Sandcats of Rhyl
Authors: Robert E. Vardeman
The
Sandcats
Of Rhyl
Robert E. Vardeman
a division of F+W Media, Inc.
DEDICATION
For the Elder Ghoddess, nagger extraordinaire
Mixed emotions jokingly have been called watching your mother-in-law drive over a cliff in your new BMW Alpina B7. Not having a BMW, the closest I can come to appreciating this is seeing
The Sandcats of Rhyl
back in print after thirty-five years.
This was my first published book. The advance was small (though, discouragingly, not that much less than a first novel might get in 2012) and there is a strange tendency toward having minor publishers use grandiose names.
Sandcats
was published by Major Books, not Dell or Signet. It might well have gone with Major Supreme Ultimate Cosmic Books to carry through the theme, but I didn’t care. It was my first published book. The first one I saw on the rack at the bookstore. The first.
As my first book, I have a warmth in my heart for it. And as my first book, I have nothing but trepidation about its reprinting as an e-book. I hope, after more than two hundred published titles since, I have learned a little. Or a lot. Things done stylistically and thematically in my first book are difficult to defend now. That’s what experience, time and Malcolm Gladwell’s dictum about requiring ten thousand hours of practice to learn your trade have done for me.
That said, my firstborn has a spot of honor on my “Brag shelf” all the way to the left side. It seems any book has a story behind it. I loved
Dune
and over the years Dune remains my favorite SF book. Having lived in the desert most of my life has something to do with it, of course, but the book is a wonderful allegory that still haunts our lives (spice = oil, Arrakis = the Middle East). Then and now I couldn’t write such a major book, but the themes spoke to me. Deserts (and desert worlds) are hardly devoid of life and there is so much to explore in science fiction. But I grew up loving pulp fiction, especially space opera. Going along with the “Write what you know” dictum I launched into a novel I wanted to read. Action driven plots draw me more than literary SF, then and now. (I think I have integrated real characters into my fiction over the years in my evolution as a writer. Tastes change and even space opera has to have more complete characters in the 21st Century.)
But back to the story about
The Sandcats of Rhyl
, after it was sold. Very little rewriting was required and the book was quickly put in the pipeline for publishing, but the distributor refused to carry the book. Not because of the content but because of the cover. The cover was so terrible the distributor decided the book would never sell. And whoever made that decision was a hundred percent right. The original cover had olive drab multi-legged lions with gauze over their nostrils lounging about. No menace, no hint as to the story between the covers, just goofy looking critters. Faced with the inability to ever sell the book without a distributor, Major Books put a different cover on the book.
It received a new, vaguely Frazetta-esque cover. A six-pack ab, muscled barbarian in a red loin cloth and cape with a spear. On a leash he barely held back six sabertooth tigers from attacking. I don’t think that’s in the book, either, but it was a lot better illustration. Of what, who cared? The distributor took the book and sales were decent. (Today those sales would count as excellent — the markets now have fragmented and there are a lot more titles competing for your reading dollar.)
Would I write
The Sandcats of Rhyl
now? No. Would I read it? Yes! I hope you enjoy this glimpse into the time machine e-publishing affords us all.
Robert E. Vardeman
May 2012
Prologue
“ALERT! ALERT! All hands to emergency stations!”
Roderick Nightwind shifted his weight on the narrow bunk. His hands were locked behind his head, jet black hair falling over his slender, almost effeminate fingers. But one look into his coal black eyes quickly disspelled any thought of this being a soft, gentle man. He moved only a fraction of a centimeter, but he was a coiled cobra waiting to see where to strike.
The emergency sirens aboard the
Starry Heavens
continued to blare. Nightwind might have appeared calm and composed, but Heuser didn’t. “Come on, Rod! Let’s go see what the fuss is.” The man’s voice was oddly resonant for someone so small. Heuser barely topped a hundred sixty centimeters and was slender to the point of emaciation. Sandy hair and regular features made him look innocent, childlike. But his blue eyes — unnaturally blue — countered the naive, helpless appearance. Like Nightwind, Heuser’s eyes were windows into a hard, competent man’s brain. Even the seeming physical weakness was deceptive. His entire frame had been reconstructed after being caught under the blades of a giant earthmover. Rebuilt, composed of plasteel bones and monofilament wire tendons, he was stronger than any two normal humans. The too-blue eyes were artificial, being able to see a full thousand Angstroms farther into the infra-red than organic ones.
“I suppose we should. This job was getting to be dull, anyway.”
“Maybe, Rod, maybe. But the money’s good. Where else could we get a half million credits just for babysitting?”
Nightwind shrugged into the shoulder holster holding his needlegun. Both he and Heuser went armed aboard ship. Entrusted by Terra Pharmaceuticals with making sure not a single microgram of the valuable cargo was stolen, they had to remain alert. The drugs on board the
Starry Heavens
were literally worth billions — and untold lives which could be saved by the use of those drugs.
