“You’re pirates now,” Hoddan told him with a sort of genial bloodthirstiness. “You’ll do what I tell you until we fight. Then you’ll fight well or die. That’s all you need to know!”
He left them. When men are to be led it is rarely wise to discuss policy or tactics with them. Most men work best when they know only what is expected of them. Then they can’t get confused and they do not get ideas of how to do things better.
* * * *
Hoddan inspected the yacht more carefully. There were still traces of decorative features which had nothing to do with space-worthiness. But the mere antiquity of the ship made Hoddan hunt more carefully. He found a small compartment packed solidly with supplies. A supply-cabinet did not belong where it was. He hauled out stuff to make sure. It was…it had been…a machine shop in miniature. In the early days, before spacephones were long-range devices, a yacht or a ship that went beyond orbital distance was strictly on its own. If there were a breakdown, it was strictly private. It had to repair itself or else. So all early spacecraft carried amazingly complete equipment for repairs. Only liners are equipped that way in recent generations, and it is almost unheard-of for their tool shops to be used.
But there was the remnant of a shop on the yacht that Hoddan had in hand for his errand to Walden. He’d told the emigrant leaders that he went to ask for charity. He’d just assured his followers that their journey was for piracy. Now—
He began to empty the cubbyhole of all the items that had been packed into it for storage. It had been very ingenious, this miniature repair shop. The lathe was built in with strength-members of the walls as part of its structure. The drill press was recessed. The welding apparatus had its coils and condensers under the floor. The briefest of examinations showed the condensers to be in bad shape, and the coils might be hopeless. But there was good material used in the old days. Hoddan began to have quite unreasonable hopes.
He went back to the control room to meditate.
He’d had a reasonably sound plan of action for the pirating of a space-liner, even though he had no weapons mounted on the ship nor anything more deadly than stun-pistols for his reluctant crew. But he considered it likely that he could make the same sort of landing with this yacht that he’d already done with the spaceboat. Which should be enough.
If he waited off Walden until a liner went down to the planet’s great spaceport, he could try it. He would go into a close orbit around Walden which would bring him, very low, over the landing grid within an hour or so of the liner’s landing. He’d turn the yacht end for end and apply full rocket power for deceleration. The yacht would drop like a stone into the landing grid. Everything would happen too quickly for the grid crew to think of clapping a force field on it, or for them to manage it if they tried. He’d be aground before they realized it.
The rest was simply fast action. Hoddan and seven Darthians, stun-pistols humming, would tumble out of the yacht and dash for the control room of the grid. Hoddan would smash the controls. Then they’d rush the landed liner, seize it, shoot down anybody who tried to oppose them, and seal up the ship.
And then they’d take off. On the liner’s rockets, which were carried for emergency landing only, but could be used for a single take-off. After one such use they’d be exhausted. And with the grid’s controls smashed, nobody could even try to stop them.
It wasn’t a bad idea. He had a good deal of confidence in it. It was the reason for his Darthian crew. Nobody’d expect such a thing to be tried, so it almost certainly could be done. But it did have the drawback that the yacht would have to be left behind, a dead loss, when the liner was seized.
Hoddan thought it over soberly. Long before he reached Walden, of course, he could have his own crew so terrified that they’d fight like fiends for fear of what he might do to them if they didn’t. But if he could keep the space-yacht also—
He nodded gravely. He liked the new possibility. If it didn’t work, there was the first plan in reserve. In any case he’d get a modern space-liner and a suitable cargo to present to the emigrants of Colin. And afterward—
There were certain electronic circuits which were akin. The Lawlor drive unit formed a force field, a stress in space, into which a nearby ship necessarily moved. The faster-than-light angle came from the fact that it worked like a donkey trotting after a carrot held in front of him by a stick. The ship moving into the stressed area moved the stress. The force fields of a landing grid were similar. A tuning principle was involved, but basically a landing grid clamped an area of stress around a spaceship, and the ship couldn’t move out of it. When the landing grid moved the stressed area up or down—why—that was it.
