The Sky is Filled With Ships

by Richard C. Meredith

  “They’re following Kantralas,” he said, “because he’s the only man big enough to hold them together. They respect him and they know that no one of them alone could beat the Federation, and they think Kantralas can. Once he’s done it, though, his power over them will be gone and they’ll do as they please. Carman Dubourg plans to build his own little empire in the Outer Rim. Issac Holzman has the idea of cutting Krishna off from the rest of mankind and making a return to the old ways of his people. Half a dozen men want to do as they please with the Cluster, but the Cluster doesn’t want any of them. And so on. There’s a lot of justice in some of their desires, but some of the others are just plain naked power lust.

  “Well, my report is a study of each of these men, the ones who count, their personalities and motivations, and a projection of what they and their people are likely to do if and when the Alliance has defeated the Federation. If they win, despite the good intentions of men like Kantralas and Holzman, this Spiral Arm is due for a long period of internecine warfare until one of them comes out on top or they’ve all destroyed each other.”

  “That’s exactly what Herrera’s saying,” D’Lugan said coldly. “Are you agreeing with him?”

  “No,” Janas replied in the same tone of voice. “We all know what kind of peace Herrera will give us. If he can defeat the rebels and get his hands on the STC there’s nothing to stop him from doing anything he wants. Herrera’s a power mad dictator and the kind of peace he’ll give the Federation would be worse than another hundred years of war.”

  Fighting down the feeling inside him, Janas turned to face away from D’Lugan, from the others at the table, and refused to think of the terrible alternatives facing mankind.

  His eyes fell on the dancers on the stage and his ears suddenly heard the rising beat of the drums, the sensual screaming of the horns of the hidden band. The dance was approaching its end, a startling yet inevitable climax.

  Clasping each other savagely for a moment, Rinni and Gray pushed themselves apart, stepped away, and stood for a tense, pregnant moment peering into each other’s eyes. Then, with a single movement, the girl and the young man ripped off their breechcloths, threw them away. The music screamed one final sensual scream, then stopped. There was total silence.

  Rinni slowly sank to her knees on the carpeted stage, silhouetted against the starry backdrop, looking frankly and boldly at Gray, holding her arms out to him. As he crossed the two meter space between them and lowered himself to her, the lights faded out and the stage vanished into the darkness.

  “Either way mankind loses,” Emmett was saying, darkly oblivious to the events on the stage. “There’s a dark age coming, one that’ll plunge this whole Spiral Arm into barbarism. Somebody’s got to survive, somebody who can try to keep civilization going. And there’s nobody who can do it but the Solar Trading Company.”

  “Jarl’s right,” Janas said. “And if you read these reports, you’ll see that there’s only one possible outcome, regardless of what the STC does. The Federation cannot possibly win this war. There’ll be rebel forces on Earth within a month.”

  Chapter VI

  The TFSS Salamis, leading the armada from Earth, now out past Altair, now over seven parsecs from Earth, made contact with one of the surviving picket ships, the TFSS Pompey, fleeing Earthward.

  “The rebel fleet is near,” the Pompey said in reply to a question from the armada. “God, is it big! We didn’t know there were that many ships in the galaxy.”

  The Salamis acknowledged, told the picket ship to continue toward home, absorbed the information stored in its computer banks, and went forward, probing, scanning, peering into the grayness with electronic eyes, searching for the telltale emissions of electronic and nuclear equipment.

  The heavy battle cruisers formed up. Like a huge swarm of another continuum gnats, the cruisers grouped themselves in the center of the battle formation. Around them, making one vast encircling flank, were the destroyers. Behind this shield of metal and paraglas, of flesh and bone, ranged the carriers, their great ports open, tiny two-man interceptors ready to leap out into space once Abli Juliene, Grand Admiral of the Federation Expeditionary Force, gave his commands.

  Those commands came. One after another two dozen interceptors burst from their motherships, jetted forward ahead of the fleet at “max ack,” and vanished into the grayness lying before the starships from Earth.

