Ride the Star Winds

by A Bertram Chandler

  Shortening sail, thought Grimes, watching through the binoculars. There’re those tri-s’ls or whatever he calls ’em coming in. And I can see ports opening. Boat bays? Or gunports?

  A gout of yellow flame spurted from one of the openings in the raider’s hull, just abaft the masts. A long time later, it seemed, there was an explosion ahead of Pamir, about half a kilometer distant, a sudden rose of pale fire burgeoning in the blackness. So the pirate was using projectile weapons.

  “Unidentified vessel”—the joke was wearing thin—“to Pamir. That was the last warning. Surrender or take the consequences.”

  “Bearing green ninety. Range five, four, three—closing.”

  No identification marks, thought Grimes, studying the other vessel through the powerful glasses. Could be one of ours, save for a few, subtle points of difference . . .

  He said to Fowler. “All right, Lieutenant. You may open fire.”

  He saw the first rocket flash from its launching tube, trailing a wake of blue flame, spinning a flimsy filament of incandescence over the shortening distance between the two ships. It got a little over halfway, and then a stream of tracer came hosepiping from a gunport, met it, eroded it into ragged and harmless fragments of spinning debris. The warhead didn’t explode.

  “Rapid fire!” ordered Grimes. “Get the other five rockets out and on the way as quickly as possible. Don’t bother guiding them in. One might get through.”

  None did. The pirate’s machine gunners were fast.

  “Range one. Point seven five. Point five.”

  “Resistance is useless,” came the voice from the NST transceiver.

  “Starboard broadside, fire,” said Grimes into the intercom microphone.

  He was not altogether prepared for what happened. He was expecting to see the enemy’s sails shredded, his masts cut down, by the shot that he had prepared, the same sort of shot that had been used so effectively during the days of sail on Earth, the bags of scrap metal, nuts and bolts, lengths of metal chain. He had forgotten, though, that one of the old men-o’-war never, when firing a broadside, fired all guns simultaneously—they were fired in quick succession.

  Pamir lurched. It was more than a mere lurch. It was as though a giant palm had swatted her on her starboard side. The north and south masts were carried away, each of them falling to starboard as the ship was driven to port by the recoil, the yards of each of them ripping the sails of the east mast, becoming inextricably entangled with the rigging.

  “You got her, sir!” Fowler was yelling. “You got her!”

  Grimes, who had been knocked down by the violent lateral acceleration, got groggily to his feet, staggered to the starboard viewports. The raider was, indeed, in a sorrier state than Pamir. In addition to the damage to her rigging there were gaping holes in her shell plating, through some of which smoke and flame flared explosively, like rocket exhausts. Her control room ports were bright with the ruddy glare of an internal fire. She was spinning slowly about her long axis. The one undamaged main spar, the east mast, which had been on her starboard side, shielded from Pamir’s guns, lifted into view as she rolled, lifted, then dipped toward the other ship—and held steady, a long, metal lance. Freakishly, then, the rotary motion ceased. Perhaps a survivor was still exercising some sort of control, was determined to exact vengeance before his death. And on the far side air, mixed with the gases of combustion, was still escaping into the vacuum, inexorably driving the total wreck on to the near-wreck.

  “Range closing,” Denby was saying, over and over again. “Range closing. Range closing.”

  “Reaction drive!” ordered Grimes. “Get us out of here!” He could visualize the end of that long spar driving through Pamir’s shell plating and piercing the vacuum chamber in which the sphere of anti-matter was suspended in the strong magnetic fields. It was not a nice thing to think about.

  Listowel made no reply. The captain was slumped in his seat, unmoving.

  Sandra was shaking her husband violently. “Ralph! Wake up! Wake up!” Then, snarling wordlessly, she pulled him from his chair, letting him drift to the deck. Before she was properly seated in his place her long fingers were on the controls. She snarled again, then snapped, “Something’s wrong, Commodore!”

  “Starboard broadside,” ordered Grimes into the intercom microphone. “Fire!” That should push them away and clear from their dying attacker.

