He heard shouts through the turmoil: the harsh yells of the Zanat and different cries, high thin wails that rose and fell in weird ululation. The wails grew ever louder and ever closer.
The Zanat had not bothered to disarm him. He belted on his pistol, dashed to the window and looked out. Carbon arc lamps on tall poles spread a hellish blue glare over the spaceport tarmac; the shadows of the figures dashing across it were black and sharp as if cut from dies. Most moved with a sinuous grace the Zanat did not possess.
A machine gun chattered from a gun-pit, spitting flame. Running shapes toppled, one after another. A couple, Chang thought, were Zanat. Then the gun stopped—a jammed cartridge? A broken firing pin? The scout pilot had no way of knowing. Some of the graceful runners leaped into the pit. The machine gun stayed silent.
Crump! From the great cloud of smoke that shot up, it was a black-powder explosion, primitive but effective. An arc-light support tottered, swayed, fell with a heavy boom. A moment later another lamp was taken out, and a quarter of the field plunged into twilight.
The Slayor yowled in triumph. Not all of them toted only their native arms. A burst of half a dozen bullets thudded into the wall near Chang's window. He hurriedly pulled away. That had to be a captured gun.
Another explosion was followed by the iron clang of a starship smashing against concrete. Chang's gut clenched with fear. If Praise of Folly went down under the locals' attack, he was marooned as inevitably as if the Zanat smote her with a nuclear warhead.
The Zanat inside the spaceport buildings had not been taken entirely by surprise. The sentries were alert, and the species as a whole was not so sunk in sleep of nights as Terrans would have been. Alarms yammered. There were shouted orders in the next room, a tinkle of glass as a window was broken out, and a rattle of rifle fire. "That got a couple of the motherless fargs!" a trooper shouted.
But the Slayor must have been building their attack in secret for months, maybe years. They were throwing everything they had at the hated invaders from the stars. Somehow they had even hauled one of their clumsy fieldpieces to the edge of the spaceport to oppose Zanat artillery. Back at his window, Chang saw the muzzleflash and belch of smoke. A solid shot smacked into the building.
The Zanat, though, had built to withstand a lot of that kind of pounding. And when the natives tried to force the stout door through which Chang had entered, they were bloodily repulsed. The Zanat raked their retreat with fire. The scout pilot thought the assault had been wrecked.
But it was only a diversion, to draw the enemy's attention while a squad of Slayor set a charge against the far side of the port building, lit a fuse, and fled.
The blast hurled Chang from his feet. He rolled into a tight protective ball. The floor lurched beneath him. The noise was stunning, a blow at the ears.
He staggered upright, dazed, half-deafened. Faintly, as if through roaring water, he heard injured Zanat screaming. The air was thick with the smell of smoke and blood. There were other screams too, of wild excitement. The Slayor were in the building.
The door burst open. Only wan auxiliary lights burned in the hallway, but they sufficed to show Liosh and a pair of soldiers with rifles. The contact officer was limping; someone had slapped a rough bandage on his lower leg.
"Come on!" Liosh barked at the scout pilot. "We'll get you away. We may not hold here, and you're too precious to leave for the savages to butcher."
Chang agreed with that, though for reasons very different from the Zan's. Yet being taken from the neighborhood of Praise to Folly was the last thing he wanted. When he hesitated, one of Liosh's troopers hefted his gun menacingly. He yielded.
Liosh made no concessions to his wound as he hurried through the maze of corridors, picking his way over rubble and corpses. Chang saw his first Slayor, dead, a slim, gray, hairless being still clutching a large musket. Neat bulletholes stitched its chest; the exit wounds chewed its back to red ghastliness.
The contact officer followed his eyes. "They are fools, brave fools but fools. They do not see they will be better off once we pacify them and bring them into our Sphere."
The Romans had sung that song in Gaul. Chang thought, and the British in India, and the Americans in Indochina, and the Confederacy on Epsilon Eridani I. Sometimes they turned out right in the end, sometimes not. Either way, a lot of people got killed finding out.
A live native poked its head round the corner, let out a yell, and charged. It was armed only with a rapier. A burst of fire from the Zanat chopped it down.
Behind them, a gun spoke, the dull report of Slayor powder. One of the troopers with Liosh pitched forward on his face. A squeal of agony said the local had not enjoyed its victory long. Liosh knelt, asked the wounded soldier a question too low for Chang to catch. The answer came in a choked grunt. Liosh drew a knife across the Zan's throat in a quick, practiced motion, touched the ears, eyes, and nose of the body in turn, then straightened and hurried on.
He led the remaining trooper and Chang to a door. "In here." When his companions were through, he dogged it shut behind them. "Now down, all the way." On the spiral stair his injury did trouble him. His thin, dark lips skinned back from his teeth as he forced the pace.
There were no Slayor in the sub basement, not yet. Even the auxiliary lights failed, though, as Chang emerged from the stairwell. Before he could think of escape, the two Zanat had electric torches out.
