by Jo Bannister
“So they gave you this ship.”
The mercenary grinned, without much humour. Chaucer, who did not labour beneath an overly tender conscience, was aware that he smiled at all the wrong things. “I managed to persuade them that they should. Come on,” he said then, easing back into his seat, “let’s get this war on the road.”
Chapter Three
The great engines awoke like angry mountains. The throb of their rage shook the ship; the roar of their fury was an untenable agony against Chaucer’s eardrums; for only a brief moment. Then the accelerating battleship left behind all her own sound, taking with her only a deep subliminal thrum in her plates that those aboard could forget about for hours at a time but never quite completely.
In the same way it was possible to fly a ship through deep space, and for the routine of flying her to become so automatic and the sight of the lazy swimming stars so commonplace that the wonder of the thing was lost under the sheer weight of the familiarity. Whole treks were shrunk to simulator scale. But if a man left the comfort of his padded chair and walked over to the wall, and laid his hands against it, the deep thrumming in his fingertips would remind him that infinity began only four alloy inches away, and then the awesome majesty of all the cosmic miles came crowding in – as profoundly crushing to the psyche as if the endless vacuum itself had poured in through an actual hole in the fabric of the craft, fragile as gossamer in the context of the silent shimmering void.
Many men found they could not endure the burden of loneliness awaiting the children of suns in the dark wastes between the stars. Others, a few, found a curious heady stimulation in the very disparity of scale between man and the universe. They were known, in the places where space crew congregate – the docks and transit stations and cargo depots corporately known by the ancient and anachronistic name The Waterfront – as Users; the implication of the label, which was bestowed with a kind of grudging admiration mixed with mistrust by the ordinary crewmen who could best deal with space by ignoring it for a large part of the time, being that the void consumed like that was addictive and that those who courted it conquered nothing, only succumbed to its lethal magnetism.
Paul loved deep space with the great, quiet passion of a man for his inheritance. In terms of mere time he was a novice – he knew men who had been eighty years in space, their lives stretched by decades of chasing the speed of light in the days before the star-drive, their old bodies now so adapted to the life that their bones broke when they ventured ashore – but he had not come virgin to the void. His first flight had been as a home-coming, things he had never known striking him with forceful familiarity. In dark and sparkling space he found an expanded version, unlimited by horizons, of the emotional peace and freedom he had found and cherished in the harsh, unremitting, pristine wastes of the ice desert of his native planet. There was cleansing in so much distance and so little humanity. In his sourer moods he thought of mankind as the great pollutant, insidiously spreading, irresistibly poisoning: a colonial corruption, a cancer. He was not immune to the feeling of isolation that afflicted other men, but he preferred solitude where there were no people to loneliness among people who feared him as he despised them. Also, there was great beauty and order in the stars which he did not see reflected in those who inhabited the little busy worlds. This was less their fault than his, but it was an inescapable facet of his conditioning that he had been brought up to understand machines, including celestial mechanics, more clearly than people.
But now he was in his element. Doing the task he had been bred for – fusing human insights and inspirations with inhuman reactions, wielding the product with a computer-like logic and the conscience of a submachine-gun – Paul was as much a weapon of war as his ship. The secret men who made both had wrestled for an age with the problem of creating the universal soldier, the intellect of a man safe in the steel body of a robot. Only with Paul did they recognise the potential for progress in the opposite direction.
They went a long way with Paul, but perhaps not far enough. They left too much of the man inside his brain: no weakness, but too much will; no fear, but too much anger; no compassion, but too much hatred. With telepathy too he was more than invincible – he was uncontrollable. So they took away his perception. But they could not destroy his memory of godhood, and memory and hatred and anger and will were enough to sustain him until he could trap them into giving him his freedom and his ship. His business was still, crudely speaking, death; but then it was never the business he objected to, only the people he worked for. Facing death – his own, someone else’s, no matter – with only his lightning hands and his quicker wits between the one and the other was Paul’s idea of living, so that by contrast the spaces between confrontations seemed trivial, nondescript, little more than padding inserted to stretch his span out to a respectable length. He could have done happily without them, but not without his personal fix of space and cold death. Yet still he deluded himself, as users will, that he had command of his habit.
“Gyr” made one swing round the back of Mithras, a lengthening ellipse that piled on the acceleration until the four great engines seemed in imminent danger of overtaking the ship they drove, or pushing the cockpit seats clean through the bodies of the men occupying them; then she leapt out clear of the disc and began her swift, avid consumption of the miles between her and her quarry.
The men of the “Quasar Griffin” were not expecting problems. They believed they had already had, and dealt with, all the trouble Amalthea could throw at them. They were aware, perhaps uncomfortably aware, that they were traversing what might be described as Mithraian airspace, but knowing what they now did about Amalthea, including the fact that she was grounded, they saw no reason for particular concern.
Welland, the navigator, first saw the black ship in transit across the bright green disc. He blinked and she was gone. Part of the reason for this was her trajectory, which was a fine chord rather than a diameter, but mostly it was pure speed that got her out of the spot-light and safe into the inky maze before anyone on “Griffin” had a fix on her and before most of them knew she was there.
