Space 1999 - The Time Fighters Read online

  AT OPPOSITE POLES

  OF TIME AND SPACE

  A freak Space Warp sends Koenig’s Eagle ship hurtling into the unknown, leaving the Moon Base light years behind...

  The Commander is confronted with a bevy of sadistic beauties out for more than his skin...

  Back on the Moon Maya’s overloaded mind wreaks havoc amongst the Alphans. In the throes of a psycho-molecular breakdown, she unleashes a succession of hideous monsters to rampage across the Base...

  Then the Psychon’s salvation arrives but Dorzak is the prisoner of Space goddess Sahala, and Carter is under her spell...

  SPACE: 1999

  THE TIME FIGHTERS

  A Star Original

  Carter’s image on the screen vibrated alarmingly and his mouth fell slack as though he were trying to speak. But his words were drowned out in a cacophony of shrieks and screams of terror which came over the loudspeaker.

  Helena shrank away in fear as the walls and floor continued to shake. The beds and instruments in the Medical Centre seemed to tilt and run together, and she lost her orientation and crumpled to the floor. From somewhere among the chaotic scene Ben Vincent loomed over her, staggering about. Screaming and shouting, he too finally fell out of her view.

  Not only the Medical Centre was vibrating; the entire Base was. It was shaking apart...

  Michael Butterworth

  SPACE 1999

  THE TIME FIGHTERS

  A STAR BOOK

  published by

  the Paperback Division of

  W.H. ALLEN & Co. Ltd.

  A Star Book

  Published in 1977

  by the Paperback Division of

  W. H. Allen & Co. Ltd

  A Howard and Wyndham Company

  123 King Street, London W6 9JG

  Copyright © ITC – Incorporated Television Company Ltd

  This novelization copyright © Michael Butterworth 1977

  Jacket and illustrations courtesy of ITC

  Printed in Great Britain by

  Cox & Wyman Ltd., London, Reading and Fakenham

  ISBN 0 352 39607 5

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  CHAPTER ONE

  A pale grey space ship hung in the star-massed gulf that surrounded the Moon.

  Its tender skin was ruptured and torn – jagged petals of metal burst out all over it like macabre flowers blossoming in the wan light.

  It seemed to hang perfectly motionless in the maze of stars, yet in fact it hurtled through space as fast as the Runaway Moon. It was a victim of the lone, killing meteorites and the tenfold other perils that lay in its path.

  It had appeared mysteriously from out of nowhere. The Alphan Base of the lunar surface had scanned only the cold, imperceptible passage of the stars and the swirling banks of elemental gasses and dust. Abruptly its sensors had picked up the UFO. The sighting had taken the stranded Alphan population completely by surprise. John Koenig, Commander of the Base, and Tony Verdeschi, Security Chief, had mounted an immediate expedition to discover the secret of the strange craft.

  The wreck hung in front of their Eagle Ship, its wounds of unknown battle gaping obscenely at them. There was no life on board – the remote-controlled Alphan probes, sensitive to the bioplasmic auras that surround living matter had told them this. It offered them no apparent threat, yet... it had to be explored. Its question had to be answered. Perhaps in its lifeless, secret heart lay the mystery of intergalactic travel – the technology that would enable them to return to their beloved Earth. Perhaps the dead ship was from Earth. Perhaps...

  It had lain in space for centuries; this much at least was apparent. Whoever had manned it had perished centuries ago. But Time meant nothing to those who possessed the knowledge of star travel. A million, billion years could elapse; Earth could have died a thousand times; it would still be possible to return.

  Koenig felt his blood quicken with hope – and worry – as they drew close to it and he prepared to give the order to dock. He glanced questioningly at Tony Verdeschi, the only Alphan other than himself whose life he had risked on the mission. The Security Chief looked tense. He had his fair share of personal problems right now, and this was partly why he had been chosen. Maya, his girlfriend and the Moon Base’s Scientific Officer, had fallen critically ill some days ago and so far she showed no sign of recovery. He had been grief stricken and he needed to do something to take his mind off her. Koenig had also chosen him because his particular skills were indispensable on such a potentially dangerous mission.

