Day of the Dogs Read online

  He kicked away from Johnny's vehicle and let the momentum carry him back to his own ketch. The third ketch from the Louis L'Amour was now some billions of kilometres away, with HMK and Slim Drago piloting it in search of the next recruit for their team. Their posse. Middenface smiled for a moment, but the smile faded as soon as he thought of Johnny lying there in the control room of the ketch, strapped to the gravity couch like a man awaiting a lethal injection.

  For a moment he wished that he and Johnny were the ones who'd gone in search of Ray/Bel, and that it was HMK and Slim Drago who were going to attempt the prison break.

  But you couldn't send a woman and a simpleton on a mission like that. There was no way round it. This was the way things had to be. He took one last look at Johnny's ketch, a needle-nosed vehicle with black and yellow stripes that gave it something of the look of a giant wasp with its wings folded, floating in sharp relief against the bilious green clouds of Queen Victoria below. Then he turned to look at his own ketch, hanging above him, floating slowly closer, with the bulk of the Louis L'Amour suspended in space above it, filling the black infinite sky.

  Middenface docked with his ketch, activated the airlock and made his way through to the control room. There he sat down on a gravity couch, just like the one Johnny was strapped to, watching the forward viewing screen. He suddenly remembered something and tapped the communications console. Johnny Alpha's voice came over the speakers. "What is it?"

  "I was so busy sulking I forgot to say good luck."

  "Thanks. You'll remember the signal to come and get me?"

  "I'm hardly likely to forget it, am I?" said Middenface.

  "Good. See you soon." Then, as Middenface watched, one of the wings of the wasp ignited in a ball of white flame as the engine exploded. Johnny's ketch tipped out of orbit and began its long crippled sliding fall towards the planet below.

  Johnny's plan worked.

  The staff at Queen Victoria saw the explosion in orbit and their computers correctly identified it as the terminal failure of a vehicle's engine. So when the vehicle itself was detected, falling through the atmosphere, it was regarded as a distressed traveller in need of rescue, rather than a suspicious intruder to be captured, detained and questioned.

  The crippled ketch fell through thousands of metres of atmosphere, protected from the searing, white heat of re-entry by its toughened, ceramic hull. Half a kilometre above the surface of the ocean Johnny deployed a couple of drag chutes to slow his descent, as though he'd been struggling to release them all the way down and only managed to at the last possible moment. The chutes reduced the ketch's momentum enough to stop it breaking up as it hit the surging vast waves of the muddy ocean, but the impact was still enough to knock Johnny unconscious, despite the gravity couch and all the padding Middenface had used to fill the control room. Johnny woke up out of a sick, giddy daze, forcing himself back to consciousness. He checked a chronometer and gasped with relief when he saw that he'd only been unconscious for a couple of minutes. The ketch was floating safely on the breast of the planet-spanning sea and any moment now the undersea penal colony would send vehicles to effect a rescue on the surface.

  That wouldn't do at all.

  Johnny hit the controls and cut free the drag chutes. On the stern screens he saw their billowing, white shapes with fringes of long cords attached to them. They floated away on the water like giant jellyfish. He felt an absurd pang at watching them go. It was like seeing old friends leave. After all, the chutes had saved his life.

  The ketch was floating sturdily in the uneven tossing of the ocean swell. Despite its damage it was perfectly seaworthy. In addition to being an interstellar runner, the craft was designed for both atmospheric and aquatic use. It could dive and manoeuvre under water. But that wasn't what Johnny had in mind.

  He took one last look at the parachutes floating away. Then he pressed the button that Middenface had secured to the arm of the gravity couch with gaffer tape. "It isn't pretty, but it's serviceable," he'd said. The serviceable button triggered an explosion deep in the belly of the ketch. Like the explosives that had blown the engine in orbit, it was one of the disc charges from the Big Crater Mine. Greta had provided them for the Strontium Dogs. Johnny had been amused that she charged him for them, instead of giving the explosives as a present. She'd given him a discount, though.

