Mekinese fighting ships were boiling up from the atmosphere of Meriden and plunging out to space to offer battle. They were surprisingly ready, reacting like hair-triggered weapons. Bors hadn’t completed his challenge before they were streaking toward Meriden’s sky. They couldn’t have been more prompt if, say, Meriden seethed with rumors about a pirate ship in space, which it was their obligation to fight.
According to the radar screens, there were not less than fifteen ships streaking out to destroy the Horus. Fifteen to one—interesting odds.
Bors sent the Horus roaring ahead to meet them.
PART FOUR
Chapter 10
The Mekinese did not display a sporting spirit. There were four heavy cruisers and eleven lighter ships of the Horus’s size and armament. According to current theories of space-battle tactics, two of the light cruisers should have disposed of the Horus with ease and dispatch. It might have seemed sportsmanlike and certainly sufficient to give the Horus only two antagonists at a time, which would have been calculated to provide odds of six hundred to one against it. Two light cruisers would have fired eighteen missiles apiece per salvo, which would have demanded thirty-six missiles from theHorus to meet and destroy them. She couldn’t put thirty-six missiles into space at one firing. She would have disappeared in atomic flame at the first exchange of fire. But the Mekinese were not so generous. They came up in full force loaded for bear. They obviously intended not a fight but an execution. Mekinese tactics depended heavily on fire-power of such superiority that any enemy was simply overwhelmed.
Their maneuvering proved that they intended to follow standard operation procedure. Light ships reached space and delayed until all were aloft. They formed themselves into a precise half-globe and plunged at top solar-system drive toward the Horus. This was strictly according to the book. If the Horus chose, of course, she could refuse battle by fleeing into overdrive—which would be expected to be the regulation many-times-faster-than-light variety. If she dared fight, the fifteen ships drove on. Mekinese ships never struck lightly. The fifteen of them could launch four hundred missiles per salvo. No single ship could counter such an attack. But even Mekinese would not use such stupendous numbers of missiles against one ship unless that ship was famous; unless rumors and reports said that it was invincible and dangerous and the hope of oppressed peoples under Mekin.
The Horus received very special attention.
Then she vanished. At one instant she was in full career toward the fleet of enemies. The next instant she had wrapped an overdrive field about herself and then no radar could detect her, nor could any missile penetrate her protection.
When she vanished, the speck which indicated her position disappeared from the Mekinese radar-screens. The hundredth of a second in overdrive as known to the Mekinese should have put her hundreds of millions of miles away. But something new had been added to the Horus. The hundredth of a second did not mean millions of miles of journeying. It meant something under three thousand, and a much more precise interval of time could be measured and used by her micro-timer.
Therefore, at one instant the Horus was some two thousand miles from the lip of the half-globe of enemy ships. Then she was not anywhere. Then, before the mind could grasp the fact of her vanishing, she was in the very center, the exact focus of the formation of Mekinese battle-craft. She was at the spot a Mekinese commander would most devoutly wish, because it was equidistant from all his ships, and all their missiles should arrive at the same instant when their overwhelming number could not conceivably be parried.
But it was more than an ideal position from a Mekinese standpoint. It was also a point which was ideal for the Horus, because all her missiles would arrive at the encircling ships at the same instant. Each Mekinese would separately learn—without information from any other—that those projectiles could not be intercepted. No Mekinese would have the advantage of watching the tactic practiced on a companion-ship, to guide his own actions.
The Horus appeared at that utterly vulnerable and wholly advantageous position. She showed on the Mekinese screens. They launched missiles. The Horus launched missiles.
The Horus disappeared.
