The Jade Warrior Read online

  This time the quote did not work. The smile did not work. The famous Blade charm did not work. Zoe turned her face away from his.

  "I think we had best not forget it, Richard. The nightmare, yes. You are probably right and it was only that. I am a little fool and there is no other woman named Taleen. It is an odd name, though. To imagine, dream up, even in a nightmare!"

  Even the best, the sweetest, of them have nasty claws.

  Blade sighed and closed his eyes against the moonlight, plucked a stalk of heather and chewed on it, and silently goddamned Lord L and all the boffins, and computers, and J and M16A, and especially damned himself as far back as Oxford for having let himself be recruited there. He damned the concept of duty and knew he could never refute it. Most especially he damned, to the nethermost regions of the darkest pit, the Official Secrets Act. There was never any release from it. Not ever. Even if duty and country and decency did not deter - the Act did. They had you forever. You opened your mouth once, one faint whisper, and they hung you. Even J would do it. And J loved him like a son.

  Zoe was speaking quietly. "Until a few months ago, Richard, you were asking me to marry you."

  And so he had been. He had loved her then and he loved her now. He gritted his teeth and was silent. The gulls fluttered on their ledge. The moon sailed away to adventure. Blade waited. He might yet get out of this one, but it was going to be a near thing. Christ! He didn't want to lose this woman.

  "I wouldn't at first," she went on, "because of a number of things. There was no rush, I didn't know very much about you, and I wasn't sure if I loved you enough for marriage. Then, when I was sure, and loved you desperately, you stopped asking. Just like that." Blade groaned aloud.

  Quickly she leaned to kiss his cheek. Her lips were chill and in her voice was a subtle note of change as she said: "Poor darling. Does it hurt so much?"

  She was not, he knew, alluding to any physical pain. She had her lovely little sharp talons ha him now and she was going to rend a little, just to even matters up.

  "You disappear for long periods of time, Richard. You never give me any excuses, I'll say that for you. You just disappear and then come back with strange marks and scars on you, and an odd look in your eye, and you walk in and expect me to pick right up where we left off. And I do. I always have, so far. I hop right into bed and I love it. But I can't love it forever, you know. I'm a woman. I want to get married and have children and have a husband I see every day. And every night. You won't even tell me what you really do for a living!"

  Blade squinted up at her and made the effort. "Come off it, Zoe. You know what I..."

  She put a cool hand over his lips. "Bureau of Economic Planning. Whitehall."

  It was a new cover, one that J had dreamed up since the computer experiments began.

  "I asked about your real job, Richard. That Bureau thing is only what they call a cover in the thrillers. I've looked into it. Father has friends, I have friends, and all our friends have friends. It wasn't so hard, really. You have got an office in Whitehall, and a pretty little thing as a secretary, and you spend about one hour a week there, signing papers that mean nothing."

  Blade closed his eyes again. Somewhere a cuckoo sang a last sad parting note. Wait until J heard about this! The plumbing was leaking. It had, of course, been a hasty setup.

  Zoe leaned to kiss him softly on the mouth. Her lips were warm again. "Dick. Sweetheart. If you are some sort of secret agent, doing some sort of dreadfully mysterious and dangerous work, why don't you just simply tell me? Just one word. I'll understand and never ask another question."

  Hah!

  "I can't tell you," he said. "I can't tell you anything at all."

  "Not even yes or no?"

  "Not anything."

  There was silence. The cuckoo cried a last time. Zoe was leaning over him, her marvelous taut breasts touching his face.

  "All right," Zoe said at last. "Will you marry me, then? Right away. I love you so much that I'll settle for just that. Marry me and I'll try my best not to be a hindrance to you in whatever it is you do."

  "I can't marry you."

  When the computer thing began they voided his old Official Secrets Act and had made him sign a new one - with a special codicil. No marriage. J was the best security man in all Europe and he did not trust bedsprings, even connubial ones.

  Zoe drew away from him. "You can't marry me? Or won't marry me?"

  "Can't. I..."

  They heard the phone ringing in the cottage then, a hundred yards back from the cliff, shrill and angry in the quietness.