All Welland’s common-sense told him that the fleeting silhouette had been an illusion, a trick of the eyes or a trick of the skies, that a spaceship climbing from Mithras was an impossibility. But all his instincts, which after twelve years in this job were well developed, told him that danger threatened and all his training was geared to optimum safety even at the cost of wasted time and effort. So he reported the possible sighting, and Meredith, the captain, instigated the recommended searches even though he too knew that an attack from the planet was out of the question.
“Griffin’s” scanners were uninhibited by preconceptions and so found the impossible craft, climbing impossibly fast towards an encounter appallingly soon. The crew of the SAM stared horror-stricken at the projection. Then Meredith snarled, “That madwoman’s got hold of a battleship!” and, fumble-fingered from haste and lack of practice, keyed in the shields.
“You want to fight or run?” asked Welland laconically.
“Are you kidding?” glowered the captain. “That’s a bloody bastard cruiser!”
“Evasion course set and running,” reported Welland.
“Cannon armed and operational, lasers armed and waiting,” came the terse voice of the gunner, Van Tauber.
“Sod the cannon,” swore Meredith, “I want shields and speed, and anyone with no function in either department can damn well pray.”
“We can’t outrun her,” Welland said, lugubriously shaking his shaggy head.
“In space anything is possible,” said Meredith, anxiously watching the screen and chewing his lip. “For example, she might blow up. This is not as improbable as it sounds, given what we know of the Mithras atmosphere. Or she might fire a pile, or lose her gyros, or the crew might be smitten with a sudden blindness or madness or leprosy. These are admittedly less likely interventions, but the longer we delay confrontation the better the chance that someth
ing will come up. Since our position could hardly be worse, any eventuality must be to our advantage. Christ, look at that bugger move!”
The “Quasar Griffin” responded to the approach of the alien craft by jinking violently onto a new heading. The crew, all of whom had by now congregated on the flight-deck, leaned automatically into the curve. When they had straightened up again Pieter Van Tauber observed grudgingly, “That’s a lovely looking ship she’s got hold of.”
Meredith turned on him an eye cold with disfavour. His words dripped scorn. “That is not a lovely looking ship, young Pieter. If that was our ship, it would be lovely looking. If it were somebody else’s ship hastening to our aid, it would look positively gorgeous. If it carried the admittedly rather tasteless insignia of the AKW Star Patrol, to which I pay an exorbitant amount of tax in view of the fact that its craft are seldom seen more than an afternoon’s flying time from Big Molly’s brothel on Lygros, I would not hear a word spoken against it.
“But since it is Amalthea’s ship, young Pieter, and it is bearing up on us at a truly prodigious rate, and it is bristling with things that crack and spit fire and blow your arms and legs off, and all I have to meet it with is a length of drain-pipe powered by an outboard motor and protected by a shield generator salvaged off Noah’s Ark – whose efficacy is such that we might actually be safer standing behind sheets of brown paper – then no, young Pieter, that is not a lovely looking ship, it’s the ugliest, nastiest, meanest-looking bastard I’ve seen since the wife’s father was bitten by a snake and the snake died.”
Meredith’s crew tittered appreciatively. They were men facing death in a vacuum, and they were able to raise a chuckle to a bit of corny rhetoric because the alternative was bursting into tears, and if they were not particularly brave men they were certainly not cowards. They shared close confines for months at a time, many of them had been friends for years, and all were bound in a web of mutual respect. Welland was treasured for his stoical humour, Van Tauber for his fierce loyalty, Hillaby for the deep caring behind his irascible tongue, so that everyone on “Griffin” was in his debt for devoted nursing during illness although his own constitution was so far from robust that the only way he could get into space at all was as a cook.
But none was more respected than Meredith, whose lack of brilliance (though not of competence) as a pilot in no way detracted from his genius as a leader of men. The Quasar Company which had employed him for twenty-two years, twelve of them as a commander, noted in his file that their senior captain ran his ship without protocol, without an officer/crew structure, without orders (only “suggestions”, “earnest suggestions” and “fairly bloody strenuous suggestions”) and, to a degree unprecedented in the haulage business, which was slow and unglamorous and plagued by in-fighting, without rancour. Meredith very seldom lost a cargo and almost never lost a man. A patient enquirer could have combed the galaxy without finding a person more directly opposite in every particular to Paul, yet Meredith was as impressive in his own way at his own job and he had more friends.
And his friends on the “Quasar Griffin” had confidence that, if there was a way of getting out of this situation alive, Meredith would find it – he had, after all, rescued the ship from Amalthea the previous season when she lured them to Mithras with a phoney distress signal – and that, if there was not, he would lead them as well into death as he had through their strange, often tedious, communal life.
Though the flight-deck was considerably larger, if less marvellously appointed, than “Gyr’s”, nineteen men packing round the screen filled, it to capacity. The air as well as the atmosphere grew thicker. The bat-shaped black ship, beautiful as Van Tauber said in the graceful economy of her lines and the purposeful thrust of her ascent, swelled perceptibly in the perspex as she ate the intervening miles.
