The purity plot, p.13
The Purity Plot, page 13
They had their stunners drawn, and it was a lucky thing. They had just emerged from the room they'd entered and were starting down the hallway when a party of three people emerged from a door at the far end-Clunard's aide Elspeth FitzHugh and two others. The three were startled at the sight of the intruders and tried to draw their side arms, but the Bavols, who'd been expecting possible trouble, were faster. Their stun-guns buzzed and the three at the other end dropped to the floor. The rebels would be out for two hours from the number four charges.
Yvette cursed. "I'd wanted to do this without leaving any trace." Even as she spoke, she and Pias started moving quickly down the hall to investigate the room from which the enemy trio had emerged.
"Almost impossible in a place as crowded as this," Pias consoled her. "Relax; we'll find what we can and be away before they have a chance to get organized. Oof! This FitzHugh's heavier than she looks." He helped Yvette drag the three bodies into an empty office and closed the door. With their victims out of sight, it would be a while yet before anyone knew of their presence here.
They were in luck. The office from which FitzHugh and the others had come was Tresa Clunard's personal headquarters. Though as spartan in its decor as the rest of the camp, there was still an aura of power to it, the feeling that decisions affecting many lives were made in here all the time. "Jackpot!" Pias whispered. "Let's take all we can get and sort it out later."
They both had a miniature camera tucked into a pocket, and they started snapping pictures of every document in sight. There were several bookreels with coded labels; Pias pocketed them in the hope they might contain revealing data about the Army of the Just. They rifled quickly through desk drawers and pried open locked filing cabinets in hopes of getting the vital clues they needed.
So intent were they about their business that they didn't hear the sounds of approaching footsteps until it was almost too late. Yvette spun, stun-gun in hand, just as the doorknob began to turn. Pias was a tiny fraction of a second slower, but the angle at which he was standing in relation to the door gave him the better shot.
The door opened and Tresa Clunard stood there, just as surprised as the SOTE agents she'd interrupted. Although he knew the effort would be wasted against the robot, Pias's reaction was instinctive. His finger tightened on the firing button of his stunner, even as he wished he'd pulled his blaster instead.
The buzzing from the stun-gun filled the room, and Tresa Clunard slumped to the floor.
Pias and Yvette looked almost as stunned at the results of their actions as their victim had been. Clunard was a robot, and a stun-gun should not affect her. Was she playing dead, trying to trick them into tipping their hand? But what would be the point of that?
Pias drew his blaster and kept it trained on the still figure lying on the floor while Yvette approached it slowly. Kneeling down, she felt Clunard's pulse then, on impulse, took a small pin from a map on the wall and pricked the counselor's finger.
A drop of blood oozed through the tiny opening. Tresa Clunard was not the robot they had fought that night in the dark. But who was?
Chapter 12
A Saunter Through Hell
The immensity of their predicament beat into Jules's and Yvonne's brains. They were stranded in an environment as hostile as any the mind of man could comprehend, with a limited amount of oxygen and no transportation. Short of shooting themselves immediately, there seemed little they could do to avoid a lingering death on the surface of this aptly named slag heap.
It was Vonnie who broke the silence and broached the question. "What do we do now?"
Jules looked around them: at the wreck of the rocketbus, at the bodies strewn over the landscape. "The first thing," he decided, "is to get ourselves a little more air, which means more time. I don't think those fellows will be needing their tanks any more."
He walked over to one body and inspected the oxygen tanks. Even though the suit had been burned open by the d'Alemberts' blasters and the gas within it had escaped into the vacuum of Slag's surface, the tanks were still doing their job, releasing their contents at a precisely measured rate. Jules turned off the valves and the flow stopped.
"We've. got a lot more air than we first thought," Jules said, looking at the five bodies sprawled on the ground. "I'd estimate another twenty hours total, or ten more apiece in addition to our present four."
"Fourteen hours," Vonnie said slowly. "It's better than four, but it's still not enough to get us home. The base is three hundred kilometers away."
