The Million Year Hunt

by Kenneth Bulmer

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Space Opera

Synopsis

...He heard a shout, distant and ringing, "No, Carson! Not that door!" Something green writhed in through that door. Something gaseous, billowing, filling the chamber faster and faster, something that caught at his throat and gagged him, made him wretch, brought streaming tears to his eyes. Before his eyes stretched a nightmarish growth of vine and tree, of mushroom-headed stalks, of gyrating tentacles swaying from every branch and limb. He heard a shrill, triumphant chittering. He turned to spring back. A vice closed over his foot and tripped him. He fell, sprawling, his mouth and nostrils filling with stinking mud. He did not remember anything more for a very long time.

Release date: April 16, 2012

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 320

Sample

THREE INCHES before Arthur Ross Carson’s nose the armored leg and boot of the Galactic Guardsman towered up like an old single tube rocket. Carson, flat on his stomach in the dust and pressed against the mouldering stone wall of the Admin Center, carefully extended his hand from the shadows. The tiny stick glittered once in the sunshine, then it had been pressed into the hairfine crack encircling the guardsman’s ankle where boot and greave meshed.

Carson was having difficulty in stopping himself from laughing—too soon.

Moving in complete silence and with deceptive slowness, he edged back, around the corner of the guard tower flanking the Admin Center’s main gate. His young, lithe body was relaxed, his nerves under perfect control and all the art of stealth and cunning he had learned as an urchin amongst the rubble of the city was in full, unconscious play.

Cautiously he applied flame to the end of the fuse.

Then he stood up, his mobile mouth quivering against the deep laughter that welled up, and, stepping briskly, walked out and around the tower. He went straight on over the cracked tessellated paving, out of the noon-day strip of shadow from the ten-story Admin Center and into the sunshine of Starfarers Square. As though suddenly remembering an errand, he paused, ostentatiously searching the pockets of his threadbare and much-patched coat while his gray eyes slid to observe the guardsman standing hot and uncomfortable in his magnificent—and quite unfunctional—uniform and armor.

Townspeople were moving sluggishly about the square and the radiating streets that led in from the dormitory suburbs and manufacturing districts. The heat laid a pall of listlessness over everything. Dust bit acridly into every throat. No sounds came from the market, where vendors dozed beneath striped awnings. It was just another day on sleepy Ragnor, a backward planet on the Rim, where the arrival of an interstellar packet caused furore enough to last a whole month.

The silence was blasted—enormously.

The Galactic Guardsman leaped a clear three feet in the air, no mean performance considering the weight of his armor and equipment. He landed running. He was yelling blue murder and his face was that color too—blue from cyanosis; he couldn’t get enough oxygen into his lungs both to sustain his lunging muscles and to maintain his fearsome yells. From his foot a long plume of black smoke billowed in a highly satisfactory manner.

Arthus Ross Carson held his stomach and groaned in helpless hilarity. He was quite beyond the laughing stage.

It wasn’t that he disliked the Galactic Guards—the geegee’s—or that he bore them any personal ill-will. But when a man is reaching the sombre old-age of twenty and nothing—literally nothing—happens from one year’s end to the next, unless he is to fossilise prematurely, then some outlet for abundant energy and an over-developed sense of fun must be found. Either that, or burst.

Carson peered through streaming eyes as the guardsman at last beat out the hot-foot and legged it back to his beat. Carson had no desire to see the man punished for leaving his post; his idea of fun did not include unpleasant consequences for anyone, including himself.

He thought of Lucy of the flame hair and soft mouth and relished the telling of this stupendous joke. He felt regret that she had not been there to witness it all; but her job monitoring automatic dish-washing machinery for Gunlum’s one reasonable hotel allowed her small free time. Carson regretted this; Lucy was seventeen and he wanted her all to himself.

Not all Galactic Guardsmen were fools. Sharp eyes had spotted all geegee’s involuntary flight and the greasy black smoke. Somewhere within Admin Center a siren began to howl. From the police precinct the clatter of running feet came nearer; an armored car rolled from the gates, its rocket launcher swivelling menacingly. A platoon of geegees broke from the gates in the wake of the car, spread and deployed and began to move on the square.

Carson watched in fascination.

He—a twenty year old full of fun—had started all this. It was the most instructive.

“Hey! You!” The voice was angry, imperative.

Carson swung round. Other people were hurrying away from the gates, unwilling to be caught in the geegee’s net.

“Grab him! That’s right! All right, you monkey, let’s see.”

The guards had caught someone who must have been approaching on the blind side of the square; the same stretch of mouldering wall from whose cover Carson had set the hot foot. He watched now, moving uneasily, wanting to get away while the getting was good but reluctant to leave while another person was being roughed up. Some unfortunate had walked along the same track that he had used; the geegees had pounced and, for a moment, it looked black. But Carson had no doubt that the unknown would soon prove his innocence.

He was beginning to look conspicuous, loitering there where everyone else had hurriedly fled. A growing clamor by the market told of the news being spread; there would be long loud chuckles all over Gunlum this night.

Still Carson tarried. He had no feelings of pity for the man the guards had caught. It was just unfortunate, one of those things, one of those things that a hard life and plenty of knocks had taught Carson to accept with a shrug and a grim resolve to beat anyone down who stood in his way. He might be young; but he had little to learn about the ways of the Galaxy. The man should have been ready to run for it as soon as the siren sounded. He must be some soft clerk or storeman, rotting in a monotonous job and all flabby flesh and panting for breath. Carson began to walk away.

He turned for one last look over his shoulder, and that last look changed the whole course of his life.