  “The guns are off their mounts,” came a hysterical voice. “We have casualties—”

  Denby was still calling out range figures—in meters now—but it was not necessary. The shattered, burning raider was too close and was getting closer.

  “Roll her, Sandra!” shouted Grimes.

  “But our east mast is some protection—”

  “It’s not. Roll her, damn you!”

  “Roll her,” repeated Sonya. “He knows what he’s doing.” She added quietly, “I hope.”

  The gyroscope controls and the gyroscopes themselves were still working. There was the initial rumble as the flywheels started to turn, then the low hum. The drifting wreck slid slowly from view, dipping below the starboard viewport rims—but if Denby’s radar readings were to be credited disaster was now only millimeters distant.

  Grimes ordered, “Rotate through ninety degrees. Let me know when you’re on eighty-five.”

  The next few seconds could have been twice that many years.

  “Eighty-five,” stated Sandra at last.

  “Port battery—fire.”

  Again Pamir was slammed by that giant hand and was swatted clear of the dying raider’s murderous sidelong advance. The tracks of the two ships diverged—but not fast enough, thought Grimes. He said urgently, “I don’t care how you do it, Sandra, but get some of our sails trimmed to catch the light from Llanith. We must get out of here, and fast!”

  “But we should board,” said Sonya. “There may be survivors. There will be evidence. The fire will burn itself out once the atmosphere in the ship is exhausted.”

  “Not that sort of fire. Do something, Sandra.”

  Using the gyroscopes she turned the ship, at last getting the sails of the one surviving mast trimmed to the photon gale. Astern the wreck dwindled in a second to the merest point of light—and then, briefly, became a speck of such brilliance as to sear the retinas of those who watched. It had happened as Grimes had been sure that it must happen. The casing of the sphere of anti-matter had been warped by the heat of the fire—or, perhaps, had been buckled by an explosion. Contact with normal matter had been inevitable.

  The pirate was gone, every atom of her structure canceled out.

  The pirate was gone and Pamir was drifting, crippled. It was the time for the licking of wounds, the assessment of damage before, hopefully, limping into port under jury rig. Men aboard Pamir had been injured, perhaps killed. It had been an expensive victory. And Grimes knew that it would not have been so expensive had he remembered to fire the guns of his broadside in succession instead of all at once.

  He realized that Fowler, the gunnery officer, was saying something to him. “It was brilliant, sir, brilliant, the way you fought the action—”

  He replied slowly, “We won. But—”

  “But?” The young man’s face wore a puzzled expression.

  “But you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs,” contributed Sonya rather too brightly.

  “But you should be able to make one without blowing up the kitchen,” was all that Grimes was able to manage in way of reply.

  The Dutchman

  I

  Grimes was packing his overnight bag without much enthusiasm.

  “Do you have to go?” asked Sonya.

  He replied rather testily, “I don’t have to do anything. But the lightjammers have always been my babies and I’ve always made a point of seeing them in and seeing them out.”

  “But Coldharbor Bay? And in midwinter? There are times, my dear, when I strongly suspect that I married a masochist.”

  “I
f only you were a sadist we’d live happily forever after,” he retorted. “And if you were a masochist you’d be coming with me to Port Erikson.”

  “Not bloody likely,” she told him. “Why you couldn’t have arranged for your precious lightjammers to berth somewhere in what passes for the Tropics on this dismal planet is beyond my comprehension.”

  “There were reasons,” he said.

  Yes, there were reasons, one of the most important being that a lightjammer is a potential superbomb with a yield greatly in excess of that of the most devastating nuclear fusion weapon. The essential guts of a starsailer is the sphere of anti-matter, contraterrene iron, held suspended in vacuum by powerful magnetic fields. In theory there is no possibility that the anti-matter will ever come in contact with normal matter—but history has a long record of disasters giving dreadful proof that theory and practice do not always march hand in hand. The terminal port for the lightjammers, therefore, was located in a region of Lorn uninhabited save by a handful of fur trappers. It would have been at the South Pole itself but for the necessity for open water, relatively ice-free the year around, to afford landing facilities for the ships.