She and Jules were walking briskly among the corpses, turning off the oxygen tanks as they pondered their situation. "We might wait for them to come to us," Jules suggested. "Chactan will be listening back at the base for word from his men about how the ambush went. When he doesn't hear anything, he'll get anxious; he may even send out another rocketbus to investigate."
"Eh bien, and what will they find when they get here? Five dead bodies sprawled out on the ground and us standing around waiting to be picked up. Try again, mon cher."
"We hide the bodies and stand in the shadow so they can't see us."
"We can't hide the rocketbus, darling. The crash is all too obvious."
Jules turned off the last dead man's tanks as he paused to consider his wife's argument. "And you think they'd prefer to leave well enough alone rather than land and try to rescue any possible survivors. That way they could be sure we were dead, even if it cost them a few men of their own." Jules sighed. "You're probably right. Whatever Chactan has flowing through his veins, I doubt it's the milk of human kindness. That leaves us right back at our original problem. There is no way we can walk three hundred kilometers in only fourteen hours."
Yvonne suddenly stiffened and straightened up. "How about twenty kilometers?" There was an edge of excitement in her voice.
"Easily. But what good will that do us?"
"Remember as we were flying here, we passed over that automated digging station. Furman commented that it dug up the ore, put it in homing cargo rockets and sent it back to the base. I'm not sure exactly how far back that was, but I don't think it could have been more than twenty kilometers. It was only a couple of minutes before we landed here." Her voice was positively ecstatic now.
Jules caught her enthusiasm. "We can hijack one of those homing rockets and use it to get us back to the base. We may have just enough time. Of course," he added, trying to keep his excitement under control, "the instant they spot us there it'll be all-out warfare."
"Do I have to come up with everything? I thought of this plan; I'll leave the problem of the base to you, when we get there." She put a slight emphasis on the word "when." "In the meantime, shall we go for a little stroll? It's the perfect day for it. The sun is shining, the sky is clear. There would be birds singing in the trees, if there were any birds, or trees, or any air for them to sing in." She reached out and took her husband's gloved hand in her own and gave it a squeeze for luck.
They stayed around just long enough to remove the vital air tanks from the dead men's suits and strap them loosely around their own shoulders for future use. They conferred for a moment on which direction they had come from and agreed that it must have been over that range of hills on their right. With those details taken care of, there was no further need to remain at this spot, and they began their long trek across the barren landscape.
At first, in an effort to make their trip as short as possible, they took long, loping strides, as only a person from a 3-gee world on a 0.8-gee world could take. They covered almost a kilometer across open ground in this manner before they had to stop it. The extra air tanks they had strapped around them kept banging into their bodies awkwardly, and their suits' cooling systems, which had to work hard under the harsh glare of Slag's sun, had been strained near to the limit by their exertions during the shootout. These long, graceful leaps of theirs brought the suits right to the tolerance point. The agents found their faceplates fogging up with the moisture of their own breath and sweat, and the heat inside the suits building to uncomfortable levels. Realizing that they still had a long distance to cover, they decided it would be wiser to pace themselves at a more reasonable rate. There would be enough time to reach the digging station even if they kept themselves to a normal walk.
To save their suits from further strain during what they knew would be a long and arduous ordeal, they did as much walking as they could in the coldness of shadows, holding hands to avoid losing one another in the pitch darkness of those shaded areas. Even this solution had its drawbacks, however; Vonnie walked straight into a rock that had lain unseen in her path and would have gone sprawling had not Jules's strong grip pulled her back and kept her on her feet.
The patches of shadow were comparatively rare, though, on this open plain. For the most part they walked under the full heat of the blazing sun. They left a small trail of slowly settling dust in their wake, and their thickly insulated boots crunched over the dry, crumbly soil. The ground and the rocks reflected the killing heat back at them; it seemed almost as though they were at the focus of a telescope mirror. Even though the temperature inside their suits remained within comfortable limits, the DesPlainians could imagine only too well the temperatures around them.
