Raiders from the Rings

by Alan Edward Nourse

  As they talked there were many things they flatly did not believe of each other, or would not agree upon. But more and more Ben Trefon had the strange feeling that Tom and Joyce were not lying to him, but actually telling him what they believed. At the same time, he sensed that his own forthright statement of the truth as he knew it was making a deep impression on the two Earth people. It was obviously hard for them to set aside, even momentarily, the beliefs they had held all their lives. Yet Ben was certain that they were puzzled by what he was saying, groping to believe him, trying somehow to fit his viewpoint into their own thoughts and make sense of it.

  Above all, the long night’s talking revealed a subtle change of attitude on the part of all of them. Much of their earlier hostility was gone, and they no longer listened to each other with flat distrust or disbelief.

  Joyce felt free now to ask a question that had been in her mind ever since she first heard the word.

  “You never really told us,” she said to Ben. “What is a mauki? We asked you before, but you didn’t say.”

  “It’s so hard to explain,” Ben said. “Mauki isn’t just a word, and a mauki isn’t only a wife and a mother. My father once told me that he wasn’t sure but he thought the word itself was a corruption of an old Klickitat Indian word meaning ‘warrior who sings.’ There is something extra special about a mauki—it has to do with her singing and morale-building. I’m sorry, but this is the best I can do to answer your question, except that I might say without maukis our life would be empty indeed.”

  “Then,” Tom said, “I take it that while all maukis are women, not all women are maukis.” Ben smiled. “Yes, that’s right.”

  Ben would have been furious had anyone a few weeks before suggested that he might actually feel something akin to friendship with any Earthmen, but now he found himself liking this sandy-haired young couple whether he believed what they were saying or not, and could sense their own growing warmth toward him.

  As he piloted the little ship on its grim reconnaissance of the ruined planet, he felt a pang of guilt. His companions, technically, were enemy aliens, and their own military forces were responsible for the dreadful wreckage spreading out below them. Yet after their long discussion the night before, Ben realized that he could not properly blame Tom and Joyce Barron for the work of the Earth raiders; he could only stare in heartsick horror at the ruin that ignorance and fear had already spread in its wake.

  The Earth ships had done their work well. Hardly a square mile of the inhabited surface of Mars had escaped the furious bombardment. Most of the Spacer houses had been torn to rubble; the few that had been missed had been emptied of their inhabitants, their landing strips and hangars empty. Obviously, some had managed to escape into space before the destruction came. Yet in one place, far out in the desert along the rim of one of the southern rifts the tangled wreckage of a family cruiser, torn to fragments and scattered over a fifty-mile radius, gave mute evidence that even those trying to evacuate had not all escaped.

  The dreary search took most of the day. Only once did they discover any sign of life. One of the oldest Spacer houses on Mars had escaped; built deep in the Martian catacombs in the wall of the Great Rift, the House of Wing still stood untouched, and on a second pass over the house Ben saw a small scout ship still snuggled under the protection of overhanging rock. As he dropped down for a landing, he saw a human figure moving out to wave to him.

  He landed the ship on null-gravity. The figure was a woman. In one arm she carried an infant; in the other hand was a rifle, held at ready in the crook of her elbow. When Tom started pulling on his pressure suit, Ben shook his head. “Better not,” he said. “If she’s lost her family, she might lose control. There’s nothing you can do out there anyway.”

  Suited up, Ben dropped down to the rocky landing strip and greeted the mauki by himself. The lines of grief were heavy on her face, but she recognized Ben and remembered traditional Spacer courtesy. Over coffee and crude Martian barley bread she told Ben the story of the raid.