  The charge in the belly of the ketch had blown a hole in the hull that allowed seawater inside the engine room. The engine room was sealed off from the control room where Johnny sat by two bulkheads that were airtight. Johnny prayed that they were also watertight. After a few moments he could feel the attitude of the small vehicle changing. It was no longer buoyant, but was on its way to becoming a dead weight. Finally, when a critical threshold had been passed, the nose of the ship went straight up, the tail fins straight down, and it sank like a stone.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  AQUA ESCAPE

  In the desert night the square face of a fort shone. Charlie Yuletide stood in front of the mountain range, silhouetted against the fort, strumming his banjo and singing.

  "Women like a man who wrestles with danger, who'll risk his neck to rescue a stranger. So all the girls were sighin' when Johnny Alpha stepped into the lion's den..."

  "What astoundingly good luck you have, Mr Alpha," said Florien Lamarck, the chief warder and commander of the Queen Victoria Sub Aqua Penal Colony, wiping his haggard face with a linen napkin.

  "You mean surviving my drop from low orbit?" said Johnny.

  "No," said Lamarck. "Not that."

  "You mean ending up on the seabed near enough to your colony that you could come and pick me up?"

  "No," said Lamarck. "Not that either. I meant arriving on a Friday. Every other day of the week we have to eat fish in this godforsaken outpost. For obvious reasons. Living off the land and all that. Or, in this case, living off the ocean. But every Friday here at the Queen Victoria Penal Colony we allow ourselves the luxury of a little red meat."

  "Thank all the deities above," added Luis Nova-Cruz.

  Lamarck was a tall thin cadaverous man with thinning grey hair that exactly matched the colour of his watery eyes. He had large hands that manifested a perceptible tremor, which Johnny attributed to excessive consumption of alcohol or some other dangerous stimulant. Nova-Cruz on the other hand was short and fat with olive skin, gleaming brown eyes and an unruly head of thick, curly black hair. He was Lamarck's second in command. The two men and Johnny were sitting in a dining room of baronial splendour, equipped with a thick gleaming slab of polished wood for a table and elaborately carved chairs. A dazzling, white tablecloth didn't quite fit the table and therefore had been spread across it in a diamond shape. The table was covered with silver tureens and warming dishes, chunky silver cutlery and expensive china and heavy crystal decanters full of wine. Lamarck offered Johnny some wine from one of the decanters then refilled his own glass with trembling hands. Johnny noticed that he didn't offer any wine to Nova-Cruz. There was a definite undercurrent of hostility between the two men, although both of them had seemed delighted to meet Johnny.

  Johnny had briefly lost consciousness again when his vehicle plunged to the bottom of the sea. The ketch was designed to withstand such pressures and had remained watertight inside the sealed bulkheads that contained Johnny's control cockpit. He had sunk safely to the ocean floor, still strapped in his gravity couch, unconscious. But the considerable strain of water pressure at that extreme depth had squeezed the ketch like a nut in a cracker and the little vessel had begun to make distinct groaning noises as its carbon steel skeleton flexed, as though in the grip of a great fist. It was these eerie groaning noises that summoned Johnny back to consciousness. He had awoken in time to see divers from the penal colony approaching him in their white scuba suits, moving like ghosts through the green water.

  Johnny hurried to unstrap himself from the couch, grab a screwdriver and start puncturing all the plastic blocks of impact padding that had protected him. Then he
deflated them, packed them into a small mass and concealed them in the hold. Anybody who saw them might put two and two together and realise that the accident had been deliberately staged. When they were safely stashed away, he strapped himself back into the couch just in time to play possum as the divers began to burn their way through the hull to rescue him.

  He had then been sealed in a survival cocoon and towed back to the mini sub the divers had used. Still feigning unconsciousness, he was brought into the prison colony through the towering diamond shaped underwater airlock, given a cursory medical examination and a new set of clothing and then immediately invited to dinner with the two most senior officers in the colony, Lamarck and Nova-Cruz.

  Watching these two men, it struck Johnny that stuck in this distant outpost, the two men were starved for company. For fresh blood.