She reappeared, beyond and behind the half-globe formation. Again she showed on the Mekinese screens. The Mekinese could not believe their instruments. A ship which fled in overdrive could not reappear like this! Having vanished and reappeared once, it could not duplicate the trick. Having duplicated it.…
There was more, and worse. The Horus missiles were not being intercepted. Mekinese missiles were swerving crazily to try to anticipate and destroy the curving, impossibly-moving objects that went out from where the Horus had ceased to be. They failed. Clouds of new trajectiles appeared.…
A flare like a temporary sun. Another. Another. Others.…
Bors turned from the viewport and glanced at the radar-screens. There were thirteen vaporous glowings where ships had been. There were two distinct blips remaining. It could be guessed that some targets had been fired on by more than one launching-tube, leaving two ships unattacked by theHorus’s missiles.
Both of those ships—one a heavy cruiser—now desperately flung the contents of their magazines at the Horus.
Bors heard his voice snapping coordinates.
“Launch all missiles at those two targets,” he commanded. “Fire! Overdrive coming! Five, four, three, two.…”
The intolerable discomfort of entry and immediate breakout from overdrive was ever present. But the Horus had shifted position five thousand miles. Bors saw one of his just-launched missiles—now a continent away—as it went off. It accounted for one of the two Mekinese survivors. The radar-blip which told of that ship’s existence changed to the vaguely vaporous glow of incandescent gas. The other blip went out. No flare of a bomb. Nothing. It went out.
So the last Mekinese ship was gone in overdrive. It was safe! It could not possibly be overtaken or attacked. It had seen the Horus’s missiles following an unpredictable course, which was duly recorded. It had seen the Horus go into overdrive and move only hundreds of miles instead of hundreds of millions. It had seen the Horus vanish from one place and appear at another in the same combat area, launch missiles and vanish again before it could even be ranged.
The last Mekinese ship certainly carried with it the Horus’stactics and actions recorded on tape. The technicians of Mekin would set to work instantly to duplicate them. Once they were considered possible—once they were recognized—they could be achieved. The combat efficiency of the Mekinese fleet would be increased as greatly as that of the fleet of Kandar had been,—and the overwhelming superiority of numbers would again become decisive. The hopeless situation of the Kandarian fleet would become a hundred times worse. And Mekinese counter-intelligence would make a search for the origin of such improvements. Since Kandar was to have been attacked and occupied, it would be a place of special search.
The only unsuspected source, of course, would be Talents, Incorporated.
For a full minute after the enemy ship’s disappearance, Bors sat rigid, his hands clenched, facing the disaster the escape of the Mekinese constituted. Sweat appeared on his forehead.
Then he pressed the engine-room button and said evenly, “Prepare for standard overdrive, top speed possible.”
He swung the ship. He lined it up with Mekin itself, which, of course, was the one place where it would be most fatal for a ship from Kandar to be discovered.
Very shortly thereafter, the Horus was in overdrive.
Traveling in such unthinkable haste, it is paradoxic that there is much time to spare. Bors had to occupy it. He prepared a careful and detailed account of exactly how the low-speed overdrive had worked, and its effectiveness as a combat tactic. He’d distributed instructions and Logan’s tables on the subject before leaving Glamis. He would be, of course, most bitterly blamed for having taken on a whole squadron of enemy ships, with the result that one had gotten away. It could be the most decisive of catastrophes. But he
made his report with precision.
For seven successive ship-days there was no event whatever on the Horus, as she drove toward Mekin. Undoubtedly the one survivor of the enemy squadron was fleeing for Mekin, too, to report to the highest possible authority what it had seen and experienced. It would not be much, if at all, slower than the Horus. It might be faster, and might reach the solar system of Mekin before the Horus broke out there. It had every advantage but one. It had solar-system drive, for use within a planetary group, and it had overdrive for use between the stars. But the Horus had an intermediate drive as well, which was faster than the enemy’s slow speed and slower than the fast.
Bors depended on it for the continued existence of Kandar and the fleet. As the desperately tedious ship-days went by he began to have ideas—at which he consciously scoffed—concerning Tralee. But if anything as absurd as those ideas came to be, there were a score of other planets which would have to be considered too.
He sketched out in his own mind a course of action that would be possible to follow after breakout off Mekin. It did not follow the rules for sound planning, which always assume that if things can go wrong they will. Bors could only plan for what might be done if things went right. But he could not hope. Not really. Still, he considered every possibility, however far-fetched.
