by Isaac Asimov
“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 fire 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.
At the critical moment she blasted, and fire splashed over Aranimas’s ship. It must have rung like a bell.
There was a great outrush of air and assorted particles. Ariel was grateful she couldn’t see well enough to tell if the particles were kicking.
In a flashing moment they were past, and the reflected flame glare died, and Aranimas was moving again, fire spurting from points on the ungainly hulls. Another kind of fire flashed, their own ship gonged when hit, jolted again, as Ariel’s head rattled against the headrest and alarms yelled; Derec was saying something as she spun the ship as rapidly as shaking hands would let her. Mistake! she thought. Should never have blasted away from him; now they were far enough away for the gunners to sight them.
Clenching her teeth, Ariel rolled the ship again, trying to ignore the hits, hoping one wouldn’t disable them — or kill them. A single stray bolt would
“We’re still in their near zone,” said Derec, breathlessly. “Glancing hits only —”
True. she thought, smiling mirthlessly — they were still alive!
And then they had completed their roll, much farther from Aranimas than she liked, and she blasted back. No more hits; the uneven outline of the alien ship grew and grew in their vision screens, and she breathed more evenly.
Then she had a moment of wonder: she felt better because she was not going to be killed by Aranimas’s gunners in the next few moments. But she was trying to commit suicide by ramming his ship!
Aranimas began to slide aside and she automatically corrected, centering on the dark bulk. What should she do?
“Wolruf is closing fast, but I don’t know if she’s still maneuverable,” said Derec tensely. “She got hit hard.”
“Give her a call?”
Then Aranimas’s ship loomed monstrous and the alien had arranged a surprise: a gun on the hull swung to bear on them. What prodigies of effort had gotten it ready in the short time the battle had taken, they would never know. It was a full-sized gun, though its first bolt was weak, an aiming shot.
Aranimas’s gunners were not the timid Narwe. They were starfish-shaped creatures about whom Ariel knew little; they avoided the light and breathed a slightly different atmosphere than the rest of the crew.
She felt no compunction about them, and spun the ship aside. Aranimas saw that and moved to prevent her from pointing her rockets at the new gun.
A second bolt flashed at them, but the gunners lacked Aranimas’s own savage efficiency.
“Another puncture, and our antenna’s out,” said Derec calmly.
His calmness calmed her, and she made one more attempt to ram. In turning away from her jet, Aranimas had run before their nose. She cracked on full power and they were hurled back into their seats. Her vision dimmed. She thought it was the power fading.
Too slow; the huge, bloated body of the enemy slid sideways even as it grew monstrous before them.
Then the vision screen erupted in one pale flare, pale because the safety circuit wouldn’t transmit the whole visual part of the flash: the sensor had taken the next hit from the gun.
“There went our bow!” Derec cried.
Ariel gulped, half expecting to see space before her, but they hadn’t lost that much of the bow. With the vision out, she could only crouch, panting, at her board, the rocket off, hoping for
“The Key — trigger it —” she cried, turning to him, knowing in a flashing moment that it was too late — they’d hit —
The ship jolted, and the impact was quite different from the gun hits. They were thrown forward against their straps, the ship shuddered, metal squealed, something broke — all in an instant — then they were free, the ship floating quietly.
Air hissed out, alarms still burring and shrilling. All communications out, no exterior view. Ariel touched her controls and the attit
ude jets responded; she could turn and burn again. But they were blind.
“Suits!” said Derec. “And see if the auto-circuit can give us more eyes.”
Suits first, she thought. When the air goes out of a small ship, it can go fast. Should have had them on all along, if they’d had time.
They scrambled into their suits in a free-fall comedy that was deadly serious. Every moment Ariel expected the lancing fire of a hit, but the ship continued serenely on its way.
They didn’t bother to try communications, knowing that the gun’s bolt, or the impact, must have destroyed the forward antennas. Vision, however, could be brought in from any quarter of the ship. Only the bow eyes were out. After a bit of fumbling, they found an undamaged sensor that bore toward their late battle.
