Chapter 4
Four followers were selected, and once they realized what it meant, Ressie-wise, they fought with demonic desperation. But each was brought in separately by the seventeen, and against the combined mental power of the Network they could not prevail. All four were nearly as advanced in Skill as the Circle members themselves.
Ash Medai brought the four together for a last meeting as they were about to leave Surcease. They stood before him, four dejected people, three women and one man.
“You know what you’re looking for,” the powerful man said. He was fully dressed this time, in the careless tattered fashion that had recently overtaken Surcease. The four followers, however, were meticulously clothed in highfashion travel apparel.
“The quickest way you can regain Ressies,” the man said to them, “is to search out all the people to whom this dead Bodyguard was sent. Don’t worry about any occurrences of the type of Shield that he raised against us; simply maintain your Network, and nothing can threaten you. But if you find someone with Skill beyond Shielding, Skill that might have trained those Shields, then you will kill that individual in the quickest way you can. Remain only long enough to discover if there are any others that can use Power. If so, kill them too. If there are too many for you, which I very much doubt, then contact us and we will send assistance. But our guess is that you will find one man or woman, and your four linked minds will be double the power to overcome such a one.”
The emaciated followers stared hungrily at the bulge of the pantaloons on the powerful man’s lower leg.
“And for heaven’s sake, eat and drink as much as you can,” Ash said. “Then, when you return, your Ressies ...”
But he did not have to finish. They all remembered what it had been like when they had first encountered a Ressie.
“And if you cannot conquer the one with Skill, and feel yourselves in danger,” he said with final grimness, “you can use this.” And he reached into a large pouch at his side and drew forth a machine that looked like a half-sized juggling club. The four stared at it.
“Yes,” Ash Medai said harshly, “a Skill jammer. You well remember the rebellion in our ranks that brought this hellish device into being. ‘Use Skill for proper purposes alone,’ the rebels said, as if we do otherwise. It was well that they were so few, and that we had the Surceasean Police under our control by that time so that we could destroy with unSkilled soldiery. Now we own the device.”
# # # # #
“I’m not sure we can undertake that kind of work,” the Nin Tova told Guteater. “We are personal Bodyguards; we do not function as a paramilitary force. We don’t have battleships or heavy weaponry at all.”
Guteater’s image was as clear as if he were sitting in front of her, instead of in his own office three hundred light-years away. He was a humanoid alien of a common type, more like a fat, upright weasel than a man. Guteater was, of course, only an approximation of his name, or title, or whatever it was.
“I am not talking about interstellar war, Guildmaster. The attackers are not highly organized, but they make the word ‘macho’ seem like ‘wimp,’” Guteater said in automatic translation. “They have their cruisers and light destroyers, but they use them only when attacked. That type of fighting is not the real thing, for them. They prefer to land and fan out and challenge every being they meet to one-on-one or small-group combat. Needless to say, they are very seldom defeated, although humanoids are resourceful enough to make it interesting for them.”
“Emperor Guteater,” the Nin said, “I would expect any humanoid to point grav cannon at these ‘attackers,’ whoever they are, and tell them to go away. Otherwise, they should call upon the Galactic Police to intervene.”
“They will not do so—but please, you need not call me by title. I am Emperor to my own forty planets with twenty-five races only, but not Emperor to yours, and I have no expansion in mind. What I want to say is that these aliens don’t seem understood by the Galactic Concourse. We ourselves know only rumors of the planets they have plundered—planets not able to use interspace, races without tachyonic science, which have simply disappeared. That the end result is the extinction of the other race is, again, only rumor; the Encyclopedia is silent on the matter.”
“What you allege is impossible,” the Nin said flatly. “Rumors, as you call them, will inevitably rise in priority in the Encyclopedia news channels if they are important enough, and certainly the death of races is plenty important.”
“One would think so,” the Emperor said, “but nevertheless the Encyclopedia is silent.”
The Nin regarded the purple robe that hid the Emperor’s ample physique. Parts of his throne were visible around the edges of the holographic transmission, and it seemed to be made of something like platinum or iridium.
She sighed. “So what you want me to do is to investigate an unknown race which doesn’t interest even the Galactic Police, and somehow keep that race away from you?’’
“Yes,” the Emperor said; there was a note of desperation in the translated voice. “We are few, a few races on a few worlds. But you humans occupy over four hundred thousand worlds, and we thought that you, as the most effective fighting force per individual in human space, could ... Look. My colleagues and I are convinced that we can persuade the Concourse eventually that the attackers have to be controlled. It is just a question of time, Guildmaster. You know that we are talking about four hundred thirty-some thousand intelligent races in the Concourse. Our problem will seem pretty insignificant in the face of the problems of a hundred billion worlds. But eventually we think that we can persuade the Police that what is happening out here is a menace to the peace and quiet of the galaxy as a whole. It is just our bad luck that they have hit one of the few underexplored Shroud areas, and have not impacted any Concourse races yet.”
The Nin sighed again. “Emperor Guteater,” she said, “there aren’t enough Bodyguards in the human universe to randomly explore the Shroud stars where you believe this unknown race to be.”
“Oh, but the race is known!” the Emperor said eagerly. “At least, we think it is the one. It ...’
The holographic image froze suddenly. The Nin frowned. She waited, and all at once the image went two-dimensional, like a television screen, and then just as suddenly popped out of existence altogether.
“What the devil?” said the Nin’s own holo image, a computer amalgam. “It’s never done that before.”
# # # # #
Asher faced his mission team—two humans and three aliens—in one of the training rooms of the school.
“Shields,” he said. Five Shields went up. One by one, Asher probed them.
The strongest by far was Clemmy’s.
“Dov. Harden that Shield. Center. Center.” With slowly increasing force, Asher bore down upon the Shield with his mind. He pressed, harder and harder.
