by John Grant
The Spindrifter fluttered her wings briefly. "That is a greeting from my species to yours," she said.
"Would you like food?" said Strider.
Polyaggle didn't answer, but shut her eyes. What was there on this offworlder spacecraft that might be safe for her to eat? Her biochemistry was obviously entirely different from the human one.
"I brought an Image with me, as you must know," she said at length. "He has conferred with your Images here and they have devised a list of items which it is possible for me to eat without harm. I will join you for a meal of basic processed soya, if I may."
And I'll bet Strider tucks into the same beside her, thought Strauss-Giolitto. Processed soya was the hard tack on which many meals were based; one of the skills of cookbots was in blending flavors and sauces so that you could no longer taste the soya.
"Perhaps with a little pure water," added Polyaggle.
"It shall be arranged," said Strider. She nodded to Lan Yi, who spoke briefly into his commline.
"Please join us for dinner," said Strider to the other three. With a smile.
Only Pinocchio returned it.
#
"Our Images linked up so that I was able to monitor almost everything that went on during the while my people were with you, except for the time you were in your stronghold in the icecap," said Strider. And except for that bloody half-hour, she thought viciously. I'll find out more about that if I have to pull Pinocchio apart chip by chip.
They were seated round the table in Strider's cabin. It was just the right height for her and Lan Yi, but substantially too low for Strauss-Giolitto. Polyaggle had elected to remain standing. A bot would be arriving soon with their dinner. Strider grinned to herself. Lan Yi was remaining as taciturn as ever, but it was easy to read from Strauss-Giolitto's face that the woman was hoping the bot would take a very long time in coming.
"I know of the agreement you came to with Pinocchio," continued Strider, "and I approve of it. After we've eaten, allow me to show you round the Santa Maria and introduce you to a few people. If you're tired, we have some spare cabins—you are certainly welcome to claim one as your own . . ."
"I want to stay aboard this ship for as short a time as possible," said Polyaggle.
"Our friend is quite reasonably concerned about bacterial or viral infection," explained Pinocchio. "There is no discourtesy intended."
"Thank you, Pinocchio," said Strider. "I had gathered as much for myself." And that was a silly put-down, she thought. I wish I could get rid of my anger.
A klaxon screamed.
"Uh oh," said Strider, leaping from her chair. She felt the hairs all up the back of her spine rise. "Emergency. Forgive me."
She was through the door and into the nearest elevator shaft before she gave herself time to think. Pinocchio was hard behind her.
"Any idea what's going on?" she said breathlessly as the elevator hissed them towards the command deck.
"No."
"Are there any Images nearby?"
"No, not even Polyaggle's. He has gone to the deck already to work with the others. They clearly think this is not something minor." Even the bot was looking apprehensive.
Strider beat with her fist against the elevator's plastite wall. "Come on, damn you! Come on!"
It stopped abruptly, and for a lunatic moment Strider thought she might have broken it.
Leander, who had been on agricultural duties, boarded alongside them.
"What the—?" she began.
"Dunno," said Strider bluntly. "Better be good. I was just about to have my dinner."
A few seconds later they were on the command deck. All of the Pockets were glowing brightly except the two at either end.
"It's only just happened," said Nelson, looking up from one of them. His face was aghast. "It's like your worst fucking nightmare, light of my life."
"Let me see," said Strider, running to the Pocket next to the big man.
"Oh, shit," she breathed. It was a nightmare. At first glance it seemed as if the number of bright stars in the sky had doubled. Then you realized that half of them were starships.
THE AUTARCHY'S COME TO SAY HELLO, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free wryly in her mind.
"Any idea why they're here?" she barked to the Image.
US, I SHOULD IMAGINE. THE SANTA MARIA, I MEAN.
"Tell Polyaggle I want her here—she knows more about these bastards than I do. Where's O'Sondheim?"
"Here," the First Officer said beside her.
"Images, how many of those goddam starships are there?"
THREE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-TWO, said a voice she didn't recognize. That must be the Spindrifter's Image.
"Is there anything we can hit them with that could do them any harm?" For the first time in days, Strider felt completely calm. She was giving the orders again: for a time it had seemed that command of her ship was slipping away from her.
We could damage—even destroy—a few of them, but there would still be hundreds of others.
"Can we get away quick?"
THEY HAVE THE TACHYONIC DRIVE AS WELL. HOW DO YOU THINK THEY GOT HERE SO FAST? WE COULD LOSE A FEW OF THEM, BUT—Strider felt something that she assumed was the mental equivalent of a shrug—AGAIN THERE WOULD BE HUNDREDS OF OTHERS.
"Then what in hell can we do?"
WAIT AND SEE, said the Image philosophically.
"Is Ten Per Cent Extra Free there? Or Nightmirror? Or Heartfire?"
THEY ARE DOING OTHER THINGS.
"Great," said Strider, turning to Nelson. "We seem to have got ourselves a fatalistic Image."
"I'm feeling pretty fatalistic myself," he said. His attempt at casualness was unconvincing. He looked like a man who was staring into the jaws of death—which was more or less what he was doing. "Umbel almighty, but will you look at that?"