  There had been little warning, as Ben had suspected. A fleet of forty Earth ships, of cruiser size, had been detected by Communications at the Experimental Station, but quite naturally had been mistaken for returning Spacer raiders. Before the error was discovered, the ships were already sweeping the planet in pass after pass, unloading air-to-ground missiles in waves. There was no hope of defense; Spacer men had first tried to evacuate their maukis and children, seeking only to break free to the blackness of space, away from the holocaust. A few Spacer ships had mobilized enough to counterattack the bombers on their third pass. There had been a minor skirmish, with a couple of Earth ships shot out of the sky; then the rest of the fleet had drawn back and begun a scattered retreat into space with the few remaining Spacer ships in hot pursuit.

  “What kind of ships were they?” Ben had wanted to know.

  “Earth ships,” the mauki said scornfully. “Slow and crude, clumsily handled. There were just too many, and they came too suddenly. They must have had an orbit ship waiting for them out there somewhere; with ion drive, those ships could never have come straight from Earth by themselves.”

  “Any word back from our own ships?”

  The mauki shook her head sadly. “Nothing. The Earthmen hit and ran, moved out when their dirty work was done. Then after it was all over, the survivors here went on, in whatever ships were still spaceworthy.”

  “What about you?” Ben asked gently.

  “Someone had to stay, to pass the word to our own raiders coming back. There was no reason for me to go. My man was killed trying to reach the family ship, along with the two older boys. Why should I go now?”

  “Then what are the orders?”

  The woman shook her head, “No orders, just a vague plan. The men wanted to get to Asteroid Central as soon as they could; there’s bound to be murder out in the rings. They figured that some of our spies on Earth must have been broken somehow, or else we had traitors in our midst. How else could they have hit every house here, every farm? But in space, they can’t fight us. If enough ships can get to Central soon enough, they may be able to stop an attack there.” Ben thought it over, frowning. “Maybe,” he said. “But if all our ships start converging on Asteroid Central, wouldn’t that be painting it red for the enemy?”

  “The men thought of that. They won’t be going directly to Central. Each one picked one of the outpost asteroids. They were hoping to draw the Earth fleet into a booby trap, thinking it was Asteroid Central, and then hit both flanks. Nobody seemed to think the Earth fleet could hold up for an hour in a real space attack.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Ben said, thinking of the driving fear that the Barrons had spoken of. “They might try to fight their way through to Central no matter what their losses. How long ago did the last ship leave?”

  “Twenty-four hours ago. The plan was for any of the raiders returning to head for Asteroid Central, and join forces with any major Spacer ship they could contact.”

  “Then I’ll have to move,” Ben said. “Do you have food and water, enough for you and the baby?”

  “We have plenty,” the woman said. “And we have fuel stores. You’d better load all you can carry.” For the next half-hour Ben loaded the lead-shielded fuel blocks into the ship’s hold, discarding the exhausted stores. Normally these would be picked up by a “scavenger” ship, carried to a roving tanker plying its route out to the asteroid rings, and ultimately reach the great nuclear fuel repositories in the breeder piles on Asteroid Central, for refilling. But now, he reflected, there was no telling when the empties would be refilled.

  Once again aboard the ship, after a few words of encouragement to the desolated mauki, Ben activated the null-gravs and moved up into the thin Martian atmosphere. As briefly as he could, and without going into detail, he told the Barrens their destination: a swift trip out from the orbit of Mars into the barren “desert” of the asteroid rings, with sights set on a rendezvous and regrouping with Spacer forces s
omewhere in the vicinity of Asteroid Central. “There’s no choice but to take you along,” he told them. “You’d not be safe on Mars, not with her.”

  “How many people escaped?” Joyce Barron asked.

  “Only a handful. Probably ninety per cent of the people were destroyed in their houses.”

  “It’s terrible,” Joyce said, “without any warning, and no quarter given to women and children. If that many were killed spread out all over a planet, think what could happen to your central city in the Rings…”

  Ben Trefon gave her a long look. “It’s terrible to think about, all right,” he said. “But I think you’ve got it back-wards.”

  “Backwards?”

  “Mars was one thing. Asteroid Central is something else altogether. On Mars it was your kind of war on the surface of a planet with a thick blanket of atmosphere. This round has gone to you, but when you stir up a nest of hornets, you’d better be able to run. In battle in open space your ships won’t stand a chance of beating us. You’ll be wiped out of the sky.”