  The first of these weird vessels, Flying Cloud, had been an experimental job designed to go a long way in a long time, but with a very low power consumption. The most important characteristic of anti-matter—apart from its terrifying explosive potential—is anti-mass. A ship with a sphere of contraterrene iron incorporated in her structure is weightless and inertialess. With her sails spread to the photon gale she can attain an extremely high percentage of the velocity of light but cannot, of course, exceed it,

  The crew of Flying Cloud had been, putting it mildly, a weird mob. Somehow they had become obsessed with the idea of turning the vessel into a real faster-than-light ship. (The conventional starship, proceeding under inertial drive and Mannschenn Drive, is not faster than light, strictly speaking; she makes lightyears-long voyages in mere weeks by, as it has been put, going ahead in space while going astern in time.) This desirable end they attempted to achieve by means of a jury-rigged rocket drive, using homemade solid fuel, just to give Flying Cloud that extra nudge.

  Fantastically, the idea worked, although it should not have. Not only did it work, but there were economically advantageous side effects. The lightjammer finished up a long way off course, plunging down to apparently inevitable destruction on Llanith, one of the planets of the anti-matter systems to the galactic west of the Rim Worlds. But a transposition of atomic charges had taken place, She now was anti-matter herself, whereas that contraterrene iron sphere was now normal matter.

  Flying Cloud had landed on Llanith and had been welcomed by the people, human rather than merely humanoid, of that world. She had remained on Llanith until the Llanithian scientists and engineers had worked out just what had happened and why. (The attitude of the scientists at first had been that it couldn’t possibly have happened.) Then, after modifications had been made to her control systems and the makeshift rocket replaced by a properly designed reaction drive, she had returned to Lorn, carrying not only a sample shipment of trade goods but passengers from the Llanithi Consortium.

  And Rim Runners, the shipping line of the Rim Worlds Confederacy, had a new trade.

  Grimes sat in the forward cabin of the Rim Runners’ atmosphere ferry that somebody had called—the name had stuck—the Commodore’s Barge. He was not handling the controls himself. His old friend and shipmate Billy Williams, master of the deep space tug Rim Malemute, was piloting. Grimes was admiring the scenery.

  The landscape unrolling beneath the barge was spectacular enough but cold and forbidding. Lake Misere was well-astern now and the craft was threading its way over and through the Great Barrens, skirting the higher, jagged, snowcapped peaks, its inertial drive snarling as Williams fought to maintain altitude in the vicious downdrafts. The big man cursed softly to himself.

  Grimes said, “You would insist on coming along for the ride, Billy.”

  “I didn’t think you’d make me drive. Skipper.”

  “Rank has its privileges.”

  “No need to rub it in. If it’s all the same to you I’ll take this little bitch down through the Blackall Pass. It’s putting on distance, but I don’t feel like risking the Valley of the Winds after what we’ve been getting already.”

  “As you’ve been saying, you’re driving.”

  Williams brought the barge’s head around to port, making for the entrance to the pass. The opening was black in the dark gray of the cliff face, a mere slit that seemed to widen as the aircraft came on to the correct line of approach. And then they were plunging through the gloomy, winding canyon—the tortuousness of which was an effective wind baffle, although the eddies at every bend made pilotage difficult. The echoes of the irregular beat of the inertial drive, bouncing back from the sheer granite walls, inhibited conversation.

  They broke out at last into what passed for daylight in these high latitudes, under a sky which, on this side of the ranges, was thickly overcast. Only to the northwest, just above the featureless horizon of the Nullarbor Plain, was there a break in the cloud cover, a smear of sullen crimson to mark the setting of the Lorn sun.

  They flew steadily over the desolate tundra through the gathering darkness. The lights of Port Erikson came up at last, bright but cheerless. Beyond them Grimes could see the tiny moving sparks of white and red and green that must be the navigation lanterns of the small icebreaker that, in winter, was employed to keep Coldharbor Bay clear of fast ices and pack ice.

  “Too bloody much seamanship about this job, Skipper,” remarked Williams cheerfully.