He caught a single glimpse of flame hair encompassed by the black leather and gray-blue steel of the guards.

The guards had Lucy! How she, of all the people in Gunlum, of all the people on Ragnor, should be here in the square at the time of his practical joke ready to be snapped up like a soft doe didn’t matter. She was here. She had been taken. She was being hustled inside the Admin Center, and Carson knew well enough to which section she would be taken.

Then the full horror hit him. Lucy would almost certainly—absolutely positively—be carrying a handful of igniter sticks with her. She would have the plastic wrapped bundle in her handbag, along with her lipstick and compact and embroidered handkerchief and all the other feminine knick-knacks that girls of seventeen carry about with them.

And the igniter sticks would condemn her.

Arthur Ross Carson stood there in the sunshine of Starfarers Square and the acid of self-condemnation, of self hate and self-loathing bit deeply into his mind. There was only one thing he could do.

Even then, there was no guarantee that the geegees would believe him. They’d scoff and write him off as a romantic loon telling lies in order to save his light-o’-love.

Of course, he would have; but he had to convince them that he was telling the truth. The decision had taken all of a hundredth part of a second; in the next he was walking directly towards the main gate guard.

His face felt stiff but he was not sweating; so far full fear had not struck.

The guard was still stamping his foot from time to time, cursing under his breath and watching the platoon of his comrades wheel back through the dust to the gates, followed by the armored car. Carson had no time to wonder about the fellow’s feelings, or to surmise that he was probably considering with apprehension the forthcoming interview with his captain. The guard straightened and waved Carson aside.

“Out of the way, kid, or you’ll be run over.”

“She didn’t do it,” Carson said. He was panting now. “She didn’t do it. I did.”

The guard’s reactions were not quite typical, but Carson was to learn that nothing that is expected occurs in just the way it is anticipated.

The guard said: “So you did, hey? I don’t care who did it—I just want to see someone stung—” and he went into anatomical details that left Carson quite unmoved. The platoon passed by with much clashing of armored feet and clanging of accoutrements. The armored car rolled past with a soft squishy sound from its vee-sixteen gas-electric engine.

The guard saluted his captain and rapidly told him what Carson had said. The captain, a grizzled veteran with radiation burns giving his face a mottled strawberry look, sized Carson up. His eyes were black beneath the helmet visor.

“You’d better come inside with us, son, and tell your story.” He put a hand on Carson’s shoulder. “You know the girl?”

Carson hesitated. Then, knowing that the guards would unearth anything they wanted, he said: “Yes.” And left it at that.

They went inside, the captain and Carson, with a couple of guards for escort. In the big crumbling building, corridors echoed to the stamp of booted feet and the air was damp and musty. What lights there were were dim and blue with age.

“What have you done with Lucy?” Carson asked.

“Keep quiet, son, until we talk to you,” the captain advised him. There was no discernable emotion in the man’s voice. But Carson caught the hint of a great weariness. He had never before been inside Admin Center and, like most of the townsfolk, he had always thought of the interior as a palace of light and beauty and precious gems. All he saw now was dusty flooring and stained walls with the paint peeling in ribbons from the desiccated plaster.

Then his fierce anger saw the answer to that. Of course, this was the section that the public might enter; the decadent luxury swarmed behind locked doors, in the other wings of the towering building.

They entered a large room with three tall windows set in its farther wall, a massive desk of ironwood, an armchair behind it, two chairs set before it and a row of benches along the near wall. A corpulent guardsman stood at attention by the door. The air smelt flat and unused.

“Wait here, son,” the captain said, and strode away.

The waiting gnawed at Carson’s nerves. He wondered what was happening to Lucy. If they’ve hurt her, he began to say to himself, and then slumped, realizing his own futility and his utter helplessness. No-one had much time for the Galactic Guards; but at least they preserved the peace and kept off out-worlder robbers and pirates and claim-jumpers. Their job was unenviable, he could see that, but he refused to acknowledge that their braggart swagger was necessary to their task. They had too much power and the planetary government, duly elected, was virtually ruled by the Galactic Guard colonel in the capital. The door opened.

“Is this the lad?” asked a voice that growled with an impatient huskiness that tautened Carson’s nerves.

“Yes, sir. Claims he set the hot foot, not the girl.”

“Why we have to be plagued with these small fry—”

The captain stood beside Carson, who rose to his full height and waited, eyeing the newcomer. The man was a major. He wore the guard’s undress uniform, a scarlet loose-fitting shirt of some silky synthetic, white breeches and soft artificial leather boots. Around his waist, lean and athletic, was wound the blue cummerbund of authority and over his shoulder he had hastily hung and was still adjusting his embroidered baldrick, with the rapier thumping his left leg.

His face was brown and sere, with crows’-feet splaying from the corners of his eyes. He looked to be about fifty, past the age for promotion, and settled in a job that he could hold down until he reached retirement age—or was killed.

He sat with a grunt in the armchair, cocked both booted feet on to the desk and then, and only then, looked at the prisoner.

“Name?”

“Carson.”

“Carson what?”

“Carson—sir.”

“That’s better.”

The captain leaned forward and whispered. The major said firmly: “You claim that it was you who set the hot foot to Guardsman Hypman? That it was not the girl?”

“That is right, sir.” Carson found amazement that he could speak so calmly.

“What proof can you offer?”

“Proof?” Carson was bewildered. “But I did it. Where is Lucy? What have you done with her?”

“The girl is being taken care of. Forget her. Do you know what the penalty is for your crime?”

“But it was only a joke—”

The major snorted. He began to flick his boots with a paper knife taken from the desk. “I don’t think you quite understand the gravity of your position. We can deal with this. . .