To take their minds off their psychological discomfort, they talked a bit about the case, analyzing the situation and discussing alternative plans for what to do once they reached the base. Jules, though, was more concerned with the larger aspects of the situation.
"Chactan can't be the top man in this scheme," he reasoned. "He doesn't have the authority to establish a base here, not on a planet in an entirely different solar system from his native world."
"Does he even need any authority? This is an unclaimed, undeveloped world. While it belongs to the Emperor by the simple fact of its being within the borders of the Empire, there is technically no one who controls it."
"There are plenty of technicalities that go by the boards in this galaxy. There is an inhabited planet in this system, Tregania. If you were the duchess there, you'd keep an eye on all the worlds in your system, for your own peace of mind if nothing else. With so many terrorist gangs springing up all of a sudden, a world like Slag could harbor a viper very near your bosom, n'est-ce pas? Yet there is the base, right out in the open, apparently unconcerned that it might be spotted by some ducal patrol ship. That strikes me as strange, to say the least."
"You think the Duke of Tregania is in on this conspiracy, then?" Vonnie had met only a couple of dukes in her life, one of them being her new father-in-law, and their trustworthiness had been beyond question. Although she knew that was not universally the case, she was still reluctant to believe that anyone who ranked that highly in the aristocracy would be willing to-betray it.
Detecting the doubts in his wife's tone, Jules hedged. "Not necessarily him, but it would almost have to be someone high on his staff. Someone has to give the local police orders not to investigate any goings-on here and be able to cover up the facts if the base should accidentally be spotted. It could only be a top-ranking police official or a member of the duke's council. But we can't rule out the duke himself just because of his title. Remember, Duke Fyodor of Kolokov was a full participant in this conspiracy. And we netted nearly forty dukes and duchesses in the Banion affair. To some of these people, having power only increases their appetite for more; if they can't get it from the Emperor in a legal way, they'll go to someone else who'll promise them a better deal, no matter how treasonous it is."
Two hours of walking brought them to the base of the hills that lay between them and the digging station. The range of hills extended as far as they could see in either direction, ruling out any thought of going around. There simply wasn't the time. The hills looked less than a kilometer high at the tallest point, and the d'Alemberts were in good physical condition. There appeared to be no insurmountable difficulties involved.
On Slag, though, nothing was quite as simple as it seemed. The DesPlainians discovered that, although the gloves of their spacesuits had been padded to allow them to handle objects on the surface, the gauntlets could not be padded nearly as thickly as the soles of the boots; otherwise the fingers, palms and wrists would not be able to bend well enough to be of any use. Holding onto any rock for more than ten seconds allowed the rock's heat to soak through the pads and begin burning their hands.
The climb was steep, and much more difficult than they'd expected. There was no wind or rain on Slag to erode the surfaces of the rock, to smooth them down and make them more gentle for climbers. Jagged escarpments rose above the agents as they ascended, some offering few handholds. In some instances, the rock projections were so sharp that they threatened to cut right through the material of the space suits, which would have had fatal consequences. The d'Alemberts had to learn quickly not to put their full weight on any grip, and not to linger too long in one place lest they burn their hands. Several times the route they took upward proved to be impassable, and they had to work their way down again and look for another path to the top.
They were torn between the conflicting desires for both speed and caution. Every second's worth of oxygen was beyond price, and they dared not waste their time with needless safeguards. At the same time, they had none of the standard safety equipment climbers normally carried-ropes, pitons, etc.-and a single slip could send them tumbling down onto some jagged outcrop of rock that would slice their suits open, killing them instantly. Physical exertion was not their problem, but they were sweating profusely nonetheless from sheer tension.
They had made it only halfway up the slopes when the air in their present tanks began running out. They found a firm outcrop on which to rest and changed to new sets of tanks, leaving the discarded old ones as eternal reminders of the two human beings who had once passed this way. On the surface of Slag, those containers would remain until the sun above went nova and swallowed the planet to which it had given birth.
