall appoint Rheattite slave-administrators to deal with it. Men of the Rotrox Tribe do not soil their hands with such matters. Indeed, once our Earth Empire is founded there are few who would wish to spend their time here.” He retreated back behind the table and seated himself, his expression becoming dour and gloomy. With the odd, slightly inhuman cast of the Meramite face it made him look almost tearful. “Here the air is too thick, all objects are too heavy, and outlines are blurred and difficult to see. Perhaps you, who claim also to hail from another world, appreciate how unpleasant Earth is.”