The last car skidded to a stop. The two men in it ran for the boarding-stair of the cargo-boat. There was nobody of their party outside now. The landing-stair withdrew after them.
Then monstrous, incredible masses of flame and steam burst from the bottom of the rotund space-ship. It lifted, slowly at first, but then more and more swiftly. It climbed to the sky. It became a speck, and then a mote at the crawling end of a trail of opaque white emergency-rocket fumes. Then it vanished.
* * * *
Far out in space, there was an explosion brighter than the sun, and then a second and a third. There was a cloud of incandescent metal vapor. Presently a missile found its target-seeking microwaves reflected by the ionized metal steam. It plunged into collision with that glowing stuff. It exploded. Two or three more exploded, like the first. Others burned harmlessly.
A voice said, “Cargo-ship reporting. Clear of ground. Everything going well. No casualties.”
“Report again when in clear space,” said Bors.
He waited. Several long minutes later a second report came.
“Cargo-ship reporting. In clear space.”
“Very good work!” said Bors. “You know where to go now. Go ahead!”
“Yes, sir,” said the voice from space. Then it asked apologetically, “You got the battleship, sir?”
The voice from space sounded as if the man who spoke were grinning.
“We’ll celebrate that, sir! Good to have served with you, sir.”
Bors swung the Isis and drove on solar-system drive to get well away from Garen. He watched the blip which was the captured ship as it seemed to hesitate a very, very long time. It was aiming, of course, for Glamis, that totally useless solar system around a planet where the fleet of Kandar orbited in bitter frustration.
Bors got up from his seat to loosen his muscles. He had sat absolutely tense and effectively motionless for a very long time. He ached. But he felt a sour sort of satisfaction. For a ship of the Isis’s class to have challenged a battleship to combat, to have deliberately and insultingly waited for it to choose its own battle-distance, and then to let it launch its missiles first.… It was no ambush! Bors did not feel ashamed of this fight. He’d acted according to the instincts of a fighting man who gives his enemy the chance to use what weapons the enemy has chosen, and then defeats him.
His second-in-command said, “Sir, the cargo-boat blip is gone. It should be in overdrive now, sir, heading for Glamis.”
“Then we’ll follow it,” said Bors. Suddenly he realized how his second-in-command must feel. The landing-party’d seen action—for which Bors envied them—and he’d felt ashamed because he stayed in the ship in what he considered safety while they risked their lives. But his second-in-command had had no share in the achievement at all. Bors had handled all controls and given all orders, even the routine ones, since before Tralee.
“I think,” said Bors, “I’ll have a cup of coffee. Will you take over and head for Glamis?”
He left the control-room, to let his subordinate handle things for a time. He’d seated himself in the mess-room when the voice of his second-in-command came through the speakers.
“Going into overdrive,” said the voice. “All steady. Five, four, three, two—”
Bors prepared to wince. He put down his coffee cup and held himself ready for the sickening sensation.
Suddenly there was the rasping, snaring crackling of a high-voltage spark. There were shouts. There were explosions and the reek of overheated metal and smoldering insulation. Then the compartment-doors closed.
When Bors had examined the damage, and the emergency-purifiers had taken the smoke and smell out of the air, his second-in-command looked suicidally gloomy.
“It’s bad business,” said Bors wryly. “Very bad business! But I should have mentioned it to you. I didn’t think of it. I wouldn’t have thought of it if I’d been doing the overdrive business myself.”
The second-in-command said bitterly;
“But I knew you’d tried the new low-power overdrive! I knew it!”
“I left it switched in,” said Bors, “because I thought we might use it in the fight with the battleship. But we didn’t.”
“I should have checked that it was off!” protested his second. “It’s my fault!”
