The Fortress in Orion Page 2

  “Jesus H. Christ!” he exclaimed. “You’ve actually captured Michkag!”

  Cooper’s grin grew wider. “Well, we’ve finally managed to impress you.”

  “You’re damned right you have.”

  “A clever ruse,” said Cooper.

  “Are you trying to say that isn’t Michkag?” demanded Pretorius.

  “In a way.”

  “All right,” said Pretorius, stepping back and staring at Cooper. “What are you talking about?”

  “Well,” said Cooper, “that’s Michkag genetically.”

  “Explain!” demanded Pretorius.

  “The Democracy, at the cost of quite a few lives, has managed to steal a sample of General Michkag’s DNA from his own medics, and we've managed to clone him. That's what you're looking at—the clone. He's in a state of stasis right now, with language and history being fed into his brain—but he's been awake most of the time since we created him two years ago.” He paused and gave the unconscious clone a loving pat on the shoulder. “There is a Kabori psychologist named Djibmet who has ample reason to hate Michkag and the coalition he leads, and for the past two years, even since we created the clone, Djibmet has been teaching him everything else he needs to know—schooling him in Michkag's gestures, verbal inflections, everything he can teach him to help him pass as the real Michkag.”

  “Will he pass?” asked Pretorius.

  “We think so,” said Cooper. “Even as he lies there, he’s being fed tapes. Still, there’s only one way to find out.” He flashed Pretorius another grin. “That’s where you come in.”

  Pretorius stared at him but said nothing.

  “Your job will be to lead a team that will kidnap the real Michkag if you can, secretly assassinate him if you can’t, but in any event put our clone in his place, where he’ll misdirect the enemy’s forces and find some way to funnel vital information to the Democracy.

  Pretorius shook his head. “This is crazy. We won’t get within five light-years of Michkag’s headquarters. He’s better protected than our own leaders are.”

  “But he won’t be in his headquarters two months from now,” replied Cooper. “We’ve intercepted a coded message to the effect that he’ll be meeting with members of a federation of human rebels, trying to convince them to join his side. The meeting will take place at a fortress in Orion in two months. You have that long to prepare your team. You can select it from any officers or enlisted men in my command.”

  “Not a chance,” replied Pretorius. Cooper opened his mouth to object, but Pretorius held a hand up to silence hm. “I used your people the last three times, and there are parts of me scattered all the hell across the galaxy. If I go, I’ll pick my own team—and they probably won’t be members of the armed forces.”

  “That’s absolutely out of the question!”

  “Fine. Get yourself another boy. I’m going back to the rehab center.” Pretorius began walking to the airlift.

  “Damn it, Nathan, it’s got to be a military operation!”

  “Round up your own military team and good luck to you.”

  “I could court-martial you for refusing a direct order in wartime!”

  “Go ahead. I’ll be safer in jail than trying to kidnap or kill the most important general the enemy has.”

  Cooper stared at him for a long minute. “You really mean that, don’t you?”

  “I really do.”

  There was a long silence.

  “All right,” said Cooper at last.

  “All right, I can choose my team, or all right, you’re court-martialing me?” replied Pretorius.

  “Choose your fucking team!” growled Cooper, walking past him and heading to the airlift. “Don’t just stand there! You’ve only got two months to turn the tide of this goddamned war. Time to get to work!”

  2

  Pretorius sat on his couch, with his favorite symphony playing in the background. It was some four hours after he’d spoken to Cooper, his first night out of rehab.

  He sat perfectly still for half an hour, letting the music wash over him, trying to get used to the feel of his new body parts. Then he pressed his right forefinger against the chip that had been embedded in his left wrist, and an instant later the entire wall of the room became a computer screen.

  “Orion,” he said, and the Orion constellation appeared.

  “Please tell me it’s not in the Rigel or Betelgeuse systems,” he muttered.

  “It’s not in the Rigel or Betelgeuse system, Nathan,” replied the computer obediently.

