by Steve White
He didn’t really have any reasonable hope that any of the Kappainu up ahead understood English. But apparently his tone and the sight of Valdes were enough. The Kappainu parted for them, and they stepped over the barricade warily. Just ahead was the open hatchway with the hangar bay beyond it.
Just about there, Andrew thought, trying not to let relief weaken him.
“Watch him,” Andrew ordered and stepped up toward the hatch, activating his wrist communicator. “Hold your fire,” he ordered Davis. “It’s us. We’re coming through.”
Someone uttered an exclamation behind him. He swung around just in time to see Valdes wrench his gag off with his free hands.
So they can vary the size of their wrists and hands just enough to slip out of bonds, flashed through his mind in some tiny fraction of a second.
Valdes yelled something in his own language as he lunged back toward the barricade. Andrew suspected a rough translation would be: “Stop them! They’ve planted a bomb!”
Morales lunged, grabbing awkwardly with her left arm. With unerring viciousness, Valdes punched her where the patch showed she had been wounded. With a strangled gasp of pain she staggered backward, dropping her M-3. Valdes scooped it up and swung it toward her.
Gallivan flung himself forward, pushing her down out of the line of fire, just in time to take the hypervelocity bullet meant for her. It struck his inner right thigh just below the groin, and he collapsed to the deck just as Valdes turned and sprinted back toward the barricade, where the Kappainu were standing in indecision, hesitant to use their weapons with him in the line of fire.
Rachel, who had been standing frozen, broke into a run and took Gallivan under the left shoulder. Morales took him under the right, and together they helped him hobble toward the hatch.
At that instant, Valdes cleared the barricade and an insanely short-range firefight erupted. Kozlowski took a laser beam full in the face and dropped like a poleaxed steer. The others sprayed the barricade with their M-15As, sending the surviving Kappainu crouching for cover.
“Move!” Andrew yelled. “Get to the ship.”
With a final blast of fire to keep the Kappainu down, they made for the hatch and emerged into the vastness of the hangar deck. With sudden inspiration, Andrew shouted, “Lieutenant Davis, use the shipboard lasers on the hatchway!” He did not shout it into the wrist communicator; it was for Valdes’s benefit. That ought to get them moving back, away from the hatch, he told himself, unless Valdes figures out that we can’t really do it until we’re clear of the hatch ourselves.
The ploy seemed to be working. There was no pursuit from the hatch as they crossed the hangar deck toward City of Osaka at the best speed they could manage. “Leave me and run,” Gallivan grated in his pain.
“Shut up,” snapped Morales.
Davis’s men closed in around them as they neared the ramp, covering their rear. Davis himself waited at the top of the ramp. He helped with Gallivan as they piled in.
“Is the bomb—?” Andrew began.
“Yes, sir,” Davis assured him. We found the best hiding place for it we could. It’s in the—”
“Never mind! Start the detonation sequence now. And give the hatch we came through a hit with one of the lasers. Then get us out of here.”
Davis spoke an order into the intercom as he headed for the control room. The ship trembled with the shock of abruptly heated air as the unique crack assaulted their ears. Andrew hoped the Kappainu, up to and especially Valdes, were just inside the hatch, but he wasn’t counting on it.
Andrew knelt beside Gallivan while Reislon applied his first-aid kit with the assistance of the medical corpsman who was the closest thing to a doctor the prize crew had. “The bullet must have just missed the femoral artery,” said the latter, “or you would already have bled to death.”
The Irishman looked down toward his groin. “Fortunately,” he said tightly, forcing his words past his pain, “it also just missed something else.”
“Lie still,” Andrew said. “You’ll be all right.”
“Of course I will.” Gallivan somehow managed a roguish grin at Morales and Rachel. “How could it be otherwise, with not one but two lovely angels of mercy?”
“I’ve got to get to the control room,” said Morales. For an instant her eyes and Gallivan’s held each other.
