The Crimson Tower

by Alex Marshall

appears
in this issue.

part 2 of 4

As the last of the factories and outhouses vanished in the darkness, a change in the pitch of the engines warned him that they were coming in to land. Dust obliterated any view of the last stages of the descent. He watched the pilot going through his procedures, silent and deliberate like an automaton as he made fine adjustments for wind and ground conditions.

They touched down. The hatches opened and the desert blew in. Lord Limbold followed the count down the gangplank and over the sand. A sentry loomed. He saluted and pointed to a gap ahead and then they were within the temporary camp and following a path between low, hooded lights.

Upon either side, pressure tents billowed and trembled as they were buffeted by air currents inside and out. One, larger than the rest and emblazoned with seven stars upon the door seal, appeared from the darkness in front of them.

Another sentry snapped to attention. He gave the salute; right fist upon left breast and left hand with fingers straight in front of the genitals, signifying loyalty to the protection of the race — the soldier’s oath that bound them all in service to the death. Stooping quickly, the sentry peeled the door flap open and stood aside to let them enter.

Stepping over the high threshold, the count simultaneously bent down and swivelled his body sideways in the difficult manoeuvre that best allowed a body encumbered by battle dress through such a narrow opening. Lord Limbold, lacking the count’s campaign experience, blundered into the hole, tripping and snagging the membrane until the sentry from without and the count from within pushed and hauled him inside.

“For pity’s sake Limbold!” Voormidrath’s pink and tiny head scolded as the helmet came away. “You’ve let the blasted air in!” Lord Limbold removed his own headgear to the sound of coughing and the whine of the filter pump, complaining as it sought to re-establish positive equilibrium with the outside.

“Come in, please.” Field Marshall Kulne greeted them. It was his men who were stationed outside. “Take some refreshment,” he said, leading them to a long table set against the side-wall where bowls and decanters were in evidence, “and then come and join us.” To the weapons master he said: “Have you met the vice-chancellor?”

“No,” Lord Limbold replied sullenly, peering beyond the field marshall to where three figures stood about a central table spread with maps.

With the stiff mannerisms of one more used to having wine served for him, the field marshall poured from a decanter into two alloy goblets. Voormidrath lifted his, gulped, and smacked his lips. Ignoring the food, he strode immediately to the table.

Lord Limbold took his and sniffed at it with the air of a man checking for poison. It was an improbable purplish colour from, he knew, a dye they employed to make it appear more palatable. He tasted it. The flavour was sharp, artificial and unsubtle but he had tasted far worse. Still, he grimaced for the host’s benefit and eyed the food. There was fruit!

The weapons master snatched a platter and, ignoring the tray of greyish biscuits daubed with some indeterminate paste proffered by the field marshall. He loaded it with berries, dripping slices and fleshy corms ripened under lamps in the silent space of some subterranean farm.

Field Marshall Kulne was not an indulgent man. Heavily boned like all of them, his eyes were virtually invisible beneath thick brow ridges but his narrow mouth pressed into a tiny white line and his moustaches bristled. He turned his back and joined the rest. Lord Limbold drained his glass and helped himself to another before taking platter and goblet to the council table.

It was Count Voormidrath who introduced him to the vice-chancellor; a dark, cunning-faced man in an ultra-lightweight exoderm. By marking him out as a non-combatant the gleaming suit underlined his exalted rank but it also made of him a pygmy among giants. In appreciation of this someone had procured a chair for him and now the council was officially joined, he seated himself. He regarded each of them in turn before turning to the field marshall

“What are we all doing here, Kulne?” he asked.

“We’re here to agree actions in relation to the defence of Beth-el, vice-chancellor,” the field marshall replied. “This is in response to intelligence we have from a captive taken near Mount Hermon some weeks ago. There are some notable gaps but some things seem certain.”

“Intelligence from a captive?” The politician’s eyes widened. “Since when did we start taking prisoners? I wasn’t aware we had anyone who understands their filthy tongue!”

Kulne smiled sardonically as he continued: “There have been recent developments in the north. We have made an important discovery — or, rather General Udin and his command have. General?” Kulne motioned to his comrade.