  ‘We’re steady,’ Verdeschi told him in response to his gaze. He read from a panel of instruments in front of his control seat. ‘We’re armed to the teeth and all our guns are trained on it, just in case.’ He smiled sardonically. ‘But we can’t do anything about the possibility of an unstable Time Warp.’

  Koenig nodded grimly. The dark-haired Italian could be relied upon to operate accurately and sensibly. The worrying factor wasn’t him. It wasn’t even the hypothetical electronic antagonist that might lurk on board the derelict. The worry was that if they weren’t careful or lucky, they could easily find themselves disappearing through the freak temporal crack that must have ejected the UFO.

  Time Warps weren’t uncommon along the celestial highways and byways. The continuous formation of anti-matter super stars – the so-called Black Holes – resulted in many such compensatory disruptions in the normally stable Space/Time mesh. The good thing was that the Universe was so vast, and Mankind so infinitesimal by comparison, that the likelihood of direct encounters with such faults was thankfully low. Nevertheless, the Moon Base had encountered its fair share since being ripped from Earth orbit in A.D. 1999.

  If they and their ship were unlucky enough to encounter a Time Warp head on, then they would have no protection against being flung through the fault into another Time, perhaps even into another Universe, and separated forever from their fellow Human Beings on the Moon.

  The wreck drifted closer. Its image of loneliness and desolation filled the Eagle’s tiny video screen. The reassuring banks of humming, clicking equipment that crowded round about the two pilots supplied no solace now to the haunting thoughts of Death that they could not keep from creeping into their minds.

  Inside the Psychon woman’s head, the tragedy had already occurred.

  Time had become mixed up.

  Memories had become realities as she plunged through the psychic Time Warp that had suddenly consumed her. Now she was lost in the Past, unaware that she had ever led any other existence.

  Her mind had stuck at the time she had been wrenched from her home planet.

  It had returned her to her last memories of Mentor, her father, and the dead world of her ancestors that he had so desperately tried to re-create. She had been unwittingly instrumental in helping him to steal the lives of other beings from other worlds that he and his bio-machine had needed to complete his self-assigned task.

  He had intended only good...

  Then Koenig and the Alphans came. Mentor had drawn them into his trap and tried to use them also in his well-intending, misguided scheme. But the Alphans had been too clever. They had outwitted him and revealed to her the awful truth about her own father.

  Her father had been mad...

  She could no longer be taken in by his deceitful tales that the Life Force that he stole was given willingly by the beings who owned it for the glory
of Psychon..

  She had been brought roughly out of her sheltered childhood that her father had provided for her. The Alphans had destroyed her father’s dreams. They had destroyed the machine that he had given his own life to build – the machine that was to resurrect Psychon.

  And the planet had begun to boil...

  Then it had begun to explode, unable to exist now that the machinery that had held it together had been damaged...

  Boiling flows of lava ran down from the barren mountain slopes. Gaping cracks appeared in the planet’s crust as the fearful plasma beneath had forced its way up and the cleansing, flickering tongues of flame had snaked evilly out...

  She screamed.

  Her innocence had gone.

  The monster that had lurked in her childhood had appeared and it had begun to devour her father...

  ‘No, father, don’t do it!’ She shook her head from side to side on the sweat-soaked pillow.

  At her bedside stood the unhappy figures of Dr Helena Russell and Dr Ben Vincent.

  Helena looked anguished. ‘Every time I try some new medication, she gets delirious. I can’t understand it.’ She reached down and put her hand on Maya’s forehead. ‘She’s completely gone to the world. She doesn’t know we’re here... she doesn’t know anything except that...’ She broke off as a sudden thought occurred to her. ‘Maybe that’s it; maybe her mind never came to terms with what happened to her... maybe it has to relive it...’

  She withdrew her hand and looked despairingly at her second-in-command.

  Ben Vincent shook his head, equally at a loss to explain. They had tried everything. They had gone over every possible diagnosis. Nothing seemed to fit.

