As the ship was readied for battle it seemed to draw in on itself, like a crouching tiger. Its skin seemed to be too small for it. Men stood as if rooted to the metal floor-plates, but they quivered in tune with the accumulating mass-energy of the drivers.
A fighting ship is built around its guns, therefore a word about these may not be out of place. The Excalibur had the most modern of armaments. From every imaginable spot in its hide there could extrude the spaceship equivalent of old seagoing "murder guns." Disgusted gunners gave that name to the little quick-firers with which they picked off floating men and boats.
The Excalibur's "murder guns" were about a yard long with a caliber of three inches between the lands. They were loaded with shells exploding on time; it would be murder indeed to leave a score or more of contact shells floating unexploded in space. The rate of fire from these little killers was adjusted from single-shot to ten a second and never a jam from the loading mechanism.
There were intermediate guns as well, but more for their own sake than for any practical use. The twelve-inch shells from these could blow a destroyer out of space, but who ever heard of a lineship fighting a destroyer? However, if the occasion should arise, they were there, about twenty of them scattered throughout the ship, covering every second of curved surface.
Finally there were the Big Guns. These were the reason for building the Excalibur or anything like it. The rest of the ship was designed to service those guns, store their ammunition, shelter the men who worked them, move them about in space, and protect them from harm.
The Big Guns were really big, so there was no need for more than four of them. Two fore and two aft were sufficiently heavy armament for any ship. One of these four happened to be out of commission on Hertford's ship. That, he thought bitterly, would count heavily against him in the fight that was coming.
"Aim gun II, aft," said the commander. There had been no answer from the mocking fighting ship that had suicidally turned on every light it had. The thing was still in plain view. Hertford did not draw nearer or even move for fear he would be spotted. It was enough that he knew where his nameless foe was.
"Fire," said Hertford, "when ready."
From the magazine in the heart of the ship there slid along frictionless runways barrel-like capsules of propulsive burner compound, which consisted of big-moleculed acid and base which combined, in the presence of a catalyst, and released monstrous clouds of gas in the fraction of a second. Following the capsules there slid the Shell, approximately the size of a three-story suburban villa.
Loading machinery, that looked as though it could be utilized in off moments to build universes, fitted the shell into the breech and rammed it home, shoved after it the burner compound that would shoot it on its way.
And all this while, in the quarter of the ship devoted to fire-control, two hundred men had been sighting, resighting, calculating and recalculating at batteries of machines to whom the integraph was as the amoeba is to the mastodon.
The point is this: that Shell couldn't possibly miss, because to avoid it, the colossal bulk of the nameless enemy would have had to begin moving only a second after the order to fire when ready had been delivered. It was violating every rule of warfare, and, the fire-control men were confident, it would not survive the error.
The Gun finally moved on delicately jeweled bearings. This was going to be the most direct hit of all time. Cubic yards of metal locked it in position.
Metallically, over the loudspeaker: "Ready to fire, commander."
The commander: "Then fire!"
There are no words to describe the discharge of a Big Gun and the progress of a Shell through space towards a goal. But that mile-long battlewagon was rocked like a sapling in a hurricane. When the initial shock was over the reeling commander clung to a stanchion and glued his eye to the telescope fixed on the nameless enemy.
It still glowed with lights; it still seemed to be a shade bigger than the Excalibur. The feelings of the commander, subtly schooled to brutality and murder, were mostly of exultation as he saw the Shell enter the field of the telescope. Now, he thought, they would be frantically dashing about as it drew nearer and desperately trying and trying to move a mass that could not be moved in less time than it would take the Shell to contact it and explode.
Two seconds …one second …half—quarter—eighth—
"What the hell?" asked the commander with a childishly hurt air. He scratched his head, and as he scratched it his lineship, the Excalibur, disintegrated in a tangled, pulverized hell of metal, plastic, flesh, bone, Miss Beverly deWinder, two hundred fire-control men, operating crew of a thousand, half that number of marines and Commander Alexander Hertford III. They never knew what hit them, but it was their own Shell.
