The Trojan Horse, Chapter Three

On Mars, warning-klaxons were adding their blare to the noise in the beaming-station and the lurid light from the Feeder Ray’s furnace was leaping and guttering like fire under a gale. “What in the two moons are they hitting us with?” Iskira exclaimed. “Nothing should be able to disrupt field coherency so fast!”

Gages were dropping to zero all along the Professor’s terminal. “It’s no use!” she cried hopelessly. “Power reserves already gone. Integrity of the particle matrix...negligible. We cannot sustain the Feeder Ray!”

“One chance remains for us, Iskira,” declared Dr. Mendelssohn. He was busily at work, throwing switches and adjusting settings without once turning in his chair to face her. “One option. One decision that must be made.”

“Irwin, what are you doing?” Iskira demanded sharply. The fear that had earlier chilled her heart was suddenly back again like never before.

“Deleting the changes you made to the Feeder Ray’s functional parameters before we left,” came back the reply, and there was no mistaking the old quality in his tone of voice now. Iskira screamed aloud: “Irwin, no! It will revert to a beam of pure destructive force! None of us will survive!”

“It is the only way, my dear!” Mendelssohn returned, and suddenly he was bellowing out the words as if in triumph. “You see this as clearly as I, for I taught you well. The Solidity, and Earth, and Mars, all in one fell swoop...this is war, and war must inevitably end thus!”

Iskira rose and gripped the back of her chair in both hands.

“Mutually assured destruction!” Dr. Mendelssohn declaimed, his staring eyes and hideous grin etched in the light of the console, his voice rising to screeching laughter amid the sirens’ endless howl. “My life’s work finds its glorious culmination! Only a scientist of true genius would be prepared to confront this eventuality! I’ll show you at last that that’s what I am, Iskira! I’ll show you you married the wrong one! I’ll – ”

Then Mendelssohn’s terminal exploded into glass and steel and fire, as his former student flung her chair two-handed into its heart. The Doctor was bowled over backward by the force and the flying fragments, while Iskira and a stupefied Bendigo scrambled for shelter as the resultant system-wide short-out ravaged the beaming-station’s interior. Blast after devastating blast spared no item of equipment, killing the lights and quelling at last the furnace’s tortured undulations. Outside in the desert, the coruscating summit of the needle-shaped tower dimmed, fluctuated, and then giving up a final fading streak of dim reddish hue vanished to nothing against the black. The Feeder Ray was no more.

Ahead of the Henry Martin a route to the Control Centre had been cleared. Even knowing they were already too late the Collective members on deck set off at full sail, leaving the others to finish off the last of the mob. In what felt like mere seconds they had swept skyward to what remained of the towering building’s roof, and were coming about broadside to board the makeshift open-air workshop where the four robots waited.

Gala flew from the bridge and her cutlass of shining light whirled in a ring, cleaving the steel chest of Technomancer and striking cataracts of sparks from him as he fell. Electromagnet thrust out his power-arm, violently propelling every nearby metallic object straight at the intruders, but Degris’s psionic shield deflected the barrage while Joe, fighting alongside his old brother-in-arms, countered with flames that drove the enemy back. Some deft targeting from Lisa clogged pink gum into the twin nozzles of Conduit’s weapons and glued Breakpoint’s four feet to the floor before he could spring, at which a hail of energy-bolts and artillery-fire from Guy and The Chancellor swiftly brought the computerized quartet to a strategic decision. Technomancer summoned up a fog to cover their escape, and the robots were gone into the waning night.

Joe made to pursue them but Gala cried: “Let them go! They’ve achieved their objective, and that’s given us more than enough to deal with.”

Degris meanwhile was freeing Carmilla. “Thanks, big guy,” she murmured to him as he helped her down to her feet. Then she turned to survey her rescuers.

“Some friendly faces, at least,” Carmilla declared, though not without reserve. “And trust me, I do appreciate the save. What’s more, no matter what else I might think about the Collective, there’s no denying we’re on the same mission these days. So how would you feel about signing up a girl who’s suddenly found herself with nowhere else to go?”

