Pre-Gargantua

by Neil Charles, Denis Hughes

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

Synopsis

Man is established on Kliron XIV, a dark, bleak, barren little globe used solely as a base for spatial patrol ships. Life on Kliron is no bed of roses, but it is only when faced by perils that seem at first too incredible to believe that the best - and worst - is revealed in men. Here in Kliron XIV just such a peril materialises. For the first time in their lives men find themselves confronted by an enemy against which no weapon can prevail. Worse even than the Master Entity, the Gargantua are its slaves, evil Flowers of Darkness that bloom where no life can exist . . .

Release date: May 31, 2018

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 146

Sample

The grin of pleasure remained on Shearer’s face for several seconds after he switched off the visiphone and clouded out the image of the dark haired girl with whom he had spoken. His fingers still rested on the switch, he still smiled with a certain reminiscent wistfulness even when Lieutenant Beck entered the office, saluted and placed before him a sheaf of routine reports from the Sector C Patrol ships.

Beck eyed his superior shrewdly. It struck him that on more than one occasion of late he had caught his chief in just such a mood as this. Shearer was normally something of a tartar and a stickler for discipline. There were signs of a softening up. Beck wondered about it and made a guess or two, but he did not voice his findings.

He coughed gently now, for Shearer still seemed to have his mind on other things.

The cough brought him abruptly back to the dry routine of his task as Intelligence Controller at the Earth base on Kliron XIV. He pulled himself together, thrust the image of Denys Larsen from his mind, and concentrated on the spotty features of Lieutenant Beck. It was a return to normal that left a lot to be desired, but Shearer had to be fair and privately admitted to himself that Beck was a valuable man.

“Well?” he said quietly. “What are you waiting for? And stand up straight, man! You look more like a drunk than an officer! My God, I don’t know what the cadet schools are turning out these days!”

Beck flushed darkly. Maybe Shearer hadn’t softened up as much as he’d imagined. He straightened with a jerk, aware, as always, that his posture was defective. It was a point he tried to forget; Shearer wouldn’t let him. There was insufficient physical training on Kliron XIV to make up for the deficiency of his earlier cadetship during the crisis when Earth faced the still-recent threat of invasion from Mars.

“I’m sorry, sir,” said Beck. “I’ll remember and do better in future.” He always felt he had to humble himself before Shearer, though the act went against the grain.

“I’ll have you returned to Earth for a six-month intensive course in body culture, if there isn’t a marked improvement,” Shearer told him bleakly. “Now then, what did you want?”

Beck swallowed uncomfortably. He had thought that this might be an ideal opportunity to put in a request for special leave. Now he wasn’t so sure. There was nothing very soft or forgiving in Shearer’s countenance, none of the hoped-for milk of human kindness on which to rely. If he risked it and asked for special leave he would probably be met by a flat refusal, which of its very nature would veto any further request for some considerable time.

“It was nothing, sir. Nothing at all,” he said.

Shearer’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “Do you take me for a fool?” he snapped. “Of course there was some reason why you stood there like a stuffed dummy instead of going at once! Out with it!”

Beck cursed himself silently. He also cursed Shearer, but it was too late now and wouldn’t have a very marked effect.

“I had a request to make, sir. It’s not … important now.”

“I’ll be judge of that. You know perfectly well I’m always prepared to listen to requests or suggestions from my officers. Well?” Shearer’s gaze was intense. He was a strikingly handsome man at any time; when he wore his rather imperious official expression on duty, he was doubly handsome and considerably more frightening in appearance. None of which reflections was of much comfort to Lieutenant Beck.

Beck gulped again and shuffled his feet on the austere grey carpet that covered the concrete floor of the underground office.

“I—I hope to get married, sir,” he said. “I was going to put in for special leave.”

Shearer’s mouth tightened in abruptly.

“Were you though!” He looked at Beck and wondered what kind of girl would fall in love with his spotty, rather unhealthy countenance. There was, of course, no accounting for taste, he supposed.