4
New Metropole, capital of Earth and, before the Navy took over, capital of the All Earth Union and Colonies, was being pacified. This is done by lighter-loads of marines and fighting sailors who descend from a lineship hanging ominously over the most highly populated portion of the city. The lineship itself does not descend because an uncalled bluff is worth more than a called one and because the battlewagons cannot land from the moment they are launched to the moment they are scrapped except in graving docks, and the nearest to Earth was at Alpha Centauri.
Marines swarmed through the streets in the traditional manner of rightist revolutionaries. Should a face appear that hinted of Rigelian blood, or should a half-breed with the abnormally long hands and black teeth of a Betelgeusian pass the marines, there would be bloodshed and no questions asked. After a few hours of the reign of terror, the extraterrestrials crept into cellars and stayed there for the duration.
The All Earth Executive Committee was imprisoned pending trial; trial for what was never made clear. Communications sending sets were declared provisionally illegal; anyone caught with one in working commission would suffer death. The only etheric voice that could be legally heard was the light, mocking one of Voss, personal secretary to Admiral Fitzjames, and that only from the powerful sender aboard the Admiral's ship Stupendous, floating grimly above the Bronx.
The receiving code set in the communications room of the little suite of offices once occupied by the Intelligence Wing was clicking like a mad thing, and never an answer came, for the Wing had moved out lock, stock and barrel. The message that kept repeating (Admiral Fitzjames had said "Keep trying" two days ago) was: "Why don't you answer, Intelligence Wing? Bartok, report immediately aboard Stupendous to show cause why you should not be removed from office and the Wing disbanded. Why don't you answer, Intelligence Wing? Bartok, report—"
et cetera.
A squad of marines would shortly break into the office and find nothing of interest to anybody.
But there were two people who seemed to be partly Rigelian from the greenish patches on their faces and their peculiar scalp-lines, shaped like tipsy S's. They were cowering in a cellar as many other Rigelians were doing during those lunatic days when the Navy had first taken over, but there was something purposeful and grim about their behavior that didn't fit the disguises.
Babe MacNeice was tinkering despondently with the central control panel of the conference-type communications system exclusive to the Intelligence Wing. The panel was a little thing, like a book in size and shape, but its insides were so fearfully complicated that nothing short of an installations engineer could make anything of them. And the panel was definitely shot to hell.
She said as much, and burst into a flood of tears. Bartok, the other Rigelian, snarled softly and handed over a mussy handkerchief. "Take it easy," he snapped, his own nerves raw and quick with strain. "We're sitting pretty compared with the rest of the office staff."
The brave smile that always ended the weeping spells flashed out as she returned the handkerchief. "What now?" she demanded tremulously.
"Now that we can't keep in touch with the rest of the men?"
"Now," he said slowly, "I don't know. But—" He snatched at her wrist and dr
agged her behind a pillar as the door of their cellar swung open and a streak of light shot through the gloom. The profile of a marine's cap showed against the light. Bartok raised his handgun, resting the long barrel across his left forearm, pioneer-sharpshooter style.
The door opened fully. The marine called: "Come on out or I'll shoot!"
That was on general principles. It was surprising how many fell for the centuries-old dodge. Then when the hider came out the marines would have a little innocent fun with their handguns and depart for other cellars.
Babe sneezed. The marine started and Bartok shot him through the head. "Come on," he snapped in an undertone as he tore off the Rigelian wig. "Through the window, Babe, and try to forget you're a lady!"
The hue and cry has been called the most shameful tradition of genus homo; for generations it had been abandoned in favor of more civilized and efficient methods, such as teletype alarms and radio squad cars.
Now, in the taking-over by the Navy, the dishonorable tradition was revived as a further testimony that this taking-over was nothing short of barbarism once you sheared it of the nickelplate of the lineships and the gold braid dripping from officers' shoulders.
