Refuge iarc-5

by Rob Chilson

  “At least I don’t go into convulsions anymore,” he said. The one incident was all there had been, but Ariel was obviously still frightened by the memory. He was glad he hadn’t been able to see himself. “You occasionally have-fugues, I guess, in an even more literal sense-yourself.”

  She nodded. “I see you do the same thing-I suppose you still have flashes of memory, when memories return, so vividly that you are there.”

  “Usually when I’m asleep, and I lose most of them,” Derec said.

  Her memories were returning in a massive way, compared to his own. She wasn’t getting anything like a coherent account of her past life, of course, merely a chunk here and a chunk there. Like pages of a book torn out and scattered by the wind, here a leaf caught by a tree, there one against a house.

  Four days out from Earth, with the mother planet a mere blue-green brilliant star behind them, now getting closer and closer to Sol, Derec and Ariel agreed that it was safe to open the hyperwave. They called Wolruf and Mandelbrot at Kappa Whale, but got no answer.

  “Can you shift the elements so it broadcasts on the same wavelengths as the Keys to Perihelion do?” Ariel asked.

  He had told her their deduction about the failure of the hyperwave aboard Dr. Avery’s other Star Seeker; she had been in such a feverish state that it hadn’t registered with her at the time.

  Derec shook his head somberly. “It calls for precision tools and a fairly lengthy research effort. First, just to determine what broadcasts the Keys spray their static on.”

  “Ship static wavelengths, perhaps?”

  “Perhaps…Likely, in fact.” Hyperwave static was a fact of life, one the usual hyperwave link was designed to ignore. “But when did you even hear of a hyperlink designed to pick up static?”

  Ariel smiled faintly, shook her head.

  A week out from Earth, they started calculating the Jump to Kappa Whale.

  “It hasn’t been too long,” said Ariel. “Wolruf’s food will hold out, of course, and so will their energy. The micropile is good for years yet. They’ve a sufficient supply of fuel to do what little maneuvering they may require. They could Jump out of Kappa Whale and back to avoid pursuit, if they have to.”

  “So they should still be there. Where would they go, without us, if they acquired star charts?”

  Ariel couldn’t guess.

  Charts were one of the first things he and Ariel had checked for when they had entered the ship. There was a complete set, and if there hadn’t been, they could have requested a copy from Control. One would have been beamed to them immediately, without a question.

  “It’s easier to calculate a single Jump for Kappa Whale,” he said. “But it definitely isn’t safer.”

  Ariel calculated three Jumps, and Derec almost agreed. “The trouble is, Kappa Whale is nearly behind us. Your first Jump turns us in hyper, which is possible, but it’s a strain on the engines. I suggest we Jump to Procyon, which is near enough to our line of flight, and do a partial orbit about it, burning to bring us out on direct line for the first of your Jumps.”

  She bit her lip and said, “I’m sorry. I know I’m too reckless. I think it’s because I had a sheltered childhood. I never got hurt much when I was a kid.”

  Derec grinned. “I have to admit that in my few short months of life I’ve acquired a healthy respect for the laws of chance.”

  Their first approximations done, all that remained was to put final figures into the computer and let it solve the equations of the Jump. They needed to know their correct speed and direction with some accuracy, so they would know what to expect when they landed in Procyon’s arms.

  Ariel bent to the instruments while Derec fumble-fingeredly tried to set up the computer for their first Jump.

  After a long time, he said, “ Ariel, can you handle this? I can’t seem to concentrate, and my fingers are made of rubber.”

  She looked at him in concern. “I was afraid you were going off into a fever again.” Twice before on the trip he had had feverish episodes, as the chemfets altered their growth, in turn altering the environment around them: him.

  Derec tried to fight off fear. He had no idea yet of the ultimate purpose of the chemfets, and had not been able to “talk” to them. Worse, he had no idea if he was contagious. After that one hug, they had avoided so much as touching each other, for fear that Ariel, too, would be infected with them.

  They could well kill him-and might not care if they did.