“I’ll stay with him,” Rachel told her.
“Get him to sick bay and strap him in for acceleration,” Andrew ordered. “Alana, you belong there, too. But come with me.”
Davis was nearing the end of the takeoff checklist and sounding the acceleration warning when Andrew, Morales and Reislon ran into the control room. Assuming the captain’s chair, Andrew ordered a final laser blast as they lifted off the hangar deck and slid through the atmosphere screen and into the featureless blackness beyond.
“Now straight outward—fast!” Andrew ordered. “Never mind about our heading for now.”
He wasn’t concerned with the station’s tractor beam, which the ship’s drive could overcome. But he was coldly certain that the only way to avoid annihilation by the station’s laser weapons was to get City of Osaka through their field of fire in very little time. Acceleration hit them.
But the laser fire was oddly uncoordinated, not the time-on-target salvo Andrew had feared. The ship’s deflection shield was able to handle it. He wondered if the command center Reislon had incinerated had contained crucial elements of the targeting cybernetics. Whatever the reason, he was in no mood to complain.
Then the station was no longer visible astern, and the stars appeared.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
City of Osaka fled outward, broadcasting its signal to Borthru, who presumably had already detected the ship’s emergence from the Kappainu station’s zone of nullity. Andrew ordered the acceleration cut to one gee—more was not needed, when their objective was to rendezvous with the Rogovon rebels. He also ordered Morales to join Gallivan in sick bay. She obeyed with less resistance than he had expected.
Just after she departed, Rachel made her way up to the control room. She really had no business there, but Andrew was disinclined to stand on regulations. Maybe she needs to be here, he thought. Maybe I need for her to be here.
“Strap in,” he told her expressionlessly. “We may be in for some rough maneuvering if those warships Valdes mentioned come after us.”
“Right,” she acknowledged in a tone as neutral as his. She settled into the acceleration couch beside his, which Morales had vacated, and their eyes met warily. They both knew they had much to say to each other, but this was hardly the time or the place.
“It’s too bad Valdes got away,” she finally said as though seeking a safe conversation opener.
“Yes. Especially since, if he lived through our last laser blast, they’re now searching the hangar area frantically for our bomb.”
“Didn’t you say it had a short detonation sequence?”
“Yes, but we couldn’t make it too short, because we weren’t able to foresee the exact circumstances of our departure. We had to allow ourselves ample time to get clear.” Andrew glanced at the chronometer. “Still—”
“Incoming!” yelled the rating manning the sensor station.
All at once the display board Zhygon had hooked up to the access key began to flash as the device detected the Kappainu fighting ships. It was set up to feed data directly to the tactical plot, and red “hostile” icons began to appear . . . all too many of them. Missiles were streaking ahead of them, grimly seeking City of Osaka.
“Captain,” called the comm rating just as Andrew was ordering evasive action, “Borthru acknowledges. They’re—”
“I see them,” said Andrew as the green icons began to flash into existence. Then he turned back to Rachel, who was staring at him with the round eyes of someone who had never been in a space battle before, and resumed where he had left off. “Still, assuming that they haven’t found the bomb and disarmed it or, more likely, sent it out into space
, it should be just about—”
All at once, the control room was bathed in a white glare from the view-aft.
“—now.”
The generator for the station’s invisibility field must have survived the blast for some fraction of a second, because the nuclear explosion was already in progress when it became visible. So it was even more startlingly abrupt than such things normally are. One millisecond there were the serene star fields against their black velvet backdrop; the next there was a new, temporary sun that dazzled the eyes of anyone who happened to be looking at the view-aft at that moment. A rapidly expanding and dissipating cloud of glowing debris surrounded it, for the Kappainu space station had been too massive to be simply vaporized. There were even some fairly substantial chunks, which was one reason they hadn’t dared to cut their escape too fine.