Behind the two fleeing people poured a ragged mob of marines and sailors, roaring inarticulate things about what they would do to the sneaking murderers when they caught them.
Luckily—in a way—an officer of the Navy popped from a doorway armed to the teeth and charging them to surrender. This they gladly did as he stood off the mob with his weapons.
They found themselves at last in a lighter, one of the small boats connected to the Stupendous. In an off-hand way, as the boat left the ground, the officer said: "I recognized you, you know."
"Really?" asked Babe, frozen-faced.
"Not you," he hastily explained. "But Commander Bartok—I've seen his picture. Did you know you were proscribed, Commander?"
"I assumed so," answered the commander dryly. The officer—an ensign—was very young and callow. The hard lines were growing about his mouth, though. When he could call this "pacification" without laughing out loud, thought Bartok, he'd be a real Navy man.
"How's everything going?" asked the commander. "Would you know how the campaign's progressing in other parts?"
The ensign, seemingly delighted to converse on equal terms with a Wing Commander, even though a proscribed one, drew nearer—or as much nearer as he could, in the windowless, tiny, completely enclosed compartment that was the load-space of the lighter, and grinned:
"Some dashed mysterious things have been happening, and I wouldn't be a bit surprised if you johnnies in Intelligence were behind them."
He shifted uneasily beneath Bartok's steady, piercing stare. "You needn't look at me like that," he complained. "Even if it isn't true, it's the official non-official news—if you understand me." He chuckled.
Bartok moved swiftly then, clutching the ensign by the throat and bringing an elbow into his midriff. The ensign, not wholly taken by surprise, apparently, drew his gun and fired.
They dragged his bloody body—he had been shot in the face, and it had run all over the enclosed space—from the lighter a few minutes later.
Babe was having a hysterical attack and the ensign frantically signaled to the sailors who took in the boat to relieve him of her. The engineer of the little craft came from his cubbyhole in the bow and took her by the arm, led her away from the mess on the floor.
"Poor girl," said the ensign. "She must have loved him terribly."
To follow Babe MacNeice, after the first torrential outburst she was dry-eyed, but there was a catch in her voice when she spoke: "Where are you taking me?"
"To the O.D., lady. He'll route you."
The Officer of the Day decided that she was important enough to go directly to the Admiral.
In the super-sumptuous office of Fitzjames she thought at first that she was alone, but a snaky individual who had a knack of blending in with the furniture, as if he didn't want to be seen, coughed tentatively.
She eyed him up and down. "You," she said, "must be the Satanic Mr.
Voss."
He cocked an eyebrow at her. "Indeed? How so?"
"It's no secret that you're the one who started the—the taking-over."
"I defy you to prove it," he snickered.
"You're a civilian. That's final and conclusive. There isn't one of these certifiable fatheads in uniform that'd have the guts to do what they've all been talking about for fifty years. You touched it off, and you see victory in your hands right this moment. Bartok is dead."
"No!" he spat. "Where?"
"Coming up here on a lighter. He rashly jumped the ensign who'd arrested us. He got his face blown off."
"So," grunted Voss. "The end of organized resistance to our program.
How did he manage, by the way, to blow up our ships with their own ammunition, or whatever really happened?"
"I don't know the details," she replied wearily. "We used glorified lantern-slides to project the simulacrum of a lineship; we could do that with about fifty one-man craft. It's a kind of formation flying. We turned back your shells by magnetic fields. Normally you could dodge them, because you keep ready to move whenever you fire the big guns. But we dubbed in a dummy shell—like the lantern-slide lineship—and you'd see that shell and there wouldn't be a thought in your heads until you were blown up. But you're onto that trick now. It only worked four times, I think. I was a lunatic to think that you could fight guns with brainwork and hope to win."
