Android

by Karl Zeigfreid, Lionel Fanthorpe, Patricia Fanthorpe

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Space Opera; Fantasy; Sci-fi Action & Adventure

Synopsis

Dakos was an alien humanoid who hated earth; he detested the planet; its people were anathema to him. He loathed its cities; its countryside was an abomination to him. He lived for one thing only... the destruction of the world which had rejected him. Dakos was no mean enemy. His hatred was allied to a brilliant mind and a very superior technology. He was a man of action... highly destructive action! Security agents Blanthus and Croberg were after him, but Dakos covered his tracks with all the cunning of a diabolically clever homicidal maniac. He could so easily pass as a terrestrial humanoid. ...Are you sure that man sitting beside you in the bus isn't the alien? What's in that case? His clothes? His lunch? His business documents? Or an alien bomb? This is the story of a world reeling from a war of nerves with a sinister secret enemy.

Release date: December 19, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 152

Sample

DAKOS stood by the observation port, his strangely cold, metallic eyes looked out dispassionately in the direction of the planet that Explorator Nine was approaching. Dakos was a singularly emotionless type. His only thoughts were for the manipulation of the controls and the observation of the various phenomena associated with approach orbit. Explorator flew at a long low tangent, and Dakos moved mathematically about the control room getting everything ready for the observation orbit and the landing orbit which would follow it, if all went according to plan. Something bounced violently on to the for’ard observation screen. Dakos swung his attention from the dials, levers and switches, which he had been manipulating with the same detached scrutiny that he had used for the controls. It was a meteorite, quite a sizeable one. He was still some 20,000 miles from the planet’s surface and things did not look particularly roseate, he decided. Things were not going according to plan, and when things did not go according to plan Dakos felt strangely uneasy. His normally expressionless features creased into something that might have been a frown of concentration. Explorator Nine continued on course. Dakos watched the dancing danger line on the screen; the meteorite was coming closer, and closer still. He increased the power on the deflector screens and pressed the number 6 steering rocket. By one of those strange quirks of fate which sometimes happen in even the best regulated circles, number 6 steering rocket failed to ignite. He pressed the button a second time, and a third time. He pressed quickly and urgently but there was no emotion or desperation about the movement. At the third touch of the button the rocket fired—but the delay had been too long. The meteorite made contact with the outer hull of Explorator Nine. The ship quivered and spun, as though it had been hit by a great thunder bolt.

Dakos found himself rolling over and over amid his madly gyrating machinery.…

The wild spinning continued; over and over went the ship. Dakos made no sound as he got first to his knees, and then to his feet. He steadied himself and made his way across the spinning ship. Carefully and very precisely he re-orientated himself to his surroundings.

He tried the stabiliser button and Explorator Nine responded just a little. He pressed the emergency stabiliser button and the response improved. The ship was still spinning, but it was spinning much more slowly now. Dakos began to inspect the damage. The outer shell had been pretty well torn away, the inner shell had a small puncture. Pressure was leaking out dangerously fast. It was all the compensator could do to keep up with the air that was being lost. Dakos looked at the gauges rather coldly. Unless the leak was dealt with quite swiftly, survival time was down to about an hour and a half. With the surface of the planet still about twenty thousand miles away that did not give him very much time. What time there was had to be used to best advantage. There must be no inefficiency of any kind. Not that there ever was, as far as Dakos was concerned.…

He took the emergency repair apparatus from his locker and put his head on one side, listening keenly for the source of the leak.

Finally he found it, and the emergency repair material was put in place across the puncture. Dakos stood back, looking at his work and listening again. He regarded the pressure gauge soberly. It had creased to drop. His survival time went up from an hour and a half to five hours, then six; then it went back beyond the red danger margin—balance had been restored. Automatic replacement mechanisms were now working at normal speed and Dakos allowed himself a very thin, enigmatical smile of satisfaction, if so minute a movement of the face could be called a smile, and if so passionless a mask could be called a face.

Dakos began checking gear. Half of the steering gear and part of the landing thrust equipment had been torn away by the impact. That was not good; that was bad. Dakos fed the thoughts into the computer. The computer keys moved fast beneath his fingers. He surveyed the rest of the damage and fed the statistics into the computer in the wake of the preceding data, and then he waited for the computer to arrive at conclusions. He did not have to wait long. The statistics were evaluated in a matter of seconds, and the tape began pouring out of the answer slot.