Rachel slumped down into her acceleration couch, weak with reaction. There was a scattering of cheers. Andrew did not join them, to Rachel’s evident surprise. His face remained unrelievedly grim as he studied the tac plot. Rachel looked over his shoulder. He knew she didn’t understand all the supplemental data displays, but the crawling color-coded icons were self-explanatory.
City of Osaka was forging ahead along the orbit the Kappainu station had formerly followed around the distant sun. As they watched, its point defense lasers dealt with all but one of the missiles, and the deflection shield held off the survivor’s bomb-pumped laser. No more missile-icons had separated from the scarlet icons of the enemy ships, whose crews were doubtless stunned by the cataclysmic destruction of their base and further rattled by the appearance of Borthru’s force.
That paralysis, Andrew was coldly certain, would not last.
The two formations of icons crept toward each other in the tac plot. Both were equally slaves to the same orbital mechanics as City of Osaka. The red one swept forward and outward from a point of origin slightly sunward of the space station’s former location. The green ones converged inward. But they both followed courses that would shortly bring them together in a maelstrom of techno-annihilation.
And in between, the tiny white icon of City of Osaka was on course to be ground between the upper and nether millstones.
“Mister Davis,” Andrew suddenly rapped out, “we’ve got to get out of here. Apply a vector tangent to our present course that will take us in a sunward direction. It’s our best avenue for getting out of the battle that’s about to commence.”
Rachel looked at the tac plot and then at Andrew. He gave her what he hoped was a reassuring look, for he knew her background had not prepared her for this. Her early hero worship of her father had been overrun by her parents’ divorce, when her mother had taken her into a world where the military mind-set was neither understood nor admired. She was still conflicted, and out of her element in this control room. But what she saw in Andrew’s face seemed to embolden her to speak up.
“Uh, Andy, not that I know anything about it, but is there really going to be a battle? I mean, now that their base is gone, won’t the Kappainu ships just make transition into overspace—which I know they can do, ‘way out here—and go home? Or am I just being naïve?”
“No, you’re not. I imagine that’s exactly what they’d like to be doing. But they don’t dare. If they did, Borthru could go into overspace and follow them. And then we’d know the location of their home system—and they must be really afraid of that. No, before they can go home they have to destroy every ship in a position to observe them.”
“Including this one,” she said evenly.
“That’s why I’m taking us out of the line of fire. This ship has got no business in the battle that’s about to begin. And for a while, at least, the Kappainu are going to be otherwise occupied.”
Rachel stared, clearly mesmerized, as the red and green icons continued on their convergent courses, the green ones spawning a scattering of offspring as Borthru’s cruisers launched their fighters. Before the antagonists interpenetrated, the space between them began to be crisscrossed by missile salvos. Those tiny icons began to flash bewilderingly as they were destroyed by defensive fire or else got through and detonated as was their destiny. Then the opposing forces slid together into the range of their shipboard lasers, and any attempt at formations dissolved into a brutal melee. Ship-icons began to flicker and die in the ravening hell of directed-energy fire.
“Can Borthru win?” Rachel breathed.
“Maybe,” said Andrew without looking up at her. “He’s heavily outnumbered, but his five cruisers are bigger than anything the Kappainu have got. And it’s clear from the tactical analysis that he’s taking advantage of that.”
“Clear to some people, maybe,” muttered Rachel, obviously bewildered and appalled by the prettily colored light show of death she was watching.
“He’s deployed his frigates and the cruisers’ fighters outward in a kind of umbrella,” Andrew explained. “They’re trying to sort of herd the Kappainu inward, into the concentrated fire of the cruisers, which he’s keeping close together so they can datalink without appreciable time lag. The Kappainu don’t seem to have been able to work out a very effective counter to his strategy.”
“Why not?”
“Well, they’ve probably grown so dependent on their cloaking technology that they’re having trouble dealing with enemies who can detect them. I wonder if they may also be overdependent on central control from their late, unlamented space station, and now find themselves on their own. And on top of all that, the Kappainu lack experience in space combat—not their style. The Rogovon, on the other hand, do have experience, thanks to—”
“—Their war with us.”
