Hitting the Target Read online

  The Science Officer drew himself up to his full, diminutive height and got a stubborn look on his pale, bespectacled face.

  “It doesn’t work like that.” He spoke almost primly. “All our equipment is set up to maintain the Barrier and to bring it back up when it flickers because of power failure. Which, regrettably, it does—far more often than we would like. So you see, I cannot shut it off.”

  “That’s a lie,” Mia said, speaking up to Trey’s surprise. She had been almost entirely silent since the Commandant had shown her dark history.

  “What do you mean?” he asked her. “How do you know?”

  “When they were bringing me over from the Republic to the South, I heard one of them tell the Commandant there was a ‘scheduled flicker’ and we had to hurry to make it on time,” she said. “So they do have a way of turning it off and on. He just doesn’t want to show you.” She nodded at the Science Officer who was looking paler than ever.

  “That’s a lie,” he muttered unconvincingly. “Who are you going to believe—me or a woman?”

  “I’ll take her word over yours any day. Even if she is a female,” Trey said dryly. “Now show me the damn controls or I’ll burn a hole through you and just set a charge and blow this entire room and all the equipment in it sky high.”

  Science Officer Hndlr looked like he wanted to protest again but when Trey motioned with his blaster he at last jerked his head in the direction of a small door at the end of the room.

  Trey followed him, walking past the rows of instrument banks which looked important but seemed to be of little interest to Hndlr. Placing his hand flat on the metal door, the Science Officer waited until a red light outlined his palm and fingers and then pushed it open.

  “The stuff outside is just the routine maintenance and power flow equipment,” he explained, when Trey gave him a questioning look. “This is the control room—where we actually turn the Great Barrier off and on.”

  Trey stepped into the room, making sure to keep Hndlr in front of him with his blaster pointed at the skinny back. What he saw was a surprisingly simple set-up. There was a desk with a large black console box sitting on it. The box had a stick-like lever which was currently pushed up to the “on” position. A large vidscreen, mounted on the wall opposite the desk, showed a clear picture of the Great Barrier and the guards who patrolled it. It reached up into the air, vast and blue and crackling with magneto-electric energy like a wave frozen forever at its highest peak.

  It was indeed an impressive sight. Trey had been obliged to fly right up out of the atmosphere to get over it so that it wouldn’t affect his ship’s instruments. Also, he noticed that the guards at the border all carried non-ferromagnetic weapons—there were a lot of copper pulse pistols evident. Obviously it wouldn’t do to have a loaded magnetic gun so close to the vast wall of blue energy.

  “That looks simple enough,” Trey remarked, eyeing the console box with the on/off lever.

  “It might look like anyone could turn the Barrier off and on, but I assure you, it is not true,” Hndlr said proudly. “The switch is keyed to my handprint alone. No other in the entire Republic can control the Barrier—well, other than the Commandant, that is,” he added.

  “I knew there was a reason I didn’t kill you,” Trey said, frowning. “So this was your job—sitting here and turning the Barrier off and on whenever the powers that be told you to?”

  “Yes.” The Science Officer straightened his shoulders. “The Ruling Council often scheduled flickers—both brief and prolonged. But I was allowed to turn it off and on as well—trying to catch as many prospective defectors as possible, you know.”

  “So you sat here and waited for people to try and get through the Barrier when it was down and then fried as many of them as you could?” Mia sounded horrified.

  “Well…not always.” Hndlr looked uncomfortable. “Sometimes we had orders to let an especially troublesome dissenter go free. Then I just had to turn off the Barrier and sit and watch as they ran across the No Man’s Land and went South.”

  “But most of the time you were frying people for fun?” Trey growled. “Just watching until they got up to the Barrier, then turning it off, then flipping it back on again as soon as they were in the middle so you could kill them?”

  Hndlr began to look positively pale.

  “It was my job,” he protested. “And besides, it was necessary. Defectors had to be taught a lesson! How else could others learn not to try to escape?”

  “You sick bastard,” Trey growled. He could just imagine the thin, pale Hndlr sitting here in the dark, surveying the Barrier on the view screen, flipping it off and on for fun and trying to fry as many people as he could like they were so many bugs in a giant insect zapper. And to think, he’d believed this male was innocent because his beast hadn’t smelled the torture chamber on him. This little bastard had probably killed more people than all the other guards put together!

  “I assure you, I was only doing my job,” Hndlr protested again. “Only doing what the Ruling Council ordered! It’s not my fault if the Barrier killed people—they shouldn’t have been trying to get out in the first place!”

  “Yes, Goddess forbid they should try to find a better way of life for themselves when they were in a living hell,” Trey growled sarcastically. “And you only killed them because your bosses said so. How many did you fry, Hndlr? Hundreds? Thousands?”

  “I didn’t keep count of the subjects I terminated,” the Science Officer said primly. “It was enough for me to do my duty to the Council and to The EYE. And sometimes a let a few get through, here and there—otherwise it wouldn’t look random.”

  Trey couldn’t stand it anymore.

  “Turn it off,” he said, motioning for Hndlr to take hold of the control lever. “Now—I want to see you do it.”

  “Very well.” Giving him a nervous look, Hndlr sat behind the desk and reached for the lever with the ease of long practice. With a quick jerk of his wrist, he flipped the lever to the off position.

  The effect was immediate. On the viewscreen, the vast, crackling wall of blue energy abruptly disappeared, as though it had never been there. The wide No Man’s Land—the empty space it usually occupied—was a scorched swathe of blackened ground where nothing grew.

  Immediately a walkie-com hanging on the wall beside the desk crackled to life.

  “Major Hndlr, do you read me? Major Hndlr, this is Captain Grnstng here at the Barrier. What in the hell is going on there? We weren’t informed of a scheduled flicker today!”

  “Answer him,” Trey said when the Science Officer sat there looking at the walkie-com helplessly. “Go on—pick it up. Tell him it’s a special drill ordered by the Commandant.”

  “A drill?” Hndlr frowned.

  “Yes. Tell him that he and all his men—all the guards along the border—are to walk up and lay all their weapons in the no-man’s land,” Trey ordered.

  “What?” Hndlr sputtered. “But he’ll never believe that’s a real order!”

  “Do it. Now.” Trey prodded him with his blaster. “Tell him it’s a direct order from the Commandant himself.”

  Hndlr gave him another alarmed look but complied at last, picking up the walkie-com and repeating Trey’s words. As expected, there was some pushback from the Captain but Hndlr outranked him and the Commandant outranked them both—or he had, anyway, before Trey had killed him.

  Also, even more than most soldiers, the PR guards had been trained to follow orders exactly. It probably helped them sleep at night when they thought of all the innocent people they had gunned down, Trey thought grimly. They could always just claim, as Hndlr had, that none of the deaths were their fault— after all, they were just following orders.

  Grumbling, the Captain complied with the order and compelled his men to do so too. They watched on the viewscreen as all of the guards walked carefully to the edge of the No Man’s Land and placed their weapons where the Barrier normally stood.

  “Tell them to leave