“What … what is it?” Ariel asked, awed.
“I was about to ask you,” Derec said. “You know more about Aranimas’s ship, you were on it longer —”
“That was before my amnesia,” she said.
“Oh.”
“I think — one of the hulls, broken free?”
They had only a partial view of it — it was below the sensor’s view. Only a spinning, irregular curve of dark metal, with an occasional highlight gleaming, here and there a projection — derricks, turrets, landing ports, sensors — and interior beams?
“It can’t be the whole ship,” Derec said finally. “But what happened to it?”
Ariel took a deep breath, found the air inside her suit rank with her sweat. “I’ll turn around!” she said, chagrined. “I didn’t realize how tense I was.”
She wasn’t thinking. I’ll never be a combat pilot, she thought shakily. Wasted minutes looking into a view I could’ve adjusted — Or do pilots get used to this kind of thing?
But the human race had no combat pilots. No telling how well they could perform. Grimly, she thought, if there are many of Aranimas’s kind in space, we may have to learn.
“Aranimas — he disintegrated!” Derec said.
The big composite ship was now a dozen big pieces in a cloud of hundreds of smaller ones. They looked at each other. Derec’s face was as blank as she felt her own to be.
“Did we do that?” she asked.
“I don’t see how — Wolruf!”
After a moment she nodded. “You must be right. But where did she get the guns?”
Derec just shook his head.
If anybody was alive over there, they weren’t disposed to do any more shooting. The wreckage was retreating slowly. Ariel came to herself with a start.
“We’ve got to get back over there —”
“Frost, yes!”
But how?”
It wasn’t easy, but they worked it out. The view they had gave them bearings. They chose a spot that would enable them to miss any of the junk, and rotated the ship until its blind nose pointed along that bearing. Ariel then placed her hands on the board, looked into darkness, and thought, now we find out how good a pilot you are, girl.
In a moment she was back on Aurora, about to do her first solo takeoff. She had had that very thought, or something very close to it, and even more nervousness than now. Now, though, she was in shock. The memories went on and on, the takeoff, the acceleration seeming more fierce than ever now that she had to remain conscious, the relief as the jets shut down, and then the indescribable free, floating sensation of one’s first solo orbit.
“Ariel?”
Her instructor —
“Ariel?”
With a shake, she brought herself out of it. “Sorry. Memory fugue.” As her hands moved over the board — taking care to push the buttons on the real board instead of the remembered one — the memories went on, flashed back, picked up details; A whole chunk of her past restored to her by a chance thought, a chance repetition of forgotten circumstance.
She burned for ten seconds and rolled the ship to study the junk. There should be detectors back there that would tell them how fast they were moving relative to the junk, but they weren’t working. The junk still seemed to be receding. Ariel rolled and blasted for another twenty seconds, again looked.
“That should do it.”
They had only to wait, floating toward the wrecked ship aft-end first, ready to burn to brake down.
“How did she do it?”
Chapter 16
WOLRUF AGAIN
“IT’S HOPELESS;’ SAID Derec.
Mandelbrot was trying to patch their hull.
“It’s got to work,” Ariel said, biting her lip behind her helmet … Otherwise, Wolruf —”
The other Star Seeker had been hit harder than their own and was scarcely maneuverable. Mandelbrot, using rockets welded onto his body and a line gun, had brought them close together, with Ariel doing most of the maneuvering. There was very little air in either ship — and there was no spacesuit for the caninoid alien.
“We’ve been stressed too severely. The best we can do is temporary patching.” Derec tried to rub his head, and his hand encountered his helmet for the fifteenth time. Frustrated, he let it drop.
“If it holds long enough to Jump out of here —” she said.
Derec shook his head. “Four Jumps to Robot City — five for safety,” he said … That’s days of work checking courses and calculating. I wouldn’t want my life to depend on that kind of patching. And we’ll be maneuvering. That’ll strain the patches even more.”