He came to first-breakout, a light-week short of Mekin. The yellow sun flamed dead ahead. He determined his distance from it with very great care. The Horus went back into overdrive and out again, and it was well within the system, though carefully not on the plane of its ecliptic.
Then the Horus waited. She was twenty millions of miles from the planet Mekin. Bors ordered that for intervals of up to five minutes no electronic apparatus on the ship should be in operation. In those periods of electronic silence, his radars swept all of space except Mekin. He had no desire to have Mekin pick up radar-pulses and wonder what they came from. The rest of the system, though, he mapped. He found two meteor-streams, and a clump of three planetoids in a nearly circular orbit, and he spotted a ship just lifted from Mekin by its landing-grid. It went out to five planetary diameters and flicked out of existence so far as radar was concerned.
It had gone into overdrive and away. Another ship came around Mekin, in orbit. It reached the spot from which the first ship had vanished. It began to descend; the landing-grid had locked onto it with projected force-fields and was drawing it down to ground.
Bors growled to himself. It was not likely that this ship was the one he’d pursued, sight unseen, since the end of the fight off Meriden. But it was a possibility. If it were true, then everything that mattered to Bors was lost forever.
Then a blip appeared. It was at the most extreme limit of the radar’s range. A ship had come out of overdrive near the fourth planetary orbit of this solar system.
Bors and the yeoman computer-operator figured its distance to six places of decimals. Bors set the microsecond timer. The Horus went into low-speed overdrive and out again. Then the electron telescope revealed a stubby, rotund cargo-ship, about to land on Mekin.
Bors swore. It would be days before this tub reached Mekin on solar-system drive. But it must not report that an armed vessel had inspected it in remoteness.
“We haul alongside,” said Bors angrily. “Boarding-parties ready in the space-boats.”
Another wrenching flicker into overdrive and through breakout without pause. The cargo-boat was within ten miles.
“Calling cargo-boat!” rasped Bors, in what would be the arrogant tones of a Mekinese naval officer hailing a mere civilian ship. “Identify yourself!”
A voice answered apologetically, “Cargo-ship Empress, sir, bound from Loral to Mekin with frozen foods.”
“Cut your drive,” snapped Bors. “Stand by for inspection! Muster your crews. There’s a criminal trying to get ashore on Mekin. We’ll check your hands. Acknowledge!”
“Yes, sir,” said the apologetic voice. “Obeying, sir.”
Bors fretted. The space-boats left the Horus’s side. One clamped onto the airlock of the rounded, bulging tramp-ship. The second lifeboat hovered nearby. The first boat broke contact and the second hooked on. The second boat broke contact. Both came back to the Horus.
The screen before Bors lighted up. One of his own crewmen nodded out of it.
“All clear, sir,” said his voice briskly. “They behaved like lambs, sir. No arms. We’ve locked them in a cargo hold.”
“You know what to do now,” said Bors.
“Yes, sir. Off.”
Ten miles away the cargo-boat swung itself about. Suddenly it was gone. It was on the way to Glamis and the fleet.
Another hour of watching. Another blip. It was another cargo-carrier like the first. As the other had done, it meekly permitted itself to be boarded by what it believed were mere naval ratings of the Mekinese space-fleet, searching for a criminal who might be on board. Like the first ship, it was soon undeceived. Again like the first, it vanished from emptiness, and it would be heading for the fleet in its monotonous circling of Glamis.
The third blip, though, was a light cruiser. The Horus appeared from nowhere close beside it and its communicator began to scream in gibberish. It would be an official report, scrambled and taped, to be transmitted to ground on the first instant there was hope of its reception.
“Fire one,” said Bors. “The skipper there is on his toes.”
He watched bleakly as the Horus’s missile arched in its impossible trajectory, as the light cruiser flung everything that could be gotten out to try to stop it, while its transmitter shrieked gibberish to the stars.
There was a blinding flash of light. Then nothing.
