Douglas Hill - The Last Legionary 03 - Day Of The Starwind

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DOUGLAS HILL
DAY
OF THE
STARWIND
BOOK THREE OF THE
THE LAST LEGIONARY
A strange tower stands within an impenetrable force-field on a barren planet. Its mystery draws Keill
Randor,The Last Legionary , in his continuing search for his enemy, the Galactic Warlord.
On the planet Keill, and his alien companion, Glr, must do battle with deadly life forms and with the
clones of great warriors. But far greater threats to their lives come from the terrible power of the
Deathwing – and then, finally, from the awesome, planet-scouring Starwind itself.
THE LAST LEGIONARY QUARTET
No.1 GALACTIC WARLORD
No.2 DEATHWING OVER VEYNAA
No.3 DAY OF THE STARWIND
No.4 PLANET OF THE WARLORD
for Marni and Ken
Douglas Hill ©1980
Piper Edition 1989
ISDN 0 330 26652 7
PART ONE
THE MYSTERY OF RILYN
PROLOGUE
Generations of peace had left the people of Jitrell unwary by nature. The planet was rich enough in
resources to be nearly self-sufficient, yet not so rich as to attract the greedy or the violent from elsewhere
among mankind's Inhabited Worlds. It was close enough to the main space lanes to profit from trade,
when it needed to, yet remote enough to be untroubled by turmoil and upheaval on other worlds.
It was just about right, according to its first colonists, when man had been spreading himself
among the stars in the centuries of the Scattering. life was good on Jitrell; life was comfortable. Perhaps
too comfortable...
Comfort was definitely uppermost in the minds of the spaceport guards in Belinter, the premier
city of Jitrell, in the middle of a balmy summer night. The guards were tending to lounge, to idle, to cluster
in groups and exchange murmured jokes and easy chat The port had not been busy for weeks, and was
nearly empty – except for two or three freighter ships whose cargoes had already been forwarded on
their long commercial journeys, and a few stacks of commodity containers behind the stout doors of
storage depots. Nothing much worth stealing; nothing much worth guarding.
So the guards were totally unprepared for the sight of their command post, with all their outgoing
communication systems, apparently beginning to collapse upon itself – as if struck by a giant, invisible
club – and then exploding in a thunderburst of flame and flying debris.
The guards were ordinary men, with only basic training, and they reacted like ordinary men. They
froze. Shock, bewilderment and fear blanked their minds, paralysed their limbs, for just long enough.
And the others were upon them.
They seemed to come from nowhere, as if the very shadows had given shape to them. Twenty or
more men, in dark red, one-piece uniforms, moving in a perfectly co-ordinated attack that was all the
more terrifying in its smooth speed and its eerie near-silence.
Some of the attackers rode light, two-man skimmers, hovering on a cushion of gases. Others
were on foot, as swift as predators, and as deadly. They came at the guards in a rush, while those on the
skimmers fanned out towards the dark shapes of the freighters and the storage depots.
In seconds both the ships and the depots were also crumpling in upon themselves before
exploding in violent bursts of flame. But the Jitrellian guards did not see that happen. The guards were
busy dying.
To their credit, one or two of the guards had overcome their panic soon enough to reach for their
bolstered weapons. But that merely meant that they were the first to die – in a storm of energy beams
from the guns of the attackers.
Those slower guards who were not cut down by the searing beams fell soon enough. The
attackers, closing in on their victims, used only their hands – with the easy, almost casual skill that a
woodman might show lopping limbs from a tree with his axe.
At the precise instant that the last guard crumpled, a spaceship swept in low over the port,
hovering for a landing. It was the shape of a semicircle, like half of a giant disc, with a dark,
non-reflecting exterior and no visible insignia. As it landed the attackers moved towards it, with the same
speed and coordination, their silence still unbroken. In seconds they were aboard, less than three minutes
after their first appearance. The ship lifted swiftly, vanishing into the night sky.
On the ground of the spaceport the huddled forms of the guards lay still, and a last small flame flickered
and died within the shattered remains of a freighter.
_
_
The Jitrellians reacted to the news of the attack with a towering but useless rage, tinged with fear. Their
rage was useless because there was not the smallest clue to the identity of the raiders, or their purposes.
