Star Winds

by Barrington J. Bayley

  Half an hour later he suddenly found himself surrounded by the egg swarm. The eggs drifted and hurtled by, some bouncing off the hull and deck. He replaced his helmet in case one should rupture the air balloon, and continued to peer anxiously to see if any of them would react to the ship’s presence.

  Not all were absolutely sterile. Some burst into abortive life, sprouting insignificant creatures that lashed about themselves feebly before expiring. Then, when Zhorga had almost given up hope, there came what he had been waiting for.

  Instinctively he threw his arm before his face. A writhing patch of nebulosity had blossomed into existence. In little more than a minute it had expanded and solidified into a full-grown monster—and, like its earlier brother, this monster moved toward the ship, sensing her, reaching toward the only mode of life it knew: to attack and destroy.

  And Zhorga unhesitatingly gave the order for his men to steer the galleon straight for the heart of the lashing beast!

  Even the best of them recoiled with horror when it was realized what was required of them. But only one broke and ran, loping with ten-foot strides back along the shed toward the airshed. Zhorga saw Clabert raise his pistol. A puff of smoke from the flintlock followed. The runner’s body jerked suddenly, and rammed against the airshed, then to go rolling across the deck and lie motionless.

  Now the others hurried to obey Zhorga’s order, though whether they understood the purpose behind it was questionable. The ship turned toward the monster, which as it neared seemed to fill the sky. Zhorga clung to the lashed-down wheel to steady himself as the ship gathered speed. For hideous moments the frantic tentacles seemed to enclose her—but they were made to reach out for a fleeing prey, not to snatch at something coming in close. Miraculously, it seemed, she had slipped swiftly between them—and then she crashed into the web-like body!

  The concussion was less shattering than Zhorga had feared. The monster yielded and vibrated. The Wandering Queen was like a great cumbersome insect caught in that web, and the beast seemed not to know that it could, if it chose, use its massive tentacles to pluck her out.

  Yet the monster continued to charge on its former course, and though the galleon was not broken by the impact her change in momentum was bone-cracking. For all his strength, Zhorga was torn from the wheel and found himself flung hard against the thick covering of the air balloon, which mercifully held. For a while he was confused, and afterward deduced that he must temporarily have lost consciousness. He only knew that eventually he recovered his wits to find himself resting lightly on the deck, but with practically no discernible weight.

  The monster was gone. It had disintegrated, its brief, truncated life had collapsed. But, as Zhorga took note of the almost imperceptible level of acceleration, and observed that the galleon had already swung lazily round so that her decks again lay beneath Mars, he knew that the space beast had served his purpose.

  The basis of his suicidal strategy had been his reasoning that the creature was not composed of ether silk and so was unaffected by the vortex. It was simple chance, he had decided, that had sent the eggs drifting through this region. He had speculated that the monster’s dread strength might just be enough to tear the Wandering Queen free of the ensnaring current before she was drawn too deeply into its coils.

  He had not seriously expected the plan to work. He had expected the galleon to be torn to pieces, bringing himself and his crew a quick death, instead of a lingering one in the eye of the whirlpool, full of misery and—what was worse from his point of view—recrimination.

  He relaxed, feeling peaceful, basking in his triumph. The rest of the voyage, he told himself, would be relatively plain sailing. Until Mars was reached anyway.

  He wondered if the brave men on the main deck had all survived, or if more had been added to the death toll so far.

  A wry thought occurred to him.

  They would be dying, he admitted sourly, in the cause of trade.

  Chapter SIX

  Zhorga’s prediction proved correct and the Wandering Queen journeyed on through calm ether for the remaining distance to Mars. The temperature dropped sharply and the ship grew bitterly cold. He gave permission for braziers to be lit which burned chak, a combustible charcoal-like preparation which gave off heat but no stupefying fumes or irritant smoke.

  There was ample time to make good the damage done by the space dragon. The midmast had cracked and so was cut down, the sails being redistributed among the remaining spars as best as could be managed. Zhorga reckoned he still had sail power enough. Mars was smaller than Earth and so had less gravity to contend with—it was only the shock wave that worried him.