“He got out maybe fifteen seconds of transmission,” said Bors somberly, “which may or may not be picked up from this distance, and may or may not tell anything. He got a tape ready while he was in overdrive, with plenty of time for the job. My guess is that he’d take at least fifteen seconds to identify his ship, give her code number, her skipper, and such things. I hope so.…”
But for minutes he was irresolute. He’d send his own minutely detailed report back to Glamis on the second captured ship. He did not need to return to report in person. He hadn’t yet sent back provisions enough for the intended voyage of the fleet. The solar system of Mekin was an especially well-stocked hunting-ground for such marauders as Bors and his crew declared themselves to be—so long as word did not get to ground on Mekin.
But it did not get down. From time to time—at intervals of a few hours—specks appeared in emptiness. Mekin monopolized the off-planet trade of its satellite world. There would be many times the space-traffic here that would be found off any other planet in the Mekinese empire.
One ship got to ground unchallenged. By pure accident it came out of overdrive within half a million miles of Mekin. To have attacked it would have been noted. But he got two more cargo-ships. Then he found the Horus alongside a passenger-ship. But it couldn’t be allowed to ground, to report that it had been stopped by an armed ship. A prize-crew took it off to Glamis.
Bors made a formal announcement to his crew. “I think,” he told them over the all-speaker circuit, “that we got the ship which could have reported our action off Meriden. I’m sure we’ve sent four shiploads of food back to the fleet, besides the passenger-ship we’d rather have missed. But there’s still something to be done. To confuse Mekin and keep it busy, and therefore off Kandar’s neck, we have to start trouble elsewhere. From now on we are pirates pure and simple.”
And he headed the Horus for the planet Cassis, which was another victim of the Mekinese. It was a rocky, mountainous world with many mines. Mekin depended on it for metal in vast quantities. The Horus hovered over it and sent down a sardonic challenge. One missile came up in defiance. But it was badly aimed and Bors ignored it. Then voices called to him, sharp with excitement. He heard shots and shouting and a voice said feverishly that rebels on Cassis, who had been fighting in the streets, had rushed a transmitter to welcome th
e enemies of Mekin.
Bors had one light cruiser and merely a minimum crew for it. He couldn’t be of much help to insurrectionists. Then he heard artillery-fire over the communicator, and voices gasped that the Mekinese garrison was charging out of its highly-fortified encampment. Bors sent down a missile to break the back of the counter-attack. Then the communicator gave off the sound of gunfire and men in battle, and presently yells of triumph.
He took the Horus away. Its arrival and involvement in the revolt was pure accident. It was no part of any thought-out plan. But he was wryly relieved when he had convinced himself that Mekin needed the products of this world too much to exterminate its population with fusion-bombs.
More days of travel in overdrive tedium. Bors was astounded and appalled. Interference here would only make matters worse. The Horus went on.
There was a cargo-ship aground on Dover, and the Horusthreatened bombs and a space-boat went down and brought it up. That ship also went away to Glamis where the fleet was accumulating an inconvenient number of prisoners. The fact that the capture of this ship only added to that number made Bors realize that King Humphrey would be especially disturbed about the passengers on the liner sent back from Mekin. Unless they were murdered, sooner or later they would reveal the facts about the Fleet. And King Humphrey was a highly conscientious man.
There was dissention even on Dover. The landing-party was cheered from the edge of the spaceport. Bors could not understand. He tried to guess what was going on in the Mekinese empire. He could not know whether or not disaster had yet struck Kandar. He could only hope that there were ships lurking near it, ready to use the recent technical combat improvements against any single Mekinese ship that might appear, so no report would be carried back. But it seemed to him that utter and complete catastrophe was inevitable.
He reflected unhappily about Tralee, and wondered what the Pretender, his uncle, really thought about his loosing of chemical-explosive missiles against puppet government buildings there. He found himself worrying again about the truck drivers who’d warned his men of booby-traps in the supplies they delivered. He hoped they hadn’t been caught.
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 224