“Right.” Andrew finally looked up and met Rachel’s eyes. “They’re not likely to forget the lessons your father taught them.”
“With help from a lot of others,” Rachel added. “Including, as I recall, you.”
Andrew did not trust himself to reply, for he could not let the moment last—he had too much to think about. So he contented himself with a wordless smile before turning his attention back to the display and the readouts.
Rachel watched, too. But since it all meant less to her, it captivated her attention less totally than Andrew’s.
Thus it was that she was the first to notice the tiny red icon in a portion of the plot remote from the battle.
“Andy,” she said hesitantly, “I don’t want to bother you, but isn’t this a hostile ship?”
His eyes followed her pointing finger, and he stiffened.
“Mister Davis!” he snapped. “Verify the tac display return at—” He rattled off coordinates.
Davis went to the sensor station, then turned to Andrew, his young face flushed with excitement. “It checks, sir. That’s an unidentified and presumably hostile ship on a sunward course compatible with having departed the space station just before it blew.”
Rachel held Andrew’s eyes. “Didn’t Valdes say something about—”
“—His private ship,” Andrew nodded. “Mister Davis, change course immediately. We will pursue that ship.”
“Sir?” Davis’ voice rose to a squeak and broke.
“You heard me. I believe that’s Valdes, running away. He thinks we’re too distracted to notice him—and he knows Borthru is fighting for his life and can’t detach a ship to follow him home even if he is noticed. But we can follow him!”
“But what can we do to him, with no ship-to-ship weapons . . . sir?”
For a manic instant, Andrew was reminded of the old chestnut about a dog chasing a car: What would he do with it if he caught it? But, he told himself, it wasn’t applicable here.
“We don’t need to fight him,” Reislon explained to Davis. “All we need to do is follow him in overspace to his destination, then turn around and come back—and we’ll know the location of the Kappainu home system!”
Andrew could almost see the proverbial lightbulb going on in midair above Davis’s head. “And now, Lieutenant, I’ll be obliged if you carry o
ut your orders.”
“Aye, aye, sir!” Davis wrenched City of Osaka into a tight course change to follow the red icon on the nav plot, which seemed to be shaping a flat hyperbolic course that, if continued indefinitely, would pass Sol at a distance of about one astronomical unit.
“Why is Valdes heading across the inner solar system?” asked Rachel in her now-accustomed state of bewilderment.
“I suppose his destination is some star somewhere on the far side of Sol from here, and he might as well be headed in the right course when he makes transition,” said Andrew. But in fact he felt puzzled himself.
“Captain,” Davis spoke up. “I’ve been analyzing the sensor readings on that ship—specifically, the mass readings. And it’s a pretty small ship, less than corvette-sized. Furthermore, the acceleration it’s pulling suggests a drive whose mass requirements would . . . well, sir, the bottom line is, that ship can’t possibly mount an integral transition engine.”
“Will its course take it to any of Sol’s transition gates?” Andrew demanded.
“Negative, sir,” said Davis after a brief check. “Nowhere close to them.”
Andrew thought furiously and stared at the nav plot. Funny, he thought as he studied Valdes’ projected course. It’s almost as though he’s . . .
“Lieutenant,” he ordered, “put the planetary orbits on the nav plot and have the computer project the position of Earth at the time the hostile ship will be at its closest approach to Sol.”
“Aye, aye, sir. I’ll speed both of them up.” The scarlet icon zoomed ahead on its course, like a bead sliding along a string. At the same time, a tiny circle representing Earth swung around Sol on its orbital path. The two came together and intersected.
“It can’t be coincidence,” Andrew thought aloud, “especially since Valdes is coming in from outside the plane of the ecliptic, making it in effect an interception in three dimensions.”
