They woke up to the smell of danger. No one could see it. None of them could hear it. But it was there. Lurking... intangible... inaudible... invisible. The space around them was alive with it. They breathed it into their lungs. It crept through the pores of their skins. It was the dreaded presence of X the Unknown.
Release date:
November 28, 2013
Publisher:
Orion Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
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JONNY DRESCOTT was waiting for the bell. It was an odd phrase, he thought. In a way it made him like a boxer in a ring. There was a contest up ahead of him. A battle of wits almost, a clash of personalities. A clash of personalities between his immediate chief and he himself. Captain Drescott had never liked Marshal Adam Colfax. That was an odd position for a start, because most of the Cirtrangs were conditioned to get on with each other. Colfax was old, and iron grey and tough. A 30th century Bogart … there was nothing he was afraid of. There was nothing he couldn’t do. He was a forthright, inquisitive temperament. His eyes were everywhere; his ears missed nothing; it almost seemed as if he could smell trouble a hundred miles away. Jon, on the other hand, was quiet, almost subdued, by comparison. He made no impression on anybody—he just got things done! Maybe that was the reason he was passed over so often in the promotion race. …
He wasn’t much more than fifteen years junior to the Marshal; lesser men who had launched out had got past him. Not that their achievements were less great than Drescott’s own, but they had magnified them so much more and they had a habit of running to Colfax to be patted on the head every time they did anything. That was an attitude which Drescott despised, nevertheless he realised that it was an attitude which paid off in the rather corrupt world of the thirtieth century.
“World,” he thought to himself, as he sat on the anti-grav cushion, awaiting for the bell that would summon him into Colfax’s office. “Colfax palace, more like,” he thought. The old boy does well for himself, if nothing else. He pulled a self-lighting cigarette from a plastic wallet in his tunic pocket, put it to his lips, and inhaled. A tiny incandescent flash appeared at the other end, and he sucked lungfuls of perfumed nicotine into his body. What a lovely way to die, he thought, even in the thirtieth century. Funny how the deepest traditions of men lead to the bad habits.
The bell rang.
Drescott got up and went through to the ‘palace of the minotaur.’ Behind an enormous desk the eagle eyes were glaring at him, blazing at him; he could sense the hostility as soon as he got into the room.
“You’re late!” The whiplash voice was accusatory, it was a cue for ‘I’m sorry, sir.’ Jonny Drescott’s answer was not on cue!
“I came as soon as the bell went! I’ve been sitting out there half an hour waiting for you.” No ‘sir’; no ‘Marshal’; no ‘Mr. Colfax’—just a blunt, straight answer.
The glare became even more pronounced, the whiplash voice grew even sharper. Colfax came straight to the point.
“Now, look, Drescott, you don’t like me and I don’t like you, but now I need a man to do a job, and I think you’re the man for it. We’re both Cirtrangs—doesn’t matter whether we like each other or not, because over and above any personal, petty opinions is the fact that a job has got to be done. I have to use any available man, you have to take any available commissions.”
“That much is history,” replied Jonny. His voice was quiet, almost a whisper. His pals called him ‘Whispering Jon,’ but there was no humour in the epithet. Like the legendary cowboy, ‘Whispering Smith,’ that quietness in Drescott’s voice concealed a tremendous power and strength. Strength, not only of body, but of mind and of spirit. Jonny Drescott was steel right through; steel and wire and whipcord. His nerves were either the toughest fabric that had ever been devised, or else he had no nerves at all. Whichever of the two alternatives was correct, it still made John Drescott a devilishly formidable an opponent. Threats had no weight with him, neither had thoughts of promotion. He was like a classical romantic hero come to life. He was almost too good to be true. He was that sort of man. A man whose ideals balanced. He set himself a standard so strong that he lived by it. To have lived in any other way would not have been life to Jon Drescott.
“You say you like coming to the point—come to the point,” he said quietly, softly, almost sibilantly. “What?” The monosyllabic interrogation was charged with meaning.
Colfax made no answer for a moment, reached across the desk, pulled a self-lighting cigar from a box; he didn’t trouble to offer the box. He sucked at the cigar, watched as the end spark burst into flame, pressed a button below the desk, and a star chart sprang up on the indicator, on the domes ceiling of the ‘palace-office’. Jonny flicked an eyelid towards it.