She collapsed limply into a chair and stared dully at the floor. "Bartok's dead. The communication system's wrecked. You can have your taking-over, Mr. Voss; we're licked."
5
"Hell!" said the Admiral. "Why can't I go out into the street if I want to?"
"Because," said Voss patiently, "you'd be shot down like a dog. You're going to speak from behind cover, and I'll post the best shots in the Navy all over just in case."
"Right," said the Admiral. "Then it's decided. I guess the old brain's clicking right along, eh?" He forced a laugh, and Voss responded with a meager smile.
Tapping on the door, Voss opened it on the young ensign who'd been boasting all over the ship of shooting down the insidious Bartok. He was being avoided by his friends now; he wouldn't let them get a word in about their own feats of clubbing and mayhem.
"What do you want?" thundered the Admiral. "I'm preparing my address to All Earth and Colonies!"
"Beg pardon, sir," said the ensign. "But I was wondering if I could be assigned to your guard of honor for the address. After all, sir, I did outwit Bartok."
"Since when," asked Voss coldly, "does outwitting consist of getting in a lucky shot?"
"Tut," grumbled the Admiral. "Let him have his way. Why not, Voss?"
"I was going to," said the secretary. "Report this evening."
"Thank you, sir. And—and—"
"Spit it out, kid. What do you want?" demanded Voss.
"About Miss MacNeice, sir. She seemed awfully broken up about what I did. How is she now?"
"Resting easy in Cell Eleven," said the Admiral. "Now go away."
"Thank you, sir," said the ensign, saluting as he closed the door.
"Good boy, that," said Voss. "It pays to have semi-fanatics like him in your train. They'll do the dirty work when nobody else will. Remember that, Fitzjames."
"I will, Voss," said the Admiral. "Now about this speech—"
The ensign was walking down one of the very long corridors of the ship, whistling cheerfully, oblivious to the superstition to the effect that it's the worst kind of luck to a ship; even worse than changing her name.
And in Cell Eleven—neat and comfortable, but a cell—Babe MacNeice was fiddling desperately with the communications control. Trust those bloody incompetents, she dryly thought, to leave a woman unsearched because a matron wasn't handy …
Then, by the most convenient of miracles, there was a little tone signal from the switchboard. "It work
s," she said in a hushed whisper. "It was bound to happen—nobody could try as hard as I've been trying and not get some kind of results."
She hissed into the tiny grid mouthpiece: "Hello—who's in?"
A male voice grumbled: "My God, woman, you've been long enough about it! I'm Casey, heading towards Spica because I can't think of anything else to do. My fuel's low, too."
"Keep going," she said. "When you get there, be prepared for anything at all. I'm not making promises, but there's a chance. And my God! What a chance! You get out now. I have some heavy coverage to do."
"Good luck, lady, whoever you are."
She smiled briefly and fiddled with the elaborate, but almost microscopically tiny, controls that directed the courses of the Intelligence Wing.
"Come in, anybody, in the Twenty-Third Cosmic Sector. Anybody at all.
This is MacNeice—urgent!"
"Not the famous Babe herself?" came a woman's voice dryly. "I'm listening, dearie."
"You locate on Aldebaran III, sister, in no more than ten hours. Keep under cover. Now get out. Aldebaran III has to be covered."
With an anxious note the voice asked: "Just a minute—how's Barty? I heard a rumor—"
"Forget it, sister," snapped Babe. "You have a job to do." She cut the woman out and called in rapid succession as many of the thirty Cosmic Sectors as she could get. One set had fallen into the hands of the Navy, and that was bad, but she cut out before they could have traced it or even guessed what it was. There had been a confused murmur and a single distinct voice saying: "The damned thing's a radio, sir!" before she cut out.
What she had been doing was to locate operatives on the principal planets and stations of the Cosmos; operatives prepared for anything. It had been a job of routing; they bunched together when they weren't under orders. She had to break them up—and she did.
His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction Page 52