Bors shrugged. Deciding whose fault it was wouldn’t repair the damage. There’d been a human error. Bors had approached Garen on the low-power overdrive that Logan had computed for him. There was a special switch to cut it in, instead of the standard overdrive. It should have been cut out when the standard overdrive was used. But somebody in the engine-room had simply thrown the main-drive switch when preparations for overdrive travel began. When the ship should have gone into overdrive, it didn’t. The two parallel circuits amounted to an effective short-circuit. Generators, condensers—even the overdrive field coils in their armored mounts outside the hull—everything blew.
So the Isis was left with a solar-system drive and rockets and nothing else. If the drive used only in solar systems were put on full, and the Isis headed for Glamis, and if the food and water held out, it would arrive at that distant world in eighty-some years. It could reach Tralee in fifty. But there were emergency rations for a few weeks only. It was not conceivable that repairs could be made. This was no occasion calling for remarkable ingenuity to make some sort of jury-rigged drive. This was final.
“I’ve got to think,” said Bors heavily.
He went to his own cabin.
Talents, Incorporated couldn’t improvise or precognize or calculate an answer to this! And all previous plans had to be cancelled. Absolutely. He dismissed at once and for all time the idea that the Isis could be repaired short of months in a well-equipped space-yard on a friendly planet. She should be blown up, after adequate pains were taken to destroy any novelties in her make-up. There were the tables of Logan’s calculation. Bors found himself thinking sardonically that Logan should be shot because he had no obligation of loyalty to Kandar, and could as readily satisfy his hunger for recognition in the Mekinese service as in Kandar’s. The crew.…
That was the heart of the situation. The Isis could not be salvaged. She should be destroyed. There was only one world within reach on which human beings could live. That world was Garen. The Isis could sit down on Garen, disembark her crew, and be blown up before Mekinese authorities could interfere. Perhaps—possibly—her crew could try to function on Garen as marooned pirates, as outlaws, as rebels against the puppet planetary government. But they knew too much. Every man aboard knew how the interceptor-proof missiles worked. Logan might be the only man who had ever calculated the tables for their use, but if any member of the Isis’s crew were captured and made to talk, he could tell enough for Mekinese mathematicians to start work with. If Logan were captured he could tell more. He could re-compute not only the tables for the missiles, but the data for low-power overdrive which would make any fleet invincible.
And there was the Kandarian fleet. If its existence became known, it would mean the destruction of Kandar. Every soul of all its millions would die with every tree and blade of grass, every flower, beast and singing bird, even the plankton in its seas.
Bors had arrived at the grimmest decision of his life when his cabin speaker said curtly:
“Captain Bors, sir. Space-yacht Sylva calling. Asks for you.”
“I’m here,” said Bors.
Gwenlyn’s voice came out of the speaker.
“Are you in trouble, Captain? One of our Talents insists that you are.”
Bors swallowed.
“I thought you’d gone on as you were supposed to do. Yes. There is trouble. It amounts to shipwreck. How many of my men can you take off?”
“We’ve lots of room!” said Gwenlyn. “My father kept most of the Talents with him. We’re heading your way, Captain.”
“Very good,” said Bors. “Thank you.” He was grateful, but help from a woman—from Gwenlyn!—galled him.
He heard her cli
ck off, and shivered.
Presently the Sylva was alongside. The transfer of the Isis’s crew began. Bors went over the ship for the last time. The ship’s log went aboard the Sylva, as did Logan’s calculated tables for low-power overdrive. Bors made quite sure that nothing else could be recovered from the Isis. He looked strained and irritable when he finally went into one of the lifeboat blisters on the Isis left vacant by the sacrifice of two space-boats in the Garen cutting-out expedition. A boat from the Sylva was there to receive him.
“Technically,” said Bors, “I should go down with my ship, or fly apart with it. But there’s no point in being romantic!”
“I’m the one,” said his second-in-command, “who will stand court-martial!”
“I doubt it very much,” said Bors. “They can’t court-martial you for partly accomplishing something they’re in trouble for failing at. Into the boat with you!”