  *

  Despite the anti-acceleration forces of Contra-grav, Major Evan Branchi, pilot of the Wanda Love, commander of the TFEF “probe squadron,” lay crushed against his acceleration cot as the tiny interceptor’s plasma jets blasted into the grayness. Drugs circulating in his blood kept him awake despite the fierce acceleration that tried to steal consciousness from him. His eyes stayed open, peering at the screens and dials before him, watching the chronometer tick away the seconds.

  Here we go, Branchi thought, and here they come. They can’t be far away now.

  The chronometer reached its cutoff point. A signal was sent through the interceptor, back to the plasma jets that threw it forward. The jets suddenly ceased their atomic flaming. The Wanda Love fell forward.

  “Able Leader to Able Q,” Branchi said into his throat mike. “This is it, gang. Radio silence from here on out—unless we’re attacked. Otherwise, if you see anything, tell the fleet; don’t talk to me.”

  There were brief acknowledgements from the twenty-three other ships, then the radio gear grew silent.

  Branchi glanced over his shoulder to the young man who sat behind him.

  “How is it, Jack?” he asked.

  “Buttoned up tight, Major,” Jack answered. “We don’t have a single leak that I can detect. The only emission leaving Wanda is the tight beam back to Shilo.”

  Branchi nodded, turned back to his instruments, and watched and waited.

  As the Wanda Love fell through Non-space, she was little more than a derelict. Detection instruments outside her would hardly have known of her existence: drive cut off, scanning equipment reduced to a passive minimum, grav-control gear disabled, life support systems not operating. Her two-man crew lived inside their spacesuits. Virtually the only electromagnetic energy that escaped from the Wanda Love was a very tight radio beam aimed directly back toward the armada’s flagship. Only by passing directly through the beam would the enemy be able to detect it.

  Her job was to sweep in as close to the rebel fleet as possible, gather what information she could by passive detection gear, then turn back to rejoin the fleet. In the event of her discovery, she would report what she had found to the fleet and then fight for her life. So it was with all twenty-four interceptors that fell toward the supposed location of the enemy.

  The elapsed time chronometer continued to sweep its dial as the Wanda Love fell farther and farther away from the massive fleet from Earth. Evan Branchi felt an uneasiness in the pit of his stomach, that same sensation that he had felt on his first “probe” mission and had hoped would pass with time. It had not left him; never really left him even while secure behind the lines, or even on Earth herself, for Evan Branchi knew, as men are given to know few things, that one day, sooner or later, a “probe” mission would not turn out right, that one of them would go wrong, and Evan Branchi would never again see the green of Earth’s hills, the blue of her sky.

  This one may be it, he said to himself, as he had said a dozen times before on a dozen near-suicide missions. Before he had been wrong, wrong a dozen times—but this one made thirteen. Branchi was not a superstitious man, not in the Federation’s tenth century, but still…

  Passive detection gear operating on subtleties that would have gone unnoticed amid the electromagnetic storm of space-time sensed something ahead in the grayness, something unnatural, man-made, something that meant enemy interceptors.

  “Do they see us?” Branch’s copilot asked, a tremor to his voice that betrayed his sudden fear.

  “How can they miss us?” Branchi asked, the shakiness within him solidi
fying into something that passed for courage, into whatever it was that made him one of the best interceptor pilots in the fleet. “They have the same equipment we do.” His voice was as calm and solid as the Rocky Mountains.

  “What do we do?”

  “Kill ‘em,” Branchi said through his teeth, his hands dropping to the controls before him. Active scanning gear came to life, sharply outlining the enemy craft on his screens: sixteen rebel interceptors, bearing on a course that would take them within a few kilometers of Branchi’s path. Then the plasma jets fired; the radio broke silence.

  “Able Leader to Able Q,” he said. “Contacted rebel scouts.” He read off a list of coordinates for the benefit of the armada behind them. “Orders are to engage and destroy.”

