Palmer watched the flickering pattern of lights on the great computer-face tensely. He knew that the outcome of the computer’s calculations would determine whether he would live or die, but somehow, after the perfidy of the Solarians, this did not seem terribly important—not when the entire human race was doomed in any case. A part of him wanted to live, but another part of him wanted the Solarian strategy to fail. Revenge was a poor satisfaction when it meant your own death, but perhaps it was better than no satisfaction at all.
And there was something that Ortega was missing. Palmer could not put his finger on it; it was little more than a feeling in the pit of his stomach. But somehow he just knew that Ortega had overlooked some small but vital detail….
Finally, after what seemed like centuries, the Kor began to study his data screens intently. After a few moments, he looked up, his alien face calm and unreadable, his ears still.
“The Council of Wisdom has completed its calculations, vermin,” the Kor said. “It accepts your proposition, with the understanding that any attempt to deviate from the agreed upon course will be met by instant destruction.”
“Agreed,” said Ortega. “With the further understanding that if any of your ships try to inch up on us, we will immediately activate our Stasis-Field Generator.”
“Understood, vermin. You will return to your ship immediately. The guards will conduct you to the proper output channel.” The Kor screeched an order in Duglaari, and the ten nearest Duglaari soldiers stepped forward and surrounded the humans. The Solarians turned their backs disdainfully on the Kor and stepped towards the moving strip which led out of the chamber. Five of the guards began to walk in front of them.
The other five stepped between Palmer and the Solarians. Two of them grabbed his arms and pulled him to his knees. The other three raised their energy rifles.
Lingo whirled, his huge green eyes blazing. “What is the meaning of this?” he snapped.
“The Confederal officer who accompanied you is about to be executed,” the Kor said blandly. “Nothing more. Return to your ship.”
“Just a minute,” Lingo said, pointing to Palmer as if he were some inanimate object. “He goes with us.”
“You have declared that the humans of the Confederation are no longer under the protection of Fortress Sol,” the Kor said. “Therefore this officer is not under your protection. Therefore he is a prisoner. Therefore he is to be killed.”
“Not so fast,” Lingo said. “We agreed to withdraw our protection from Fortress Sol providing you met our terms. Since you have not met our terms, the offer no longer holds. Or do I misunderstand you? Are you now willing to turn over four thousand ships to us? If you are, why then….”
“Enough, vermin,” the Kor said, with a furious snap of his ears. “You are to be permitted to escape with your lives. Do not attempt to set further conditions. Return to your ship, while you can.”
“Don’t give me orders, Doog,” Lingo roared. “This officer came here under our jurisdiction, and by damn, he’ll leave under our jurisdiction, or I’ll give the order to detonate the bomb right now!”
The Kor flapped his ears in rage, but the Duglaari penchant for logic prevailed. “Very well,” the Kor said. “It is not worth risking the Council of Wisdom over human illogicality. Take the Confederal vermin and go.”
Palmer was jerked to his feet and ushered onto the moving strip with the Solarians. He stared at Lingo with unrelieved loathing. The Solarian had saved his life, but only to show his superiority over the Kor. Somehow, Palmer felt more sympathy for the Doog who had wanted to kill him than for the human who had saved his life.
“Sorry about this, Jay,” Dirk Lingo said, “but we’re going to have our hands full, and we can’t take the chance of your doing anything foolish.”
Palmer convulsed his muscles against the bonds tying him firmly into one of the dummy seats in the Solarian ship’s control room.
“Don’t give it a second thought, traitor,” he snapped. “You’ve got much more important things to be sorry about.”
Lingo was already preparing the ship for lift-off; Fran Shannon was in her control seat; Ortega sat in the other dummy.
“Things aren’t always what they seem, Jay,” Lingo said, as the great hemispherical viewscreen was activated.
“They sure aren’t!” Palmer said. “You people seemed like decent human beings, friends…more than friends. All that baloney about accepting me as a member of the Group. All that crud about the noble mission of Fortress Sol. And what do you turn out to be? Garden variety cowards and traitors!”