Liosh went ahead with such confidence that he hardly needed light. At last he came to the door he was seeking. "Escape tunnel," he explained to Chang, "in case of such embarrassments as this. I hope there's a vehicle left at the far end."
The passage was several hundred meters long, with only thin orange beams of light stabbing into the blackness ahead. Then the scout pilot smelled fresh air ahead, night-cool and moist. Liosh swarmed up a metal ladder. "You next," he called. Very conscious of the trooper's rifle at his back, Chang climbed.
A belt of thick, shrubby vegetation had hidden the vehicle park from the spaceport. Two or three pieces of heavy armor still sat there, squat and deadly, but most were already in the fight; their passage had flattened wide swathes of the native plant life.
Liosh ignored the behemoths, heading instead for lighter, swifter transport. A military historian would have called it an armored personnel carrier; Chang had seen similar machines on several human worlds.
The trooper scrambled into the driver's compartment. Liosh and Chang went round to the rear of the vehicle. The contact officer turned to open its double doors—and Chang, at last unwatched for an instant, drew his pistol and sapped the Zan behind the right ear.
Liosh fell bonelessly. The scout pilot raced back to the trooper, who was cursing as he tried to coax the machine's engine to life. The sight of the handgun froze him. "Out," Chang ordered. He clubbed the second alien into unconsciousness.
He paused for a moment over Liosh, pistol in hand. But shouts came echoing up from the mouth of the tunnel—and the Zan, after all, had been trying to save him. He turned and trotted toward the field. The smell of sap from crushed plants filled his nostrils.
He dug his handset from a pocket. "On my way!" he shouted.
"Took you long enough," Praise of Folly said tartly. "Things have been lively out here."
That, the scout pilot saw as he emerged from the undergrowth, was putting it mildly. Several armored vehicles blazed on the tarmac; they and the burning port buildings gave all the light there was.
Chang ran past corpses of Zanat and Slayor flung every which way in death, past wrecked spacecraft. He knew a moment's relief when he realized that Praise of Folly had been away from the worst of the fighting. Then a bullet whistled past his ear and another spanged viciously from concrete, and he realized that the greater distance did nothing for his safety.
Still, he was only one more shape moving through darkness, not likely to draw much fire and not a good target if he did. Praise of Folly stood tall a couple of hundred meters ahead.
He did not spy
the Slayor until almost too late. The local slashed at him with a sword—no rapier this, but a great two-handed claymore. The blow went wide. Chang fired at point-blank range, and also missed. He threw his pistol in the native's face. The Slayor went down, keening. Chang did not look back. He flew up Praise of Folly's boarding ladder three rungs at a time.
"Out of here!" he bawled the instant the airlock doors were sealed behind him. "They have more things to worry about now than us."
Praise of Folly outran the missiles that came streaking after her, sped toward free space. Chang whooped and punched for champagne.
His glee proved short-lived, for the Zanat spacecraft in orbital patrol were more alert than the distracted planetary forces. The radio crackled with challenges, which he ignored. Radar and contragrav detector warned of ship-to-ship missiles, faster and more deadly than ground-based weapons.
"Take 'em out," Chang said, adding quickly, "Chemical warheads only. One day soon we'll have to deal with these people, and I don't want to be remembered for screwing up a whole planet with an electromagnetic pulse from our atomics."
But he did not want to be shot out of the sky, either, and did not tell Praise of Folly to degrade its counter-missiles' performance. With better sensors and stronger contragravs, they easily destroyed the attackers. Small puffs of red and gold flame blossomed astern.
Far sooner than most pilots would have dared, he went over to hyperdrive. He was so exhilarated that the surge was over before he remembered he should have been sick.
He gunned Praise of Folly for all the ship was worth, trying to get out of detector range before his pursuers went FTL. For most of an hour, he thought he'd done it. Then a point of light winked on in the detector display, far behind but indisputably there. He swore and shifted vectors. The enemy followed. He swore again. He had already seen that the Zanat had good FTL instrumentation.
"Just have to run them into the ground, then," he muttered.
But the bogey refused to disappear. After awhile, another crawled onto the edge of the screen, and then two more. All were prominent echoes, warcraft for certain.
He tried to console himself with the truism fallen back on by every captain in trouble since the days of ships on Terran seas: a stern chase is a long chase. But when he looked at the detectors, he saw that it would not be long enough.
It was several days later, ship's time, when he and the computer finished commiserating with each other over his poor choice of drinking establishments. By then his lead, almost a light-year when he set out, had melted to hardly more than half an AU. The Zanat ships were maneuvering into englobement formation: if they surrounded him and touched his drive field with all theirs at once, they and he would be thrown into normal space together, with all the odds in their favor in the ensuing slugging match.
"I'll have to go sublight myself first," he decided unwillingly: the last resort of an outmatched pilot. "Maybe," he added without much belief, "they'll lose me." If the ploy would ever work, the Nebula was the place for it. Gas and dust could play merry hell with gadgetry.
"Any particular thick patches close by?" he asked hopefully.