  Zoe stood up abruptly and starting brushing off her skirt. "I'm not expecting a call."

  "I am. Come on. I'll carry you." Blade snatched her up and ran down the path, carrying her as effortlessly as a man carries a kitten. There was a four-step stile just at the turnoff to the cottage and he took it in stride, vaulting the high stone like a thoroughbred at the National.

  Zoe cried out. "You fool. You'll cripple both of us!" Ordinarily she would have loved it. There was no particular hurry. Blade knew the phone would keep ringing. It did.

  The phone was in the bedroom. Blade flung Zoe on the bed in a flurry of skirts and long bare legs and went to answer it. It was an ordinary black phone with no scrambler attachment. "Hello."

  "Hello, dear boy. How are things?" J's tone was bland and calm as the Channel a hundred yards away. He sounded as if he were about to invite Blade to tea the next day.

  "Things might be a little better," Blade said. He glanced at Zoe on the bed. She had arranged her skirt and was regarding him with an odd little smile, her chin cupped in her hand. A reclining Mona Lisa.

  "My dear fellow," said J, "I hope I haven't interrupted anything." J sounded as though he actually meant it.

  "Only a blazing quarrel, sir. Nothing to worry about. What is it? Is the deal going through?"

  "It is," said J. "First thing in the morning. Can you be at your office in Whitehall to sign the necessary papers? Quite early?"

  "Right, sir. I'll be there." He hung up. Blade went to a closet to get his light suitcase, very conscious of Zoe's dark eyes on him.

  "Off again, darling?"

  He nodded, still without looking at her, and began to toss things into the suitcase. He hadn't brought much down from London this time.

  "When shall I see you again?"

  At last he could be honest. "I don't know. And I'm not being evasive, Zoe. I just have no way of knowing when I will see you again."

  He was about to add - perhaps not ever, but cut it off in time. That would be cruel. She loved him. She was going to imagine things anyway, but at least they would be in the realm of ordinary human fears. Bad enough. Tell her he was going into a new dimension, with only a fifty-fifty chance of ever getting back, and she would go mad. Or think he was. And anyway there was the ACT.

  Blade said: "I have to do a little job. I can't say when it will be finished."

  "Dick!"

  He turned and she was holding out her arms to him, her eyes moist and her mouth trembling. He went to her. It was like one of those beautifully done scenes in the silent movies when no word is spoken and no shred of meaning lost.

  She pulled him down on top of her. He took her tenderly, then with a rising lust and ardent savagery, matched by her own, until the peak was reached and they could be tender again.

  Blade did not tarry. He left her crumpled and pale and completed, weeping a little, and went away.

  He entered London with the dawn. He drove straight to the Tower - J had meant him to read Tower for Whitehall - and found J waiting for him by the site of the old Water Gate. J was wearing a Burberry against the morning chill and smoking his pipe. The harsh morning light made him look older then sixty, and the sacs under his eyes were a flaccid purple.

  Two burly Special Branch types were waiting for them near a postern. As they headed for it Blade looked at the head of M16A and asked, "There is no possible way out of the Official Secrets Act, sir? Ev
er?"

  J's eyes were compassionate above their fleshy bags. In a tired voice he said, "But of course there is, my dear boy. Death."

  The Special Branch men took them down a long ramp and into a tunnel that emerged in a maze of subbasements and, finally, to the bronze elevator door that Blade remembered so well. Even J was not permitted beyond this point when an X-Dimension experiment was GO.

  They shook hands briefly. J looked as weary, and worried, as Blade had ever seen him. He had little to say.

  "Good luck, my boy. Seems strange to say this - where you're going - but don't worry about things here. You've signed all the proper papers and your affairs are in order. I'll take care of everything in the event..."

  They were standing a little aside from the armed guards, waiting for the elevator to come up. Blade smiled at his boss and half whispered, "I've been thinking about that, sir. In the event - I'll just be a non-person, won't I? That should cause a sweat over at Somerset House."

  It was an effort, more than anything, to cheer the old chap up a bit. Blade had never seen him looking so miserable.