"I just have," said Strider harshly. "Get your brain together, Nelson. We need it."
She stepped away from the Pocket and glanced around.
"Anyone else got any good ideas?" she snapped.
They shook their heads at her—all except Pinocchio, who was looking thoughtful.
"They wouldn't send a fleet that size against just a single vessel," he said. "All they'd need to overwhelm us would be half a dozen—maybe twice as many if they wanted to capture us. I have a bad feeling about this."
"Keep bad feelings to yourself right now," she said. She gestured towards the Pocket behind her. "There are three hundred and seventy-two bad feelings hanging out there in space at the moment."
"Please . . ." began Pinocchio.
"If it's not some way we can get the hell out of here, I don't want to hear it."
"Captain," said O'Sondheim. "Look here."
He pointed towards his own Pocket. She moved quickly across.
O'Sondheim had called up the representation of Spindrift. As the two of them watched, the appearance of the surface of the planet was changing. The southern polar icecap seemed to be melting; the northern icecap was doing the same sort of thing, but more patchily. Abruptly the planet's surface features disappeared entirely: all that Strider could see was a fuzzy pink disc.
"The Spindrifters' defenses," she breathed.
"That's my guess, too," said O'Sondheim.
"Three hundred and seventy-two ships are far too many to send against just one," repeated Pinocchio. "It's as I feared. We're just the sideshow."
#
Kaantalech had expected the job to be easy, but as soon as she saw the disc of Spindrift change color in her holoscreen she knew she was in for a fight. It normally took a couple of hundred cruisers to torch a planet down to its bedrock. She was glad that some instinct had warned her to bring a larger fleet. Perhaps it had been the surprise of hearing the Autarch ask a meaningful question for once.
She was looking forward to this. The databanks had told her that the dominant species here was confined to this single planet: torching it would mean there was one less developing species in The Wondervale to worry about. Develop
ing civilizations made her anxious: one moment they were primitives and the next they were launching an armada of ships armed to the teeth with intramolecular disrupters aimed directly at your head. Better to get rid of them early, before that happened.
To judge by the defense shield that had been thrown up around Spindrift, she had got here with only a decade or two to spare. There was some sophisticated stuff on offer here.
"Take up standard formation," she said to an aide. He hurried off to transmit the order to the rest of the fleet.
The pinkness expanded rapidly from the surface of the planet until it enclosed the inner moon. From the fuzzy surface suddenly erupted a squadron of missiles, which moved in intelligent cooperation to effect maximum destruction among Kaantalech's front-line vessels. She watched the flares as ships died.
For a moment she was concerned. Those missiles had penetrated the best shields the Autarchy could produce.
"How many have we lost?" she asked another aide. She had sensibly placed her flagship, the Blunt Instrument, well to the rear of the fleet.
"Fourteen," he said.
"Keep moving into standard formation. The more we spread out, the less easy it'll be for them to attack us."
Even as she watched, her armada was shifting apart. Soon it would be forming a sphere all round the Spindrifters' defenses. That was the time to start attacking back.
Another flotilla of missiles emerged. She learnt a few seconds later that a further twenty-seven of her cruisers had been destroyed.
The Spindrifters had teeth, all right.
OK, so had she.
The diameter of the pinkness abruptly expanded by about ten per cent, and numbers of the ships under her command were simply swallowed by it.
This was more serious.
"Losses just incurred?" she snarled.
"Another fifty-eight gone, Kaantalech."
This couldn't go on much longer. The Spindrifter defenses had to be running low. Even though her fleet wasn't yet in position, she ordered the foremost vessels to launch a salvo of maxbeams down into the pink sphere. A couple of the maxbeams swerved to hit Autarchy vessels en route—this was par for the course—but the remainder seemed to hit home. The local space was a lightshow as the blue beams struck the pink surface and vanished somewhere beyond.
The pink paled perceptibly. Yes, some of those little darlings had struck paydirt, all right.
Kaantalech's mouth filled with joy.
"Continue moving into standard formation," she commanded brusquely.
Barely ten minutes had passed since combat had been declared. Conflicts in space don't generally last very long, because almost every blow that is successfully delivered is a fatal one. There have been legends of damaged warships somehow limping gallantly home, but almost without exception they are just that: legends. In the vacuum either you're alive or you're more generally dead: the status "wounded" is not an option.
The Blunt Instrument rocked, and Kaantalech staggered.
How had the Spindrifters been able to get a missile through without its being detected long before? She should have been warned. Someone was going to die painfully for this.
She squinted at her holoscreen, looking out for any trace of activity from the pink disc.
Off to her left, one of her cruisers erupted into a maelstrom of fire and glowing debris. She had seen no trace of a missile or ray. The Spindrifters must be using some technology of which the Autarchy knew nothing. Perhaps she ought to forbear from torching the planet and instead torture enough of the indigenes until one of them gave up the secret. But the Autarch would be bound to discover what she'd done, and then she'd have to hand over the technology to him—and he'd undoubtedly waste it on some damn-fool project or other. Besides, assuming he didn't, she had no wish to arm him up any more than she had to.
Better just to get rid of the world and its weaponry.
