THEIR MASTER

The calming voice was stretched out into an inhu scream. The damaged ship had gone into the jump.

The hallucinations were jagged and metallic, no doubt a result of the surroundings. Razor-sharp shards slice through tiny vulnerable figures as they scuttled through towering mazes of incredible pain. Steel jaws snapped and snarled and tore at naked flesh. Iron claws gouge1 and ripped, spikes impaled, and needles slid through genitals and eyeballs. All the time they were falling, down toward other waiting rows of knives and teeth. Perhaps it was the noise that was the worst. A screeching, ripping scream, surface against surface, that con stantly rose in pitch and volume assaulted the ears and seared through the mind. Where the surfaces touched, sheets of flame and burning gas spiraled upward, broiling flesh and brain into red, raw, blind horror. The universe was a hollow steel drum being constantly pounded by some hammer of the gods. Metal. Metal. The prisoners of the hallucinations were chained to the interior of that drum. The vibrations rattled loose their teeth and caved in their chest cavities, shaking apart their very molecular structure. Ears and eyes and noses were bleeding. Blood ran down between their legs. It was oozing from their every pore. Hot blood was everywhere. They could taste it, boiling and angry against the background of the ever-present metal. As they drowned in blood, a terrible laughter started, a laughter so angry and mocking that it seemed to be a summation of all previous pain.

"At least it was a short jump."

Hark opened his eyes. He was no longer one with the pain of everyone around him. He was himself again, strapped in, inside the dropcraft. There was acrid smoke in the air from fires that flickered somewhere outside, but everything was real. It was Renchett who had spoken. He had unsnapped his restraint cage and removed his helmet. He was standing in the central aisle with a look of pure madness on his face. Abruptly, his eyes rolled back into his head, his legs gave way, and he crumpled to the deck. The laughter was still going on. That, too, was real and right in the ship with them. Hark unsnapped his own cage and tried to stand. His legs threatened to let him down, but he willed them to work for him. He tongued a whiff of pure oxygen from his helmet, and he felt a little better. He walked unsteadily to where Renchett had fallen. He knelt beside him, feeling his suit for some sign of life.

"Is he breathing?"

Hark looked up. Rance was standing behind him. The topman had also taken off his helmet. He looked green, and there was blood caked around his nose.

Hark shook his head. "I can't tell."

"Take off your helmet; the air's okay."

Hark put his ear to Renchett's mouth.

"Yeah, he's breathing."

"Okay, we'll see about his sanity later. Let's take a look at the others. Who's doing that goddamn laughing?" "It's down that way."

The laugher was clearly beyond help. His eyes had the vacancy of someone who had retreated into his own distant world and was never coming out. Hark wondered if the trooper was doomed to go on living in the hallucination for the rest of his life. Or maybe he had just seen the whole terrible joke. Hark was relieved that the man was a stranger to him. The next man was quite dead. His helmet had filled with blood. Hark started in momentary horror at the dark red faceplate. Had they been sharing a collective hallucination? How was that possible? Some of the others were coming to life. Cages were being unsnapped, and men were trying to stand. Most were going through the angry confusion that followed any jump. Renchett opened his eyes. He looked as sane as he had ever been.

"We made it?"

"We made it so far."

The final total of casualties was two dead, one insane, and one catatonic. Rance ordered them left where they were.

"We've no time to bury the dead. First we have to find out what our own prospects of life are."

Once all the survivors were back to normal, Rance led them out of the dropcraft. As they emerged onto the hangar deck, the Anah 5 let out a rumbling roar that ended in a drawn-out sigh. It was as if a part of the ship had just died.

"We'll head into the interior of the ship and try and hook up with whoever else is left. I don't have a clue what we're going to find."

At first, all they could find was death. The first corridor they walked down was nothing more than a burned-out shell. The troopers had to pick their way through the remains of an entire nohan damage-control party who had fried inside their armor. Farther on they came across three dead sluicers, huddled together in positions of mutual protection. They must have been caught out by the jump and succumbed to the heart-stopping horror of the hallucinations. In the final moments of terror they had clawed their lightweight radiation suits to shreds.

"Looks like we got lucky, holing up in that dropcraft."

Rance didn't bother to point out that their survival might have had more to do with his own quick thinking than with luck. "Let's keep on going."

Right from the start, it was obvious that the ship had taken a terrible pounding. Although there was still air and gravity throughout the ship, the lights had gone in a number of sections. Small fires burned all over, and there were major conflagrations in some of the larger compartments. Flares of energy arced across breaks in cables and the gaps in ruptured ducts. The decks were littered with debris, and repeatedly the squad had to climb over tangled barriers of wreckage. Their first encounter with life was less than encouraging. The two e-vac crewmen were wandering aimlessly. No one was home behind their blank eyes. So when the strange voice came over the communicators, it brought both shock and a release of fear. There was at least some kind of authority. For all their rebellious anger, the troopers still craved someone to tell them what to do.

"All uninjured perso

"What the hell is that?"

Although the voice had been speaking in their language, it was definitely not human.

"Section eighty-two is median country."

Rance halted and faced the men. "I think I know what that was."

"You don't look too happy about it."

"Anybody know what the interpreters are?"

"Some kind of alien, right?"

"We never see them. I heard they were ugly suckers, kind of blue globs with tentacles."

"Is it true they can talk everyone's language?"

"They're supposed to be part instinctive linguists and part telepaths. Their function is interspecies communication. If one of them is issuing orders, there can't be too many of us left alive on this hulk."

Section 82 was just inside the ship's hull. Its center was a transparent fire-control dome. Although most of the equipment was burned out and the dome was badly scarred, it was still intact and airtight. When Rance's squad arrived, there was already quite a big gathering in the large circular area. It was a gathering that only a few days earlier they would not have envisioned even in their wildest dreams. Almost every species on the ship was represented, including a number of aliens that the men had never seen before. The atmosphere was set for humans, and three of the alien species present were contained in their sealed environmental enclosures. The trooper who had described the interpreters as blue globs with tentacles had been very close to the truth. There were three of them in their tank, floating in a soup of methane and ammonia. One side of their mobile tank was covered in a complex of communication equipment. The lone lantere was still in its battle armor, as were the pair of wormlike dauquoi. Another tank contained a dim,' constantly changing shape.

Hark whispered to Dyrkin. "You know what that is?"