And their fear came from the fact that this was not the first such raid – though it was the most murderous
– that had happened on Jitrell within the previous months.
All over the populated parts of the planet, units of the small armed forces were sent to reinforce
the guards at spaceports and important industrial sites. And the Jitrellian authorities argued, debated,
theorised, yet in the end came to the conclusion that they could come to no conclusion. There was no
way of knowingwho ,orwhy.
It was pointless, they said. It was mindless.
But wiser, calmer heads, a long, long way away from Jitrell, studied the reports of the raids –
which they gleaned from widespread monitoring devices that the rest of the galaxy did not dream existed.
These wiser heads were sure that the raids were not pointless. And they were sure that they could
recognise a mind – a very special mind – behind them.
CHAPTER ONE
Like a spearhead with a rounded point, a small spaceship burst out of thick cloud cover, heat shields still
glowing from its plunging dive through atmosphere. Its trajectory flattened as it curved down to skim the
surface of the planet Rilyn, where the rust-coloured waters of a broad ocean moved sluggishly in slow,
flat waves.
Billows of fog reached up to enfold the ship, which was a compact, one-person fighter. Within it
the viewscreens showed only swirls of grey. But the man at the control panel – a lean, dark-haired young
man in a grey uniform – did not alter his speed. The ship sensors and computer instrumentation gave him
all the guidance data he needed. Leaning forward tautly in his slingseat, hands moving over the controls as
if they had eyes of their own, he watched the data screens with tireless concentration.
He was Keill Randor, once a young officer in the celebrated Legions of the planet Moros. Now
he was the galaxy's last legionary, the only survivor of the swift and terrible destruction of the Legions.
But even though he was a man without a planet, without a people, he did not travel alone.
The other occupant of the small, hurtling ship was not human. It was a small, winged alien being,
resting on an adapted slingseat that was nearly a perch. From the short body, with its soft leathery plates
of skin, the seemingly delicate membranes of the wings extended like half-furled sails. The head was
smooth and domed, and above a blunt muzzle two bright, round eyes stared at the control panel with a
concentration equal to Keill’s. The perch brought the alien's stubby legs and small feet within easy reach
of the panel: and those feet, which were in fact hands – three fingers and an opposing thumb – fidgeted as
if they too wanted to race over the controls.
The alien's name was Glr, a female of a race called the Ehrlil – from another galaxy, for man had
found no other intelligent life in his own galaxy, when he had spread out to populate the Inhabited
Worlds. The Ehrlil were a long-lived race, much given to roaming among the stars, and Glr's wanderings
had brought her to man's galaxy. There she had eventually met and befriended Keill Randor, and had
willingly joined him in the lonely and hazardous quest that had occupied him since the destruction of his
world – a quest that had now brought them to the planet Rilyn.
_
_
Keill glanced up at the viewscreens as the fog thinned and fell away. The ship burst out into clear air
beneath a dull, overcast sky, and swept over a shoreline where waves flopped heavily against reddish
soil. The terrain beyond the shore was typical of Rilyn. It was uniformly flat and almost featureless – a
reddish plain with outcrops of dark, bare rock, interrupted here and there by swathes of thick, greenish
shrubbery that grew no higher than a few centimetres.
'Hard to imagine people ever wanting to live here,’ Keill said idly.
It is usually hard to understand why humans want the things they want.Glr's silent reply
formed itself in Keill's mind, for her race was telepathic. And while Keill was not, Glr was able to project
her thoughts into his mind, and could pick up his surface thoughts when they were dearly formed. She
had met only a few humans whose minds were clear enough for that kind of communication – which was
one reason why Glr often claimed to hold a low opinion of mankind.
A smile tugged at the corner of Keill's mouth, but he left the remark unanswered. A smear of a
darker red had appeared on the horizon, in the forward viewscreens.
'That's what we want.' His hands moved, and the ship veered slightly, still skimming low over the
empty land.
In moments the distant smear showed itself to be an upland region, where the land heaved itself
into broad, rolling mounds and hummocks. Everywhere the dark rock thrust up out of the soil, as if
striving to become hills – but without success. For the rock surfaces were flattened and razed, scarred
with cracks and crevices, creased and pitted by erosion.
