Empire of Two Worlds

EMPIRE OF TWO WORLDS

Barrington J. Bayley

www.sfgateway.com

Enter the SF Gateway …

In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain's oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language's finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

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The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

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Contents

Title Page

Gateway Introduction

Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Website

Also by Barrington J. Bayley

About the Author

Copyright

One

The sun was not bright for us that day we fled from Klittmann City, riding at seventy miles per hour across the grey stone plain.

Behind us Klittmann filled the landscape, a stupendous grey castle quarried and raised out of the cold rock terrain.

I had been out in the open only once before, so the scene was a great novelty to me and despite the weirdness of our situation I took time to examine it from this new, unnatural angle.

Seen from the outside Klittmann scarcely had the appearance of an artificial construct at all. It was a vast pile, a rough-hewn mountain. A titanic mass of rock that had risen from the ground in some natural catastrophe, breaking out in slabs, blocks, gullies and canyons, ramp-like slides and roofs. It was all roughened and lumpy, and excess building materials spilled down the sides in frozen avalanches.

Which was as it would be. To the inhabitants of Klittmann the external wall was incidental, unconscious. No windows or doors except the one ground-level portal which was almost never opened. The city was completely internalised. When there was any rebuilding or extension the work was done from the inside; nobody ever visualised the exterior.

Unpretty though it was, for us the view had a not small degree of poignancy. We had no doubt that it was our last look at home. At that, we nearly didn’t make it. I was keeping my eye on the upright ring of the portal at the foot of the steel and concrete pile. A police sloop shot out bullet-like and came chasing after us.

“There’s one of them on our tail!” I said to Becmath.

Becmath was in the driving seat. He glanced in a mirror, grunting.

“I thought they would. Cops got no sense. Hold on, we’ll take him.”

He decelerated fiercely to about forty. Soon the cop-ship was pacing us, racing parallel at a respectful distance over the grey rock surface. I saw more sloops emerging from the portal.

Becmath grunted again. “He thinks he can play with us. Chase a mobster out of the city. Feel brave in the open. O.K., let’s go.” He hurled the sloop round in a screaming curve that took us on a convergent course with the cop vehicle.

We had built the sloop originally to operate in the lowest Klittmann streets where the cops do not usually dare to enter. But we had built it with that eventuality in mind and consequently we were bigger, with more fire-power. The sloop was thirty-five feet in length and twelve feet in the beam, and it was armed with Jain repeaters and Hacker cannon. Becmath was laughing now. Before the cop ship could change course we were sending Hacker shells whining away to smash through the other’s armour. Bullets rattled against our plating. Then the cop-ship swerved crazily from side to side and finally rolled over, a mass of junk.

Bec drove in a wide arc, keeping the range steady. A couple of cops were crawling out of the wreck, torn and bleeding. Our Jains rattled out a hail of lead. The cops twitched and jerked, then lay still.

“What about those other klugs?” Bec asked.