The silence grew harder and more brittle until it broke. “For God’s sake,” wrung out Van Tauber, “can’t I at least get in a couple of blasts from the cannon before she blows us out of the sky?”
“Gently, Pieter,” murmured Meredith. “No, I don’t want to start the shooting. That’s a contest we can’t possibly win – if we take her on we’ll end up in fifteen different constellations. Perhaps if we don’t fire she’ll be reluctant to: it’s the ship she wants, after all, at least it was before, so she won’t want big holes in it. Still, there is one action we probably ought to take.”
He thumbed down the communicator switches, opening a broad band of channels. “This is the ‘Quasar Griffin’calling Amalthea of Mithras; ‘Quasar Griffin’calling Amalthea of Mithras; come in, please.”
Paul was surprised at the development, perhaps disproportionately so. It was not unknown for doomed men to try to bargain with Fate; still, it seemed somehow improbable that such communication should be couched in the formal language of the wireless operator’s handbook. He reached for his switches. Chaucer’s soft, heavy hand fell on his.
“I’ll talk to them.”
Paul twisted his head slowly and spoke with exaggerated patience. “Chaucer. Until I have this job wrapped up, mopped up and delivered with little bows on it, you will not even talk to me.” His dark eyes, golden-aureoled, held the Chancellor unwinkingly until Chaucer removed his hand. Then he replied.
“‘Quasar Griffin’, this is the battle-cruiser ‘Gyr’. I am equipped and prepared to reduce your vessel to a cloud of swarf and protein globules three miles across. Alternatively, I will accept your unconditional surrender. What I am not going to do is discuss any compromise between those options.”
Meredith said, “Isn’t it rather early to be talking about unconditional surrender?”
“Not really,” said Paul. “Gyr” leapt to the cough of her main cannon. Flak stitched the eternal night with lines of brilliance. Where the bright seams converged a length ahead of “Griffin” they created an explosive eddy from which waves of force burgeoned outward, invisible except for their effect on the hapless merchantmen. “Griffin” reared on her tail like a startled horse as the shock waves broke under her nose and screwed through three parts of a circle before the stabilisers regained control.
Bruised and winded men picked themselves off the walls of the “Quasar Griffin”. One man slid down unconscious, blood trickling from his temple. Hillaby caught him before he hit the floor and, grumbling, whisked him off to his bunk.
Meredith turned from the console – he and Welland alone had ridden the wave without upset, wedged safely in the left- and right-hand seats – and looked gravely round his crew. “I think it’s time everybody strapped in: duty-watch in here, the rest of you in the mess. Don’t worry about missing anything: if we win you’ll be the first to know. Also if we lose.”
He swung back to the speaker. “All right, ‘Gyr’, we acknowledge your superior fire-power. There’s no need to labour the point. It was never actually at issue. These overgrown beer-cans were armed against native outriggers, not bloody destroyers.”
“What is your arsenal?”
Meredith snorted. “Oh come on, now. It may not be spectacular but it’s all the defence we have – you can’t expect us to give it to you on a plate.”
“If you choose to surrender.”
“You’d have to persuade us we had something to gain.”
“I thought I already had.”
“‘Gyr’,” said Meredith grimly, “I do not doubt that you can demolish my ship with minimal difficulty and effort. If you do so my crew will die, but they will die quickly and cleanly and not at the hands of a gorgon with a grudge. We do not intend to engage you, that would be fatuous. But while I have power and steerage I will neither stop this ship nor turn her round. If you want ‘Griffin’ you’ll have to punch holes in her, and much good she’ll do you then.”
Paul made a small wry grimace at the small silver grid which brought Meredith’s voice into his ship. If asked he might have admitted to being mildly impressed, but probably not. “Oh well,” he remarked to Chaucer, “I’ll shake them up a bit, see what they say
then.”
There were weapons in “Gyr’s” armoury that the men of the “Quasar Griffin” had only heard of, and some more precocious than that. Some of the bursts and poundings that rattled “Griffin’s” hull Pieter Van Tauber could identify approximately from the characteristics listed in the manufacturers’specifications – not that he ever persuaded the Quasar Company to invest in the like of sound missiles or alternating field-beams. He once nearly got a charged particle lance, but the company changed its mind at the last minute and bought a new carpet for the head office instead.
Van Tauber, who like all experts was something of a fanatic, managed to glean a certain pleasure from finally seeing the supreme technology of war, long coveted, in action even from the sinister side; and his watch companions managed to find room in their fearful hearts for a mounting irritation at his frequent oddly conceited observations of the “Ah yes – scorch bombs – I said we should have had some of those” variety as the belaboured ship ricocheted from blast to blast along the crests of force-waves like an inexpert surfer.
Paul too was growing tetchy. He was not enjoying this as much as he had expected to. Without risk there was no satisfaction, and if the privateer refused to face him there was no risk. There was no skill involved in shot-peppering a sitting duck. The “Griffin” was not even making a good job of running away. Her only defence was obstinacy.
“Why don’t they fight?” he snarled. “They must have something worth throwing at us. You can’t make a living as a pirate on SAM weaponry.”
“They were not noticeably reticent about turning their guns on people on the ground,” Chaucer said, tight-lipped.