It looked almost as if some gigantic weight had settled crushingly on the land, and had then been
dragged along to grind away any upthrust peak or rise. And that levelling image was reinforced by the
abundance of crushed rock and cracked boulders scattered in the vales and gullies that lay between the
flat-topped promontories.
There, too, the reddish soil lay heaped in drifts and dunes, as if it were light sand. Yet it was
dense soil, Keill could see, held firmly by the tough green shrubbery and by a rich carpeting of flat
vegetation like moss.
Nothing on Rilyn seemed to reach up, to grow vertically towards the light and the sky. The
landscape seemed to cower, to prostrate itself, in its empty, silent bleakness.
Do you really hope to escape detection by flying so low?Glr asked, her mental voice sounding
testy as the ship skimmed an outcropping.
Keill shrugged. 'Maybe – if whoever's here isn't being careful. There's no point in coming straight
down on top of them.’
But if they are being careful, and their detectors are working?
'We'll take the chance,' Keill said.
As he spoke he slewed the ship around another shoulder of rock, and nodded at a broad
expanse of open greenery ahead, like a shallow basin. 'We can set down here. If the coordinates are
right, the place we're looking for isn't much of a walk from here.’
Walk?said Glr, spreading her wings, her tone implying that Keill had used a dirty word.
But before Keill could reply, he was flung to one side In his slingseat as the ship shuddered and
bucked beneath him.
He heard Glr's mental yelp of surprise as his hands flashed over the controls. The power had cut
out – the ship's energy drive had stopped. And the electronics were dead, the screens blank, the
computer-guidance system silent.
What is it?Glr cried.
There was no time for a reply. The ship struck the ground with a grinding crash, torn shrubbery
and red earth fountaining up around it.
But Keill had been flying low and had already begun to slow the ship with its retro rockets. So it
struck the shallow basin flat, on its belly, without tumbling – skidding forward, ploughing a deep furrow
across the basin's green surface.
At last friction halted the slide, and the ship came to rest. Keill and Glr, held safe in the slingseats,
together expelled the breath they had been holding and looked at each other.
Not one of your better landings.The laughter in Glr's mental voice was slightly shaky.
Keill shook his head. It's some kind of force field, a suppressor. Whoever put it there wouldn't
care much how we came down.'
Glr looked at the dead controls.And what about getting up again?
'We'll come to that,' Keill said. 'We'll go and find whoever owns the suppressor field – and
convince him to turn it off.’
Glr's silent laughter rose as Keill reached for the fastenings of the slingseat. But he did not
complete the motion.
The ship had started to move again.
The very ground where it had come to rest fell away, with a rumble of fracturing, collapsing rock.
The ship lurched sideways, metal screeching against stone like a death-cry, and toppled with a slow
finality into the yawning mouth of the pit that had opened beneath it.
CHAPTER TWO
The ship's downward plunge halted in a few seconds, with a resonant crash. Keill waited a moment,
listening, then carefully released himself from the slingseat. The ship had come to test on its side, so the
deck of its inner chamber was tilted steeply, but Keill moved easily up the incline towards the airlock.
Take a weapon.Glr said as she released herself from her perch.It must be some form of trap.
'Energy guns won't work,’ Keill said. The suppressor field that had knocked out the ship's drive
would also affect the guns that used an adapted form of the same power source. 'I’ll just have a look – a
careful look.'
The airlock had a manual failsafe that opened it readily even without power. Keill waited,
sheltering within the lock, watching and listening, his body poised to meet any threat.
But no danger appeared. Only darkness, turned into twilight by the light from the opening in the
rock where the ship had fallen through. And a tomb-like silence, save for a few trickles of crushed rock
and gravel coming to rest around the ship. And the smell of dust, and of the musty dampness of very old
stone.
Keill stepped forward, watchfully, to the edge of the lock, letting his eyes adjust to the dimness.
'It's a cave,’ he said to Glr. 'The ship's weight simply broke through the roof of a cave.'
As he spoke he dropped lightly to the ground. Behind him Glr soared out of the airlock,
swooping down, on her wide wings to settle on Keill's shoulder.
I dislike caves,she said.