  Tom Barron looked skeptical. “Maybe,” he said.

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “I think I would, except for one thing that you aren’t considering,” Tom said. “Remember that your own ships are fighting to stay alive. Ours aren’t. As far as they know, the men in our fleet believe they are already contaminated beyond help by radiation. They have no hope of ever coming home again. And that means that your men are going to be fighting a suicide fleet.” Tom looked up at Ben Trefon. “They may not be so easy to wipe out of the sky as you think.”

  With the rusty disk of Mars far behind them and the sun a small gleaming beacon in the blackness, the two Earth prisoners and their Spacer captor set their ship’s course for the long pull outward toward the Rings.

  If the ruined houses and plantations on Mars were Spacer outposts in the solar system, the asteroid belt was their heart-land, the vast and mysterious spaces where only Spacers were equipped to survive.

  With the nose of the ship pointed away from the sun, Ben Trefon began plotting their course, his heart growing lighter by the minute.

  It was true, of course, that the first battle of this war had gone to the Earthmen. It might also be true that the pilots of the Earth fleet would be desperate men, ready to fight to the bitter end in their quest to stamp out every vestige of Spacer culture in the solar system. But every Spacer knew that nature had no feelings or emotions, no respect for human valiance, or courage, or even desperation. Any ships in space, no matter how determined their crews, would face the cold equations of celestial physics; the prize would go to the experienced and skillful, not to the brave or the desperate. And this meant that no fleet of Earth ships could hope to excel the long training and familiarity with space, the enormous skill in navigation and space maneuver that the Spacers possessed.

  The Spacers’ major problem would be mobilization of their forces into an effective force to oppose the Earth fleet, and then to drive it into battle in the depths of space. This would take organization and planning. In the meantime, Ben thought coldly, the more confident the Earthmen became, the harder their fall when the awakening came. The annihilation on Mars was dreadful, but it was also futile, for it would be repaid a thousand times over in the great empty spaces of the asteroids. For Ben, the problem now was to reach the vicinity of Asteroid Central without encounter with any of the Earth fleet, and then establish contact with the Spacer command trying to organize defending forces. He knew that the great Spacer stronghold was in opposition to Mars at this time of year, so that the course was outward from Mars’s orbit to that of the asteroid. A few moments’ work with the computer set the basic course. As the Barrons watched the panorama of stars through the view screen Ben settled down to the job of calculating a fast, precise route of approach.

  His prisoners seemed fascinated by the panoply of stars, far more numerous than those visible through Earth’s atmosphere blanket, and by the sun which appeared much smaller here than on Earth. But something else seemed to be puzzling them as the ship’s course was set and acceleration began. They seemed to be searching the blackness, looking for something.

  “What’s the matter?” Ben said. “What are you looking for?”

  “The Rings, of course,” Tom Barron said.

  “We’ve been in the Rings for three hours,” Ben said. “Ever since we left Mars. We’re approaching the first concentration ring of asteroids in another hour or so.”

  “Then where are the asteroids?” Tom wanted to know.

  Ben grinned and scratched his jaw. “Well, let’s take a look.” He whirled the dial of the radar scanner through all quadrants, watching for the characteristic light spot that would signal one of the flecks of interplanetary debris. From time to time in the view screen the Barrons could see brief flickers of light, almost like lightning, around the ship. “Of course, those are asteroids too,” Ben said, “dust-particle size, or sand-grain size. The ship has a force screen to atomize them as we go; if it didn’t they’d just punch holes through one side of the ship and out the other as well as through anybody that happened to be in the way. But let’s find you a big one.”

  After ten minutes of scanning, a characteristic blip appeared on the radar screen in the segment of space they were approaching. On the tracking screen a red line appeared, showing the gentle arc the contacted object was following in relation to the ship’s course since the moment of contact. Ben uncapped the eyepieces of the coordinated telescope, picked up the object itself outlined in the eerie shadow of the distant sun. As it came closer, it resolved into a solid-appearing mass, and Ben moved aside so that the Barrons could peer through the ‘scope.

