There was the sun of Garen, burning peacefully in a vast void with millions of minute, unwinking lights in the firmament all about it. There was a gas-giant planet, a mere fifteen million miles away. Further out there were the smaller, frozen worlds. Nearer the sun, on the far side of its orbit, there was the planet Garen.
The Isis drove for that planet, while Bors tried to decide whether the remarkable accuracy of this breakout was due to accident or to Logan’s computations.
Logan appeared as Bors was gloomily contemplating the days needed to reach Garen on solar system drive, because overdrive was too fast. Logan looked offhand and elaborately casual, but he fairly glowed with triumph.
“I found out the fact behind the bugger factor, Captain,” he said condescendingly. “The speed of a ship in overdrive varies as the change in mass to the minus fourth. Your computers couldn’t tell that! Here’s a table for calculating the speed of a ship in overdrive according to its mass and the strength of the overdrive field.”
“Fine,” said Bors without enthusiasm.
“And to go with it,” said Logan, his voice indifferent, but his eyes shining proudly, “just for my own amusement, I computed a complete table of overdrive speeds for this particular ship, with different strengths of field. They run from one point five light-speeds up to the maximum your equipment will give. You have to correct for changes of mass, of course.”
Bors was not quite capable of enthusiasm over the computation of tables of complex figures. He simply could not share Logan’s thrill of achievement in the results of the neat rows of numerals. Nor had he struggled unduly to grasp the implication of Logan’s explanation.
Instead, he said politely, “Very nice. Thank you very much.”
Logan’s eyes ceased to shine. His wounded pride made him defiant.
“Nobody else anywhere could have worked out that table!” he said stridently. “Nobody! Morgan said you’d appreciate my work! He said you needed my talent! But what good do you see in it? You think I’m a freak!”
Bors realized that he’d been tactless. Logan’s experiences before Talents, Incorporated had made him unduly sensitive. He’d done something of which he was proud, but Bors didn’t appreciate its magnitude. Logan reacted to the frustration of his vanity.
“Hold it!” said Bors. “I’m not unappreciative. I’m stupid and worried about something. You just figured an overdrive jump for me that’s the most accurate I ever heard of! But I’m desperate for time and we’ve got to spend two days in solar-system drive because we can’t make an overdrive hop of less than light-days! So we’re losing forty-eight hours or more.”
Logan said as stridently as before:
“But I just showed you you don’t have to! Cut the field-strength according to that table.”
Bors was jolted. It was suddenly self-evident. Logan had said he’d figured a table of overdrive fields for the Isis which would work for anything between one point five light-speeds to maximum. One point five light-speeds!
It was one of those absurdities in technology that so often go so long before they are noticed. During the development of overdrive, it had been the effort of every technician to get the fastest possible drive. It was known that with a given mass and a given field-strength, one could get an effective speed of an unbelievable figure. Men had spent their lives trying to increase that figure. But nobody’d ever tried to find out how slowly one could travel in overdrive, because solar-system drive took care of short distances!
“Wait a minute!” said Bors, staring. “Do you really mean I can drive this ship under two light-speeds in overdrive?”
“Look at the table!” said Logan, trembling with anger. “Look at it! You’ll find the figures right there!”
Bors looked. Then he stood up quickly. He left the ship in the care of his second-in-command and plunged into a highly technical discussion with its engineers.
He ran into violent objections. The whole purpose of overdrive was high speed between stars. The engineers insisted that one had to use the strongest possible field. If the field were made feeble, it would become unstable. Everybody knew that the field had to be of maximum strength.
“We’ll try minimum,” said Bors coldly. “Now let’s get to work!”
He had to do much of the labor himself, because the engineers found it necessary to stop at each stage of the effort to explain why it should not be done. He had almost to battle to get an auxiliary circuit paralleling the main overdrive unit, with a transformer to bring down voltage, and a complete new power-supply unit to be cut into the overdrive line while leaving the standard ready for use without delay.