Keill nodded absently, intent on a survey of the ship's exterior. It seemed undamaged by the fell,
as it should be: the niconium steel hull had survived far greater impacts in its time. He turned his attention
to his surroundings.
It was a high-vaulted cave, not more than twenty metres wide but more than twice as long. There
were patches of deeper black here and there in the curved walls that seemed to be niches, crevices,
gouged into the rock. Keill stepped further away from the ship, and only then became aware that Glr's
grip on his shoulder was unnecessarily fierce, and her wings were half-opening and closing with a nervous
restlessness.
'Glr...?' He formed her name silently, in his mind, knowing that she could reach in and pick it up.
Keill, I cannot stay here.The words burst into Keill's mind rapidly, and with a quality that he had
never sensed in Glr before. An edge of fear.
'There's no danger,'he replied soothingly.
But even as he formed the words, he was proved wrong – by the scratching, slithering noise
behind him.
He whirled, into a fighting crouch, while Glr sprang away with a slap of wings. From the deeper
darknesses of the crevices in the far wall of the cave, something – somethings– were emerging.
The creatures seemed to be shaped like large inverted bowls, or perhaps helmets, the colour of
the cave's dark stone. But as they pushed further out from their hiding places, Keill saw that the helmet
shapes were only their heads – which tapered back into longer bodies, legless, like worms, but thick as a
man's thigh. There were no recognisable features, nor did the creatures move threateningly. They had
merely pushed their helmet-like heads out, as if waiting.
Keill stepped cautiously towards them. But his boot came down not on rock or gravel but on
something soft, that gave beneath him. Reflexively he sprang sideways, staring down with some distaste.
This was a different sort of creature, squeezing out of a narrow crack in the cave floor. It was a
dirty white in colour, and seemed to have no fixed shape as it oozed along the rocky surface – sometimes
stretching out a long thin projection from itself, sometimes spreading out like a puddle of thick, viscous
liquid.
It seemed anxious to get away from Keill, but its anxiety took it too near the wall. From beneath
the bulky helmet-head of one of the creatures in the crevices, a long tendril lashed out – almost a filament,
so thin that Keill might not have seen it in the dim light had it not been a bright orange.
The tip of the filament touched the oozing creature, and its motion stopped at once, its edges
curling up like those of a dry fallen leaf. The tendril then withdrew, and the entire length of the creature
slithered forward, down the wall, moving slowly towards its prey.
The tendril was a stinger of some sort, Keill realised, certainly lethal to the oozing thing. What the
tendrils might do to humans was not something he was interested in finding out. As the helmet-head
creature slid near, he turned, took two running steps, and sprang to grasp the lower edge of the ship's
airlock. He swung himself up with acrobatic ease, and went into the ship to find Glr.
She was sitting in her slingperch, her round eyes fixed on the airlock as he came through.Caves
are unpleasant enough, she said, still with that edge of fear in her inner voice.But caves with slimy
ground-crawlers ... A shudder rippled across her body to the tips of her wings.
Keill knew that she would have perceived some of what had happened, through his mind. 'They
can't hurt us...’ he began.
I do not fear them,Glr replied.But caves. ..Keill, l am a creature of the air, the sky, openness
and freedom. Most of my race have a horror of being underground. Caves, tunnels, pits, all such
things are nightmares to me, I cannot control the feeling. I must get out.
'Then let's get out,' Keill said with a smile. 'Take a lifeline up with you and fasten it so I can climb
up. And I'll follow in a minute.’
Thank you,Glr said. She floated on half-spread wings to the airlock, where Keill detached one of
the safety lines that could be fastened to a spacesuit if a pilot had to leave his ship in space. They were
long strands of extremely tough artificial fibre – far longer than would be needed to reach from the
surface down into the cave.
Glr took one end of the line, studiously not looking at the creatures that were still silently thrusting
their heads out from the cave wall.Climb carefully, she said. And she rose in a sweep of wings towards
the welcoming patch of light above.
Keill waited until a firm tug on the line showed that Glr had fastened her end safely, probably to
some solid boulder nearby. Then he turned back inside the ship, to open the compartment that held his
weaponry.
His eyes drifted across the assortment of beam-guns, useless to him now, and some of the other
more sophisticated weapons. What could be used in a suppressor field? Knives and clubs? Pointless –
his own barehanded combat skills were far more lethal. But ordinary, old-fashioned explosives...