Lingo scanned the gray cloud cover, patently ignoring Palmer. “Should be here any minute,” he muttered to himself.
“If you had any guts,” Palmer sneered, “you’d detonate that fusion bomb right now, and at least destroy the Council of Wisdom. How can you live with yourself, anyway?”
Lingo, Fran and Ortega burst into laughter.
“Bomb?” said Ortega. “Bomb? Didn’t you hear what the Kor said? It’s impossible to sneak a fusion bomb past radiation detectors. There isn’t any bomb.”
“What? But…but the second time, the detectors did show that there was a bomb…?”
“Oh, use your head!” grinned Lingo. “Remember, Linda was on the ship at the time. Thought waves are a form of electromagnetic energy, and a rather gross form, compared to what radiation detectors work on. If telepaths can control other beings’ bodies, they surely can create illusions on delicate instruments, create the illusion of radioactives where there are none.”
“The whole thing was a fake? Like everything else?”
“Very aptly put, Jay,” Lingo said. “Think about it: the bomb was a fake, like everything else. Like everything else.”
“Here they come!” cried Ortega.
Duglaari warships were breaking through the cloud cover and dropping down towards the ship, ten…twenty…fifty…a hundred, over two hundred ships formed a solid blanket over the landing area, hovering at about two thousand feet.
“Solarian ship to Duglaari commander. Solarian to Duglaari….” Lingo droned into his mike. “We are now lifting off and proceeding as per our agreement.”
“Acknowledged.”
Lingo turned on the Resolution Drive. The ship began to rise, and the blanket of Duglaari warships above rose at the same rate, keeping the distance between them constant.
As soon as they had emerged from Duglaar’s atmosphere and achieved escape velocity, the Duglaari Fleet formed itself into a great hollow hemisphere, concavity forward. The Solarian ship took its position, as calculated, just forward of the lip of the cup-shaped formation and directly in line with its center, and hence with its line of flight, balanced just ahead of the great Duglaari Fleet Resolution Field.
Thus, a slight relative acceleration forward would put it momentarily ahead of the Doog Field, and an equally minimal cut in speed would throw it directly upon the Duglaari Fleet Resolution Field.
The Solarian ship began to accelerate outward, accompanied by its oversize escort which maintained its position nearly, but not quite, surrounding it, like a shock wave pushing a dust mote before it.
Palmer was somehow calmed by the terrible spectacle of the Duglaari warships, filling the viewscreen in all directions save one. Here was raw power; here was death. He remembered that he had faced much the same death with these six Solarians before, not once but three times. He remembered that wonderful comradeship, that unspoken mutual trust that he had felt then, and he perversely found himself mourning for it, like a small boy who has finally discovered that his trusted father is a fallible human being.
He found himself desperately considering Lingo’s words: “…the bomb was a fake, like everything else. Like everything else.” Everything that Lingo had said to the Kor had been a bluff or a lie or a trick: the bomb, the impregnability of Sol, the…Why, even the superweapons might not be real! They did sound suspiciously like Human Confederation propaganda…. But…. But why would Lingo have warned
the Kor of weapons Sol might or might not have in the next decade? Why had he bragged that it would take eight thousand ships to destroy Fortress Sol, when he must’ve known that it would be impossible to defend against even four thousand? Surely, they must’ve known that the Council of Wisdom would not be fooled.
There had to be some hidden purpose behind it all, hidden from himself as well as the Duglaari. And if everything else was some kind of elaborate trick, couldn’t Lingo’s attempt to sacrifice the Confederation be just a trick too? After all, the Kor hadn’t accepted it…. In fact, he suddenly realized, Lingo had made the proposal in such arrogant terms that he must’ve known that the Kor would turn it down. He must’ve planned it that way!
As the ship sped outward from Duglaar, balanced precariously on the razor-edge of death, Palmer realized that he wanted very much to be able to trust the Solarians again. For without that trust, all was meaningless, all was hopeless. Whether they escaped alive or not, Fortress Sol was the myth that had sustained the Confederation for three centuries, and if Sol were proved a hideous and traitorous lie, the human race was finished and the paranoiac’s nightmare that was the Duglaari Empire was destined to destroy the Galaxy.