All this was known to everybody. But a third trick had been evolved on Zan. It was based on the fact that ball lightning could be generated by a circuit fundamentally akin to the other two. Ball lightning was an area of space so stressed that its energy-content could leak out only very slowly, unless it made contact with a conductor, when all bets were off. It blew. And the Zan pirates used ball lightning to force the surrender of their victims.
Hoddan began to draw diagrams. The Lawlor drive-unit had been installed long after the yacht was built. It would be modern, with no nonsense about it. With such-and-such of its electronic components cut out, and such-and-such other ones cut in, it would become a perfectly practical ball lightning generator, capable of placing bolts wherever one wanted them. This was standard Zan practice. Hoddan’s grandfather had used it for years. It had the advantage that it could be used inside a gravity field, where a Lawlor drive could not. It had the other advantage that commercial spacecraft could not mount such gadgets for defense, because the insurance companies objected to meddling with Lawlor drive installations.
* * * *
Hoddan set to work with the remnants of a tool shop on the ancient yacht and some antique coils and condensers and such. He became filled with zest. He almost forgot that he was the skipper of an elderly craft which should have been scrapped before he was born.
But even he grew hungry, and he realized that nobody offered him food. He went indignantly into the yacht’s central saloon and found his seven crew-members snoring stertorously, sprawled in stray places here and there.
He woke them with great sternness. He set them furiously to work on that housekeeping—including meals—which can be neglected in a feudal castle because strong outside winds blow smells away and dry up smelly objects, but which must be practiced in a spaceship.
He went back to work. Suddenly he stopped and meditated afresh, and ceased his actual labor to draw a diagram which he regarded with great affection. He returned to his adaptation of the Lawlor drive to the production of ball lightning.
It was possible to wind coils. A certain percentage of the old condensers held a charge. He tapped the drive-unit for brazing current, and the drill-press became a die-stamping device for small parts. He built up the elements of a vacuum tube such as is normally found only in a landing grid control room. He set up a vacuum-valve arrangement in the base of a large glass jar. He put that jar in the boat’s air lock, bled the air to emptiness, and flashed the tube’s quaint elements. He brought it back and went out of overdrive while he hooked the entire new assembly into the drive-circuit, with cut-outs and switches to be operated from the yacht’s instrument board.
Finished, he examined the stars. The nearby suns were totally strange in their arrangement. But the Coalsack area was a space-mark good for half a sector of the galaxy. There was a condensation in the Nearer Rim for a second bearing. And a certain calcium cloud with a star-cluster behind it was as good as a highway sign for locating one’s self.
He lined up the yacht again and went into overdrive once more. Two days later he came out, again surveyed the cosmos, again went into overdrive, again came out, once more made a hop in faster-than-light travel—and he was in the solar system of which Walden was the ornament and pride.
He used the telescope and contemplated Walden on its screen. The spa
ce yacht moved briskly toward it. His seven Darthian crewmen, aware of coming action, dolefully sharpened their two-foot knives. They did not know what else to do, but they were far from happy.
Hoddan shared their depression. Such gloomy anticipations before stirring events are proof that a man is not a fool. Hoddan’s grandfather had been known to observe that when a man can imagine all kinds of troubles and risks and disasters ahead of him, he is usually right. Hoddan shared that view. But it would not do to back out now.
He examined Walden painstakingly while the yacht sped on. He saw an ocean come out of the twilight zone of dawn. By the charts, the capital city and the spaceport should be on that ocean’s western shore. After a suitable and very long interval, the site of the capital city came around the edge of the planet.
From a bare hundred thousand miles, Hoddan stepped up magnification to its limit and looked again. Then Walden more than filled the telescope’s field. He could see only a very small fraction of the planet’s surface. He had to hunt before he found the capital city again. Then it was very clear. He saw the curving lines of its highways and the criss-cross pattern of its streets. Buildings as such, however, did not show. But he made out the spaceport and the shadow of the landing grid, and in the very center of that grid there was something silvery which cast a shadow of its own. A ship. A liner.