"Continue to move into standard formation," she repeated unnecessarily. Even though three more cruisers had been blasted into oblivion, no one would dare deviate from one of her orders until it had been countermanded. The sick joke the troopers passed around among each other when they thought they weren't being monitored was: "The Autarch'll kill you if he can't think of anything better to do, Kaantalech'll kill you because she can't think of anything better to do." Kaantalech not only allowed the apparently subversive joke to circulate freely: she had created it in the first place.
"Check the Humans on the bigger moon," she said to an aide.
Could it be that the Humans were chipping in with some of their own weaponry? She doubted it. If they'd had weapons of this class they'd merely have blown Maglittel to bits on first contact, rather than go through all the palaver with the red giant. In the name of the Autarchy, Maglittel had been a fool: she had attacked the Humans without first ascertaining their defense capabilities. It was one thing to kill innocent bystanders; quite another to be so stupid as not to check out first whether or not they could kill you.
The aide came bustling back, wagging his short proboscis.
"The Humans are quiescent, Kaantalech," he said. "Shall we divert a couple of cruisers their way?"
"No. Not yet," she said.
The Blunt Instrument was once again hit by something heavy. It was a good job she'd arranged that the flagship be kitted out with the best defensive shields of all the vessels in the fleet.
Vastly depleted—there were now fewer than two hundred and seventy ships left—Kaantalech's armada was forming a ragged version of the standard attack pattern. Most of the ships' commanding officers were adjusting their positions to take account of the gaps in the ranks. Here and there, however, the gaps remained. Kaantalech cursed. Patronage was still an important factor in an individual's attaining high rank in the Autarch's military. She would bet her fourteenth breast that the captains too slow on the uptake to get things right had friends or family in high places.
Still, she had to do the best she could with what she'd got.
"Four more cruisers out of it," said an aide nervously.
Kaantalech nodded absently. In the holoscreen, she'd seen three of them go down simultaneously. The fourth must have been around the far side of the pinkness. She congratulated herself yet again on having had the foresight to bring almost twice as many warships as were normally required.
The formation was ragged, but it was there. Surely the Spindrifters couldn't keep this up much longer. Even so, better to give them a first barrage now.
The earlier maxbeams had clearly weakened them.
She gestured to the nearest aide that she wanted to take over direct control.
He passed her a mike that was barely larger than a pajwhat's eye.
Kaantalech spoke a few words, and it was as if the heavens themselves were blown apart.
#
"I told you the Humans should never have been allowed to come here," fluted Feefaar. "All they have brought in their train is death and destruction." With a few assistants, she and Nerita were running the defense operations room.
"They were not to know that," said Nerita. Slidecraft were arriving from all over Spindrift; the port in the hillside was left constantly open because, with the deflector screen surrounding the planet out as far as the inner moon, there was no way the bunker could be observed by the attackers. But neither she nor Nerita was certain how long they could keep the deflector screen in place.
The screen caused a distortion in spacetime so that energy towards its exterior was diverted away to somewhere else in the Universe—in this instance, into Spindrift's star, where even the mightiest of the forces at the command of the Autarchy could do little damage. That was the theory of the device, which the ancient species had developed millions of years before, when they had seen the aggressive natures of the emergent secondary species taking form. The trouble was that no one had ever been able to make a deflector screen more than about eighty per cent efficient. If the Autarchy fleet poured enough energy into it they would, despite the huge wasta
ge, nevertheless be able to destroy Spindrift just as effectively as if the screen had not been there at all.
"I'm not saying it was their fault," said Feefaar, fluttering her wings angrily as she flitted over Nerita's head to get from one puter to another. "But it wasn't our fault, either, that they drew this armada after them. As soon as they arrived we should have had the foresight to tell them to go away."
"Stop this. The deflector's losing power. Concentrate on that."
The two Spindrifters said nothing for a few minutes as they fought with various controls to try to beef up the energy resources available for the screen. They were drawing energy from the hot magnetic core of the planet; there was plenty of power on tap, but for technical reasons it was difficult to turn the tap on far enough to get more than a trickle at any one time.
"They're using maxbeams," said Nerita.
"I'd noticed."
Maxbeams sought out complex organic molecules and shredded them into their component atoms, those atoms being repelled from each other with such ferocity that the effect was not unlike a miniature version of a nuclear explosion. The disadvantage of the maxbeam was that it was difficult to target properly: if en route it passed too near some other collection of organics than the one you were aiming at, it was likely to change course, hungrily. If that collection of organics happened to be, say, the crew of one of your own starships, the starship would be blown into a depressingly large number of pieces. The weapon was outlawed throughout The Wondervale, which meant that no one but the Autarchy's military was allowed to use it.
"Even in here we may not be able to survive them," said Nerita. Between them, they'd got the deflector screen back up to full power again.
Feefaar looked upwards apprehensively. The dome of the hidden stronghold was built of meters-thick deadmetal, under the ice—the ice itself afforded a certain amount of protection. "We should be all right unless we get a direct hit."
"Should be. Hope so."
Both of them were all the while conjuring up in their minds an image of the disposition of the attacker's fleet. They were startled when one of the cruisers spontaneously and explosively disintegrated, soon to be followed by another.