“We would be thankful for more reasons than one, Carmilla,” Joe replied earnestly. “For you will surely have received Neetra’s telepathic message, and the Collective must learn at once all that you know of this coming storm. Only then can we hope to prevail, in the confrontation that even now is upon us!”

Emergency backup lights cast their dim glow across the ruins of Iskira Neetkins’s desperate gambit. On the floor of the beaming-station, surrounded by black-shadowed obelisks of scrapped and burnt machinery shrouded in a pall of smoke, knelt she and Dr. Mendelssohn in each other’s arms. He was clinging to her as might a helpless child.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered tearfully to him. “Why didn’t I think? Your old problem, the trauma that has plagued your life...and I, knowing more of this than anyone else, threw you into a war, placed a weapon of mass destruction in your very hands...”

Iskira choked. “How can I have been so blind?” she asked herself in despair. “How can I have been so heartless...?”

And when Mendelssohn looked back at her dumbly, his face barely registering comprehension of his circumstances, Iskira broke down at last. She fell upon his neck, weeping out her shame and self-reproach.

“Learned ones...” Bendigo began ominously. On the monitor beside him, the dart-shaped blips and the red circle that represented Mars were all but overlapping.

“Indeed, Bendigo,” Iskira said with a sigh, rising to her feet. “The Feeder Ray must not be allowed to fall into the Solidity’s clutches.”

With one hand she reached for a console and tapped in the self-destruct sequence, then assisted by Bendigo helped Dr. Mendelssohn to stand. Bearing him between them they hurried to their all-terrain vehicle which was parked outside, and made off with the greatest possible haste.

They were many miles into the rolling red wilderness when the beaming-station went up, crumbling to ash and fragments of mortar. Iskira, at the wheel with the two men seated behind, turned her head for a moment to look back. The deadly technology of the Feeder Ray was safe from a foe who might otherwise have used it against them, and in that at least, Iskira had reason to be glad. Nevertheless the Solidity interceptors would arrive at the blast-site, and imminently, and Iskira had no way of covering the ATV’s tracks. She was certain to be followed, and out here in the pitiless desert, leagues from any Martian city with the semi-comatose Dr. Mendelssohn in tow and only Bendigo to protect her, Iskira did not like to speculate on what her chances for survival now were.

Dawn was breaking over Nottingham. The six Collective members and their new recruit Carmilla stood beneath a cold sky of ever-lightening blue in which the stars were going out one by one.

“The implications of this,” Gala began, slowly shaking her head. “Now that we finally know the reason Dimension Borg came to that other galaxy...it’s staggering. Who could have imagined the prophecy has a bearing on so many other worlds, so far distant? What it means for our mission, Joe, I can’t even begin to grasp. But this Solidity’s here to destroy the Earth, so everything else will have to wait until their immediate threat is dealt with.”

Joe nodded his grim agreement. “A threat made all the more dire by an impostor loyal to Dimension Borg, who deceived all of us these many months,” he declared ruefully. “Some scheming robot in the guise of Blaster-Track Commander...never did we guess the traitor might be he!”

“Traitors are usually the last people you expect, Joe,” Carmilla remarked. She spoke in a tone well below freezing-point, and had fixed an unforgiving glare on her addressee and Gala beside him.

At that moment the Henry Martin loomed back into view off the side of the Control Centre, answering Gala’s psychic summons and bringing with it the other seven Collective members from the street below. Their arrival and disembarkation did little to smooth over the impasse between Carmilla and the two leaders, but now that the team was together again there were far more pressing matters before them.

It was The Chancellor who put the situation into words. “Our enemies will descend upon us,” he announced succinctly, “and we must get up there to them. So we meet in the middle.”

As boys, girls, men, women and extraterrestrials turned their eyes heavenward, facing the direction from which their ultimate challenge even now advanced, Gala turned to Carmilla.

“Welcome to the Collective, Miss Neetkins,” said she. “Here’s hoping you survive the experience.”

END OF CHAPTER THREE