by Konig, Artor
“You would have been thirteen-hundredths of a second too late if you were only about to do that.” I told him crossly, “You’d better hand over to me until we’re completely clear of this debris.” As I told him this, I had to swing the two craft out of their line three times, each dodging motion taking less than a quarter of a second. He seemed reluctant to let me overplay my time on duty; but he could quite clearly see that his speed of reaction was simply not up to coping with the enormous speed of the two Wrens. The additional stress of having to compensate for two craft at once, where one may be endangered and the other perfectly safe if it remained on course, seemed to be more than he could handle.
At last he agreed to sit back and relax, letting me take control. I lay back on the couch, casting a glance at the chronometer; it was a quarter of an hour into my period of rest. I opened the visor of my helmet, looking out into the starry darkness of the outer void into which we were tripping at many hundreds of miles a second.
The chronometer was mercilessly ticking away those seconds, not seeming in the slightest bit inclined towards making them any longer or shorter than they actually were. Even though we were edging formidably close to percentage figures of the speed of light, the chronometer showed no distortions. I concentrated on reading the monitor for traces of solid mass before me, and looking through the windscreen, though that was a largely futile exercise.
Even with my eight-one-hundredths of a second reaction time, any stone that I saw would already be far behind me before I was able to respond. The solid-mass detector, using radar, gave me a good few hundredths of a second warning, enough to get out of the way of any meteor that was happening along.
I glanced over the display of the solar system that showed just where we were relative to everything else. We were still within the Taurus that it insisted was the asteroid belt; in fact, we were less than halfway through though we were well past the inner ring. Even with our formidable speed, there was a good long stretch before me. I kept my mind on the job, knowing that though I had flown for the past forty-eight hours to get this far into the debris area; less than halfway through, that it would take much less time to cover the remaining distance, because of our ever-mounting speed.
Every time I dodged, it was a matter of going down, increasing my distance from the grim web of stone that hurtled over my head. I glanced at the war-system scanner, where everything within its targeting range was clearly mapped and orientated along all three axes, each view presented according to which direction I specified. It showed me that seemingly above my head the sky was streaming with huge stones, each one picked out in blue light and black shade, each one moving to my left and behind me astonishingly fast. I tore my eye away from that view as the proximity alarm howled. I dodged around another huge lump of nickel-iron almost eighteen miles across, sweeping over my head and presenting its torn and sheared surface almost as an affront that I was obliged to answer.
One rock followed another, one ducking and diving following each previous dodge with almost monotonous order. The intervals between each wild-seeming dive became longer, seconds then minutes passing before my taut nerves were called into action again. After an interminable interval I allowed myself to relax, turning from the proximity radar to the war-system scanner, only too pleased to hear that there were no more boulders within clear targeting range.
It at once told me that there were plenty of records of lots of cosmic junk whirling about greedy old Jupiter, who seemed to have a weakness for that sort of thing; and who was directly above my present line of flight. I chose to ignore that priceless piece of information, allowing that I would deal with it when the time came. I hiked up the aperture of the proximity detector to the limit of its useful range, confirming that we were out of the debris area. At last I allowed the stiff and tense muscles of my body relax.
I buzzed the Doctor, almost reassured by the fact that he trusted me enough to fall back to sleep. But it occurred to me that it was the only sensible thing to do; there was nothing else he could do and breathing over my shoulder and wearing himself out would have done neither of us any good in the final showdown. He woke up reluctantly but took control at once.
He told me to set my chronometer eight hours ahead; he would do his full watch. I looked at the time, seeing that I had spent an extra twenty-four hours in control, give or take a few minutes. We had been on our way for a seventy-two hours and were already a small way beyond the asteroid belt. I felt rather as if the Wrens could kick through the light barrier if we’d let them. I wondered how long it would take us to slow down when we arrived at where the aliens were; if we carried on like this, we would whiz past them before we had the chance to come to grips with them. The craft were still quite manoeuvrable, considering their speed; this was because of the inertialess drive, I supposed. What would happen if the inertialess drive happened to pack in, I didn’t like to think about, largely because I didn’t have a clue about how the whole setup worked anyway.
I unstrapped myself from my couch, disengaging the controls first so there would be no hazard if I accidentally kicked something I wasn’t supposed to. I unhitched my helmet and unzipped my suit, feeling in need of a hot shower as I had never felt before. I drifted around the cabin, checking where everything was and seeing if everything was working. I gave myself a good scrub with a spot of water from the recycling plant before finding another tracksuit to put on under the heavier space suit. Although the atmosphere control had been set at slightly cooler than I was used to, I still found myself getting rather hot and bothered being suited up all the time. I went through the difficult task of feeding myself, not willing to experiment along the old fork-in-tin line, not in zero gravity at least. Once I was happy with the state of everything, I strapped myself back into my couch and had a look at what was going on outside.