He went back to the control room. He took a distance-reading on the huge planet off to port. He threw on the new, low-power overdrive field. He held it for seconds and broke out. It was still in sight.
The speed of the Isis, with the adjusted overdrive, was one point seven lights.
Now, instead of spending days in solar-system drive for planetary approach, Bors went into the new-speed drive and broke out in eleven minutes twenty seconds, and was within a hundred thousand miles of Garen. He’d saved two days and secured the promise of many more such valuable feats.
As soon as the Isis broke to normal space near Garen, there was a call on the communicator. A familiar voice;
“Calling Isis! Calling Isis! Sylva calling Isis!”
Bors said softly, “Damnation! For the second time, what are you doing in this place?”
Gwenlyn’s voice laughed.
“Traveling for pleasure, Captain Bors! I’ve news for you. We were allowed to land and then told to leave again. There’s a warship down below. I told you about it before. It’s still there. There’s a huge cargo-ship, too, and there are riots because it’s almost finished loading with requisitioned foodstuffs for Mekin. Mekin is—would you believe it?—unpopular on Garen!”
“Very well,” said Bors. “I’ll see what can be done. Will you carry a message for me?”
“Happy to oblige, Captain!”
“Tell them that—” Then Bors stopped short. It was not probable that the fleet wave-form and frequency were known to Mekinese ships. But the possibility of low-speed overdrive travel was much too important a military secret to risk under any circumstances. He said, “I’ll be along very shortly with some highly encouraging news.”
“Who do I tell this to?”
“I name no names on microwaves,” he told her. “Get going, will you?”
“To hear,” said Gwenlyn cheerfully, “is to obey.”
Her communicator clicked off. The Sylva showed on a radar-screen, but had not been near enough to be sighted direct. The blip shot out from the planet.
Bors growled to himself. The Isis floated a hundred thousand miles off Garen. There was no challenge. There was no query from the planet. But Gwenlyn said that there were riots down below. They could be serious enough to absorb the attention usually given to routine. But there was another reason for this inattention. Garen was a part of the Mekinese empire which was not encouraged to trade off-planet except through Mekin. Very few non-Mekinese ships would ever land there, and therefore wouldn’t be watched for. It was unlikely that a long-range radar habitually swept space off Garen. The battleship should be more alert, but again there was no danger of space-borne rebellion, and the affair of Kandar might not have been bruited so far away.
But the spaceport would respond to calls, certainly. Bors considered these circumstances. A large cargo-ship loaded with foodstuffs requisitioned to be sent to Mekin. A population which had been rebellious before—witness the battleship aground to overawe resistance—and now was rioting.
Bors called for the extra members of his crew. He uncomfortably outlined the action he had in mind. There was one part that he disliked. He had to stay on board ship. The important action, as he saw it, would take place elsewhere. It was so obviously painful for him to outline a course of action in which other men must take risks he couldn’t share, that his men regarded him with pl
eased affection which he did not guess at. In the end he asked for twenty volunteers, and got fifty.
He swung the Isis around to the night side of the planet. Its two port blisters opened and two boats floated free in the orbit Bors had established. The ship moved on ahead.
Just at sunup where the spaceport stood, a voice growled down from outer space.
“Calling ground!” it said contemptuously. “Calling ground! This is the last ship left of the fleet of Kandar. We’re pirates now and we’re looking for trouble! There’s a battleship down there. Come up and fight or we blast you in your spaceport! Just to prove we can do it—watch!”
Bors said, “Fire one,” and a missile went off toward the planet. It was fused to detonate at the very tip of the fringes of the planet’s atmosphere.
It did. There was light more brilliant than a thousand suns. The long low shadows of sunrise vanished. The new-rising sun turned dim by comparison.
The voice from space spoke with intolerable levity. “Come up with your missiles ready! We‘ll give you ten thousand miles of height. And if you try to duck out in overdrive.…”
The voice was explicit about what it would do to the Mekinese-occupied areas of Garen if the battleship fled.
