Raiders from the Rings

by Alan Edward Nourse

  Very slightly, Ben dropped the ship’s acceleration, and shifted its course away from the mysterious intruder. Without a moment’s hesitation, the red line on the screen also slowed and veered. Ben veered more sharply, this time in toward the intruder in a long flat arc. The red line veered instantly to match the move again. Whatever it was, it had attached itself to the little S-80 and was following its maneuvers move by move with rather amazing agility. Once more Ben tried to telescope, with no more success than before.

  “Look, what’s going on?” Tom Barron demanded.

  “I don’t know,” Ben said. “But whatever it is, I don’t like it. There’s something out there that behaves like a ship, but I can’t pick it up on the ‘scope.”

  “Maybe it has some kind of masking device,” Tom said.

  Ben looked up at him sharply. “We’ve been trying to develop a masking device for ships for decades, and we haven’t gotten to first base. Unless your people have stumbled onto one that we’ve never heard of.”

  Tom looked dubious. “If we had, seems to me we would have been using it for ground protection during raids.”

  “Exactly,” Ben said. Once again he veered the S-80 in to-ward the intruder, watched the red line veer away in tandem. “They don’t want to close in on us, they’re just staying on our tail.” He peered through the view screen at the empty expanse of space, saw the flat brilliance of the sun’s disk and the thin red fingernail of Mars now visible at the extreme edge of the screen. “And they don’t want to be seen… well, maybe we can chisel a look all the same. Hold on.”

  With a few swift moves Ben activated the ship’s side jets, and began a sharp banking maneuver, turning the ship as hard as he could. In the engine room the null-grav generators whined in protest at the overload; Ben eased up momentarily, then banked again, turning the ship through a 180-degree arc in a series of sharp maneuvers. With each shift the red line on the tracer screen followed suit, shifting and straightening. Ben’s little ship bucked and shuddered under the impact of force vectors it was never expected to withstand, and his passengers gripped their shock bars for dear life.

  But in the space of a few moments he had turned the ship in a full half-circle, so that the sun’s bright disk lay full in the view screen with the intruder moving somewhere between him and the sun.

  A few more carefully calculated moves did it. The tracer screen was three-dimensional, with coordinates zeroed in the plane of the sun’s orbit. Now Ben calculated his ship’s angle in relation to the sun’s plane, and figured the intruder’s angle as well. Abruptly, Ben dipped the little ship’s nose down so that the intruder lay in a straight line between the S-80 and the sun.

  An instant later the phantom ship seemed to recognize Ben’s trap; the red line veered downward sharply. But it was already too late. For the space of a few seconds the sun’s disk was blotted out, eclipsed by the phantom. Prepared and waiting, Ben punched a stopwatch. Moments later the shadow was gone, and Ben stopped the timer. “Got him,” he said. “Tom, read that interval dial.” Tom read the figures on the tracing screen indicating the phantom ship’s distance from their own ship at the instant its hulk had crossed in front of the sun. Swiftly Ben taped the figures into the computer, adding the ship’s velocity and the length of the eclipse. It was crude calculation, ignoring a couple of minor variables, but it would be close enough to tell Ben what he wanted to know. The computer buzzed for a moment, and ejected a card.

  Ben looked at it, and sucked his breath in between his teeth.

  There was something out there, all right. Almost beyond doubt, it was a ship… a phantom ship that could somehow mask itself from observation by reflected light. But it was made of solid matter that could not avoid masking the sun’s disk as it passed between the sun and the observer.

  And it was no ordinary space ship. The answer on the card was hardly believable; the ship was huge, larger than any Spacer cruiser, larger than the largest orbit ship the Spacers had ever built. It was a ship so large that it defied belief, and yet it was there.

  What was more, the phantom ship must have realized what Ben Trefon had done, for a moment later it suddenly veered away from the parallel course it had been following and moved swiftly out into the darkness of the asteroid Rings. Within a few seconds it disappeared from the radar scanner, as though once detected it no longer dared to stay.