  The Wanda Love, suddenly a living thing beneath his hands, cut a wide arc through the grayness of Non-space and swung to make a lateral attack on the enemy that had also come to sudden life.

  The two small interceptor squadrons were still hundreds of kilometers apart when they began to exchange fire. Energy cannon burst in the grayness, swinging through the space between ships. Sprays of electrical energy sparkled across metal hulls. Light flashed where there had been no light before.

  For an instant Branchi wished that he were on a larger ship, one big enough to hold force screen generators…

  The Wanda Love led the Federation interceptors in their rush toward death—and she was the first to feel the full force of the energy blasts of the enemy sweeping across her bow. Electric flame swept up across her needle-like shape, searing, then melting metal and paraglas. The Wanda Love exploded as a second fifth-level energy blast caught her hull—and Major Evan Branchi, TFSF, died as his spacesuit ruptured into the vacuum of Non-space.

  Chapter VII

  Janas thought that the morning was unexpectedly cool as he stood looking out of the window toward the park behind the house. A breeze ruffled the brown leaves of a small bush a few meters from the window, sending a sympathetic chill down his spine. A cold front had moved in during the night, heralding the coming chill of winter, and Janas found something prophetic in it, something that matched his own feelings and that seemed to foretell the coming catastrophe. He tried to shrug off the feeling but it would not go, and he quietly resigned himself to it.

  There was a knock on the door behind him.

  “Yes,” he answered.

  “Are you awake?” asked the voice of Miriam Lysek, Jarl Emmett’s wife, through the wooden door.

  “Sure,” Janas answered. “Just a minute,” he added as he took his robe from the chair beside the bed and slipped it on. Then he crossed to the door and opened it.

  “Did you sleep well?” asked Miriam, a small, attractive woman twenty or thirty years younger than her husband.

  “Yes, but not long enough,” he answered her.

  “Stay in bed as long as you like,” she said. “Jarl and I have to go to work. Your breakfast’s in the hotbox when you want it.”

  “Thanks. I think I’m about ready for it now.”

  “Jarl said to give him a call later on.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “Okay. See you later.” And with that Miriam made her exit, leaving Janas again alone in the Emmett’s guest room where he had spent the short night.

  After taking his shaving equipment from one of his suitcases, Janas went into the bathroom to shave and bathe, hoping that these would help to dispel the feeling of gloom that hung over him.

  While he shaved, the steam of the bath swirling up around him, Janas thought about the night before. Jarl had flown him, Hal Danser, Juan Kai and Paul D’Lugan from Flagstaff to STC Central in a rented helicopter. During the flight the question had been asked again: “What do we do now?” Franken had violated his promise to Janas and had acted without the information that Janas carried in his attaché case. How could Franken’s act be undone? How could STC support of the Federation be withdrawn?

  Paul D’Lugan advocated violence—gather sufficient men and storm Franken’s office by force, demanding that he withdraw his commitment to the Federation and call back the STC ships that now went to the Federation’s aid. Janas had said, “No!” Franken was still his friend and had probably acted properly within the scope of his knowledge. Janas would go to him and show him the facts and request that he act in accordance with them. D’Lugan laughed bitterly. Franken could not and would not call back his orders willingly, he said. Janas, with the agreement of Jarl Emmett and Juan Kai, said that violence was too risky and uncertain—and at best should be used only as a last resort. Though he said this aloud, Janas was strangely unwilling to admit to himself that violence might be the only course of action available to them. D’Lugan snorted but said that he would wait until Janas talked himself blue in the face, and then they would storm Franken’s office and force him to save the STC.

  Janas climbed into the hot bath, feeling the water rise over his thighs and buttocks, a warm, gentle caress. For a moment he thought of nothing, did nothing except relax and let the heat drain the tensions out of his body.

  A few minutes later, clad in a fresh dress uniform, Janas went into the kitchen and took his breakfast out of the hotbox. As he sat down to eat he noticed a note on the table.