  The dining room they were sitting in was a long, low and had been decorated to look like a captain's cabin from the days of sailing ships. It even had fake portholes fastened onto the rough-hewn wooden walls. For the most part, though, the walls were decorated with stuffed fish of the most bizarre varieties Johnny had ever seen.

  Nova-Cruz caught the direction of his gaze. "Ah, I see you are admiring the denizens of the deep that we have caught and used to decorate our humble abode."

  "Humble abode?" snapped Lamarck. "I hope you're not referring to my private quarters in a slighting fashion."

  "No, of course not, commander," said Nova-Cruz smoothly.

  "No? It sounded to me as if you were."

  "Forgive me if I'm mistaken, commander," said Nova-Cruz in a charming and urbane voice, "but didn't you just a moment earlier refer to the colony as a 'godforsaken outpost'?"

  Lamarck simply ignored this comment and continued doggedly with his own tirade. "What precisely is so humble about this place?"

  "It was just a form of words, commander."

  "A very offensive one, if I may say so."

  "You certainly may say so, commander. However, if you have anything else to say to me I suggest you do so now, because I find I must be going."

  Lamarck's watery eyes hardened with rage. "What? You're leaving before I've served dinner? Before you've broken bread with our new guest?"

  Nova-Cruz turned to Johnny and bowed. "For that I am sincerely sorry, Mr Alpha. I shall speak to you another time and perhaps you'll even do me the honour of dining with me."

  "Sure," said Johnny.

  "Dining with you?" demanded Lamarck. "But he's dining with you now, you ill-mannered cur. Or at least he would be, if you weren't so unfailingly ill-mannered."

  Johnny could read anger in Nova-Cruz's dark eyes as he sat weathering this storm of abuse. But the small, fat man remained admirably composed. "I repeat, commander. My apologies. But I find I have quite lost my appetite and in any case I must now attend to my duties." He rose from the table, bowed to Johnny, snapped Lamarck a perfunctory salute, then strode out through the beaded curtain that separated the dining hall from the next room. Lamarck stared after him with undisguised hatred. Finally, the strands of the beaded curtain stopped swaying and he turned back to Johnny, making an obvious effort to compose himself.

  "I'm sorry for my subordinate's appalling manners, Mr Alpha."

  "No problem," said Johnny. It was clear to him in any case that Nova-Cruz had left the room because he couldn't stomach any more of his commanding officer. There was some kind of long-simmering resentment between the two men, but Johnny doubted he'd ever learn the cause of it. He had no intention of staying in this place long enough to find out.

  "What were we discussing before that lamentable cur spoiled our meal with his disgraceful behaviour? Oh yes. The fish on the walls." Lamarck stared at the mounted specimens for a moment, in the manner of a man looking upon something overwhelmingly familiar and trying to force himself to see it through fresh eyes. "Yes they are an ugly lot. Verily, monsters of the deep. But fortunately we do not have to eat any of them, or their brethren. Not tonight. Tonight it is good fresh meat." Lamarck chuckled happily and lifted one of the silver lids that sat on the table. Underneath it was a coffin-shaped wooden chopping board with a large slab of undercooked meat on it. Bloody juice from the meat gathered in a deep groove that ran around the rim of the chopping board.

  Johnny wondered where the hell you could get red meat like that from in a prison at the bottom of the sea. He decided he had no intention of finding out.

  "You are indeed fortunate, Mr Alpha," continued Lamarck. He picked up a long and extremely sharp knife and studied the piece of meat, calculating the best angle of attack. Then he leaned forward and prodded the roast with one long pale index finger. "You know, I think this could do with a moment more resting before we carve it."

  He set the knife down on the table with an audible clank and picked up a large silver ladle instead. "I believe I shall serve the soup first. That would be a civilised thing to do, wouldn't it?"

  "Sure," said Johnny. Lamarck lifted the lid off a soup tureen and a puff of steam wafted out of it. He stirred the soup thoughtfully, making a slopping sound.

  "Tell me, Mr Alpha, where were you travelling to when you had that dreadful and unfortunate accident with your engine? What was your destination?"