They made it to the top of the ridge and took a second's rest to survey the journey ahead of them. On this side, the hills sloped downward less- steeply, but with ominous series of deep ridges gouging through the range at irregular intervals. Jules and Yvonne discussed the best route to take to avoid those chasms.
"Look!" Vonnie pointed. Far away, across the plain at the base of another set of hills, was a small dot. "That's the digging station, I'm sure of it."
"It better be," Jules said. His voice was even, but Yvonne could sense the tension behind it. "We don't have the oxygen to try climbing past that next range of hills as well."
Climbing down was in some ways even more hazardous than climbing up, because they had gravity pulling in the same direction they were moving. If their handholds or footholds were not secure, they would find themselves falling, with tragic consequences.
At one point, Jules found himself lowering his feet into a silvery puddle. It had looked deceptively gentle, but the instant his boots entered the liquid there was a burning that scorched right through the suit material. He cursed and hurriedly pulled himself out, inspecting the damage ruefully.
Both his boots were covered up past the ankles with a bubbling, gray liquid. He yowled in pain and Vonnie, who was just to his side and slightly above him, turned her attention his way. "What is it?"
"I stepped in a pool of something molten. I'm not sure what, exactly."
His wife bent down to give it a closer examination. "Offhand, I'd say it was lead. It's starting to solidify, too."
True enough, the molten lead, now in contact with the comparatively cooler surface of the space-suit, was rapidly cooling into a solid coat on Jules's boots. The transference of heat was being conducted through the fabric of the boots to Jules's feet and legs. Without the suit, his feet would have been burned completely off; with it, he was merely in an agony comparable to a very bad sunburn.
"Will you be able to move on?" Vonnie asked. "I'll have to, won't I!' But Jules's body belied the courage of his words. He tried to stand on his own and groaned from the pain.
"Here darling, put your arm around my shoulder," his wife said. "We're almost down to the plain. We'll just have to watch where we step from now on, that's all."
Vonnie's estimate of the distance turned out to be overly optimistic; it took them another couple of hours before they reached the bottom of the range of hills, and by that time--they had had to shed air tanks once more. They now had just under six hours left in which to get back to the base and replenish their air supply.
Jules gazed out across the horizon at the tiny speck they hoped was the digging station. "That's a long way for me to limp in a short time," he said wistfully. "Whoever said I was going to let you limp, lummox?" Yvonne said, stooping over. "Climb on. My husband rides first class."
"Vonnie, I couldn't..."
"Nonsense. You never objected to riding me before. Besides; the gravity's so light here that the two of us and our suits combined weigh less than I do normally back home on DesPlaines. Nothing to it. Now climb aboard."
Jules did as he was told, hooking his arms and legs around her to hang on. The distribution of the weight was different than what she was used to, but it took only a small adjustment for Yvonne to compensate. The extra mass caused some inertia problems getting started that she hadn't expected, but once she was in motion it felt as though she were strolling through the Bois Mercredi back home with a knapsack on her back.
The molten lead on Jules's boots was hardening now into a tough metallic coating; the actual heat had stopped as the temperature equalized inside and outside the boots. But the burning pain in Jules's feet remained. "You won't be able to run quite as fast with your boots coated with lead," Yvonne remarked lightheartedly as she walked. "I think you're about to get a new nickname: Leadfoot."
Jules's response was unprintable.
The ground over which Yvonne walked was cracked and hard, an uneven surface unwilling to concede anything to the DesPlainian's indomitable courage. The weight of Jules on her back was not burdensome as she'd said, the total of their combined weights was less than her own weight on her native world-but the distribution of the weight was awkward. She had to continually be leaning forward to avoid becoming unbalanced, producing a strain on her back and shoulders. They could both tell that she was breathing harder, using up her precious supply of air that much more quickly.