Palmer felt a mre terrible fear lurking behind the normal fear of death—the fear of dying meaninglessly, alone, confused and betrayed, of dying alone with the awful knowledge that the entire human race would soon follow him into that final oblivion.
And the only thing between him and that most horrible of deaths was belief in six people who were, on the face of it, the blackest traitors in all history.
He desperately wanted to believe in them but he knew all too well why he wanted to believe, and so he could not.
“I don’t like it…” Ortega muttered, staring out at the great amoeba that was the Duglaari Fleet. “It just doesn’t add up. The Kor gave in too quickly. It was all far too easy. It just doesn’t make sense that they would let us go like this. There’s got to be some trick up their sleeves….”
“Oh, come on, Raul,” said Lingo, “stop worrying. You should have more confidence in your own Talent. You just outsmarted them, that’s all. It’s much more logical for them to let us go and not take the chance of losing Dugl than to try and destroy us and risk a nova.”
“It’s much more logical to destroy us without risking Dugl,” Ortega said uneasily. “That’s how the Council should’ve seen it. That’s the way I would’ve figured it in their place….”
“But how? That’s just it, Raul, they can’t try to englobe us without an even chance that we’ll be able to activate our Stasis-Field generator before they can crush us in their Fleet Resolution Field. We set things up that way, didn’t we? Once we pass the point where we can go safely into Stasis-Space without triggering a nova….”
Lingo’s jaw dropped. His face whitened.
“Oh no!” Ortega cried. “That’s it! Of course! How could I’ve been so stupid? Sure it isn’t worth the risk to try and destroy us while there’s a chance for us to nova Dugl. But what’s to prevent them from trying to englobe us after we cross the point where our Stasis-Field generator won’t nova Dugl? And you can be damn sure that the Council of Wisdom has calculated when that distance will be reached, down to the microsecond! They’ll try an englobement the moment it’s safe for them. If they succeed, we’re dead, and if they fail, they’ve risked nothing. Sure, their chances will still only be fifty-fifty, but they’ll have nothing at all to lose!”
“And there’s nothing at all we can do about it,” Lingo grunted.
“Outsmarted yourself again, eh, traitor?” Palmer gloated. “If you damn Solarians had fought beside us in The War, instead of isolating yourselves, you’d’ve known that the Doogs are clever tacticians. You’d’ve known that they don’t even make little moves unless everything is on their side. Why, in the last battle my Fleet fought with them, we….”
Of course! he thought suddenly. There was a way to escape! The Solarians might be big on strategy, but they hadn’t fought a battle in centuries. If they had, they’d’ve seen it too. It didn’t require any supercomplicated schemes; it was a standard Confederation escape tactic, and it almost always worked. This case might be slightly different, but….
He grinned sourly. If there was one thing the Confederation forces had plenty of practice at, it was the art of retreat.
“What is it, Jay?” Ortega said, turning to stare at the smirking Palmer.
“Why don’t you figure it out yourself, Gamemaster Ortega?” Palmer said. “Any Confederation Fleet Commander would know what to do. Standard tactics. Maybe it’s just a little too simple for your complicated mind. Too damn bad!”
“You’re talking like a fool,” Lingo snapped. “Remember, Jay, you’re on this ship too. It’s your life as well as ours. If you’ve got a way out, you’ve nothing to gain by not telling us.”
“Nothing but revenge, Lingo,” Palmer said.
“Only a madman throws away his own life for meaningless revenge. I don’t think you’re insane, Jay.”
It hit home. There was no point in dying, not when your death was meaningless, not when you died not knowing whether you were killing traitors or whether you might be destroying…friends.
“Okay, Lingo,” he said. “As usual, you win.”
Outward the ship sped, trailed by the Doog Fleet, past the orbit of Dugl V, approaching ever faster the orbit of Dugl VI, Dugl’s outermost planet—and the border of Dugl’s vulnerability to the Solarian Stasis-Field generator. The border of their safety, as well.
“How close are we, Fran?” Lingo asked, nervously studying the wall of warships behind him.