“Something’s got to be done! Maybe Aranimas’s ship —”
Jumping at straws, and she knew it. “Even Wolruf doesn’t really know how to fly it — assuming any of us had the arm reach for that control board. No computer aid, Ariel!”
She nodded soberly … I know. It’s not possible; it’s these ships or nothing.”
“Maybe there’s air or food over there. We could use both.”
They looked at each other somberly. It was not a pleasant position.
On a wrecked ship, barely maneuverable, with most of its instrumentation out, leaking like a proverbial sieve, on a trajectory that would take it somewhere near Procyon in a few million years, short on air, water, and food, with a friend on another, worse ship, sealed into a single room.
“Join the Space Service and see the stars,” Derec said, forcing a grin.
Ariel grinned back, just as wanly.
The alien ship was all around them, and some of the pieces definitely had once been living. Derec, feeling none too good to start, avoided looking at them, though they were at such a distance that details were lost. His imagination supplied them. Many were Narwe, but there was a goodly number of the starfish-shaped dwellers-in-darkness he had glimpsed in his brief time aboard the ship.
“I’m amazed they aren’t trying something,” he said again. They’d both been saying that for nearly an hour.
“Derec … I think they’re all gone.”
It could be. But —” Dead?” he asked.
Many were. Ariel shook her head, though. “I don’t think so. I think they must have Jumped out at the height of the battle.”
Leaning forward, Derec eagerly scanned such of the surroundings as were visible, trying to count the hulls. It was no use. “I don’t know how many hulls there were, and they all look different now. The central one, I suppose, had the hyperatomic motors. Maybe some of the other hulls did, too. I don’t think there’s more than one hull missing, though.”
“You agree, then?” she asked, worried.
“I agree,” he said. “Knowing Aranimas, if he were alive and here, he’d be shooting at us. With something.”
“Yes.” She was silent for a moment. “It’s not likely that all that damage could have been done by Mandelbrot.”
Wolruf had dropped the robot off when she had braked sufficiently to bring the relative motion of the ships down to a level Mandelbrot’s rockets could handle. The robot had made a landing on the alien ship, damaging one knee joint, and then had swarmed allover it, planting explosive charges at the joins of the hulls. The mighty ship had simply broken up.<
br />
“We already know that there were explosive charges at the hull connections,” Derec said. Aranimas had dropped one of his hulls to make his escape at Rockliffe Station.
“Yes. He must have blown them all, got his central hull free, and Jumped.”
“If he Jumped blind, he could be anywhere in the universe,” Derec said. “Let’s hope he never finds his way back!”
It wasn’t something they could count on.
Half an hour later, Mandelbrot called them on the radio and suggested that they go lock-to-lock with Wolruf’s ship. Presently, Ariel brought them together, Mandelbrot guiding them, and the open airlocks grated together. They were compatible, and with a little nudging clanked into position.
“This join will not hold air long,” observed the robot. “We must charge it, and Wolruf must move fast, despite the bag.”
They had been pumping their leaking air into bottles, to save at least some of it. Derec took one of the bottles to the lock, shoved its bayonet fitting into the lock’s emergency valve, and opened the bottle.
Presently Wolruf banged on the inner door, the outer door clanking shut behind her. Derec let the air continue to hiss to equalize pressure — but the bottle went empty first.
Muttering, he jerked it out of the emergency valve, which closed automatically, and turned to the manual spill valve. It took a good grip to hold that open, but after a moment pressure was equal and they hadn’t lost much of their precious air.
Wolruf entered in a transparent plastic balloon, now half deflated under cabin pressure. She looked a little short of breath — or scared; Derec certainly couldn’t blame her. Itcould not have been easy to flounder in free-fall, inside that balloon, through the other ship and the twinned locks.
The little caninoid emerged from the release zipper with a shake, saying, “Thank ‘ou. It wass a nervous time. I ‘ave grreat fearr of the Erani.”
“We think Aranimas is gone,” said Ariel.
“I ‘ope so, but I do not understand.”
Ariel explained tersely.