  The asteroid was a ragged, irregular chunk of rock, perhaps forty feet in diameter, rolling crazily end-over-end as it moved in its orbit. Small as it was, it carried with it a fuzzy halo of reflected light around it, the collection of satellite asteroid particles that accompanied it in its course around the sun. As the Barrons watched, Ben adjusted the course a fraction of a degree to stay clear of the rock, until it had passed and vanished from the range of the telescope.

  Ben laughed at Tom’s crestfallen expression as he recapped the eyepieces. “Not very impressive, eh?”

  “Not only that,” Tom said. “You had to hunt so long for it. I thought the Asteroid Belt was full of them.”

  “It is, compared to the rest of interplanetary space,” Ben said. “There are millions and millions of those little rocks floating around the sun with their orbits in this general area. But there’s also a whale of a lot of space between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter for the asteroids to fill. There’s so much space that a ship moving through the Rings rarely encounters anything much larger than a sand grain, unless he goes looking for it. You’ll only find one rock of significant size in every four hundred square miles in the plane we’re moving in, and you’d have to search about thirty-five thousand square miles to find a rock big enough to make a landing on.”

  Tom had been watching the radar screen as they talked. Now he scratched his head. “Maybe so,” he said. “But then you’re beating the statistics already. Look at that.” Another blip had appeared on the radar screen. The contact lay off the starboard bow of the ship, at the outer limits of the radar’s range. As they watched a bright red line began to appear again on the tracking screen.

  Ben crossed the hairlines on the tracking screen, punched a stopwatch, recrossed them ten seconds later, and frowned. “Sure looks like another rock,” he said. “And a big one, too. Pretty close to collision course with us.” He punched figures into the computer, adjusted the ship’s course a hair. “This one should be easy to pick up with the ‘scope.”

  He swung the ‘scope into coordination with the radar beam and peered through the eyepiece. For a moment he just sat looking, moving the ‘scope controls from time to time. “Hm,” he said finally.

  “Something’s out of whack here.”

  “What’s the matter?” Tom Barron wanted
to know.

  “I’m not sure. I can’t pick it up in the ‘scope. But look at the tracing screen.” The red line had begun to curve. A moment before it had been approaching Ben’s ship in a straight 45-degree trajectory; now it was curving upward on the screen until it was almost parallel to the white line of the little S-80.

  Tom Barron looked up at Ben. “Since when can an asteroid change course?”

  “It can’t,” Ben said. “That’s no asteroid. That’s a ship under power. And it’s close enough for us to see it.” He turned back to the telescope, searching the area of space where the intruding ship had to be.

  He went back and searched again, more carefully, with growing alarm. The ship, or whatever it was, was unquestionably close enough for reflected light to reveal it as Ben crisscrossed the area a third time. But there was no image of any kind in the telescope. Tom Barron started to say something, but Ben waved him to silence. There was something wrong here, something Ben simply couldn’t understand. Friend or foe, there was a ship out there, probably no more than fifty linear miles from his own ship, moving on a parallel course with his ship. The tracking screen showed it to be moving at precisely the same speed.

  The radar said plainly that it was there… but the telescope revealed no sign of it.

  And that, of course, was flatly impossible. Any ship or any other object in space that would show up on a short-range radar scanner should be equally visible in the telescope. With the new intensifiers to quadruple the light-gathering power of the telescope’s lenses, even a ship deliberately painted flat black to reduce its reflectivity should stand out like a beacon in the sky. But this area of space appeared utterly empty.

  Thoroughly alarmed now, Ben turned back to the ship’s controls. He had encountered his share of curious happenings in space, but this was something new. “Tom, you’d better strap down here and keep an eye on the tracing screen for me. Joyce, you get secured on a cot. We’re going to do some jumping around.”