The longest stage of our journey had begun; the wide open space between the asteroid belt and Jupiter, three hundred million miles beyond. The huge world was growing perceptibly on the screen; a golden coin, so tiny, set in black velvet speckled with diamonds of every imaginable shade, all of them afire with a lust and power that was nearly tangible. They were cosmic catastrophes, every one of them, each one on a scale that brooked no comparison, yet so plentiful that their might and majesty became meaningless. I looked at the chronometer, mercilessly measuring the time that was yet to go before zero-hour. A seventy-eight hours, forty-two minutes had elapsed. Sixty-two hours and eighteen minutes to the previous deadline; this had been extended by a matter of nearly twenty hours by my altered route.
It occurred to me then that the Wren’s formidable tracking system compensated on every aspect of its information to create a usable picture. It received its signals from who-knew-where and worked out from that exactly where the origin of the signal was. Therefore I deduced if the Wren said the aliens were just inside the orbit of Saturn then that’s where they were. I was not going to ask the system how she worked it all out; I felt it was reasonable to trust the information she was giving me. After all she hadn’t made a mistake yet. I put my helmet back on, closing the visor and wondering if I would even get used to sleeping at the controls of the active craft, in full readiness for almost any emergency.
I peered at the view through the war-system’s targeting monitor, seeing the huge mass of Jupiter now a good way above our line of flight. Beyond, now almost completely unobstructed by any mass, were the seven red dots that were our primary target. At the end of sixty-odd hours the Wren would decide whether or not to commit herself to specific targeting. But not before. But even then I now began to realise that it would take a long time before those accurately targeted beams of coherent X-rays got to where they were going.
The beams that I had already launched were still on their way out of the system; a good way in front of us and probably already out of the system. Nevertheless the Wren was still able to calculate more or less where they were. I began to have an appreciation of just how vast these stellar distances were. When a
fellow talked about a million miles he was talking about more than three pairs of track shoes, much more. The moon and back twice sounded rather a small sort of do; but it was the only yardstick I had. It didn’t help me much to realise that I was at present covering the said distance in something like five hundred seconds. An astronomical unit in something over thirteen hours and the craft was still accelerating; accelerating fiercely. The airspeed was distracting, the way the long string of digits kept on flickering. The electro-augmented ramjets were at their very highest throttle, the reactor showing its twenty-gigawatts drain; the highest the super-stages and the inertialess drive consumed. I imagined that the Doctor could come up with a method of augmenting that frightening acceleration; but I for one could see no need for it. All I knew was that in under sixty hours time we would be almost across the void that separated the asteroids from Jupiter; close enough for the war system to accurately predict the line of flight of the alien craft; accurately enough so it could practically guarantee placing a laser beam on the aliens’ path in such a way that the enemy would ride into it if they didn’t dodge the beam in time.
It occurred to me that they may have done exactly what I had done in making their path erratic. But the targeting system didn’t think so. I also knew that their craft were much too big to throw about the way I was handling the Wrens; and further the aliens did not seem to have a system of inertialess acceleration as we did. The Wren was almost saying, “Let me get in range and I’ll show you fire and blazes” But yet there was still that sixty hours, time that I didn’t intend spending awake. I had another look about me, raising my visor to see what the monitors and stars were up to, before shutting my eyes most resolutely. So sped the sixty hours; or maybe they dragged; I wasn’t sure. Finally there was only fourteen hours to go; eight of which I was off-duty.
The chronometer gave a thoughtful chirp right in my left ear then another in my right ear. It carried on like that until I was forced to admit that I in fact was awake. I flipped up my visor and had a look about me. But for the fact that Jupiter looked a bit like the moon looked at through the wrong end of a telescope, there was nothing to show that I had spent the past eight hours asleep, hurtling along at C-one percent; about two thousand miles a second. The airspeed had given up reckoning our pace in miles per second some time during my restful nap and had taken up the more convenient percentage of C instead. Even at that speed neither the chronometer nor the stars showed any signs of erratic behaviour or any signs that any such was on the way.
There was no feeling of drag and the radio link between the two craft on its tight beam showed no distortion. The Doctor told me to snatch some breakfast before settling down for my watch; he’d take another two hours on before leaving the whole show to me.
I took this respite gratefully; it meant that there would be less than four hours on watch before I could start targeting in more than earnest. I set the chronometer one and a-half-hours ahead and settled back to my very important nap.
The comlink buzzed me again, the chronometer’s annoying little chirp stirring me from the sluggish depths. I found myself a jolly bit of food; not that tinned green beans and fruit salad made a perfect breakfast even though I rounded it off with some potted meat on Italian wafers. But I wasn’t in a fussy mood. I was actually quite pleased with my sallyance into the world of alternative gastronomique and was more than ready to tie a big knot in the alien’s tails.
I let the Doctor know I was ready to take over just before the minute waned. I flexed my fingers, looking over all the familiar monitors and controls. I even went so far as to look through the glass bubble beneath my feet, beyond the rudder pedals. This was a new view for me and I saw a whole new set of stars. Even this, however, didn’t convince that doubting little part of my mind that in fact I was moving forth at one percent of the speed of light. Nothing could, not even if there had been a whole string of silvery boulders flashing past; they would look ever-so-fast if they were seen at all; but not that fast.