  As suddenly as it had appeared, it was gone. But much as he tried to conceal his alarm from his prisoners, Ben Trefon could not conceal it from himself. The Barrons might assume that it had merely been another Spacer ship making a reconnaissance run without stopping for contact, but Ben could not brush the incident aside so easily.

  He was reasonably certain that the phantom was not a Spacer ship. But that was not what worried him. The real trouble was that he was equally certain that it was no ship that had ever been built on Earth either.

  6. The Face Of The Enemy

  IN THE FIRST few minutes after the mysterious intruder vanished, Ben had plenty of routine navigational work to do to keep his mind off the strange encounter. The course of the little S-80 had to be rectified and a new course plotted, since the maneuverings had involved both movement through space and loss of time on the previous plotting. But the work was largely automatic once the computations were complete; Ben’s hands went through the motions as his mind worked feverishly to make some sense out of the phantom ship and the things its visit implied.

  The truth was that the encounter had shaken him up badly. Tom and Joyce Barron appeared to have shrugged the incident off without much concern and began busying themselves among the ship’s music tapes. It seemed obvious that the real significance of the encounter simply had not dawned on them.

  Which was just as well for the moment, Ben thought wryly. It kept them from asking him a lot of unanswerable questions, and gave him time to search out some answers for himself… answers that had to be found and found quickly. With the ship’s course returned to its original direction, Ben sat back at the controls, trying to push confusion and bafflement out of his mind and make sense out of nonsense.

  Certain things, he knew, were beyond argument. The ship had been there. Nothing but a manned craft could have behaved the way the phantom had behaved. Crude as his computations had been, he was certain that they had given him at least a rough estimate of its size. And there was no question but that it had been concealed most effectively from observation. These were things he would testify to. But put them together and they spelled nothing but nonsense.

  There simply could not be any such ship. He knew, of course, that the Spacer military council did not make public all the weapons in the arsenal on Asteroid Central, but Spacers were too small and close-knit a group for secrets to keep long. The discovery of null-gravity had been common knowledge among Spacers before the first prototype engine had been completed. Whenever new defensive missiles had been developed, the whole Spacer clan knew about them in a matter of weeks. And even if the phantom had been a Spacer ship developed in secrecy, it surely would have recognized the S-80 as a Spacer ship and at least exchanged recognition signals.

  But the other alternative—that it was an Earth ship—was even more ridiculous. Suppose Earth science could have developed such a craft, what could explain its strange behavior after contact? It too would have been able to recognize a Spacer scout. Then why had Ben’s ship not been attacked? Even if a crew of Earthmen aboard had known of Ben’s prisoners, they certainly would have made an effort to grapple his ship and unload his hostages. And for that matter, where could Earthmen have learned such skill in maneuvering, especially in maneuvering such a huge ship?

  Either way it made no sense, and it was this very senselessness that sent a cold chill up Ben Trefon’s back and brought sweat out on the palms of his hands. The phantom ship had not behaved like an aggressor, or like a friend either. Its behavior had seemed more curious than warlike, as though it had been trying to observe him without being observed, and then had zoomed off again as
soon as it knew it was detected.

  But zoomed off to where? That, of course, was the big question. If the intruder had been curious, perhaps he was still curious enough to follow Ben’s ship from some point beyond effective radar range.

  That in itself was a disquieting thought. If Ben were to pursue his original plans to reach one of the outpost asteroids near Asteroid Central he did not care to bring unexpected company with him.

  Carefully, he turned other possibilities over in his mind. He could, of course, change course and make his way directly to Asteroid Central. And if his encounter had been with an orthodox ship, he might well have done that. He knew the kind of ingenious fortification that surrounded Asteroid Central; prior to his encounter with the phantom ship he had been supremely confident that no enemy ship could follow him through the Maze to the surface of Central and survive, no matter how hard they tried. But this ship might be a different kind of pursuer altogether, a pursuer with totally unexpected capabilities in space.