  “Thanks a heap,” growled Pretorius. “And call me Colonel.

  You want to show me where the damned thing is?”

  “What damned thing would that be?” asked the computer.

  “The goddamned fortress!” snapped Pretorius. “Cooper said it was programmed into you while I was in the hospital.”

  A bleak, barren, dust-covered brown world appeared.

  “That’s it?” asked Pretorius, frowning.

  “Yes.”

  “So where’s the fortress?”

  “Beneath the ground,” said the computer. “No member of the armed forces has seen it, so I cannot image it for you.”

  “Can you pinpoint its location?”

  “I just did. It is on the fourth planet of the star known to the military as Petrus.”

  “Can you pinpoint it any more accurately?”

  “Not without further data,” replied the computer.

  “I assume it’s not an oxygen world?”

  “You are correct.”

  “Wonderful,” muttered Pretorius.

  “I am glad you are pleased.”

  “You go to hell.”

  “I have been instructed by your superior to ignore that command,” replied the machine.

  Pretorius glared at the screen for a long moment, then got up, poured himself a glass of Alphard brandy, and began pacing restlessly around the room.

  “I don’t suppose anyone has told you what kind of armaments and defenses the damned planet or even the fortress has?” he said at last.

  “No.”

  “Or how big the fortress is?”

  “No.”

  He leaned back, closed his eyes, and considered his options. Finally he sat up again.

  “All right,” he said. “If we don’t know what’s awaiting us there, and we’re going to have to approach it world by world, some hostile, some neutral, hardly any of them friendly, I’m going to have to put together a very eclectic team. And a small team. I approach with a ship than can hold too many, they’ll blow us apart while we’re still approaching the damned planet, before I can even start lying about why we’re there.” Suddenly he shrugged. “What the hell. If he thought he could approach it with a large military ship, he wouldn’t have tossed the damned job into my lap.”

  He drained his glass, then uttered a curse.

  “Is something wrong?” asked the computer.

  “I’m supposed to sip that stuff,” answered Pretorius. “I got caught up in the problem and drained it, and it burned all the way down.”

  The computer offered no comment.

  “All right,” said Pretorius. “I’m going to rattle off a series of names, people I’ve either used before or at least seen in action. I want you to show me a holograph of each and a readout telling me how old they are, where they are now, if they’ve received any disabling wounds since I programmed their bios into you, if they’ve recovered from any such wounds—and wipe any who are deceased. Got it?”

  “Yes, Nathan.”

  “That’s ‘Yes, Colonel,’ damn it.”

  “Yes, Colonel Damn It.”

  Pretorius glared at his wrist and wondered how soon they could give him a new wrist and hand if he cut this one off just above the embedded chip. Finally he rattled off forty names, studying each as the computer produced a holograph and a readout for each.

  When it was done, he leaned back again and shook his head. “Nine of them dead,” he said. “Tha
t’s hard to believe. These were the best.”

  “I can produce copies of the death certificates if necessary,” offered the computer.

  “Definitely not necessary,” said Pretorius. He closed his eyes, lost in thought, for another long moment. “Okay,” he said at last. “I’m off to bed. You’ve done your job. Tomorrow I’ll start doing mine.”

  3A

  Pretorius walked down the midway, past the barkers, the hucksters, the hints of sinful pleasures within the old-fashioned canvas tents. There were strippers of both human sexes and three other sexes that had very little in common with humanity. There were half a hundred games of skill and even more games of chance. There were trained animals from a dozen exotic worlds, their number of limbs differing wildly.

  There were grifters, pickpockets, hookers, everything you’d expect to find in a carnival except a freak show. With over two hundred known sentient races in the galaxy and hundreds more presumed out there somewhere, one entity’s freak was another’s lifemate.

  “Kill a Pizo!” cried a barker, holding up some wicked-looking spears. “Three throws for fifty credits!”