  J took him seriously. "It will be arranged, my boy. It will be taken care of. Here's your lift. Good-bye."

  Ten minutes later Richard Blade, wearing only the usual loincloth, followed Lord Leighton into the master computer room. The hunchbacked old scientist, in a soiled white smock, hobbled on polio-ruined legs through a maze of lesser computers. Blade, with a feeling of some revulsion, listened to the song of the future: One-oh - one - oh - one-oh-one-oh - . Binary logic. Be-bop-be-bop-be-bop-be-bop - . Milliseconds that would soon be nanoseconds. One billionth of a second. Spinning magnetic drums and tiny bulbs flashing GO-GO-GO-GO.

  It was most certainly GO. They entered the small room where the dimensional computer waited like a gray crackled Moloch. Blade had not been in this room since his first trip through the computer. It had not changed. There were the thousands of multicolored wires running through portholes into the penetrailia of the vast machine. There was the small square of floor covered with rubberized fabric. There was the glass booth and the chair that always reminded Blade of an electric chair.

  And yet everything had changed. Lord L, as he applied tar-smelling ointment to Blade's huge body, waved a fragile hand at the monster.

  "Completely rebuilt. Radical changes. The old one was only sixth generation - this one is at least eight. Skipped one, you see."

  Blade, who knew that conventional computers were only in the third generation, was impressed. This crippled old genius was already five generations ahead of the rest of the world in cybernetics. That in itself, with all its implications, should get England back in the race. Was this trip really necessary?

  He was in the chair now and the old man was carefully taping the shiny electrodes to Blade's flesh. They were the size of a shilling and shaped like a cobra's head.

  Lord Leighton finished the job and flashed his tawny eyes at Blade. "You're nervous. Much more so than the first time out. Afraid?"

  Blade was not a liar. "Yes, sir. A bit. The first trip was an error. It happened so fast I had no time to anticipate. I hadn't had time to tense up and I didn't know where I was going."

  Lord Leighton patted his shoulder and said, with perfect logic, "You don't know where you're going this time, either. Do you now? But don't let it worry you, my boy. I have made the most complex calculations and the matter is now quite proved out. I'll have you back all in good time. In the meantime you must remember - make no conscious effort to remember! The memory molecule will take care of all that. Ready?"

  "As ever I'll be," said Blade grimly. "Get on with it, then."

  Lord Leighton closed a switch.

  The first time there had been pain. Great slashing scarlet pain. This time there was no pain, only a huge and relentless hand pressing him beneath tons of water. He could not breathe and it did not matter. He did not need to breathe. He was hurtling through a vacuum filled with thunder. Silent thunder that he felt but could not hear.

  Richard Blade began to disintegrate. He watched the process with a cold part of his brain that did not care. He felt nothing. He was not interested. He was bored with it all. He saw his hands fall off and his feet detach. His head left his body, which by now was impaled on an icicle the size of the Empire State building. His head circled the body, which was still coming apart, like the planes after King Kong. His belly had split now and his viscera were coming out like pink and blue ribbons and getting tangled in the buzzing planes.

  He saw the fist coming. A fist the size of the world. Blade's floating head could not duck. It could only wait He smiled. What did it matter? It was only a fist. The size of the world.

  The fist slammed into him and at last there was pain.

  Chapter Two

  Richard Blade lay for a time, face down, on rocks that were still hot. Hot from a sun that had passed its zenith so long ago that now dark shadows lapped his naked body. He lay unmoving, without a tremor, scarcely breathing. He was in X-Dimension once more and there would be danger. Wherever he was, whatever it was, there was danger. He must begin the slow and difficult process of orientation. He was allowed no mistakes.

  Without moving his head he examined the terrain immediately before him, and to both sides. Blade had tremendous peripheral vision - one of the many reasons he had survived so long in the murderous game of espionage - and he saw that he was in a cup-shaped depression. Lying on sun-heated rock and surrounded by a ring of tall jagged boulders.

  The rock beneath him was lightly dusted with sand. He gathered some in his fingers and brought it close to his eyes. Black. Fine and black.