He took up two small, flat oblongs of black plastic. They were one of the variety of grenades
developed by the Legions. A nick of a finger could prime them, and they would explode powerfully
enough to devastate a good-sized room. Yet they were designed to be clipped fiat to a belt, where they
seemed to be no more than innocent decorations or fastenings.
From another compartment he took a plain pouch, two handsbreadths wide, into which he
stowed some wafers of food concentrate, a container of water and a basic medikit – the essential field
pack of the legionary going into action. It too clipped neatly to his belt.
Now he was as ready as he could be. He stepped out of the airlock on to the tilted side of the
ship, reaching for the lifeline. For a moment he glanced around at the cave, thinking how much it looked
like a tomb, a place of burial. Then he shook himself, dismissing the morbid thought. Glr was right –
caves were unhealthy places. Effortlessly he began his hand-over-hand climb towards the light, towards
the purpose that had brought him to Rilyn.
_
_
That purpose was part of the larger purpose that had been the central driving force in Keill Randor's life
– ever since the terrible day when he had returned to Moros, to learn that every man, woman and child
of the Legions had been wiped out, murdered, before they could begin to defend themselves, by a
mysterious, deadly radiation that had enveloped the planet.
Keill had begun a desperate, vengeful search through the Inhabited Worlds for the unknown
murderer of his world. Yet he had realised that his search would probably fail, for he too had been lightly
touched by the radiation. It had settled in his bones and was slowly, surely, killing him.
But a near-miracle had intervened. Keill's survival had been noted by a strange, secretive group
of brilliant elderly scientists, whom he came to know as the Overseers. They had taken him to their
hidden base, inside an uncharted asteroid. And there they had saved his life, astonishingly, byreplacing
all his diseased bones with an organic alloy – which, among other things, was virtually unbreakable.
From the Overseers Keill had at last learned why they had saved him, and why they lived in
obsessive secrecy, so that Keill saw them only as robed and hooded figures, and was never to know the
position of the asteroid. Their reasons had much to do with the murder of the Legions of Moros.
Before they had hidden themselves away, the Overseers had lived normal lives, deep in their
different studies of events around the galaxy. But then, slowly, they began to detect a frighteningpattern
in many of those events. And that had led them to give up normal life, to set up their secret base, from
which they sent out unique, nearly undetectable monitoring devices through the Inhabited Worlds.
The pattern they had found had to do with warfare among mankind's planets. It had become dear
that more and more small, local wars were breaking out – but not in a random, accidental way. There
was some guiding principle at work. Some force, some being, wascausing them, spreading war like an
infectious disease among the Worlds.
The Overseers had learned nothing of who or what this mysterious maker of wars might be,
though they had given him a code name, for convenience – the Warlord. But they had no doubt about the
Warlord's purpose. By spreading the infection of war wherever possible, he was working slowly towards
creating a conflict that would involve the entire galaxy in an ultimate, all-consuming holocaust. And out of
the ruins of that final calamity, the Warlord would surely emerge, to rule the galaxy unchallenged.
And the Warlord's methods could also be perceived. He sent out agents to various worlds, who
would work their way into positions of power and influence, and then turn the local people towards war
– using the human weaknesses of greed, or fear, or patriotic bigotry, or whatever else came to hand. So
the infection was spread, and the Warlord's plans developed.
That was why, the Overseers told Keill, the Warlord had destroyed the Legions of Moros.
The people of Moros had learned to fight and to discipline themselves to survive the rigours of
their harsh planet. Over the generations they had developed their fighting skills to an amazing degree –
and had realised that those skills were the only real natural resource that Moros possessed. So they
continued to develop, to train and discipline their children, until they became an almost legendary warrior
摘要：

     DOUGLASHILL    DAYOFTHESTARWIND       BOOKTHREEOFTHETHELASTLEGIONARY Astrangetowerstandswithinanimpenetrableforce-fieldonabarrenplanet.ItsmysterydrawsKeillRandor,TheLastLegionary,inhiscontinuingsearchforhisenemy,theGalacticWarlord. OntheplanetKeill,andhisaliencompanion,Glr,mustdobattlewithdeadl...

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