  "Here," said Johnny.

  "Here? You were travelling here? You mean to somewhere else in this planetary system?"

  "No, to right here. To this prison, where I'm sitting with you now."

  Lamarck chuckled. "What an extraordinary thing to say. Come, come, Mr Alpha. You're teasing me. Why would you want to come to this desolate place?"

  "So I can arrange the escape of one of your inmates. You know, a good old fashioned jail break."

  Lamarck laughed uproariously. "Better and better. You certainly are a card, Mr Alpha. I'm tremendously glad to have your company at my table. That foul dog Nova-Cruz doesn't know what he's missing. Tell me more about this 'jail break' of yours."

  "Not much to tell really. I calculated the trajectory and sabotaged my own engine so I'd end up crashing on the ocean floor just about at the limits of reach for a rescue team from your penal colony."

  Lamarck made no noise, but he was rocking back and forth with silent mirth. After a moment he managed to recover himself enough to knuckle tears of merriment from his eyes. "Ah, Mr Alpha, you are a tonic. But why crash at the limits of reach, as you put it when, with your obvious gift for precision crash-landing you could have set down just outside our gates?"

  "Because I didn't think it was a good idea for me to be too close when the reactor on my ship goes critical and blows like a nuclear bomb."

  Lamarck sighed and leaned back in his chair, idly stirring the soup with the silver ladle as he spoke. "Yes, I must say that's a good reason for parking your craft some distance away. But it's not, if you don't mind me saying so, quite as good as the rest of your story."

  "No?" said Johnny.

  "No, I fear. The rest of your story had a certain zany plausibility, or no, better call it authenticity, because while it possessed a certain dramatic purity it still remained utterly implausible. But this is a less successful, though still thoroughly amusing jape. I mean, why would you have a nuclear reactor going critical on your ship? A ketch of that designation doesn't even have a reactor on it."

  "No, you're right," said Johnny. "That's why we had to take one off the starship and put it on board especially."

  Lamarck slapped his legs and chortled again. "All right, all right, very good. That makes sense. But nevertheless, why should it go critical?"

  "Because I set it to do just that."

  "Just for the hell of it?" said Lamarck cheerfully.

  "No, because a nuclear explosion will provide a useful diversion."

  "For this 'jail break' of yours?"

  "No, for my friend who'll be bringing his own ketch down here to pick us up. Me and the prisoner I'm going to free."

  "I see. Yes. That does tie up most of the loose ends. Except for the most important ones of course."


  "Like what?"

  "Such as, how are you going to find the prisoner in this huge maze-like penal colony. And how are you going to set them free from their maximum security cell?"

  "I wasn't exactly sure of my plan when I arrived. I decided I would improvise on the basis of any opportunities that presented themselves and, that being the case, I now think I'll get you to do it," said Johnny.

  "Me?"

  "Sure," said Johnny. "As chief warden you have access to the database of all your prisoners, and you'll also have the clearance for releasing the one I want."

  "Mmm. Yes. True. But what about the other enormous loose end? Why am I going to do this for you? How are you going to threaten me? Because presumably some form of physical threat or intimidation would be essential. And you haven't provided one. Come, come, Mr Alpha, these little details are all-important. Where are you going to find a weapon to make me do your bidding? After all, you were thoroughly searched when we brought you into the colony, weren't you? Mr Alpha... What are you doing with that knife, Mr Alpha? Put it down. Put it down. Please put the knife down..."

  The Strontium Dog called Stella Dysh had a cell in the isolation wing of the penal colony. Access to it was through a series of concrete tunnels with guard posts and gun emplacements at every junction. However, the designers of the colony had included a number of short cuts and concealed access passages, which allowed the warden to keep an eye on his staff. Travelling through these passages, with Lamarck leading the way, Johnny was able to make extremely good time. Lamarck's initial defiant resistance had crumbled as soon as Johnny looked him in the eyes.

  Johnny's mutation had made his eyes like two tiny windows into some strange hell. When he turned his full gaze on someone, few men could resist the fierce weird flames that blazed there.