  Wind gusted through the rocky bowl, sandblasting his eyes and face and enormous rugged body. Borne on the wind was sound - a rising and ferocious din of battle. It could be nothing else. Blade had known battle and he recognized the cries and curses of men trying to kill each other. And yet another sound! He put his ear to the rock and listened intently. Horses. Many hundreds, or thousands, of horses careening across the earth not far away.

  Now trumpets, brazen and haunting on the wind that scoured him. Trumpets and a new high screaming of frenzied men. Men in pain. Men dying. Men defeated. Men victorious.

  WHOOMPPl A new sound. A gun. By the sound of it a giant cannon of some sort. It had a deep, hollow, bell-like sound that Blade had never heard before.

  For the moment he judged himself safe. It was time to see as well as hear. He crawled on hands and knees to the barricade of tall rearing boulders, going against the wind that still howled in his little shelter. He found a crevice in the rocks and peered cautiously out.

  Blade had marvelous sense of direction, and he placed himself immediately in relation to the battle raging beneath him on a broad and far-flung plain. He was a mile to the rear of the fighting and he reckoned his elevation at about two hundred feet. For a man with Blade's eyesight every detail was plain. He began to study the frenetic bloody scene that unrolled beneath him like some vast panoramic painting.

  A mile beyond his vantage point a great wall undulated along the horizon like a yellow snake. Blade drew in his breath and shrugged his big shoulders in admiration. He was impressed. That wall must be fifty feet high, broad enough for four horsemen to ride abreast, and it had no end. It stretched away to either side as far as Blade's keen eyes could see. It simply vanished into distance.

  Before a sector of the wall nearest Blade the fighting raged most fiercely. Hordes of horsemen raced back and forth before the wall, firing arrows from peculiarly short bows, all the time screaming in a high savagery that set Blade's teeth on edge. Bad tactics, though. What could horsemen hope to achieve against the wall?

  "Like trying to kill an elephant with an air gun," he muttered to himself. What could they hope to gain.

  A moment later he saw. The attackers were trying to taunt the defenders into a sortie. Blade smiled. Surely they would not be fools enough to—

  They were. He watched, incredulous, as a huge gate in the wall swu
ng open. Horsemen and men on foot rushed out. The attackers screamed in triumph and charged in. The two forces met with a clangorous shock that made Blade wince, even at his distance.

  The melee was brief and bloody. Men and horses went down in scarlet heaps. Spears and arrows arced and glinted in the fading light - there was a nacreous tint to the air now - and there was no quarter given. Men killed and were killed in the act of killing.

  A gutted horse, riderless, broke away and galloped within bowshot of the hidden Blade. It was a small sturdy beast with a wild mane and very long hair. Just beyond Blade's vantage the horse stopped, and began to graze on sparse grass growing from the black earth.

  Farther down the wall a new horde of attackers were trying to raise scaling ladders. They were on foot, hundreds of them, rushing in with long narrow ladders and covered by the fire of bowmen. The defenders on the wall greeted them with spears and arrows and heavy stones. Great cauldrons of boiling oil were poured down on the few ladders that went up. The attack broke and retreated. The party that had sortied out was now also retreating. It was continually attacked by the charging horsemen. The defenders fought their way back into the gate, covered by murderous spear and arrow fire, and boiling oil, and at last the ponderous gate swung shut.

  Blade saw the gun. His eyes widened. It was enormous. He had never seen anything like this gun. He guessed the muzzle to be six feet across. It must be fifty feet long. Hundreds of men were tugging it up a ramp behind the wall.

  Blade watched with something akin to awe. It was one hell of an impressive gun, yes, but how did they expect to hit anything with it? It was tilted at an impossible angle and it was not even aimed at the attackers' camp, a vast cluster of black tents off to Blade's right.

  A moment later he understood. They were firing the huge gun for effect.

  Whoommph - Boinggg—

  The muzzle flash was tremendous. Great clouds of black smoke billowed up and cloaked the wall and the defenders. Blade, a little amused now, saw the projectile leave the huge maw of the cannon and begin to sail. Toward him.