“About ten minutes to the orbit of Dugl VI,” was the reply.
“It’s now or never, Lingo,” Palmer said. “You’ve got to do it gradually.”
“Are you sure this is going to work? Are you sure they won’t detect it?”
“I’m not sure of anything,” Palmer snapped. “But the chances of their detecting it are very slight. I’d say that the mass of the Duglaari Fleet is at least three hundred times our mass. So our combined speed will decrease only a total of a third of a percent, and if we spread that decrease out over ten minutes, the deceleration will never be more than a thirtieth of a percent. I can’t see them detecting that. Besides, we’re doing the exact opposite of what they should be expecting us to do.”
“Okay, Jay,” Lingo said. “Here goes nothing.”
Slowly, minutely, gingerly, Lingo began cutting the power of the ship’s Resolution Drive. The ship lost the tiniest fraction of its forward speed and fell back towards the Duglaari Fleet by less than a hundred yards—an imperceptible distance by the standards of interplanetary space.
But that miniscule change in relative position was enough to put the ship within the boundaries of the mighty Duglaar Fleet Resolution Field.
“We’re in contact with the Doog Field,” Lingo said. “I don’t think they’ve noticed anything.”
“So far so good,” said Palmer. “Now keep cutting power slowly but steadily. You’ve got to time it so that our Resolution Field is completely off just as we cross the orbit of Dugl VI.”
Palmer watched tensely as Lingo continued cutting the ship’s power. It should work, he thought. Their mass is so much greater than ours that they’ll never realize that our drive is off and that we’re just riding their Fleet Resolution Field. And once we cross the orbit of Dugl VI….
“Eighty percent power….” Lingo droned. “Seventy…sixty…thirty…twenty…ten….”
He lifted his hand and breathed a sigh of relief. “It’s working!” he said. “Our Resolution Drive is off, and we’re riding their Fleet Field. And I don’t think they realize it.”
“Good,” said Palmer. “Now remember, timing is everything. You’ve got to turn on the Resolution Drive full power ten seconds before we cross the orbit of Dugl VI, and you’ve got to go into Stasis-Space exactly ten seconds later. If you turn on the Stasis-Field generator too soon—blooey! And if you turn
it on too late, the Doogs, with their more powerful Resolution Field, will be able to make up for our sudden burst of speed and englobe us. It all depends on timing. Timing and surprise.”
“Don’t worry about the timing,” Lingo said. “And we can only hope that they’ll be surprised, because if they realize what we’re doing….”
“Don’t even think it!” said Ortega.
“Fran,” said Lingo, “I want you to give me two countdowns: first to the ten-second to Dugl VI’s orbit position, and then give me another ten-count as soon as our drive is on.”
“Right, Dirk.”
Outward the convoy continued. We’re ready for our tactic, Palmer thought. I wonder what the Doog commander is thinking right now….
“We’re just about there, Dirk,” Fran Shannon said. “Twenty seconds to the ten-second mark. Fifteen…ten….”
Lingo gripped the throttle lever of the Resolution Drive with his right hand; the forefinger of his left hand was poised over the button that would switch on the Stasis-Field generator.
“Nine…eight…five…four…three…two…one…now!”
Lingo slammed the throttle lever over. The ship’s Resolution Drive went on under full power.
The Solarian ship had been moving forward at the same speed as the Duglaari Fleet, riding the Fleet’s powerful Resolution Field. Now it was suddenly given a tremendous additional burst of speed by its own Resolution Field—an inertialess drive capable of accelerating the ship to near-light velocities. The ship shot forward, leaving the Resolution Field of the Duglaari Fleet and opening a gap between itself and the Doogs.
“…two…three…four…five…” Fran Shannon began counting.
Palmer watched the receding Duglaari Fleet in the view-screen intently. It was still falling behind…but it was receding slower now!
The Duglaari commander had recovered! Now the Doog Fleet was accelerating; the Solarian ship was no longer gaining ground, but the sudden gap it had opened up was too great for the Duglaari Fleet to begin its englobing action as yet….
The Solarians Page 14