“Yes, sir.” Beck took courage when Shearer failed to jump down his throat immediately.

“And when was this to be?”

“The end of the month, sir. Sally—that is, Miss Barrow, my young lady, has already fixed the date.”

Shearer shaped his lips for a swift and devastating denial that such arrangements could be made without his previous consent and without reference to the stringency of duty on the barren little globe of Kliron XIV. He decided he did not like Lieutenant Beck or the unknown young woman with whom he was affianced. And then he changed his mind again. It worried him slightly because he was not in the habit of doing such a thing. The whole trouble was that an image of Denys, dark haired and very lovely, kept cropping up in his mind’s eye whenever he gave it the smallest opportunity of showing itself. He growled and took his eyes off Beck’s face for a moment. Then:

“Humph…. Well, Beck, put in your application in writing and I’ll consider it. There seems no reason why it shouldn’t be granted.”

Beck could hardly believe his ears. He flushed with pleasure and spontaneous gratitude.

“Thank you, sir!” he said, saluting more smartly than he had ever done in his life before. He turned with equal alertness and efficiency and started for the door.

Shearer said: “Hold it a minute, Beck. There’s one other thing….”

Beck’s heart sank like a stone. His step faltered and he came to a halt, his mind a sea of anxiety.

“Yes, sir?” he murmured.

Shearer gave a sudden smile. “I forgot to offer my congratulations,” he said. “That will be all for now.”

Beck breathed gustily, saluted yet again and almost ran from the office, leaving Shearer staring at the door while his fingers drummed on the desk at which he sat. If things like that could happen to Lieutenant Beck, he reflected, he saw no reason why they shouldn’t happen to him, between him and Denys Larsen. In fact he had a shrewd suspicion that they were already happening, a singularly disturbing thought to a man of his ordinarily celibate outlook. He supposed there was nothing wrong in being emotionally disturbed by the mental image of a woman. He knew there was nothing wrong with it, of course, it was just unexpected and a little more than he was accustomed to. No doubt, like Lieutenant Beck, he would welcome the idea before long. In the meantime he intended to let matters take their course.

With something of an effort he forced his mind back to the concrete facts of his routine work. His face soured and a frown grew over it as he fingered through the sheaf of reports that Beck had delivered. They were mostly routine stuff coming in over the tele-link from Earth, or pilots reports from space patrols, or return forms that merely called for his scrawled, signature before despatch by the regular intelligence vessel running bi-weekly round the circuit of base ports on the lesser and otherwise useless bodies of the inner galaxy, of which Kliron XIV was the most cheerless.

“I suppose it’s worth it,” he muttered. His mind ran back over the five years during which he had controlled the flow of reports and intelligence that centred on Kliron XIV. Shearer shrugged grimly, recognising his position as being that of a clearing house. There was little enough romance in the notion, small chance of revealing himself as a man of outstanding brilliance. In fact it often crossed his mind that his own superiors, the great war chiefs on Earth, were in all probability entirely unaware of his existence. True, he had been commended on his work during those critical days when the massed fleets of Martian vessels had dared to jump the gap between the planets and threatened the Earth. But the commendation had brought him no release from the barren life of a Service-man on Kliron XIV. Since it had been his information that had sounded the first warning note and given the Earth navies a fair chance to intercept and meet the massed threat of the Martian fleets he had at least hoped for promotion or a move to some other post, preferably nearer Earth. But no such promotion had come; he was still in charge of Intelligence on the gloomy, cold, cheerless little world of barren Kliron XIV, a burnt-out cinder of a globe that was habitable only because of the most modern underground living accommodation. Movement on the arid surface was possible if a man wore full space equipment, but apart from the servicing of short-stay vessels almost all activities were confined below ground. Such was a measure of the physical hospitality of this world towards conquering Man. And the long-term effect on the men themselves revealed itself in eyes that were duller than they should have been, a paucity of smiles and a general curtness of speech that told of the strain of constant vigilance under conditions of life that amounted to near imprisonment. It was not that Kliron XIV was in itself a dangerous station, far from it, but there was so little to recommend it as a home for men that lengthy periods without home leave to the green and fertile Earth was bound to take its toll on human nerves. Perhaps that, as much as anything else, bad warmed Shearer’s heart while he spoke to the dark-haired girl who operated the one and only civilian communication outfit permitted on Kliron XIV.