General Udin was a grim veteran of decades of bitter frontier war. His unadorned battle dress was scarred and blackened from a lifetime of firefights, massacres, routs, retreats and desperate ambushes. The head that regarded them from the huge, armour-plated chest and shoulders was grey and weathered as if the general himself were carved from the rock of the northern hills.

“It was after the battle of Kahraman,” said the general. “We had inflicted a heavy defeat upon the enemy and forced them back into the mountains. But we had pushed far and fast! My armoured divisions were stretched and we were not without casualties ourselves, so we did not pursue them. We had re-taken the fortifications at Maras, in enemy hands since the early days of the front. Deep in the bowels we found the machine. It must’ve been there since the keep was abandoned by the allied eastern armies at the end of the third age.”

The general paused to take a mouthful of wine. The vice-chancellor leaned forward. Like all of them, he knew the stories: the legends of a great scientific age that had lasted for a hundred thousand years. A time of technological wonders, now gone and long buried in the ashes of the nuclear fires.

“Well, I set my boffins to it,” General Udin continued. “But it was a little the worse for wear and the manuals and ops programmes were U/S. We knew it was an Interrogator but we couldn’t get it to work! Anyway, I took the decision to bag it and move it down to Tyre when we fell back. I thought maybe Voormidrath here would take a look at it!”

“Indeed,” the count nodded. “Like the general, I was intrigued. Any fool could see the value of the thing but getting it working seemed to be another issue entirely. I bent some ears, made some enquiries and they led me to Lord Limbold.”

All eyes came to rest upon the weapons master, who was cramming fruit into his mouth and dribbling a good deal down his unshaven chin.

The scarlet and gold-trimmed warlord felt obliged to justify his nomination. “Ah, Lord Limbold of Beth-el is a weapons master of high renown,” he informed them. “He is one of our foremost scientists. His work on guidance and delivery systems has been crucial in our recent successes in the north and the east. Once we had secured his co-operation, I arranged for the Interrogator to be moved to his laboratories, here in Beth-el. And so it was to Beth-el that the captive was bought for evaluation.”

“And you managed to get the contraption working,” the vice-chancellor prompted Lord Limbold from behind steepled fingers. Irritated by the weapons master’s poor grace, he wanted to hear what the scientist had to say.

The weapons master swallowed. “Yes” said he, “though not without some difficulties — as no doubt you might expect with so little of the builder’s knowledge and after such a period of disuse. It is a wondrous thing, a complex machine. They knew much... ah, the things they knew! So much is lost, so much...”

“Yet you managed to get it working...” said the vice-chancellor with icy impatience.

“We did, we did. In the end the damage to the systems was not extensive. It was the knowledge gap that caused me the greatest problems. But I researched. I found some old texts, some inventories that led to certain files in the Academy’s central records library in Varushalem. If there is one thing that we are good at, it is the keeping of records — military records of course! We are good at that, oh yes, very thorough! Mostly stuff that nobody is the least bit interested in, but every now and then it yields up a pearl! Cataloguing... and killing, of course. In both these areas we excel!”

“What did we learn, damn it!” the politician’s fist thumped onto the chair arm.

Glaring at the weapons master, it was Count Voormidrath who stepped in again. “The enemy are planning a major offensive against the cities of the south including the capital. They are establishing supply lines and logistics and gathering strength as we speak. We believe that they will attack within the month, probably Beth-el will be first and then they will turn west.” He paused and drew a breath. “The attack will come from the air, in several waves and then they will follow with ground troops.”

“From the air? Preposterous!” Air Vice-Marshall Dhorvush, who had not yet addressed the council, interjected. Dhorvush was bald and darkly bearded. Slighter than the count or the giant general, he was still an imposing warrior with much of his face and skull bound together by surgical steel mesh.

“Wait!” the warlord held up his hands. “There is more. Before he died, the creature — through Limbold’s endeavours — revealed that they have developed a new type of fuel cell. With this technology they can vastly extend the reach of their gun ships. Where we’ve had to defend only against the odd whistler, now we will have to contend with battle cruisers, armed to the teeth with blast bombs, shredders and photon cannon! They’ll be dropping marines on the bloody rooftops in Varushalem before the month is out!”