  Pretorius grinned and continued walking. He’d seen Pizos in action. They looked reasonably normal: humanoid bipeds with two eyes, two ears, a purple tint to their skins, and totally without hair, down, feathers, or any other natural covering—and they could absorb just about anything from a dagger to a bullet to a laser blast with absolutely no ill effects.

  “You sure you want to walk away, fella?” said the human barker, grabbing his arm. “For you, we’ll make it four throws.”

  “Keep your spears,” said Pretorius. “I’ll pay you fifty credits if you’ll let me feed him a candy bar.”

  “Get outta here!” snarled the barker.

  Pretorius grinned. Not much killed Pizos, but contact with chocolate or sugar did it instantly.

  He continued walking, looking at the various signs, and finally he saw the one he’d been searching for: The Galaxy’s Strongest Creature.

  And in smaller type, just beneath it: Is he Man, Alien or Machine?

  Pretorius paid his admission and entered the tent. Only eight other spectators were there, two humans, four Robalians, and two whose races he couldn’t identify.

  Standing on a makeshift stage was a man, or rather, thought Pretorius, what was left of a man. He wore only a loincloth. His head was bald, and his eyes seemed to be entirely pupil and iris, with no white showing. He had gleaming metal prosthetic arms, heavy prosthetic legs made of a heavier metal, and his left ear was also artificial.

  “Okay, Samson,” said a voice over a speaker system, “show ’em what you can do.”

  The man walked up to a pair of metal weights, each emblazed with “500 pounds,” inserted his artificial hands into grips at the top of each, and lifted them until both arms were extended straight out from his body. There was mild applause, and he lowered the weights to the ground.

  “Now,” continued the voice, “if any member of the audience can lift even one of those weights, the management will refund double your money to every member of the audience.”

  One of the Robalians climbed up onto the stage, tried to lift a weight, grunting ferociously, and gave up after about half a minute.

  The mostly prosthetic strongman offered four more demonstrations of his prowess, and then the show was over, and the audience walked out.

  All except Pretorius.

  “Not bad, Felix,” he said. “Not bad at all.”

  The strongman peered into the darkness. “I’m Sampson,” he said.

  “You’re Felix Ortega, and you’re wasting yourself here,” said Pretorius.

  The strongman peered more intently, then straightened up. “Nathan,” he said. “What the hell are you doing here? Have you come to gloat?”

  “I’ve come to offer you work,” replied Pretorius. “Real work, not this bullshit stuff.”

  “I got this way from what you call real work,” replied Ortega. “And then,” he added bitterly, “when it was over, the military wouldn’t take me back. They gave me a bunch of money and medals and basically told me to go away. I think it made them uncomfortable to look at me.”

  “Nonsense,” said Pretorius. “You’re as good as new. Better, even. Could the old Felix Ortega lift a thousand pounds? And what do those eyes see? Infrared, telescopic?”

  “Both, plus microscopic, and I can also see well into the ultraviolet spectrum.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “The problem is that I’m not a man anymore,” said Ortega. “I’m a goddamned machine.”

  Pretorius shook his head. “You’re an enhanced man, and the military was crazy to let you go. What’s in your head and in your heart is still Felix Ortega. The rest is just improvements.”

  “Easy for you to say,” replied Ortega.

  “You want a list of every body part I’ve had replaced?”

  Ortega stared at him for a moment. “No.”

  “So do you want to hear my deal?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ortega. “Why me?”

  “Because with your enhancements, that’s four or five normal men and women I don’t have to take.”

  “Normal men,” repeated Ortega bitterly.

  “That’s right,” said Pretorius. “And thanks to science, you’re a superior man. Maybe even a superman.”

  “I’d rather not be.”

  “I’d rather be happily married, working at a desk, going home every night, and looking forward to being a grandfather,” replied Pretorius. “But there’s a war on, and if we do our job, maybe some other poor bastard can enjoy those simple pleasures a few years from now.”