“More concentration,” he said with voice and mind to Dov. “More no-mind.”
Dov’s glistening face relaxed slowly as he forgot about his body and put all his attention into concentrating on a single point within his skull. Physically it might have been located in the pineal gland at the center of his brain, but such is an analogy only.
“Good,” Asher said. It seemed to his pressing mind that he was encountering a globe made of solid diamond. When he had been an Apprentice in the October Guild, Asher would have been hard pressed to break through such a Shield. However, he had since been trained further by the Sculptor.
“Relax,” Asher said. Life came back into Dov’s freckled face. “Excellent, Dov. Remember how to do that. Later we will train under physical stress. Above all. remember how to forget that body that you love so much. Spimmon!”
The little Ghiuliduc tensed his mind, and Asher moved in on it.
Again, Asher was struck by the analogy of a pool of still water, which he thought of every time he encountered a Ghiuliduc mind.
But this time the water had turned to ice. This was a test of each of them as individuals, and Asher would not permit Spimmon and Nisha to link together this time.
Asher pressed. He had a technique for piercing the ice, but he would employ it only after he had explored the strength of the alien’s conventional Shield.
“Good ... good,” Asher said. His normal Apprentice attack was not breaking through. “Now concentrate, Spimmon, concentrate ...” Asher turned his mind into a lance of fire and plunged at the lake.
And the lance broke through. Spimmon stiffened and uttered a plaintive scream, then collapsed into a pile of quivering rods.
The others would have moved to help him, but Asher stopped them. “He is but stunned,” Asher said. “He will be back with us in a moment, and I will teach him further. Nisha!”
The olive-skinned alien’s tail moved restlessly, and he put force into his Shield. Again, Asher caught a thread of contempt in the Ekans’ mind, but it had been softened by his fight with Spimmon, and further sobered by the reality of Asher’s Skill-trained mind. Physically, Nisha Scalli still felt the absolute confidence that he could crush Asher Tye. But as a reasoning being, he knew that raw physical power was not the only ability in the universe.
Nisha had been distracted lately. There was growing in him the certainty that he already had all the answers that he had come for.
Asher pressed. There was strength there, but it was wobbly and uncertain. The alien had neglected Shield practice while working on physical development, Asher saw.
And so he hammered in. Not like a lance this time; instead, he smashed against the Shield as if he were a sledge striking stone.
The Shield shattered in a thousand fragments. Nisha’s eyes went blank, and like a tree, he toppled forward on his race.
“Adio-Gabutti,” Asher said. The Therd seemed to be racing him, although it was hard to tell. “Raise your Shield.”
“It is raised,” the acidic voice of the alien came. And then Asher found it, a glassy invisibility as transparent as glass, revealing behind it ...
Nothing.
Try as he might, Asher had still not been able to penetrate a Therd’s mind. In one key way, however, it made the Therd invaluable in any encounter with October. For if October Skill could not detect a Therd, then it could not directly attack one. A Therd’s mind could be hammered or lanced, but first the attacker would have to know that the Therd was there, and then cast blows all over the place until the Therd was hit.
WHAM! Asher smashed at Adio-Gabutti’s Shield, and it held. He hit it again, and it held.
“Excellent,” Asher said. He closed his eyes for further concentration, and ...
The Therd’s Shield was gone. Asher cast about with his mind, and ...
“Ooof!” he exploded, and staggered backward. The Therd had moved up on him and smashed him in the stomach with one of its tentacular arms.
Asher laughed. “Adio-Gabutti—very, very good!” For against hostile Skill, the Therd had realized that its Shield was a liability, enabling as it did the attacker to pinpoint its mind. The Therd had taken the logical step, and Asher knew that he had an apt student in the person of the ghastly yellow and writhing red-patched cone.
Clem ...
“Ahhhh!” Asher screamed. For something had seared the edges of his mind. He threw up his own Shield, and felt another burst of mental fire pour over it.
Then he opened his eyes, and was just in time. He side-stepped Clemmy’s hurtling heel and struck back with his right fist. But she had recovered instantly and was already out of reach.
WAUWMMMMMM! came her mental hammer blow. But with his mind, Asher reached out and grabbed her feet and upended her with a convulsive jerk. Her head came within an inch of impacting with shattering force on the ground.
“You advance,” Asher said to her, “but there is much yet to learn.”
She reached one arm toward him, and the others, recovering from their lesson, were astounded to see a sort of green aura form around the wrist, focus around the palm, and ...
A tremendous bolt of green fire leaped at Asher. He laughed, a mentally induced physical Shield between himself and the pouring flames, which cascaded off into nothingness.
“Bravo!” Asher said. “A perfectly focused Green Flame. But watch your head.” And he dropped her from his mental grasp.
Clemmy was ready. Her head was bent and she took the fall on her shoulders, letting the floor roll down her back, and then she came springing upright.
Perhaps she would have attacked him then, as would have been expected, but Asher uttered the Word. Hypnotically implanted, any October-trained Apprentice knew the Word, and Asher had made certain that Clemmy had internalized it early in her training. It was a Word that stopped all activity, ended mental and physical attack, bringing the hearer to a frozen standstill. October Adepts had used it to control their students. Now Asher used it the same way.
Clemmy froze. Her thin, strong body stiffened into immobility, and the life went out of her eyes.
Asher clapped his hands, and she started, conscious again, and ...
“No,” Asher said, laughing. “No attacking now. End of lesson.”
They all, Asher thought, are doing very, very well. But he was uneasy still. Someone with fair Skill had killed Randolph Tarney, and such use of Power would challenge to the limits any of his mission partners, and perhaps himself as well.
And still he felt that trace of contempt in Nisha Scalli’s mind.