  “Very well,” Ariel said, her voice trembling a little. “Why don’t you take some febrifuge and stretch out? Maybe a nap will bring you out of it.”

  It sounded good to him. The febrifuge had helped break the last fever, they thought. He was swallowing the thick liquid carefully, because of free-fall and a slightly swollen throat, when Ariel cried out.

  “Yes?” he said, catching his breath and relieved that he had not choked.

  “There’s a spaceship closing on us.”

  Pursuit from Earth!he thought.

  The Star Seeker didn’t have very good detection apparatus, mostly meteor detection. It was this that had flashed an alarm. Meteors, however, do not move very fast. This object was flashing toward them. The detector gave two readings, and Derec finally-through the throb in his head -concluded that their assailant had come up behind a more slowly moving rock.

  “We should be able to get some kind of picture,” said Ariel.

  “It’s still too far off, I think, for a visual image,” Derec said. He blinked his eyes to bring his vision back to a single focus. “I wish we had neutrino detectors.”

  All nuclear power plants gave off neutrinos, and nobody bothers to shield them off. A neutrino reading would give them an estimate of power generating capacity, and thus of ship size. Of course, a battleship and a medium freighter would have similar-sized power plants, but some information would be better than none.

  “Heat?”

  “It isn’t burning at the moment,” she told him, consulting the bolometer. “It must have spotted us days ago and burned to intercept.”

  “Go ahead and enter our Jump in the computer,” he said. It was all he could think of, and it wasn’t much. “How long will that take?”

  “Too long,” she said gloomily. “You are right, though. It’s the best bet, especially if that’s an Earth Patrol ship. Derec, it might follow.”

  He opened his mouth to say that it didn’t matter, then closed it. “Frost!”

  They intended to maneuver at Procyon-they might be in the system a week, during which the bigger ship could hunt them down. Nor would there be any hope of help there.

  He grasped at a straw. “Bigger ships need more fuel. If he can’t match our maneuvers-”

  “And you call me reckless. Let’s not bet on it, okay?”

  “Frost.”

  The other pilot wasn’t maneuvering: he was swooping in to intercept their course from behind and to one side. He’d cross their course at a very sharp angle, pull ahead, and brake down, to let them drift into his arms. He was moving quite rapidly relative to them, far faster than the rock he was coming up behind, and would have to burn soon or swoop helplessly by them.

  Their options were limited: they could fire their rockets to speed up, they could roll the ship and burn to slow down, or they could Jump. It would take time to set up the computer for that; Jumping blind might not mean certain death, it might merely mean being permanently lost in the vastness of the galaxy -or the galaxies! In hyper, all parts of the normal universe were equidistant.

  Or they could roll the ship ninety degrees and turn aside.

  Ariel didn’t consider it, and Derec didn’t even think of it. They had spent twenty percent of their fuel to acquire their current velocity. They would retain it no matter how much they pushed “sideways” on their course. It would therefore take another twenty percent of their fuel to turn the ship aside at an angle of a mere forty-five degrees-a negligible turn.

  “Call for help?” Ariel asked dubiously.
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  “He’ll be on us in twenty minutes or less,” said Derec glumly. No help could possibly reach them. “Unless he burns toward us. “

  “Unlikely.”

  “True.” His head wasn’t working right. The rapidly closing ship wouldn’t want more velocity toward them; it would have to brake down enough as it was, when it passed.

  “I think we can assume that no Earth Patrol will fire on us without sufficient reason,” Ariel said. “So I propose that we talk to them as politely as possible, but maintain course and speed. We can burn if necessary, but-”

  “You think it’s Earth Patrol?” Derec said, then nodded. “A Spacer wouldn’t shoot, either-”

  “A Spacer would be calling us. Face it. Whoever this is, it’s an enemy,” Ariel said.

  “We should have a good idea of our course and speed relative to Sol before he reaches near point,” Derec said, nodding in agreement. “We can Jump any time after that now that you have the prob input.”

  The enemy spaceship wasn’t going to ram, of course; its point of nearest approach was its “near point” with their course, but the two ships would be farther apart-it would then be ahead of them.