  Ben scratched his jaw and glanced back at the Barrons who were now entranced by some tapes of mauki songs. Whatever else it did, the encounter changed his mind about trying to go it alone to Asteroid Central. For a moment he seemed to hear his father’s voice in his ear: “Never insist on doing it alone if you can’t handle it. Admit your limitations and don’t be ashamed to get help. Remember, a whole army of men have died in space just because they were too stiff-necked to ask for help, or too stupid to tell when they needed it in the first place.”

  Ben was certain now that he needed help, needed it badly enough to take chances to get it. Other Spacer ships would be converging on Outpost 5, his immediate target destination, a medium-sized asteroid moving in its orbit some two hundred thousand miles in from Asteroid Central. Outpost 5 was a Spacer utility station: a fuel and ammunition dump, orbit-ship drydock, laying-over station for Spacers in transit and repair station for the Spacer fleet. Ben had originally intended to move into contact with Outpost 5 as silently as possible. Now it was imperative that he establish contact with other Spacer ships before the outpost was reached.

  This meant breaking radio silence in order to flag the attention of other ships which might be in the same segment of space. A risky business, for Earth ships also would be traveling in this sector, but at least Earth ships could be understood and dealt with.

  And Ben Trefon was not at all too certain about the phantom ship he had encountered.

  He made contact with another Spacer some six hours later, as the little S-80 moved closer and closer to contact orbit with the Outpost 5 asteroid.

  With every passing hour Ben’s tension had been growing. He had not dared to throw open his radio with a standard distress signal. Instead, he had beamed out five-minute periods of signaling, trying to cover all quadrants briefly with a signal that would be identifiable to any Spacer craft without continuing long enough for an enemy ship to fix his position and acceleration in space. After each signal period he had waited, straining to catch even the weakest response signal. It had been a long and weary vigil. Over eighteen hours had passed since the sleep period on Mars, and the Barrons had finally grown bored and retired; Ben’s body ached with fatigue, and he longed for a few moments’ rest, but knew that those few moments could lose him his chance for contact.

  So he stuck it out in the silence of the little ship’s cabin. The view screen showed an unchanging panorama of pinpoint stars on a velvet black canopy; Ben felt utterly alone and abandoned as his repeated efforts to raise a friendly signal failed.

  Then, unexpectedly, there was a tiny blip on the radar scanner. As he drew closer the blip resolved into two, and then into a dozen. With the telescope he scanned the area of the contact, and decelerated the ship as rapidly as the null-gravs would permit. Moments later he saw the objects his radar had picked up, and drew in his breath sharply.

  It was no wonder there had been no radio response from Outpost 5.

  He had wandered into a cosmic battlefield. Far and wide over a four-hundred-mile radius the debris of shattered space ships was spread. A great Spacer cruiser was reeling end-over-end, its side split open like a pea-pod with bits and pieces strewn around it like a halo. Looking more closely, he spotted an Earth ship, also of cruiser size, literally torn into shreds. Fragments of other ships, fuel tanks, oxygen bottles and bombarded lifeboats came into view as he approached. At least half a dozen ships had been involved in the battle. Now there was no sign of life anywhere in the vicinity .

  But a demand signal from Ben’s transmitter brought a feeble response. Scanning the area again, Ben saw another Spacer ship well beyond the debris-scattered area. It was a small, three-man ship, one of the SD-7’s that Spacers so often used as family craft, and it was under power in spite of the gaping hole torn in the engine-room hull and the drunken roll that signified that its stabilizing gyros were no longer functioning properly. As Ben moved closer, he recognized the brilliant black-and-white decoration and insignia of a ship that he had seen many times in the hangar of the House of Trefon. It was the ship owned by Roger Petro, one of the men in the Spacer Council and one of Ivan Trefon’s closest friends.

  Now the response to Ben’s signal was stronger as he moved into orbit alongside the Spacer ship. He could see movement on the hull; two or three men were working there with welding torches, obviously trying to repair the hole in the ship’s skin. Locking his ship’s controls in parallel with the SD-7, Ben checked to be certain the Barrons were still sleeping. Then he donned a pressure suit, climbed aboard the little scooter that served as the S-80’s lifeboat, and piloted himself across the intervening space to Petro’s ship.