  The target planet became first a glowing ruby, then a red disk which Zhorga studied through his spyglass, and at last a full-blown world floating ahead of them, in its own way as fascinating a sight as Earth. At closer range its fiery redness mellowed, and was relieved by other features—the glittering white and blue of the half-frozen polar seas, the clouds of various types: white for water vapor, orange (like dyed cotton wool) for atmospheric dust, and gray for the sooty by-products of the air fires which showed up against the general background as blotches of a deeper, maroon red. Zhorga explained that these burning areas had been ignited in ancient times to release warmth and breathable air onto the planet, for once it had been uninhabitable.

  The hazy dark triangle of Syrtis Major was easy to find, but he searched it in vain for any sign of Kars, its major city. At length, however, the planet became like a vast wall and it was time to act. He ordered all crewmen lashed in their places, and all sail taken in, so that the galleon coasted in free fall.

  Then he waited for the telltale signs. Eventually they came, chiefly a rocking to and fro of the vessel as the first ripples of the shock wave lapped against the furled silk.

  Deeper into the wave he would harness these retroactive ripples, using them to slow the ship down and make it safe for her to enter the atmosphere.

  He unfurled one small sail: the aft topgallant. For a second or two it flapped, then filled with the retroactive eddy as though trapping a fall of water and bellied toward the deck, which in response tilted sternward.

  The red wall which was Mars swung, tilted vertiginously, and vanished beneath the hull as the topgallant turned the ship through a hundred and eighty degrees like a weathercock turning in the wind. She was now falling Marsward bottom first, and for the first time in months the sun shone directly on the deck—a sun shrunk to half size, giving off a wan, clear light.

  Zhorga ordered more sails cautiously unfurled. The shock wave snatched at them, buffeting and shaking the galleon with terrifying force. Agonized, he wondered if the tackles could take the treatment. Already the deceleration was bearing him down toward the deck. But soon the whole sail canopy had been unfurled and the galleon was on full brake.

  Gasping, crushed by the thunderous deceleration, those on board lay stretched out on deck. The timbers groaned and protested, and the ordeal went on and on and on, seemingly without end.

  It was, in fact, impossible to gauge its length, for no one stayed conscious. Zhorga was not sure how many times he blacked out, how many times he dimly recovered his senses to find the ship shaking and shuddering all around him. He only knew that, in the end, he became aware of a series of decided bumps, as if the vessel were bouncing down a flight of steps. This, he decided later, betokened the ship’s passage through the shock wave’s inner isoclines, for suddenly everything became marvelously calm. The deceleration slackened and became merely mild. The sails no longer vibrated or rucked wildly.

  The ship was, through the shock wave’s leading fracture zone. Here the wave manifested as an easy swell, making it an easy matter to control the ship’s rate of descent Zhorga, trying to bring life back into his aching limbs, grinned with triumph. Far from being the most dangerous maneuver he had attempted, the deceleration had proved in many respects to be the easiest He had made it!

  The ship swooped over Mars, moving southward away
from the dead center of the shock wave. Shortly she encountered the beginnings of the normal circum-planetary flow, the sort of ether movement Zhorga understood best. He ordered the crew to dismantle the sail canopy and prepare for aerial flight.

  Masts, booms and yards shifted jerkily into position. Zhorga was so intent on the operation that he was not the first to spot the object that came hurtling round the curve of the planet, and which expanded rapidly from a tiny wedge into a long elegant shape. When it was pointed out to him, all he could do was stare.

  It was a ship, orbiting in free fall below the violence of the shock wave, all sail taken in. But what a ship! She was, he judged, nearly a quarter mile in length, and at first she seemed so strange, her appearance so unexpected, that he was confused.

  Abruptly she put out a sail, an oddly-shaped sheet of silk, and with incredible skill altered course to go flashing by the Wandering Queen at close quarters. Now her immensity was overpowering and her length seemingly endless. Her burnished wood shone in the sun, and her decks seemed jeweled, bedecked with satins and velvets. Colors glowed along her hull, which was decorated with unfamiliar designs. At her stern a stiff pennant bearing a black emblem added to her outlandish appearance.