  The truth was, despite the fact that Maya had been with them for well over a year, they still knew next to nothing about her miraculous body, least of all how to mend it. Maya had never once suffered anything more serious than a mild Psychon equivalent of a Human’s common cold.

  They could only stare in frustration at the deranged patient who lay in front of them.

  ‘We’ve got to leave Psychon, father...!’ she moaned. ‘We can’t stay here... the planet is boiling...’ Her forehead creased into lines of acute anxiety. ‘It’s going to explode!’ she shrieked. ‘COME WITH ME! DON’T STAY!’

  She rolled violently about in the bed, throwing off the covers. Helena was galvanized into action and reached down to her again. She gripped her shoulders. ‘Maya, it’s all right... Ssh, it’s all right, Maya.’

  The distressed figure took no notice.

  ‘It’s no use,’ Ben Vincent commented. ‘She can’t hear you. She...’ He broke off suddenly, noticing a change that had taken place in Maya’s eyes. Instead of staring feverishly and sightlessly out at them, they were now flickering madly around the Medical Centre. She had stopped crying out and the grip of the delirium seemed to be abating.

  ‘She’s coming round...!’ Helena shouted, overjoyed. ‘After three days she’s coming round! It’s the first sign we’ve had that she can be cured...’

  Maya looked glassily up at them, her skin pale and drawn, her lips dried with foam. She shuddered. ‘I’ve had such terrible visions...’ she whispered. They bent down to catch her words. ‘... flames...’

  ‘It’s all right now, you’re all right,’ Ben Vincent said reassuringly to her. ‘We’ll soon have you round. You’ve got a very high fever,’ he added, seeing that she was struggling to understand what had happened to her. ‘You’ll be all right as soon as we can bring it down. Is there anything you want?’

  Her eyes closed with exhaustion. Her mouth opened slowly. ‘I’m afraid...’ she said, scarcely audible. She clutched at Helena. ‘I’m afraid, Helena. Where’s Tony... I want Tony...’ Her head lolled to one side and her eyes closed.

  Helena squeezed her. ‘He’ll be back soon, don’t worry.’

  The figure went completely still.

  ‘She’s asleep, thank God,’ Helena said, rising. She turned to Vincent. ‘Ben, I’m worried too... about Koenig and Verdeschi. Something’s wrong...’

  She moved falteringly towards the Medical Centre monitor and touched a button. Instinct told her that in some yet-to-be discovered way, Maya’s illness was not just illness.

  Alan Carter’s cheerful features immediately appeared on the screen. One of the key Eagle Pilots, he was at present working on the ground, helping to monitor the Survey Eagle. At the back of him was the out-of-focus blur of the computer banks in the Command Centre. His friendly grin vanished and he frowned when he saw the Doctor’s distress.

  ‘Everything okay?’ he asked.

  She shook her head. ‘Maya’s just the same. Alan, would you contact Eagle One? Ask them to return as soon as possible. I’m worried about Maya.’

  He nodded. ‘Will do...’ He turned off-screen to give orders to Sahn, one of the Alphan Computer Operators, but he kept the channel with Helena open, sensing that she needed to be kept linked-in. ‘Sahn, would you get Eagle One on the Big Screen and open a channel.’

  Helena waited tensely, listening to the tinny voices of the Command Centre personnel in the background off-screen, doing her bidding. Eventually she heard Sahn’s voice. They were making contact.

  ‘Moon Base Alpha calling Commander Koenig... Come in please.’

  ‘Go ahead Alpha,’ Koenig’s disembodied voice replied.

  Carter’s face looked down at his console top. Dutifully, he began to speak. ‘John, we’d like an E.T.A. on your return. Helena is worried...’

  ‘Tell her not to worry. Everything is fine so far. We’ll return after we board the deri and...’

  A sudden, violent shaking began to rock the Medical Centre.

  Koenig’s voice ceased abruptly.

  Carter’s image on the screen vibrated alarmingly and his mouth fell slack as though he were trying to speak. But his words were drowned out in a cacophony of shrieks and screams of terror which came over the loudspeaker.