  “And we won’t provoke them,” Ariel finished.

  “What with?” Derec asked, feeling lightheaded.

  “You know what I mean.”

  Then Derec had it: “We do have a weapon-”

  “Comm!” she cried, at the breaking-crystal sound of the chime.

  “I hope it’s not a Spacer ship,” she said, worried, as she opened the channel.

  Both of them gasped at the face that appeared in trimensional projection above their board.

  Chapter 15. Aranimas Again

  Oh no, Ariel thought. Aranimas!

  The alien pirate’s cold visage regarded them.

  His face was vaguely human, but had definite overtones of lizard. The eyes, for instance, were widely set, almost on the sides of his face. They were barely close enough together to give him binocular vision-but, unnervingly, Aranimas didn’t much bother with binocular vision. Most of the time one eye focused on whatever he was looking at while the other roved, apparently supplying peripheral vision.

  At the moment he was focusing on Derec with both eyes. “Derrrrec,” he said. High-pitched, trilling, his voice was the most hateful thing Ariel had ever heard. “Arrriel.”

  Glaring at them, he altered the focus of his comm and shrank to distance without moving, his humanoid figure coming into view from the waist up. In this view much of his alienness wasn’t obvious, but they both had seen him in person. He was as tall seated as Derec was standing, and his disproportionately long arms had three times the span of a tall human’s. Thin body, thin neck, domed, thinly haired head, pale skin. Dark eyes, angry now.

  “Wherrre is the Key to Perihelion? You escaped with it instead of leading me to robots.”

  After a heart-stopping moment-Derec gulped, temporarily shocked out of his sickness-Ariel said, with only a faint tremor in her voice, “We lost it in the wreck. W-we’ve been in hospital on Earth-”

  “You lie. I detected three bursts of Key static about this planet. The firrrst, weeks ago, began elsewhere. The last two began and ended here. Only the Key broadcasts in this manner!”

  They looked at each other sickly. Before they could speak, the pirate pulled a small, gleaming, gold pencil out of a pocket. Ariel choked, and she heard a gulp from Derec, too. A pain stimulator! It was, she knew, something like a human neuronic whip, but even more intense. Or perhaps Aranimas was just more violent with its use. It did no damage if not overused, like a neuronic whip, but no one was tough enough to take more than one “treatment” before deciding to cooperate.

  “You will tell all, and tell trrrue, or I kill you slow with this.”

  They did not doubt his sincerity. Nor would he listen to anything until he had taken the ship apart. They couldn’t just give him the Key, even if it could have been of use to him -it was initialized only for humans. He wanted robots, among other things-power most of all.

  Derec reached over and cut the channel.

  “We have another option,” he said, turning to her. “\fe could use the Key, call agent Donovan, and put the whole problem in the laps of the TBI and whatever Spacer authorities are on Earth. Or we can try to deal with Aranimas ourselves.”

  “Deal with him-how?” she said skeptically.

  “I don’t mean bargain. Ariel, you should use the Key.” His plans were clearly hardening as he spoke. “I think I can ram that clumsy ship when he closes with us.”

  Ariel felt herself pale. “No, Derec!”

  “It’s the only way! We can’t let him live. He’s too dangerous-”

  “But-” Her face cleared. “We can use the Key at the last instant.”

  Derec looked at her. The burst of adrenaline that had washed away his illness was fading. She determined that she would not use the Key unless he did, and he seemed to realize that.

  “Okay, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll pretend to surrender-”

  He reached for the comm, but she grabbed his wrist. “No, Derec, it won’t work! He’ll never leave this ship maneuverable while he closes!”

  “It’s the only chance we’ve got,” he said. “Our only weapon is the jet-and the nose of the ship! I’d like to fire the rocket at him, but he’d never pass in front of it.”

  Ariel sighed, but she was unable to think of anything better.

  “Okay. Go get the Key. I’ll fly the ship.”

  Derec nodded in relief, clearly not up to it.

  When they tuned back into the comm channel, Aranimas was howling in his nonhuman voice, so shrilly as to make her teeth ache.