When he thought about her he remembered with definite pleasure the way in which she had smiled when reporting to him on the visiphone.

“I’m introducing myself, Colonel Shearer,” she had said. “I arrived at 1500 hours on the CYA transport ship. You’re expecting me, I believe. Denys Larsen, that’s the name. I was told to report to you as soon as I’d settled in.”

And she’d smiled so nicely that Shearer completely forgot the surge of irritability and doubts so ready to sweep over him ever since he was informed that a civilian woman was to operate the freight communication outfit leased to CYA Ltd.

“Glad to make your acquaintance, Miss Larsen,” he’d said a little stiffly. And then he had issued an official invitation for her to dine at the mess one evening. It had been something of a strain on his natural stiffness, but her smile had rewarded him warmly. And after that they had talked on the visiphone with much more friendliness—on his part. He was now looking forward, really looking forward, to meeting her in the flesh instead of as an electronic image thrown on a cathode screen by the impact of streaming ions.

He remembered Lieutenant Beck and the man’s coming marriage to some creature called Sally Barrow. Surely she could never equal Denys Larsen? Few women would ever do that, he decided complacently. Then he frowned sternly and dragged his mind back to more mundane matters.

“This evening,” he said aloud, “I shall carry out a surprise alert in the relay section. That’ll shake ’em up and test their readiness!”

Men on Kliron XIV spoke of day and night, morning and evening. They worked and lived by the twenty-four hour routine to which they were accustomed on Earth, but in actual fact there was no such state of affairs on the patrol base. A grey half-light enveloped Kliron XIV during most of the time, but at slightly irregular periods, approximately once every seven weeks, there came a phenomenon known locally as the Periodic Darkness. It lasted for exactly seventy-two hours before the barren world returned to its customary twilight. The Periodic Darkness was due in about thirty hours. During the Darkness everything came to a standstill on the surface of Kliron XIV. Not only was the darkness too thick to work above ground, but the cold that accompanied it regularly was absolute, no less than one hundred degrees lower than Kliron norm.

From the subject of a surprise alert in the relay section, Shearer turned his attention to other routine matters that went to make up his duties. He decided that a conference might be helpful between himself, as Intelligence Controller, and Berthon, chief of the Maintenance Branch. On one or two occasions he had had cause to criticise the standard of transference of command orders relating to the refuelling of patrol vessels. Yes, a conference would be a good thing. A good chance to air some of his views and make the men of the Maintenance Branch sit up and take notice. He clenched his fists spasmodically as if crushing Berthon and his men in an allegorical grip they were most unlikely to break.

Shearer used the visiphone to call up Berthon ten miles away in a similar underground warren of living quarters to those in which he himself existed.

He did not like Berthon and Berthon did not like him. Their coolness was mutual, though neither could afford an open clash, being dependent on each other for a number of vital details without which life on Kliron XIV would be wholly unbearable.

In an atmosphere of frigid politeness that even the cold and unemotional visiphone screen could not entirely conceal, they discussed a meeting of their respective officers. When it had been arranged Shearer switched off, feeling pleased with the way he had handled Berthon. And Berthon, too, switched off with an equally self-satisfied smile when he thought of how he had come quite close to insulting Shearer without actually doing so. Metaphorically, he rubbed his hands.

Shearer continued going through the various reports.

He came on one that caused him to frown once or twice and lay aside for further study. It was a pilot’s report from one of the outer circuit patrols, and it spoke somewhat vaguely of what the pilot had written in as an unidentified object that crossed his track some seven hours prior to the transmission.

Shearer went back to th. . .