He threw a switch and entered the boat. The blister opened. The small space-boat floated free. Its drive hummed and it drove far and away from the seemingly unharmed but completely helpless Isis. Bors looked regretfully back at the abandoned light cruiser. Sunlight glinted on its hull. Somehow a slow rotary motion had been imparted to it during the process of abandoning ship. The little fighting ship pointed as though wistfully at all the stars about her, to none of which she would ever drive again.
The Sylva loomed up. The last space-boat nestled into its blister and the grapples clanked. The leaves closed. When the blister air-pressure showed normal and green lights flashed and flashed, Bors got out of the boat and went to the Sylva’s control-room. Gwenlyn was there, quite casually controlling the operation of the yacht by giving suggestions to its official skipper. She turned and beamed at Bors.
“We’ll pull off a way,” she observed, “and make sure your time-bomb works. You wouldn’t want her discovered and salvaged.”
“No,” said Bors.
He stood by a viewport as the Sylva drove away. The Isisceased to be a shape and became the most minute of motes. Bors looked at his watch.
“Not far enough yet,” he said depressedly. “Everything will go.”
The yacht drove on. Fifteen—twenty minutes at steadily increasing solar-system speed.
“It’s about due,” said Bors.
Gwenlyn came and stood beside him. They looked together out at the stars. There were myriads upon myriads of them, of all the colors of the spectrum, of all degrees of brightness, in every possible asymmetric distribution.
There was a spark in remoteness. Instantly it was vastly more than a spark. It was a globe of deadly, blue-white incandescence. It flamed brilliantly as all the Isis’s fuel and the warheads on all its unexpended missiles turned to pure energy in the hundred-millionth of a second. It was many times brighter than a sun. Then it was not. And the violence of the explosion was such that there was not even glowing metal-vapor where it had been. Every atom of the ship’s substance had been volatilized and scattered through so many thousands of cubic miles of emptiness that it did not show even as a mist.
“A good ship,” said Bors grimly. Then he growled. “I wonder if they saw that on Garen and what they thought about it!” He straightened himself. “How did you know we were in trouble?”
“There’s a Talent,” said Gwenlyn matter-of-factly, “who can always tell how people feel. She doesn’t know what they think or why. But she can tell when they’re uneasy and so on. Father uses her to tell him when people lie. When what they say doesn’t match how they feel, they’re lying.”
“I think,” said Bors, “that I’ll stay away from her. But that won’t do any good, will it?”
Gwenlyn smiled at him. It was a very nice smile.
“She could tell that things had gone wrong with the ship,” she observed, “because of the way you felt. But I’ve forbidden her ever to tell when someone lies to me or anything like that. I don’t want to know people’s feelings when they want to hide them.”
“Fine!” said Bors. “I feel better.” Standing so close to Gwenlyn, he also felt light-headed.
She smiled at him again, as if she understood.
“We’ll head for Glamis now,” she said. “The situation there should have changed a great deal because of what you’ve done.”
“It would be my kind of luck,” said Bors half joking, “for it to have changed for the worse.”
It had.
Chapter 9
“The decision,” said King Humphrey the Eighth, stubbornly, “is exactly what I have said. In full war council it has been agreed that the fleet, through a new use of missiles, is a stronger fighting force than ever before. This was evidenced in the late battle and no one questions it. But it is also agreed that we remain hopelessly outnumbered. We are in a position where we simply cannot fight! For us to have fought would probably have been forgiven if we had been wiped out in the recent battle—preferably with only slight loss to the Mekinese. We offered battle expecting exactly that. Unfortunately, we annihilated the fleet that was to have occupied Kandar. In consequence we have had to pretend that we were destroyed along with them. And if we are discovered to be alive, and certainly if we offer to fight, Kandar will be exterminated as a living world, to punish us and as a warning to future victims of the Mekinese.”
“Yes, Majesty,” Bors said through tight lips. “But may I point out—”
“I know what you want to point out,” the king broke in irritably. “With the help of these Talents, Incorporated people, you’ve worked out a new battle tactic you want to put into practice. You’ve explained it to the War Council. The War Council has decided that it is too risky. We cannot gamble the lives of the people on Kandar. We have not the right to expose them to Mekinese vengeance!”