Dakos ran the tape through his fingers and held it up to the tape reading light. Symbols sprang out swiftly. Dakos translated then swiftly, as his cold, metallic grey eyes ran over the tape. The ship would have to be abandoned. One hope of survival was to go straight into landing orbit without a preliminary survey orbit. From landing orbit he would have to use the emergency descent device and allow the ship itself to disintegrate as it would. There was a chance, a chance to be considered according to the computer, that some parts of the ship would land in a reasonably usable condition. Dakos decided to abide by the computer’s decision. It would have been very unusual indeed if he had not decided to abide by the computer’s directions, for to Dakos the word of the computer was as the law of the Medes and Persians was to those ancient peoples. That which the computer said was done, and Dakos understood no other way of life. The computer was his metallic, thinking god—only Dakos didn’t think of it as a god. The term “god” itself was unfamiliar to Dakos. When he had made all the necessary preparations he set a course for landing orbit and the shattered disc ship began a concentric spin around the planet. The planet was the third in succession round a small yellow star. His observations had told him that the first planet was very small and exceedingly hot, that the second was surrounded by a poisonous cloud envelope, but the third, towards which he had been travelling when the meteorite struck him, was the most likely home of intelligent life in this particular system. The fourth might possibly be so, although the computer did not rate its chances of parenthood very high. After the fourth was a belt that looked like the broken fragments of what had once been a planet and beyond this belt were a number of giant worlds, whose gravity would be far too powerful for Dakos to attempt a landing.

Normal gravity he could deal with, but the gravity that would obviously be extant upon these gargantuan worlds would be far too high to deal with. He sat watching the dials and gauges dispassionately, as the automatic landing orbit came into effect. The crippled disc-ship spun lower and lower; the patches on the inner hull blistered with the strain, Dakos reinforced them with secondary and tertiary patches. The ship continued lower and lower; Dakos judged that the moment had come to leave the ship to its fate. The build-up of atmospheric pressure was becoming too great, the ship wouldn’t take much more.

He zipped himself into a thin, but tremendously strong, translucent capsule and adjusted his capsule navigation equipment; moving his hand against his membranous envelope, he pressed the emergency release mechanism. Doors opened in the bottom of the disc ship, and Explorator Nine thrust him out like an old, crippled chicken laying a final egg.…

There was an enormous impact as the envelope hit the atmosphere, but so brilliant was its design that despite the enormity of the impact there was never any serious question of Dakos’ survival.

He spun over and round, round and over, from side to side; now right way up; now in an inverted position. Sky and planetary surface spun around each other, but Dakos’ grey, metallic, dispassionate eyes showed not the least concern. The wrist-chron that he wore told him that it was time to abandon the membranous envelope, he unzipped it, and the rush of wind blew it clear of his body.…

Very slowly and very skilfully, each movement timed to perfection, Dakos began using his atmospheric descent gear. Part of it was a temporary-gravishield-bar; part of it was rocket braking and part was a nuclear device capable of absorbing Photon energy. The combined effect was to allow Dakos to float down towards the planet’s surface as lightly as thistledown, but a great deal faster.

He looked down with great interest at the surface that waited infallibly below him. In the distance the disc ship had split until it was falling like two discs, and then one of them split again; it looked as if three separate disc ships were crashing. Yet he knew that one was only part of the stabilising gyroscope, and another was a split from off the casement, but the optical illusion was almost complete. He himself continued his graceful, descending flight. The land below him appeared to be covered in matted blue-green vegetation—the blue tint, he guessed, was some kind of optical illusion. When Nature decides to play some of her visual tricks on man, blue is often the colour she chooses in order to be able to perpetrate her gentle deception.

Dakos decided that the green carpet on to which he was spinning, had every appearance of being a jungle. Accordingly, he controlled his descent, for he had been in the Exploratory service long enough to know that if there is going to be any primitive, hostile, animal life on the planet which is being explored, that life is often found in the sea-thick vegetation of the jungles of the planet concerned.

Dakos continued his descent until he was hovering just above the tops of the trees, for such they now obviously were—trees, creepers and vines. He had been right. It was a jungle; it was vast in its area. He flew on over the tree tops; now fast; now slow; now pausing to look, now stopping to listen. Below him he could hear the screech of small, brightly coloured flying creatures that propelled themselves by means of feathered pinions. Bi-peds, or were they quadrupeds, he wondered? Things swung through the trees, chattering to one another.

Surely, thought Dakos, they can’t be the dominant life of this planet? Ahead of him, and to the right, was a clearing, the matted jungle grasses, trees and creepers were less thick here and Dakos slowed down and steered his way towards it. He would be pleased to make a landing, but although his movements gave an impression it was to some extent a misleading one. It was far easier to detect apparent emotion in Dakos’ behaviour than to actually prove the existence of such emotion.

Slowly and carefully the space traveller landed in the clearing. He suddenly became aware that he was no longer alone. There were faces peering at him from behind bushes and trees around the clearing. They resembled humanoids, he thought, viewing them dispassionately, but they were not humanoid in the sense which he had come to understand, and almost to expect. These faces were curiously painted. They were transfigured almost beyond recognition by peculiar, garish pigmentation, which had obviously been applied for some kind of decorative purpose. Dakos had sometimes met a similar thing among very primitive peoples, but this was something more bizarre than he had previously seen on all his voyages of exploration.…

Slowly at first, and then more quickly, the primitive humanoids began coming out of their places of concealment. Dakos reasoned from the shape of their heads that they were not of the highest order of intelligence. There was latent talent there, but it was only latent. There was a . . .