  “Bob,” the note said, “here are the keys to the yellow Holt in the garage. Use it as long as you like. Jarl.”

  Janas smiled as he dropped the keys to the hovercar into his pocket and then dug into his breakfast.

  *

  It was the same as always, Janas thought as he drove the yellow hovercar out of the residential section of Central and down into the official districts.

  Little had changed among the buildings and streets of the small city that made up the central offices of the Solar Trading Company. STC Central had grown gradually over a period of twelve hundred years, beginning at the place where the city of Prescott had once stood, and ten years had made little alteration in its appearance.

  Standing starkly on the ancient Colorado Plateau, sheltered in a valley 1,980 meters above sea level, amid a land that had once harbored rough, windswept wastelands, side by side with vast grassy plains and dense pine forests, seared and burned bare by atomic fireballs before the days of the STC, Central had grown up slowly, proudly, as its starships moved away from Earth, sought new, undamaged worlds among the stars. Now Central was old, a towering sequoia, its age not really hidden by fresh coats of paint, but it was still proud, still vigorous, still the home of the starships that ranged uncounted parsecs beyond the sky.

  Janas went north into China Valley where the Academy still stood, seven hundred years in the same cluster of buildings, out to the place where young men trained as officers for the starships of the STC, and his mind slipped back to his own youth, so many decades ago, when he himself, full of hope, had trained there. He remembered those days well, too well, perhaps, and he remembered those who had trained there with him. Best of all he remembered the youngest son of Graham Franken, then president of the STC. Altho Franken, like Janas, had been fired with dreams of glory, but his dreams had gone beyond those of young Robert Janas, who hoped for no more than the captaincy of a great interstellar liner. Al Franken, though he had three older brothers, aimed for the day when he would push past them and assume the presidency of the Solar Trading Company. Our dreams come true, Janas told himself. Now what?

  The borrowed hovercar sped past the low rambling buildings and across the wide fields where stood the fleets of training ships. He wheeled around and cut back south, toward the complex of Central, and toward the Altho Franken of now, the man who sat in the office of the president of the STC and made decisions that might well determine the future of mankind for the next thousand years.

  Swinging the hovercar into a surface parking lot near the newest and most beautiful building in STC Central, Janas parked, got out, and stood for a moment looking at the huge structure. It not only housed the office of the president of the STC, the largest and most powerful corporation in Man’s porti
on of the galaxy, it was a monument to Altho’s father, for this building had been the dream of Graham Franken’s last years. Yet to Robert Janas, standing in the parking lot and admiring the structure, there was really something empty about its beauty. Perhaps, some part of his mind said, that is because it is not likely to be standing this time next year. It is not even likely to survive the winter.

  A second hovercar pulled into the parking lot not far away. Its driver did not get out but sat still, apparently gazing off into space, though Janas had the distinct feeling that the stranger was peering at him.

  Trying to ignore the despondency that filled him and his mild sense of apprehension, Janas left the parking lot and crossed to the Graham Franken building. The attaché case was cold and heavy in his hand and a sudden chill breeze ruffled his hair.

  Inside the office building, Janas crossed the magnificent main lobby with its tremendous mural, a pictorial history of the STC, from the early days as Inner Planets Mining and Transportation Company to today, when its ships traveled throughout the Federation and beyond. The other walls were decorated with the works of artists ranging from Botticelli to Wyeth, from Adamms to Senkowski. Hardly glancing either way, Janas crossed the lobby to the banks of escalators that rose from below the mural and climbed upwards into the building, disappearing behind the huge painting. On the fifth floor, Janas changed from escalator to grav-elevator and rose to the uppermost point. Leaving the elevator, he crossed the large room to the rows of receptionists.

  “May I help you, Captain?” asked the girl behind the desk he approached.

  “I want to see Citizen Franken,” Janas said simply.

  “Which Citizen Franken, Captain?” the girl asked, smiling pleasantly.

  “Citizen Altho Franken.”

  “Do you have an appointment, Captain?”