There was a tap on the control-room door. Thal.
“Anything happening?” he asked uneasily.
“I just sighted the ship we’re going to take,” said Hoddan.
Thal looked unhappy. He withdrew. Hoddan plotted out the extremely roundabout course he must take to end up with the liner and the yacht traveling in the same direction and the same speed, so capture would be possible.
He put the yacht on the line required. He threw on full power. Actually, he headed partly away from his intended victim. The little yacht plunged forward. Nothing seemed to happen. Time passed. Hoddan had nothing to do but worry. He worried.
Thal tapped on the door again.
“About time to get ready to fight?” he asked dolefully.
“Not yet,” said Hoddan. “I’m running away from our victim, now.”
* * * *
Another half hour. The course changed. The yacht was around behind Walden. The whole planet lay between it and its intended prey. The course of the small ship curved, now. It would pass almost close enough to clip the topmost tips of Walden’s atmosphere. There was nothing for Hoddan to do but think morbid thoughts. He thought them.
The Lawlor drive began to burble. He cut it off. He sat gloomily in the control room, occasionally glancing at the nearing expanse of rushing mottled surface presented by the now-nearby planet. Its attraction bent the path of the yacht. It was now a parabolic curve.
Presently the surface diminished a little. The yacht was increasing its distance from it. Hoddan used the telescope. He searched the space ahead with full-width field. He found the liner. It rose steadily. The grid still thrust it upward with an even, continuous acceleration. It had to be not less than forty thousand miles out before it could take to overdrive. But at that distance it would have an outward velocity which would take it on out indefinitely. At ten thousand miles, certainly, the grid-fields would let go.
They did. Hoddan could tell because the liner had been pointed base down toward the planet when the force fields picked it up. Now it wabbled slightly. It was free. It was no longer held solidly. From now on it floated up on momentum.
Hoddan nibbled at his fingernails. There was nothing to be done for forty minutes more. Presently there was nothing to be done for thirty. For twenty. Ten. Five. Three. Two—
The liner was barely twenty miles away when Hoddan fired his rockets. They made a colossal cloud of vapor in emptiness. The yacht stirred faintly, shifted deftly, lost just a suitable amount of velocity—which now was nearly straight up from the planet—and moved with precision and directness toward the liner. Hoddan stirred his controls and swung the whole small ship. Here, obviously, he could not use the space-drive for its proper purpose. But a switch cut out certain elements of the Lawlor unit and cut in those others which made the modified drive-unit into a ball lightning projector.
A flaming speck of pure incandescence sped from the yacht through emptiness. It would miss—No. Hoddan swerved it. It struck the liner’s hull. It would momentarily paralyze every bit of electric equipment in the ship. It would definitely not go unnoticed.
“Calling liner,” said Hoddan painfully into a microphone. “Calling liner! We are pirates, attacking your ship. You have ten seconds to get into your lifeboats or we will hull you!”
He settled back, again nibbling at his fingernails. He was acutely disturbed. At the end of ten seconds the distance between the two ships was perceptibly less.
He flung a second ball lightning bolt across the diminished space. He sent it whirling round and round the liner in a tight spiral. He ended by having it touch the liner’s bow. Liquid light ran over the entire hull.
“Your ten seconds are up,” he said worriedly. “If you don’t get out—”
But then he relaxed. A boat-blister on the liner opened. The boat did not release itself. It could not possibly take on its complement of passengers and crew in so short a time. The opening of the blister was a sign of surrender.
The two first ball lightning bolts were miniatures. Hoddan now projected a full-sized ball. It glittered viciously in emptiness, the plasma-gas necessary for its existence furnishing a medium for radiation. It sped toward the liner and hung off its side, menacingly. The yacht from Darth moved steadily closer. Five miles. Two.
“All out,” said Hoddan regretfully. “We can’t wait any longer!”