The dark-haired man moved lightly into the corridor, avoiding two rushing crew members. With the short cyborg beside him, they made their way to the “ulcer factory.” The ulcer factory, more commonly called the control room by ground grippers, was earning its nickname. The astrogator was punching endless streams of numbers into his navigational computer. The computer tech seemed to age before their eyes as he struggled to keep up with the torrent of data gushing from his machine. The first officer peered anxiously over the shoulder of the radioman who was spinning dials and flipping switches like a lost soul possessed by an evil demon.
Only the captain remained calm. He sat in the middle of the maelstrom with a placid expression on his face. Nightwind quickly sized up the situation. The
Starry Heavens
wasn’t in any danger, but something had occurred which had rattled the crew. If the ship had been in the slightest trouble, the captain would have been a blur as he sped from one section of the control room to the other, barking orders as he went.
“Gentlemen,” the gold-braided officer addressed them, “we seem to have come across a ship in distress. We picked up their automatic beacon a few minutes ago.”
Heuser propped himself against a convenient desk. “So what? Why push the panic button over a distress call? That should be routine work.”
“The ship in question is violently radioactive and emitting across a fantastic spectrum. I — ”
“Cap’n,” interrupted the computer officer, “got it analyzed. Their engine’s blown. The entire ship is going to be glowing white hot by now. That baby’s had it.”
“Any life signs?”
“None, sir,” snapped the first officer, a little too brusquely for Nightwind’s liking. The man seemed to take their presence on board as a personal affront and hadn’t gone out of his way to be friendly. It didn’t matter. As long as he did his job and let the two guards do theirs, everything was fine.
The captain leaned back in his command chair and sighed. He fumbled in the arm compartment and produced a pipe. He began stuffing it with tobacco. “Beastly habit, but it helps me think,” he mumbled. In a few seconds tendrils of smoke lazily drifted into the air currents created by the air-circulating system.
“Seems that we picked up their beacon soon enough that someone might still be alive. Mr. Proctor, ask for two volunteers to board and search for survivors.”
The officer blanched. He licked suddenly dried lips and said, his voice husky, “Sir! The radiation! That ship’s a hellhole. A big risk — ”
“Yes, yes, I know,” the captain said. He puffed vigorously a couple times, then continued, irritated, “It’s got to be done. Ask for the volunteers.”
Nightwind spoke up. “If it’s okay with you, sir, why not let Heuser and me check out the ship? We’re the closest thing to expendibles you have on board.”
The captain puffed out a blue cloud of smoke that momentarily hid his features. “And?”
“And we get half the salvage this way. Risking our necks going aboard that starship ought to be worth a goodly sum.”
“Yeah. A lot of credits, Mr. Nightwind. Any objections, Mr. Proctor?”
The first officer said rapidly in his usual clipped tones, “That would be fine with me, sir.”
Nightwind didn’t have to be a mind reader to complete the unspoken words:
“And I hope they fry to a black crisp!”
Suited up in the bulky radiation suits, Nightwind and Heuser looked like parodies of human beings. They crouched in the open airlock, staring out into the infinity of space. The
Starry Heavens
silently stalked up on the disabled vessel. Even at a distance of ten light seconds, Nightwind could see the other ship glowing eerily. It was totally contaminated by radiation. A real death trap in space.
The computer officer earned four more gray hairs matching velocities with the derelict spaceship. But the work was expert. After a few blasts from the steering jets, the two vessels seemed joined by invisible threads holding them side by side.
Nightwind jumped first — and fell into the eternity of weightlessness. He executed an adroit head-over-heels somersault and landed feet first on the hull of the spaceship. Anchoring his line, he began pulling Heuser across the gulf between the starships.
When the automatic distress beacon went off aboard the ship, the exterior airlock doors were automatically unlocked as part of the emergency escape procedure. The bulky-suited pair had no trouble getting inside the ship. Once inside, they tried to use their suit radios to communicate. All that blasted out from the speakers was loud, radiation-induced static.
Heuser expertly connected a long coaxial cable between them for auxiliary communication. “How’s this? Any static on your end, Rod?”
“A little, but I can still hear you five by five. My geiger counter’s out of action. Needle’s bent around the high side of the scale. That’s a lot of quanta zipping around in here. Let’s make it snappy and get out of here before
we
start glowing blue.”
The two quickly searched the ship. Everyone aboard had long since died. When the engine exploded, the sudden burst of wide band radiations destroyed all life aboard like candle flames blown out by a hurricane.
“Let’s blast home, Rod. Gives me the creeps being surrounded by all these corpses.”
“Just a second, Heuser. Look at this.”
The small bulk of the cyborg turned to peer through his polarized face plate at the ceramic diary his companion had picked up from a small desk. A quick scan of the projector face and he let out a whistle from between his teeth. “We really have something, Rod! Imagine! An archeological expedition. And look at that line in the professor’s notes. ‘Find utterly beyond belief!’ That sounds too good to be true.”
Nightwind pressed the button on top of the diary, watching the crabbed handwriting speed by, line by line. Occasional crude maps would appear with appropriate explanations written across them. Finally, he said, “The old codger’s Dr. Alfen. The one who dug up those cities made from the silky stuff stronger than steel on Sigma Draconis IV. Sold the deciphered process for making the gunk to Galactic Steel for a tidy sum, if I remember right. A big-time operator, Dr. Alfen.”