The tent erupted in response to Voormidrath’s words. The vice-chancellor was on his feet, firing questions at all of them. Dhorvush was complaining bitterly and trying to refute the evidence on technicalities. Field Marshall Kulne railed at the warlord about countermanding directives and troop re-deployments.

General Udin, with a naked blaster in his fist, bellowed his hatred of the alien, pledging his life and those of his command in defence of the seven cities — to the very last man. Only the weapons master remained silent. He watched them rage and bluster for a moment then he turned away. He walked over to the side and poured himself another brimming goblet of wine.

“Limbold, come here, for God’s sake!” The voice of the warlord rose above the general clamour. “This is why you are here! This is why I’ve brought you — not so as you can drink yourself insensible. Now, tell the council what else you’ve been up to in that tower, damn you!”

Lowering his voice to address the vice-chancellor and the air vice-marshall he said: “All is not yet lost! Other things were revealed by the Interrogator, some other fragments of damnable lore that we prised from the Hattooshan scum. I’ve had Limbold working on how best these can be made to serve us! So come, Limbold,” he took the old scientist firmly by the elbow, simultaneously steering him back into the gathering whilst preventing him from taking another gulp of wine, “tell us of our new weapon! What progress has been made these last days?”

“Well, I...” At the Count’s urging, Lord Limbold set his drinking vessel upon the field table. Producing the scroll that he had brought, he unrolled it before them, weighting the corners with wine cups.

“This is my machine!” he announced. His eyes glittered in the lamplight. Silence descended over the council. In a voice that was little more than a whisper he continued: “Night and day I have toiled and now it nears completion. It is a slender and desperate hope, but it is all I have now. I pray that it will work as I have intended — as should you all, for there can be no other salvation!”

Illumination within the tent was poor and the vice-chancellor seized a lamp and brought it closer as the lords bent over the table. Brows were furrowed and glances were exchanged as they sought to make sense of the riot of geometry that was inked upon the yellowed parchment.

It appeared to show, in elevation, a structure squatly spherical and constructed of gracefully curving rib-like struts. Bisecting the sphere somehow were other ribs, or perhaps they were rails. Surrounding the whole were more struts and cables like so many legs; anchoring or supporting the machine and lending it the appearance of some hideous, android insect paused for flight. Around and over the diagram, symbols and equations were scrawled in a crabbed, italic hand.

A gust of wind shook the tent. The noise of the pumps modulated and then settled again into a steady, susurrant whine.

“Brilliant, I’m sure!” commented Air Vice-Marshall Dhorvush at length. “But what does it do for us?”

“Quite so,” said the vice-chancellor. He had stood to inspect the drawing and now he sat once again, leaning back in his chair, regarding the weapons master from deep shadow.

“It is, essentially, an accelerator,” said the scientist, slowly. “It harnesses energy and uses it to accelerate particles to enormous speeds, in a very short time-span. Its power is beyond imagining. Nothing like it has been seen upon this planet for millennia!” His sinewy hands kneaded the air and his bloodshot eyes raked the gathering.

“What does it do, man?!” Dhorvush was becoming exasperated. He was not alone.

“It is a powerful weapon,” Count Voormidrath prompted the weapons master. Have a care, Limbold! he thought. Though the inventor seemed oblivious, even Voormidrath could feel the atmosphere changing. The temperature was falling. Indulgence and ambivalence toward the weapons master was crystallising into something else.

“Yes, yes indeed! A powerful weapon, and particularly against attack from the air,” said Lord Limbold hurriedly, realising finally, something of the danger. These were serious men, powerful men. Keepers of the Seven Keys, Lord Protectors of the cities of mankind, they wore their responsibilities like they wore the seven-starred badges and insignia of office — gravely and without humour. They were not men to be goaded or fenced-with over the wine cups.

“Yes, particularly effective against air-craft. It is in the targeting, you see. The great acceleration that I mentioned, coupled with an ability to lock on to the target will enable the weapon to identify, locate and activate and then move on to the next target with split-second efficiency and accuracy. Imagine a powerful cannon, sensitive to movement and fully automatic that can aim and fire then swivel and fire again in eye-blink! This is what we are talking about, here.”

To be continued...