It came up to fight. It could do nothing else.
Chapter 8
The trick, of course, was in the timing, and the secret was that Bors knew what he was doing, while those who opposed him did not. Bors had declared himself a pirate on Tralee, and here off Garen he’d claimed the same status. But no Mekinese, as yet, knew why he’d outlawed himself, nor his purpose in challenging a line battleship to fight. It seemed like the raving, hysterical hatred of men with no motive but hate. But it wasn’t. The Isis could have sent down a missile with a limited-yield warhead if its only purpose had been to kill or to destroy. He could have blasted the warship without warning and it was unlikely that it was alert enough to send up counter-missiles in its own defense. But he’d have had to smash everything else in the spaceport at the same time.
Therefore he’d left his two space-boats in low orbit on the night side of the planet. In thirty minutes or so they’d arrive near the spaceport, where there was a large cargo-ship loaded with foodstuffs, for Mekin. Bors wanted that cargo.
So when the Mekinese battlewagon came lumbering up to space, with her missile-tubes armed and bristling, Bors withdrew the Isis. It was not flight. It was a move designed to make sure that when the fight began there would be no stray missiles falling on the planet.
* * * *
Unseen, the Isis’s space-boats floated in darkness. They carried ten men each, equipped with small arms and light bombs. They listened to such bits of broadcast information as came from the night beneath them. Boat Number One picked up a news broadcast, and when it was finished, the petty officer in command pulled free the tape that had recorded it and tucked it in his pocket. There were items of interest on it.
* * * *
The Isis came to a stop in space. The battleship rose and rose. It did not drive toward the Isis. There was a maximum distance beyond which space-combat was impractical; beyond which missiles became mere blind projectiles moving almost at random and destroying each other without regard to planetary loyalties. There was also a minimum distance, below which missiles were again mere projectiles and could not greatly modify the courses on which they were launched.
But there was a wide area in between, in which combat was practical. The Mekinese battleship reached a height where it could maneuver on solar-system drive without rockets. It might, of course, flick into overdrive and be gone thousands of millions of miles within seconds. But that would be flight. It would not return accurately to the scene of the fight. So overdrive could not be used as a battle tactic. It could be used only for escape.
* * * *
Near the planet, where the two space-boats floated, the dawnline appeared at the world’s edge. The space-boats swung about, facing backward, and applied power for deceleration. They dropped into the atmosphere and bounced out again, and in again—more deeply—and then swung once more to face along their course. They began a long, shallow, screaming descent from the farthest limits of the planet’s atmosphere.
* * * *
Out where the sun of Garen was a disk of intolerable brilliance and heat, the battleship bumbled on its way. It would seem that its commander scornfully accepted the Isis’s terms of combat and moved contemptuously to the position where his weapons would be most deadly. His ship’s launching-tubes were at the ready. It should be able to pour out a cloud of missiles. In fact, a sardonic voice came from the battleship.
“Calling pirate,” said the voice.
“Yes,” said Bors.
“If you wish to surrender—”
“We don’t,” said Bors.
“I was about to say,” said the sardonic voice, “that it is now too late.”
The radar-screen showed tiny specks darting out from that larger speck which was the battleship. They came hurtling toward the Isis. Bors counted them. A ship of the Isis’s class mounted eighteen launching-tubes. She should be able to fire eighteen missiles at a time. The Mekinese ship had fired nineteen. If the Isis opened fire, by all the previous rules of space-combat, she would need to use one missile to counter every one of the battleship’s, there would still be one left over to destroy the Isis—unless she fired a second spread of missiles, which was virtually impossible before she would be hit.
It was mockery by the skipper of the battleship. He was doubtless much amused at the idea of toying with this small, insolent vessel. But Bors did not try to match him missile for missile. He said evenly,
“Fire one. Fire two. Fire three. Fire four.”