The computer was silent for nearly a minute while it searched its memory and added corrections for several centuries of proper motion. At last it said, "As it happens, yes. We're near a Herbig-Haro object."
"New one on me," the scout pilot admitted.
"What is it?"
"A luminous nebula with a denser center that—"
"Say no more; that's exactly what we need. They'll have to have their engines linked to their detectors and drop out of hyperdrive the moment we do, or else overshoot and lose me for good. FTL, half an AU is nothing. Set our course so that when we and they break out, they'll be smack in the middle of that denser center." Chang let his optimism run wild. "One of them might even emerge coincident with a rock, and lower the odds. Can we fight three?"
"Not with our store of missiles depleted as it is," the computer answered at once. The scout pilot sighed. Praise of Folly went on, "Reconsider your plan. Herbig-Haro objects are—"
Chang was not about to be balked by mechanical mutiny. "Execute, and no chatter," he said harshly. "Override command."
The silence that fell had a reproachful quality to it. Praise of Folly changed course. Like hounds after a rabbit, the Zanat ships followed.
Chang's nails bit into his palms. His lead was a bare half-AU now, hardly seventy-five million kilometers. If this Herbig-Haro whatsit didn't show up soon, the Zanat would force him out of hyperdrive and fight on their own terms.
Praise of Folly gave a sudden, sickening lurch. Her normal-space instruments came back to life—and at that same instant, every alarm in the ship went off. Red lights flared, claxons hooted, bells jangled, a commotion to wake the dead.
Chang did not even notice it. His mouth hanging open, he was staring in disbelief at the viewscreens. "What the bleeding hell is a star doing there?" he said in something like a whispered scream.
A star it was, a crimson monster. Praise of Folly could hardly have been more than fifteen million kilometers from the edge of its chromosphere. Had Chang been on the surface of a planet at that distance, its great orb would have stretched across almost two-thirds of the sky.
He could peer deep through the tenuous gases of its outer atmosphere, could gauge the temperature of the swirling currents by their colors: here a ruby so deep the eye almost refused to register it, there a coruscating uprush of brighter, molten red. It was like looking down on a stormy ocean of flaming wine.
The sight held Chang fascinated until he absently wiped his hand across his forehead. It came away slick with sweat. As the alarms could not, that reminded him where he was. Another few seconds and he would cook, no matter how well-shielded the ship was. His finger jabbed the hyperdrive switch.
The abused engines groaned, but the wrench that sent Praise of Polly FTL was the most welcome thing he had ever felt. The clamor of alarms faded away. Nothing whatever showed on the hyperdrive detector. Chang shivered. "One thing's certain, they never knew what hit 'em." Moths in a blowtorch—
He shivered again as reaction set in. That could have been him emerging in the center of a star . . . a star the computer had not known about. "You almost fried us both!" he howled.
There was no reply. He remembered his last command. "Override lifted," he said. "I want to hear what you have to say for yourself. Why did you think you were diving into a nebula instead of a star?"
"That should be obvious even to you," the computer said, testy as usual after an override. "When my navigation data was compiled, that star did not exist."
"Tell me another one," Chang snorted, "one I'll believe."
"Your ignorance is not my problem, except that it almost destroyed Praise of Folly, and you with it. You would not listen to my warning. As long ago as the end of the second century pre-Confederacy, astronomers knew that a Herbig-Haro object was the precursor to a star."
"You really mean it," the scout pilot said in wonder.
"Yes, I really do." The computer seemed determined to gets its own back. "Why do you think a Herbig-Haro object is luminous? The energy emitted by the slowly condensing cloud in the center ionizes the gas around it and makes it glow.
"But when gravitational contraction brings the cloud down to about the size of Sol's system—say, eighty AU's across—something new happens. Some of the energy inside stops going into heating the gas of the cloud and starts breaking up hydrogen molecules and such in the center: things are beginning to get hot in there.
"And when that energy gets diverted, there isn't enough gas pressure left to support the outside of the cloud any more. It falls in on itself over the next half a standard year or so, until it shrinks to a diameter of about eight-tenths of an AU. Then the heat and pressure generated by the collapse restore equilibrium and the new star becomes visible, with a surface temperature of 4,000° K or so."
"Visible! I should say so." Chang would never forget that fierce red
glare. "Why hasn't any survey since the old Confederacy come by and noticed it?"
"There isn't much human traffic out this way," Praise of Folly said with what sounded like an electronic shrug. "And no one on more traveled routes would have seen the star yet; its light simply hasn't traveled far enough. From its diameter and spectrum, it can hardly have been shining longer than twenty years."
"Twenty years," the scout pilot murmured. As the fear leached out of him, awe began to replace it, the awe of having been present at the biggest birth in recorded history.
"Shape direct course for home," he told Praise of Folly. "Now I have something to keep B'kila happy and the astrophysicists, too." His expression suddenly went mercenary. "I wonder how much I can get for the tapes."
Imperial Stars 1-The Stars at War Page 27