  Helena shrank away in fear as the walls and floor continued to shake. The beds and instruments in the Medical Centre seemed to tilt and run together, and she lost her orientation and crumpled to the floor. From somewhere among the chaotic scene Ben Vincent loomed over her, staggering about. Screaming and shouting, he too finally fell out of her view.

  Not only the Medical Centre was vibrating; the entire Base was. It was shaking apart.

  Perplexed, Verdeschi stared at the trembling, blurred outline of Carter trying to re-establish itself on the Pilot Section monitor.

  ‘What the hell’s going on...?’ he demanded irritably, partly at it and partly at Koenig, who was observing the screen with equal puzzlement at his side.

  ‘It’s not an electronic malfunction.’ Koenig checked a reading from the print-out on his console in front of him. He looked alarmed. ‘Give me a shot of Alpha on the console monitor.’

  Verdeschi lunged at a button, and their eyes flicked pensively towards a badly-resolved picture of the Moon Base which appeared on the second screen. The scene was captured by the ship’s own powerful zoom cameras and its quality could not possibly have been affected by any electronic or physical interference emanating from the Moon. Yet the ghostly outbuildings of the Base sprawled out on the lunar surface like an anaemic starfish. Almost buried in the darkness of the universal night, they were visibly shaking. More than that, the entire bleak lunar surface that had been their home world was convulsing.

  Koenig turned quickly back to the section monitor and confronted Carter’s fragmented features. ‘Alan...!’ he yelled. ‘Come in, Alan!’

  There was no response.

  He reached over Verdeschi and punched more buttons. The picture of the imperilled Moon Base disappeared. It was replaced with a shot of the complete Moon.

  The dark, scarred lump of rock showed up against the myriad stars and galaxies. It looked as motionless and death-inspiring as the derelict star ship, and yet it too was hurtling through the vacuum. It was only visible because of the stars that its bulk obliterated, and becaus
e of the burning pendant of light on its top right-hand sector.

  It was like a black, malign cancer, un-illuminated by its parent sun and cast roughly adrift from the stellar family it had once belonged to. Yet it was their home; it was their only chance of survival. And the two spacemen saw that it too was quaking.

  It seemed to be on the verge of breaking up.

  As they watched it with horrified, pleading expressions on their faces, it shimmered out of existence.

  Its black, jagged mass vanished, and the ubiquitous stars that it concealed now blazed out, filling the screen with a fierce, mocking brilliance.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Medical Centre walls and ceiling, the only part of the big Alphan hospital complex that was visible to Maya where she lay on her bed, seemed to career around violently. Her bed jumped beneath her and began jerking its way across the floor.

  Immediately, the darkness returned. The delirium that she had fought off claimed her with a fresh vengeance. The subconscious phobias that normally only pervaded her dreams now began to manifest themselves again in a horrifyingly gruesome enactment of her last days with Mentor.

  She found herself in the Grove of Psyche – the room in the subterranean stronghold deep beneath the surface of Psychon where her Father had kept the bio-computer. The detestable figure of Koenig, who was a stranger to her then, was smashing the delicate tubes of the computer and releasing the precious fluids of its heart. He was attacked by the crazed Mentor, desperately trying to resalvage the bits and pieces of his life’s work. Maya stood by and watched, helpless to intervene. She damned herself a thousand times for her part in the drama. Believing that Mentor would be ultimately saved she had deceived him, enabling Koenig and the Alphans to escape from their imprisonment. She had deceived him for his own good, to put a stop to his misguided butchery of living beings.

  In the nightmare, she watched in anguish as the computer began to die, and Psychon began to crumble and boil. The Grove began to disintegrate. Cracks appeared in the walls and a gaping vent appeared in the floor. Tongues of flame licked up from the planet’s bowels and began to burn the figures. As he had promised, the determined Alphan Commander turned his attention to Mentor, trying to save him, but her father refused to leave the Grove. He stood amid the flames, in his robes of glory, touching the remains of shattered Psyche, realizing now that his end had come. There was no purpose in his living, she saw, and he had to go doyen with his creation. His face grew calm and creased with parental concern for her. It was gleaming with sweat caused by the heat of the flames and haloed by the burning brightness.