  Her design owed nothing to seagoing or airgoing influences. Her tiered decks would have made aerodynamic nonsense. This was a ship built for space alone. What was more, her masts and booms were so unbelievably long—longer even than the ship herself—that the vast expanses of silk they could presumably carry would have attained speeds too great even for interplanetary travel.

  Such enormous speeds were useful in only one area: travel from star to star. This was an interstellar ship.

  Zhorga was stunned. He had heard of these interstellar leviathans, of course, but never in his life had he expected to see one. What could be her business on Mars?

  In a fragment of time she had dwindled into the distance—but as she did so she seemed to eject a smaller part of herself, which sprouted brilliant blue ether silk and advanced toward the Wandering Queen again, swiftly catching up with the galleon and pacing her a short distance away.

  The daughter craft reminded Zhorga of a dragonfly. Its sails resembled a dragonfly’s double wings, being extended on flexible rods which could be warped, curved and twisted by means of control lines. The hull was long and black, except for two transparent domes within which figures could be seen peering across at the Earth ship. Like a dragonfly, too, it could hover and dart, displaying perfect control. Zhorga realized that he faced a sailing technique beyond his wildest dreams.

  Zhorga tore his gaze away from the sight. The task of adjusting spars and rigging still had to be completed. Stalking across the deck, he attracted the attention of Clabert, and managed to get the work back under way.

  The new activity seemed to displease those aboard the dragonfly. The craft spat out a glimmering flare which stitched a magnesium-bright necklace across the bows of the Wandering Queen, which by now had almost adopted the attitude of aerial flight. In the forward dome, the watching figures gesticulated across at the galleon, pointing upward and astern.

  Zhorga easily guessed their meaning. They wanted him to accompany the dragonfly to a rendezvous with the mother ship. But how could he? He did not have that kind of maneuverability. Could they not see he was practically helpless to go against the ether current, Mars’s version of the slipstream?

  He signaled Clabert to continue and soon all was in readiness to enter the atmosphere. A second glowing missile crossed the stem of the ship. Zhorga realized glumly that he had no choice but to hope that the captain of the dragonfly would be content to follow the Wandering Queen down, and would forebear from doing her any damage.

  But he had reckoned without the impetuosity of certain of his crew, who had received lessons galore from their master on rashness. Unseen by Zhorga, Bruge, Small and Patchman levered one of the bombards out of its storage pit, loaded, primed and fired it, all in the space of a minute.

  The ball missed the dragonfly proper, but tore a rent in one of the silken wings. Aghast, Zhorga yelled futilely in his helmet, but the dragonfly’s response came almost immediately. Its third glowing shot hit the Wandering Queen amidships and exploded with a dazzling blare of light.

  Zhorga distinctly heard a soft WHUMPH through the brass of his headpiece. Momentarily he was blinded. Then his vision cleared to see that a number of side strakes were smashed, and a section of deck lay propped against the rail, having come adrift from its beams.

  On the foredeck, the fighting spirit was unabated. By now both bombards had been manhandled onto their firing platforms. They were fired as fast as they could be reloaded, all balls going wide. In return, the dragonfly sent yet another fire-dart which fell among the rigging and devastated the spars, scattering fragments of wood, rope and silk in all directions.

  And then a rapid whisper of air against the sides of the hull signaled the end of the battle. The ship was entering the atmosphere.

  Mars’s air was in a sense artificial, being produced by the air fires (though these had burned for centuries and could not be put out). The continuous addition of phlogistonic gases from the burning areas was offset by a boiling off, or evaporation, of air from the top of the atmosphere, which consequently met space abruptly, not gradually as did Earth’s. Almost, the atmosphere had a surface of its own, and the Wandering Queen was now plunging into that surface.