“I agree, Majesty,” said Bors, “but at the same time—”
The king leaned back in his chair.
“I don’t like it any better than you do,” he said peevishly. “I expected to get killed in a space-battle—not very gloriously, but at least with self-respect. Unfortunately we had bad luck. We won the fight. I do not like what we have to do in consequence, but we have to do it!”
Bors bit his lips. He liked and respected King Humphrey, as he had respect and affection for his uncle, the Pretender of Tralee. Both were honest and able men who’d been forced to learn the disheartening lesson that some things are impossible. But Bors believed that King Humphrey had learned the lesson too well.
“You plan, Majesty,” he said after a moment, “to send me out again to capture food-ships if I can.”
“Obviously,” said the king.
“The idea being,” Bors went on, “that if I can get enough food for the fleet so it can make a journey of several hundreds of light-years—”
“It is necessary to go a long way,” the king confirmed unhappily. “We need to take the fleet to where Mekin is only a name and Kandar not even that.”
“Where you will disband the fleet—”
“Yes.”
“And hope that Mekin will not take vengeance anyhow for the fight the fleet has already put up.”
The king said heavily, “It will be a very long time before word drifts back that the fleet of Kandar did not die in battle. It may never come. If it does, it will come as a vague rumor, as an idle tale, as absurd gossip about a fleet whose home planet may not even be remembered when the tales are told. There will be trivial stories about a fleet which abandoned the world it should have defended, and fled so far that its enemies did not bother to follow it. If the tale reaches Mekin, it may not be believed. It may not ever be linked to Kandar. And if some day it is believed, by then Kandar will be long occupied. Perhaps it will be resigned to its status. It will be a valuable subject world. Mekin will not destroy it merely to punish scattered, forgotten men who will never know that they have been punished.”
“And you want me,” repeated Bors, “to find the stores of food that will let the fleet travel to—oblivion.”
“Yes,” said the king again. He l
ooked very weary. “In a sense, of course, we will simply be doing what we set out to do—to throw away our lives. We intended to do that. We are doing no more now.”
Bors said grimly, “I’m not sure. But I will obey orders, Majesty. Do you object if I pass out the details of the new device among some junior officers? I speak of the way to compute overdrive speed exactly and how to vary it. It could help the fleet to stay together, even in overdrive.”
The king shrugged. “That would be desirable. I do not object.”
“I’ll do it then, Majesty,” said Bors. “I’ll be assigned a new ship. I’d like the same crew. I’ll do my best, in a new part of the Mekinese empire, this time.”
“Yes,” said the king drearily. “Don’t make a pattern of raids that would suggest that you have a base. You understand, it is impossible to use more than one ship.…”
“Naturally,” agreed Bors. “One more suggestion, Majesty. A ship could be sent back to Kandar—not to land but to watch. If a single Mekinese ship went there to ask questions, it could be destroyed, perhaps. Which would gain us time.”
“I will think about it,” said the king doubtfully. “Maybe it has occurred to someone else. I will see. Meantime you will go to the admiral for a new ship. And then do what you can to find provisions for the fleet. It is not good for us to merely stay here waiting for nothing. Even action toward our own disappearance is preferable.”
Bors saluted. He went to the office of the admiral. The commander-in-chief of the Kandarian fleet was making an inspection, to maintain tight discipline in the absence of hope. A young vice-admiral was on duty in the admiral’s stead. He regarded Bors with approval. He listened with attention, and agreed with most of what Bors had to say.
“I’ll push the idea of a sentry over Kandar,” he said confidentially. “I’ll make it two ships or three and take command. I want to send some of my engineer officers to get the details of that low-power overdrive. A very pretty tactical idea! It should be spread throughout the fleet.”
“It will help,” Bors said with irony, “when we go so far away that we’ll never be heard of any more.”
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 222
