The Witches of Karres

a passage for itself through them…

That wasn’t the worst of it.

“You saw what happened to the side of the vault?” the captain asked unsteadily.

They’d seen it. “Burned out!” Vezzarn said, white-faced. “High intensity — a combat beam! It’d take that. It’s an old war robot he’s got with him, skipper. You can’t stop a thing like that… What do we do now?” The last was a frightened squeal.

* * *

Laes Yango suggested, via intercom from the storage, that surrender was the logical move.

“Perhaps you don’t fully understand the nature of my pet,” he told the captain. “It’s been in my possession for fifteen years. It killed over eighty of my men while we were taking the ship it guarded, and would have killed me if I had not cut one of the devices that controlled it from the hand of the lordling whose property it had been. It knew then who its new master was. It’s a killing machine, sir! It was made to be one. The Sheem Assassin. Your hand weapons can’t harm it. And it has long since learned to obey my voice as well as its guiding instruments…”

The captain didn’t reply. The last of the war robots were supposed to have been destroyed centuries before, and the deadly art of their construction lost. But Vezzarn had been right. The thing that beamed its way out of the vault must be such a machine. None of them doubted what Yango was telling them.

They had some time left. No more time than the Agandar could help — and the robot undoubtedly was burning out the storage door while he’d been speaking to them. The door was massive but not designed to stand up under the kind of assault that had ruptured the vault from within. The two would be out of the storage quickly enough.

But they couldn’t reach the control section immediately then. The ship’s full emergency circuits had flashed into action seconds after Vezzarn’s frantic question — layers of overlapping battle-steel slid into position, sealing the Venture’s interior into ten air-tight compartments. At least four of those multiple layers of the toughest workable material known lay between the control room and the storage along any approach Yango might choose to take. They probably wouldn’t stop a war robot indefinitely; but neither would they melt at the first lick of high intensity energy beams. And the captain had opened the intercom system all over the ship. That should give them some audible warning of the degree of progress the robot was making.

Otherwise there seemed to be little he could do. The activating device he’d taken from Yango when the robot was stored in the vault was not where he’d locked it away. So the Agandar had discovered it on looking around after he’d knocked the four of them out. When the captain searched him, it wasn’t on his person. But he hadn’t needed it. There was a ring on his forefinger he’d been able to reach in spite of the handcuffs; and the ring was another control instrument. The Assassin had come awake in the vault and done the rest, including burning off its master’s bonds.

It made no difference now where the other device was stored away on the ship. They couldn’t leave the section to look for it without opening the emergency walls.

And if they had it, the captain thought, it wasn’t likely they’d be able to wrest control of the robot away from the Agandar. Yango, at any rate, did not appear to be worrying about the possibility…

SMALL PERSON, announced the vatch, THIS IS THE TEST — THE SITUATION THAT WILL DETERMINE YOUR QUALITY! THERE IS A WAY TO SURVIVE. IF YOU DO NOT FIND IT, MY INTEREST AND YOUR DREAM EXISTENCE END TOGETHER -

The captain looked quickly over at Vezzarn and Hulik. But their faces showed they’d heard nothing of what that great, ghostly wind-voice had seemed to be saying. Of course — it was meant for him.

He’d switched off the intercom connection with Yango moments before. “Any ideas?” he asked now.

“Skipper,” Vezzarn told him, jaw quivering, “I think we’d better surrender — while he’ll still let us!”

Hulik was shaking her head. “That man is the Agandar!” she said. “If we do surrender, we don’t live long. Except for Dani. He’ll squeeze from us whatever we can tell him, and stop when he has nothing left to work on.”

“We’d have a chance!” Vezzarn argued shakily. “A chance. What else can we do? We can’t stop a war robot — and there’s nowhere to run from it!”

Hulik said to the captain, “I was told you might be a Karres witch. Are you?”

“No,” said the captain.

“I thought not. But that child is?”

“Yes.”

“And she’s asleep and we can’t wake her up!” Hulik shrugged resignedly. Her face was strained and white. “It would take something like magic to save us now, I think!”

The captain grunted, reached over the desk and eased in the atmosphere drive. “Perhaps not,” he said. “We may have to abandon ship. I’m going down.”

The Venture went sliding out of orbit, turning towards the reddish dusk of the silent planet.

* * *

Vezzarn had all the veteran spacer’s ingrained horror of exchanging the life-giving enclosure of his ship for anything but the equally familiar security of a civilized port or a spacesuit. He began arguing again, torn between terrors; and there was no time to argue. The captain took out his gun, placed it on the desk beside him.

“Vezzarn!” he said; and Vezzarn subsided. “If you want to surrender,” the captain told him, “you’ll get the chance. We’ll lock you in one of those cabins over there and leave you for Yango and the robot to find.”

“Well—” Vezzarn began unhappily.

“If you don’t want that,” the captain continued, “start following orders.”

“I’ll follow orders, skipper,” Vezzarn decided with hardly a pause.

“Then remember one thing…” The captain tapped the gun casually. “If Yango starts talking to us again, I’m the only one who answers!”

“Right, Sir!” Vezzarn said, eying the gun.

“Good. Get busy on the surface analyzers and see if you can find out anything worth knowing about this place. Miss do Eldel, you’ve got good hearing, I think—”

“Excellent hearing, Captain!” Hulik assured him.

“The intercom is yours. Make sure reception amplification stays at peak. Compartment E is the storage. Anything you hear from there is good news. D is bad news — they’ll be through one emergency wall and on their way here. Then we’ll know we have to get out and how much time we have to do it. G is drive section of the engine room. Don’t know why Yango should want to go down there, but he could. The other compartments don’t count at the moment. You have that?”

Hulik acknowledged she did. The captain returned his attention to the Venture and the world she was approaching. Vezzarn hadn’t let out any immediate howls at the analyzers, so at least they weren’t dropping into the pit of cold poison the surface might have been from its appearance. The lifeboat blister was in the storage compartment; so was the ship’s single work spacesuit. Not a chance to get to either of those… The planetary atmosphere below appeared almost cloudless. Red half-light, black shadows along the ranges, lengthening as the meridian moved away behind them…

How far could he trust the vatch? Not at all, he thought. He should act as if he’d heard none of that spooky background commentary. But the vatch, capricious, unpredictable, immensely powerful — not sane by this universe’s standards — would remain a potential factor here. Which might aid or destroy them.

Let nothing surprise you, he warned himself. The immediate range of choice was very narrow. If the compartment walls didn’t hold, they had to leave the ship. If the walls held, they’d remain here, at emergency readiness, until Goth awoke. But the Agandar’s frustrated fury would matter no more than his monster then — unless Yango’s attention turned on the strongbox in the vault. No telling what might happen… but that was borrowing trouble! Another factor, in any case, was that while Goth remained unconscious, Yango would want her to stay alive. All the pirate’s hopes were based on that now. It should limit his actions to some extent…