A boat darted away from the liner. A second. A third and fourth and fifth. The last boat lingered desperately. The yacht was less than a mile away when it broke free and plunged frantically toward the planet it had left a little while before. The other boats were already streaking downward, trails of rocket-fumes expanding behind them. The crew of the landing grid would pick them up for safe and gentle landing.
Hoddan sighed in relief. He played delicately upon the yacht’s rocket-controls. He carefully maneuvered the very last of the novelties he had built into an originally simple Lawlor drive-unit. The two ships came together with a distinct clanking sound. It seemed horribly loud.
Thal jerked open the door, ashen-white.
“W-we hit something! Wh-when do we fight?”
Hoddan said ruefully:
“I forgot. The fighting’s over. But bring your stun-pistols. Nobody’d stay behind, but somebody might have gotten left.”
He rose, to take over the captured ship.
IX
Normally, at overdrive cruising speed, it would be a week’s journey from Walden to the planet Krim. Hoddan made it in five days. There was reason. He wanted to beat the news of his piracy to Krim. He could endure suspicion, and he wouldn’t mind doubt, but he did not want certainty of his nefarious behavior to interfere with the purposes of his call.
The space yacht, sealed tightly, floated in an orbit far out in emptiness. The big ship went down alone by landing grid. It glittered brightly as it descended. When it touched ground and the grid’s force fields cut off, it looked very modern and very crisp and strictly businesslike. Actually, the capture of this particular liner was a bit of luck, for Hoddan. It was not one of the giant inter-cluster ships which make runs of thousands of light-years and deign to stop only at very major planets. It was a medium ship of five thousand tons burden, designed for service in the Horsehead Nebula region. It was brand-new and on the way from its builders to its owners when Hoddan interfered. Naturally, though, it carried cargo on its maiden voyage.
Hoddan spoke curtly to the control room of the grid.
“I’m non-sked,” he explained. “New ship. I got a freak charter party over on Walden and I have to get rid of my cargo. How about shifting me to a delay space until I can talk to some brokers?”
The force fields came on again and the liner moved very delicately to a position at the side of the grid’s central space. There it would be out of the way.
Hoddan dressed himself carefully in garments found in the liner’s skipper’s cabin. He found Thal wearing an apron and an embittered expression. He ceased to wield a mop as Hoddan halted before him.
“I’m going ashore,” said Hoddan crisply. “You’re in charge until I get back.”
“In charge of what?” demanded Thal bitterly. “Of a bunch of male housemaids! I run a mop! And me a Darthian gentleman! I thought I was being a pirate! What do I do? I scrub floors! I wash paint! I stencil cases in cargo holds! I paint over names and put others in their places! Me, a Darthian gentleman!”
“No,” said Hoddan. “A pirate. If I don’t get back, you and the others can’t work this ship, and presently the police of Krim will ask why. They’ll recheck my careful forgeries, and you’ll all be hung for piracy. So don’t let anybody in. Don’t talk to anybody. If you do—pfft!”
He drew his finger across his throat, and nodded, and went cheerfully out the crew’s landing-door in the very base of the ship. He went across the tarmac and out between two of the gigantic steel arches of the grid. He hired a ground vehicle.
“Where?” asked the driver.
“Hm-m-m,” said Hoddan. “There’s a firm of lawyers.… I can’t remember the name—”
“There’s millions of ’em,” said the driver.
“This is a special one,” explained Hoddan. “It’s so dignified they won’t talk to you unless you’re a great-grandson of a client. They’re so ethical they won’t touch a case of under a million credits. They’ve got about nineteen names in the firm title and—”
“Oh!” said the ground-car driver. “That’ll be—Hell! I can’t remember the name either. But I’ll take you there.”
He drove out into traffic. Hoddan relaxed. Then he tensed again. He had not been in a city since he stopped briefly in this on the way to Darth. The traffic was abominable. And he, who’d been in various pitched battles on Darth and had only lately captured a ship in space—Hoddan grew apprehensive as his ground-car charged into the thick of hooting, rushing, squealing vehicles. When the car came to a stop he was relieved.
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 157