  “How long will this take?” asked Ortega.

  Pretorius grinned. “The sales pitch or the assignment?”

  “The assignment.”

  “Three months at the outside. If we haven’t accomplished it by then, we’re dead.”

  Ortega was silent for a long moment, then finally nodded his head. “I’ll do it.”

  “Good!” said Pretorius. “I’m glad to have you aboard.”

  “You didn’t ask my price.”

  Pretorius stared at him. “Well?” he said at last.

  “When it’s over, if we’re still alive, I want a body and a pair of eyes that’ll pass for normal.”

  3B

  Pretorius walked down the long line of cells. Finally the officer who was leading him came to a halt.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” she said, “but I’ll have to frisk you first.”

  “I turned over my weapon at the front desk.”

  “Even so, sir,” she said apologetically. “You have no idea how dangerous this prisoner is.”

  Yes, I do, thought Pretorius, as he extended his arms out and stood for the frisk.

  “You’re sure you wouldn’t rather communicate with her via holographic video?”

  “I’m sure.”

  The officer gave him a Well, you’ve been warned shrug, proceeded another fifteen feet, and faced the prisoner in the cell.

  “Stand back,” she said harshly and waited until her order had been obeyed. Then she drew her burner, held it on the prisoner, and ordered the cell door to slide open. Pretorius stepped through, and the door immediately closed behind him.

  “Hello, Snake,” he said.

  The inmate, a slender woman barely five feet tall, with her hair clipped as short as his, walked over and gave him a hug.

  “Hi, Nathan!” she said. “It’s good to see you again. Did you make my bail?”

  He shook his head. “There’s no bail, Snake. You were convicted, remember?”

  She frowned. “If you’re not here to spring me, use my real name.”

  He smiled. “Snake is your real name. Sally Kowalski is just the name the government knows you by.” He looked around the small cell. “You’re the best—or at least you were. There was almost no space you couldn’t slither through, no locked room you couldn’t break into or out of. How the hel
l did you ever wind up here?”

  “I trusted a man.”

  He shook his head. “You should have known what scumbags they can be.”

  “All except you, Nathan.”

  “How come you haven’t broken out of here?”

  “See the sink and the toilet?” she said, gesturing toward a corner. “No metal. Same with the bars, front and back. I don’t even have a hairpin.” She grimaced. “And the cell’s electrified, Damned hard to short it out with no metal.” She pointed to a camera that was mounted in the ceiling just outside her barred door. “Watch.” She walked across the call. The camera swiveled and followed her every move.

  “So they’ve finally build a Snake-proof jail,” said Pretorius.

  “Oh, I’ll find a way out,” she said. “It’s just taking a little time.”

  He shrugged. “Well, if that’s the way you want to get out . . .”

  “You got a better way?” she asked, suddenly alert.

  “It’s a possibility,” he said. He looked around the small cell. “I don’t know how you keep in shape in a place like this.”

  “Watch,” she said, twisting her body in ways he would have sworn no human could bend. “Satisfied?”

  “You’re still the best contortionist I ever saw,” he said.

  “Don’t need a whole lot of room to stay limber,” she replied. “Though I probably can’t run a four-minute mile these days.”

  “Could you ever?”

  She grinned. “It depended on who was after me.”

  Pretorius laughed aloud. “Damn, I’ve missed you, Snake!”

  “Enough to spring me from durance vile?”

  “That’s what I’m here to talk about.” He paused and pulled a small metallic cube out of his pocket. “Activate.” The cube suddenly glowed with power. “Okay, no one can monitor us now.”

  “You mean spy on us.”

  “Comes to the same damned thing in these surroundings.”

  “Okay.” She smiled at him. “Who do you want killed?”

  “Maybe no one.”

  “Robbed?”

  “Try not to get ahead of me,” said Pretorius.

  “Okay,” she said. “But every minute you drag this out is another minute I’m stuck in this goddamned cell.”