  The men on the hull greeted him with waves. Moments later he was aboard to find Petro himself in a bunk in the ship’s cabin, one arm in a sling, and one leg splinted and wrapped with a red-stained bandage. Petro looked pale and haggard, but his eyes lit up when he saw his visitor.

  “Come in, boy!” he bellowed. “This old crate hasn’t much to offer right now, but I guess Ivan Trefon’s boy won’t mind greeting an old soldier on the battlefield, eh?”

  “What happened?” Ben wanted to know.

  “Get yourself some coffee, boy, and sit down; let me look at you.” Ben poured a cup of vile-looking black stuff. It was as strong as it looked. “What happened?” he repeated.

  “I caught one broadside, that’s what happened,” Petro said. “Too many of them and too few of us, at first. We ran into a nest of them heading out toward Outpost 5, and they buried me in fire power. Too many shells to stop too quickly. Seven of them blasting away at the same time.”

  “Seven! How many got away?”

  Petro chuckled. “You should have counted the nose cones on the way in,” he said. “Any time old Petro can’t handle seven Earth ships at a time and bring them to heel, it’ll be time he turns his ship over to a better man.”

  “Any survivors?”

  “That’s why we’re standing by, to make sure there aren’t any,” Petro said. “Treacherous dogs! One of them actually rode a shell right into this ship. Used a hand gun to detonate our defense shells. He hit us right in the guts, and blooey!” The Spacer shook his head. “Of course he didn’t know where to aim, so all he did was to get our stabilizing gyros. Except for that we’d have gotten to Outpost 5 already. But enough of this—how are things on Mars?”

  Ben told him how things were on Mars. Petro sat silent, clenching his fist as he heard about the raid, the ruin of the House of Trefon and the loss of his old friend. “I knew I should have headed there first after the raid,” he muttered finally. “And I was afraid there was trouble when there was no word from Mars on any of the ships I’ve contacted out here.”

  “You mean none got completely away?” Ben said.

  “I mean I haven’t been in touch with any.” The old man crashed his fist down on the bunk bitterly.

  “The treacherous dogs! They know where Asteroid Central is, all right, and this part of the Rings is full of them, regular nests of them. But
they won’t hit us openly, out in space where we can fight them! They hide until they find one of us alone—” He broke off with a sigh. “At least a couple were stupid enough to try to run the Maze into Asteroid Central itself, but now I’ve heard they’ve pulled back and started sniping.”

  “But where are our own ships?”

  “Mostly back at Central. Then, as far as I’ve heard, all the outpost stations are manned; four were attacked and held off the enemy without half trying. I was on my way to check in at Outpost 5 and try to organize a drive to break the siege at Asteroid Central.”

  Ben nodded. “We were headed for 5 too.” He hesitated. “Have you seen anything funny out here, except standard Earth ships?”

  Petro looked up at him sharply. His leg was obviously paining him; for a moment he set his teeth until the spasm eased up. “What do you mean, anything funny?”

  “Well… anything that didn’t seem right to you,” Ben said.

  Petro shrugged. “Nothing much. We had a false contact a day or so back, but nothing we could pin down.”

  “You mean a ship you couldn’t identify?”

  “Thought it was a ship, but it couldn’t have been. The radar picked up something for a couple of minutes, but we couldn’t see it in the ‘scope, and then it was gone.”

  “But it was close enough so that your ‘scope should have picked it up,” Ben said.

  Petro chewed his lip for a moment. “What are you getting at, boy?” Ben hesitated. Faced with the keen eyes and the long experience of the old Spacer, he realized how foolish the story of a giant invisible ship would sound. But it had been there, whether Petro chose to believe him or not. Ben told the councilman about his own encounter, and the maneuver that allowed him to see the ship and take a gross measurement. He expected a guffaw from the old soldier, but Petro didn’t even smile. “It’s happened before,” he said. “Usually been chalked up to too much red-eye and a bored pilot, but there’s never been a report of anyone actually seeing it.”