  “You will not brrreak communications again, humans! You-”

  “Very well! We have conferred and agreed to accede to your demands,” she said. “We ask only that you guarantee our lives, or we’ll destroy the Key in front of your eyes.”

  “You will not destroy the Key! I kill slow-”

  “Not if we’re dead first,” said Derec, sounding tired and exasperated-the sound of a father dealing with wrangling children. “We want your promise.”

  The alien fell silent and studied them for a cold-blooded moment. “Verry well. You have my promise I will not kill you if you give me the Key, undamaged.”

  Ariel had a moment in which she wondered if the alien might keep that promise. But it didn’t matter; Derec was right. He had to die. She felt a momentary pang for the harmless and spiritless Narwe slaves with whom Aranimas manned his ship.

  Derec pulled the Key out of his shirt and showed it to him. While Aranimas stared greedily at it, Ariel, at the controls, asked casually, “Shall we maneuver to match you?”

  “No, I maneuver.”

  There was a tense few minutes while the alien turned from them to his controls, rolled his ship, waited, waited, waited, then burned toward them. At the end of the burn the ship was not far away and still passing slowly. Again it rolled, now plainly visible: a vast, ungainly mass of half a dozen or more hulls stuck together. How Aranimas balanced that thing along a center of mass so he could fire rockets without spinning out of control, all without computer aid, Ariel couldn’t imagine.

  He’s too close,she thought, panicky. They hadn’t time to get much velocity for the impact-or to set the Key! Even as she thought, she glanced at Derec, who started squeezing the corners of the Key. She slammed the rocket on, spinning the ship on its secondaries-the gyro, more economical of fuel, was much too slow.

  Aranimas might be flying a clumsy conglomerate, but he was a skilled pilot-and it was a battlewagon. It had adequate sensors even aft, where the rockets were. The pirate spotted their maneuver and blasted aside, not bothering to scream at them over the comm channel.

  Ariel looked over at Derec, slammed into her seat by the acceleration; the Key was ready, but they weren’t. The alien ship was above them, then beside them, even as she struggled to turn nose on toward it. Too late-Aranimas had slid aside.

>   Ariel instantly cut the jet and started to spin ship, not to get too far away-Aranimas’s gunners would have them in their sights the instant they cleared the near zone. Aranimas shrewdly slapped on more side thrust when he saw which way she was turning, in order to widen the gap between them.

  Then the collision alarm rang.

  They heard Aranimas yelling for the first time since the battle began. Ariel fought them onto a line with the alien ship, too busy to look about.

  “The rock is moving!” Derec cried.

  The chunk of rock that had swung in behind them and had gradually been overtaking them was now accelerating toward them at about a Standard gravity-and the bolo registered the temperature of rocket exhaust.

  Wolruf’s face appeared beside the diminished figure of Aranimas on their board.

  “Hold him, Derec! I come!”

  What Aranimas said was not intelligible, but energy lanced from the big ship at the rock. The rock vaporized, its outline flashing away in puffs of incandescent vapor as the guns bore. Those same mighty weapons had vaporized cubic meters of ices and snow at near absolute zero on the ice asteroid where Aranimas had first found Derec.

  Underneath the flimsy camouflage was a little Star Seeker like their own.

  Ariel’s vision dimmed as she cut in the rockets’ full power. In a moment, she cut them off. Her head bobbed against the headrest, and the ship was again diving toward Aranimas. He rolled and blasted to avoid them, and something monstrous slapped their flank, making the ship ring.

  “Puncture!” Derec gasped, but she had no time. She had to hold him till Wolruf got there-

  Aranimas rolled his big ship again, and again blasted to avoid her, throwing off his gunners’ aim. Good job, he doesn’t have computerized./ire control, Ariel thought.

  She was confronted with a split-second tactical problem. In moments they’d be past the alien ship, too soon to roll nose-on toward it. Aranimas had seen their intent and was going the other way. So she rotated further in the direction the nose was pointed, to bring their tail toward the enemy.