He stopped at four. His four missiles went curving wildly, in the general direction, only, of the enemy.
* * * *
On the planet Garen two shrieking objects came furiously to ground. Men leaped swiftly out of them and trotted toward a small town, a settlement, a group of houses hardly larger than a village. One man delayed by each grounded space-boat, and then ran to overtake the others. Local inhabitants appeared, to stare and to wonder. The two landing-parties, ten men in each, did not pause. They swarmed into the village’s single street. There were ground-cars at the street-sides. The men of the landing-parties established themselves briskly. One of them seized a staring civilian by the arm.
“To hell with Mekin,” he said conversationally. “Where’s the communicator office?”
“Wha—what—?”
“To hell with Mekin,” repeated the man from the Isis, impatiently. “Where’s the communicator office?”
The civilian, trembling suddenly, pointed. Some of the landing-party rushed to it. Four went in. There were the reports of blast-rifles. Smoke and the smell of burnt insulation drifted out. Others of the magically arrived men went methodically down the street, examining each ground-car in turn. One of them cupped his hands and bellowed for the information of alarmed citizens:
“Attention, please! We’re from the pirate ship Isis. You have nothing to fear from us. We’re survivors of Mekin’s invasion of Kandar. You will please co-operate with us, and no harm will come to you. Your ground-cars will be disabled so you can’t report us. You will not be punished for this! Repeat: you will not be punished!”
He repeated the announcement. Others of the swiftly-moving landing-parties drove the chosen ground-cars away from the streets. The remaining cars received a blaster-bolt apiece. In seven minutes and thirty seconds from the landing of the small space-craft, a motley assortment of cars roared out of the village, heading for the capital city of Garen. As the last car cleared the houses, there was a monstrous explosion. One of the space-boats flew to bits. Before the cars had vanished, there was a second explosion. Another space-boat vanished in flame and debris. The landing-party had no way to return to space. The inhabitants of the village had no way to report their coming except in person and by traveling some considerable distance on foot. They were s
ingularly slow in making that report. The men of the space-boats had said they were pirates. The people of Garen felt no animosity toward pirates. They only hated Mekinese.
* * * *
Out in space, missiles hurtled away from the small shipIsis. They did not plunge directly at the battleship. They swung crazily in wide arcs. The already-launched Mekinese missiles swerved to intercept them. They failed. More missiles erupted from the battleship, aimed to intercept. They also failed. The battleship began to fling out every missile it possessed, in a frantic effort to knock out the Isis’s erratic missiles, which neither instruments nor eyes were able to follow accurately enough to establish a pattern of destination.
* * * *
Half a dozen ground-cars roared through the streets of the capital city of Garen. They did not seem to be crowded. One man or at most, two, could be seen in each car, but they drove as a unit, one close behind another, at a furious pace. When they needed a clear way, the first sounded its warning-note and the others joined in as a chorus. Half a dozen sirens blaring together have an authoritative, emergency sound. The way was cleared when that imperative clarion demanded it.
They swerved under the landing-grid. They raced and bounced across the clear surface which was the spaceport. There stood a giant, rotund cargo-ship, pointing skyward. There were ground-trucks still supplying cargo for its nearly filled-up holds.
The six ground-cars braked, making clouds of dust. And suddenly there was not one or two men in each, but an astonishing number. They knew exactly what they were about. Five of them plunged into the ship. Others drove off the ground-trucks. Uniformed men ran from the side of the spaceport toward the ship, yelling. One ground-car started up again, rushed to the control-building, swerved sharply as a crash into it seemed inevitable, and dumped something out on the ground. It raced back to the other cars about the cargo-ship. The hold-doors were closing.
The object dumped by the control-building went off. It was a chemical-explosive bomb, but its power was adequate. The wall of the building caved in. Flames leaped crazily out of the collapsed heap. The landing-field would be out of operation.
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 221