  “No such thing as too much seamanship,” retorted Grimes huffily. He pulled the microphone of the VHF transceiver from its clip. “Astronautical Superintendent to Port Erikson. Can you read me? Over.”

  “Loud and clear, Commodore, loud and clear. Pass your message. Over.”

  “My ETA Port Erikson is ten minutes from now. Over.”

  “We’re all ready and waiting for you, Commodore.”

  “What’s the latest on Pamir?”

  “ETA confirmed a few minutes ago. 2000 hours our time.”

  “Thank you, Port Erikson. Over and out.”

  Ahead was the scarlet blinker that marked the end of the airstrip. Williams maintained speed until the flashing light was almost directly beneath the barge, until it looked as though they must crash into the spaceport’s control tower. With only seconds to spare he brought the aircraft to a shuddering halt by application of full reverse thrust, let her fall, checked her descent a moment before she hit the concrete.

  Grimes decided to say nothing. After all, he himself was frequently guilty of such exhibitions and all his life he had deplored the all-too-common don’t do as I do, do as I say, philosophy.

  * * *

  Grimes and Williams waited in the control tower with Captain Rowse, the harbormaster. (In a normal spaceport his official title would have been port captain, but a normal spaceport does not run to a harbor, complete with wharfage and breakwaters.)

  “She’s showing up now,” announced the radar operator.

  “Thank you, Mr. Gorbels,” said Rowse.

  The VHF speaker came to life. “Pamir to Port Erikson, Pamir to Port Erikson. Am coming in. Over.”

  Grimes recognized the voice, of course. Listowel had been master of the experimental Flying Cloud and was now in command of Pamir. A good man, not easily panicked, one who would have been just as at home on the poop of a windjammer as in the control room of a spaceship.

  The commodore moved so that he could look up through the transparent dome that roofed the control tower. Yes, there she was, her navigation lights bright sparks against the black overcast, white and emerald, masthead, port and starboard. (Her real masts were retracted, of course, and her sails furled. She was driving herself down through the atmosphere by negative dynamic lift, a dirigible airship rather than a spaceship.) Faintly Grimes could hear the throb of her airscrews,
even above the thin whining of the wind that eddied about the tower.

  The ship was lower now, visible through the windows that overlooked Coldharbor Bay. Grimes lifted borrowed night glasses to his eyes, ignoring the TV screen that presented the infrared picture. The slim, graceful length of her was clearly visible, picked out by the line of lighted ports. Down she came—down, down, slowly circling, until she was only meters above the dark, white-flecked waters of the bay. From her belly extended hoses and Grimes knew that the thirsty centrifugal pumps would be sucking in ballast.

  “Pamir waterborne,” announced Listowel from the VHF speaker. “Am proceeding to berth. Over.”

  Grimes, Williams and Rowse shrugged themselves into heavy overcoats, put on fur-lined caps. The harbormaster led the way to the elevator that would take them down to ground level. They dropped rapidly to the base of the tower. Outside it was bitterly cold and the wind carried thin flurries of snow. Grimes wondered why some genius could not devise earflaps that would not inhibit hearing—his own prominent ears felt as though they were going to snap off at any moment. But during berthing operations it was essential to hear as well as to see what was going on.

  The three men walked rapidly to the wharf, breasting the wind—little, fat Rowse in the lead, chunky Grimes and big, burly Williams a couple of steps in the rear. The shed lights were on now, as were the position-marker flashers. Beside each of the latter waited three linesmen, beating their arms across their chests in an endeavor to keep warm. The berthing master, electric megaphone in his gloved hand, was striding up and down energetically. Pamir came in slowly and carefully, almost hidden by the cloud of spray thrown up by the turbulence induced by her airscrews. She was accosting the wharf at a steep angle at first and then turned, so that she was parallel to the line of wharfage. The wind did the rest, so that it was hardly necessary for Listowel to use his linethrowers fore and aft. She fell gently alongside, with her offshore screws swiveled to provide transverse thrust against the persistent pressure of the southerly.