“So?” He knew what was coming now, but he wasn’t letting on. … If this was Colfax’s way, let Colfax play it his way. Drescott wished that the Marshal had disposed with all this theatricalism—it was artificial, it wasn’t necessary—at least, not to Drescott’s mind.
“Know the area?” again that rapid snap-fire question, just out of the blue, cracking in that whiplash voice.
“Sure, I know it,” replied Jon.
“What do you associate it with?”
All right, I’ll play ball, thought Drescott. It’ll be the quickest way in the long run.
“I associate it with a helluva lot of things, chiefly the disappearance of Benson, Walters and Frixly.”
The eagle eyes relaxed just for a second.
“You’re on the ball.” It was one of the tiny flashes which might have been a deeper humanity. Something working beneath the hostility which said, when all was said and done, they were, both of them, Cirtrangs. They were fighting towards a common purpose and a common objective.
“Yes, that’s the spiel,” Colfax was relaxing a little. Mellowed, perhaps, by the inhalations of the cigar.
“And?” questioned Jon Drescott.
“I want you to find out why!”
A touch of the button and the star chart disappeared.
“You want me to find out why?” echoed Drescott. “Look, Skip”—he, too, was thawing a little. “We’ve sent three ships out there—Benson, Walters, Frixly—all senior men. Benson was the finest radionics expert we had. Walters—I’ve never seen a man draw a gun faster! Frixly shot first and asked questions afterwards. He was the cautious type. You couldn’t ambush Frixly. You couldn’t out-fight Walters, and you couldn’t out-trick Benson. In their respective fields, I’m not up to any of them. That’s fact! Why send good money after bad?”
“Afraid?” The question was not as harsh as it sounded.
“No!” said Drescott. “You know better than that!”
“I suppose I do!” said Colfax. “I must be honest, even if I don’t like you. You’re not afraid—why the hesitation then, Jon!” It wasn’t often the Marshal called him ‘Jon’. Things were thawing, decided the Captain.
“I believe if you sent the entire space fleet out there,” replied Drescott, “one after the other, or in a bunch, do you know what the ultimate result would be?”
“No Cirtrangs,” said the chief. It was a flat, dull, almost apathetic statement of fact. He crashed one enormous fist into the palm of the other hand. “No blasted Cirtrangs at all!”
“Right! I know it and you know it! Then why ask me to go out there?” questioned Jonny.
“Because something’s got to be dam’ well done! We can’t just write off that sector of the sky!”
“I didn’t say nothing could be done,” replied Drescott. “I said it’s no good sending the Fleet, and it’s no good sending a one-ship battle expedition. …”
“Well?”
“Well, it’s obvious.”
“Not to me,” said the Marshal.
“Somebody’ll have to go under cover,” said Drescott.
“You think a merchantman would get through, then?” demanded Colfax, raising an eyebrow.
“I didn’t say I thought he’d get through, I said it’s the only chance. What facts have we got? A story of some kind of disturbance on the other side of the galaxy. We send three very obvious Cirtrang investigation warships over and, one by one, they disappear. Whoever or whatever is causing the distance evidently doesn’t like Cirtrang warships … but nobody’s sent a merchantman out. We don’t know whether all ships are going for a ‘burton’—we just know that some power, or group of powers; some race, or group of races, has been knocking off Cirtrang war batteries.”
Colfax leant back in his enormous swivel chair, looking like a pilot perched behind the controls. He was deep in thought, the cigar was glowing. The fluorescent lights playing down from the walls, behind their niches, the whole thing looked more like a film set than real life, yet it was real.
“All right, we’ll send a merchantman. One of the old ‘O’ ship types.” Drescott shook his head.
“If there’s something out there that can fool Benson, and something that can out-gut Walters, and something that’s so devilishly well concealed that it managed to get Frixly before he got it—do you think that we could put up any kind of camouflage that would work?”
“No, I guess not!”
There was a long, strained silence.
“Well, what the hell do you suggest?” The Cirtrang Marshal’s voice exploded like the roar of a cannon.
“I want to do it my way,” answered Drescott. “All my own way. I don’t want anybody to know how, or when, or where, I reckon I can get results. Look, Chief,”. . .
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