  It had been Zhorga’s intention to skim the atmosphere, dropping into it as he got the feel of the local ether currents. Now it was too late. With so many sails gone, or in tatters, control was lost, and there was little that he could do to take effective command anyway.

  The susurration intensified. Density, Zhorga knew, would increase rapidly. The desperadoes at the bombards gave up the fight and scrambled to return to their posts as the galleon swayed under the impact of rushing air, scudding along as if driven by a storm.

  The sound of the atmosphere became a buffeting roar. Down and down fluttered the Wandering Queen, spiraling and corkscrewing with the aerodynamics of a sycamore seed. It was only her inherent airworthiness that gave her ! any chance at all—that and the efforts of groups and individuals who stubbornly hurled themselves onto capstans and windlasses, using their instincts amid the chaos to try to bring the ship some measure of stability. When she was only two or three miles from the ground some windsail was released; temporarily it brought the ship out of her spin, sending her lurching crabwise in a stiff breeze. For a minute Zhorga thought a controlled landing might be possible after all, but the damage among the spars was too great The ship skidded around the Martian sky. She dipped, and entered into a steep, curved descent.

  The crash, when it came, was a prolonged, titanic thunder. Timbers, masts, spars and sails shattered, splintered, tore. Zhorga, like everyone else who was not actually killed, was knocked cold.

  ***

  In the restricted view through his faceplate, Rachad saw that he lay on gritty soil. His head ached abominably—not just from the knock he had received from the inside of his brass helmet, but also because his backpack was nearly extinguished and the air inside his suit was foul.

  He struggled to sit up, anxiously feeling himself for broken bones, and discovering none, applied himself to unscrewing his helmet. At last the headpiece came off; thankfully he drew in a lungful of cold, thin air with a slightly burnt odor, not at all strange to him after the acrid chemical air he had been breathing.

  Unsteadily he came to his feet.

  So here he was standing on Mars, he thought shakily. The pull of the planet seemed oddly burdening after so much time in space. Evidently he had been thrown from the Wandering Queen on impact, for he was still attached to his lifeline, which led to the wreckage of the ship. For a while he stared at this wreckage. The crash had almost completely crushed the galleon, scattering timbers over the surrounding ground. A few remaining spars leaned crazily, trailing sail.

  Bodies lay unmoving. Casks and demijohns from the cracke
d-open hold spilled their contents onto the sand. It seemed to Rachad’s numbed mind, as he gazed at the scene, that he was the sole survivor.

  He turned to survey the landscape. The ship appeared to have come down in a semi-desert region. He saw a rock-strewn plain, the sandy ground ranging in color from reddish-brown to orange and dotted here and there with stunted shrubs. Beyond the horizon there jutted up a range of hills and scaurs.

  The sky was mauve, shading from grayish-pink to purple. Near the mid-heaven was the wan, half-size sun, casting a gentle, undecided light, and if one looked, one could make out glimmering stars.

  Altogether it was a world sufficiently novel in appearance to hold considerable charm, albeit an alien charm, but Rachad was unable to take pleasure in the sight. He unhooked his safety line and wondered unhappily where he might be. Certainly nowhere near the city of Kars, and probably not even in the region known as Syrtis Major.

  Behind him he heard the sound of falling timber. Captain Zhorga, unhelmeted like himself, was emerging from the wreck. Rachad hurried to meet him, but Zhorga ignored him and immediately bent to unscrew the helmet of the first body he came to.

  With a start Rachad realized that he had been negligent. He was not the sole survivor, and his inaction might be condemning others to suffocation. He hurried to copy Zhorga, who grunted with pleasure to see him.

  “I might have known you would come through all right,” he congratulated sourly.

  “A pity about your ship, Captain.”

  Zhorga sighed, and spared a glance for his ruined merchantman. She, at least, would never take to the air again. But he judged there was enough timber and silk to build some sort of flying raft to explore the surrounding countryside, and perhaps to ferry his men and goods to the nearest town. Thoughts of that, however, would have to wait. His first duty was to his dead and injured.

  There was more movement from within the wreck. Clabert and Patchman appeared. Zhorga went over and talked with them.