I glanced through the front screen at the disc of Jupiter now rather larger than the full moon, the faint rings seeming wispy and ethereal. In that eldritch golden light I could see other, much fainter orbs and sparks seemingly detached from the huge depth of the black void behind them. At this distance, much more than halfway between the forgotten Earth and this huge brown star, I could actually see the depths, the dimensions of Jupiter; and I could see those little moons as definitely separate from the sable backdrop of flaming stars.
This backdrop, I noted in surprise, was not dark. Wherever I looked, I could see those wastefully spilled gems that were stars. Nowhere in the void around me was the sky empty. Most of those stars were flamingly bright; but whatever little patch of darkness I feasted my eyes on revealed some tiny dim stars deep in their forgotten veils. And I could see painfully clearly that although Jupiter presented a disc no larger than that of the full moon, it was huge, massive beyond my ability to comprehend, offensively huge in a manner that grated on my nerves. The sight of the red spot, spot being a risible term for a cyclone larger than planet Earth, was a scarlet reminder of just where I was, an underlining of my purpose for which I didn’t feel ready. After a few minutes I wrenched myself away from that spectre of Doom and turned myself to the onboard systems which required my attention.
I ran through the checklist, noticing that the power consumption hadn’t increased although the speed most definitely had. I keyed off the autopilot and took over manual control. I keyed in the combat sequencing tracer, playing it over the war mode scanner. The red dots were clearly visible beneath the Jovian orb; but the display still read that targeting was not confirmed. I then keyed in the supreme war mode, feeling that satisfying surge of response as the laser master trips came alive and the ultimate range targeting focussed those crosshairs on those seven dots yet unspeakably far away.
I cast the proximity radar’s tentative microwaves before me just in case there was the odd boulder in my way. But there was very little cluttering up that particular stretch of space; the radio-telescope confirmed that as well. The war mode drew a pretty green graph, superimposing it over the crosshairs without distracting from the targets. The graph was at zero and it was captioned with the words, ‘Targeting surety.’ As I watched the percentage figure started to creep cautiously up. Although the Wren had an awesome firepower, she liked to be certain before she started to fire; and at times I felt she was a little on the conservative side. Not that anybody would have beaten her on the draw; the autopilot in ultimate war mode had a reaction time in the order of millionths of a second; and that was the time it took to generate a pulse from the lasers. I watched the graph hopefully as zero-hour; revised; came swiftly closer. The graph began to crawl steadily higher as she got a grip on her thousand million-mile ranging maths.
She was at ninety-two percent surety a minute before zero hour; as that minute waned she was a hundred percent sure she could belt the aliens at this range as long as they didn’t do anything unpredictable. At once I put my feet on the pedals and did a bit of serious looking at the enemy. I focussed my eyes on the leading dot. The prying microwaves would never get there and back in anything like a useful time; but the incoming radiation told the Wren all she needed to know. As I focussed on the dot, she provided me with an aspect-analysis view of the craft. We were at three-quarters below its nose, slightly to one side.
All the surface details that could be gleaned from that faint dot were correlated to the ship-cross-section she had stored in her memory. I looked at the view presented to me, focussing my attention on the place where the core reactor would be. The Wren told me obligingly what my initiation-wattage would have to be and just where I would have to place the beam, how much juice to put into the original blast and which lasers to heterodyne onto the maser carrier. I felt it was rather like shooting a tortoise with an elephant-gun; but things went rather a lot faster than that.
Thirty seconds after the Wren became sure of her marksmanship five heavy blasts had
been sent, each precisely targeted at that reactor, at the place where the craft would definitely run into the beams. Each ray would have ended the matter right then; I fired five to be totally sure of things. The next ship was targeted, the next five beams released. One after another the thirty-five heavy blasts were released; even while in the back of my mind the teasing thought that spiders actually had eight legs nagged at my mind. For after those wild and ravening beams had been released, nothing changed. Even though the Wren was totally certain she would hit the targets; that those lazy blends of supreme hellfire would eventually smack each craft upon the precise middle of its middle-lowermost fuselage plating, bursting through the layers of alien ship into the fiery reactor a good half-mile from those plates; still nothing happened.
They went serenely upon their doomed way; we trotted along to this grisly meeting almost as serenely and almost as fast. There was nothing to show that seven million megawatts of destruction had issued from the heavy lenses of the Wren’s laser array, except that I was tired; so tired that three and a half minutes of looking and pressing laser buttons could not account for it.
I reset the course of the Wrens, taking them along in a new route which would eventually see us sneaking up behind and on the other side of the enemy. I decided that I would keep on behind them, changing the course and potting them every twenty minutes until I had some tangible results of all my naughty temper. I plotted the route carefully so we had little chance of running into their beams if they were firing and little chance of running into our own beams although I knew that was totally impossible even if we did break the light barrier.
