All about him, now, he heard the deliciously dangerous thrumming of many thrustibles, although, had it been his own starship under attack, there would have been a deal more. In part, his plan to board depended upon a reluctance of captains to arm their common hands, and, once again, the risk had proven justified.
Yet before Arran could so much as draw a ragged breath, two more foemen beset him, this time obliquely from far overhead, upon the portside mainspar, and from midway along the same dorsal mizzenspar that Arran and his men now occupied.
The first thrust, of middling collimation, struck Arran upon an upraised left forearm, where the fury of the kinetic blow was absorbed as before by his axis field. The man was a dazzling thrusteur, an idle portion of Arran’s mind realized with admiration. No fewer than twentyscore measures stood between them.
Almost simultaneously, he was forced to take a second thrust—craftily attenuated to seven-eighths width, with the objective of simply pushing its victim from his foothold upon the spar and outward into the deadly §-field—upon his right forearm, which he had hurriedly crossed over his abdomen as he balanced precariously upon the spar with his knees bent to lower his center of mass.
Quickly, Arran lashed out with both of his thrustibles braced at right angles to one another. He squeezed the yokes across both palms, saw from the corners of his eyes that the designator beams illuminated both of his enemies, one a trifle sloppily at hip and thigh, the other centered squarely upon the chest. In the next fraction of a second, Arran thumbed both of his trigger buttons.
The starsailor obstructing his way upon the mizzenspar slid backward and thumped, more likely dead than unconscious, against the ankles of a wide-eyed comrade whom Arran thrust without taking aim as the fool stared at him, mouth agape.
Arran’s original opponent, whom the Osprey’s master had frankly never expected to strike with his first thrust, but merely to distract, plummeted without screaming into the §-field, where he vanished in a brilliant flash and sizzle.
“Captain!” Nadja and Cooley shouted together. “Look out!” A thrust from behind Arran’s back slammed into the spar beneath his feet, shredding its surface. But it came with a ghastly scream and the stench of burning flesh. Arran whirled in disbelief. From the nearby quarterdeck of the Osprey, the mild-voiced Suprynowicz had used his comm-laser at close range to blast this would-be assassin off the cabelle he hung suspended from like a spider. The man fell to the deck like a comet and smote hard, burning with black, greasy smoke.
It seemed a long way—half a klomme at the least—from the outboard extreme of the dorsal mizzenspar where he had landed, and where the retracted studdingsail booms were lashed, inboard to where the spar intersected the mast. “Fail to take her, my braves,” he shouted, “and we shall not see home again!”
They might not, anyway, he thought, but wisely kept the news to himself. Warding off the enemy, killing wherever they must, they made a slow, fighting progress. At last, they arrived at the railed platform which circled the mast and which, by means of a lever, could be made to carry them downward, aft, to the maindeck below. Arran’s party scoffed at such sissified contrivances—at least when they had boarded an enemy vessel—and swarmed to the rat-lines, instead, their bare starsailors’ feet slapping the metalloid mesh almost in unison.
Arran took seven steps up the ladder to the quarterdeck, where he thrust a pair standing beside the binnacle and tiller ball. He meant to be burdened in this struggle with no prisoners except one, and had given orders to his crew accordingly.
Once the maindeck had been secured, he set O’Brien at the helm and Nadja to guard him, with orders to hold upon Osprey at all costs. O’Brien nodded, knowing the cost might include his life. Nadja nodded, assuring him it would not.
Arran strode to the mast and, ignoring the uproar behind him, studied it. Failing to open an access port with his fingers, he stepped back to thrust its hinges. The door clanged open, exposing rows of control knobs, switches, and gauges.
In addition to driving a vessel through the Deep and gathering particles for the starship’s energy needs, starsails combined those particles, quark by quark, into atmospheric gases. Ships’ crews varying by species as they often did—and therefore in their planets of origin—some latitude of mixtures was to be desired. These were the knobs, switches, and gauges that controlled it.
Arran flipped a switch and swung a lever as far to the right as it would go. Then he flipped other switches and swung levers to the left. He had shut off all gases except oxygen, and stepped up production of that to the maximum. A light flashed as if the vessel knew something dangerous had been required of her. He punched an override. Adjusting his left thrustible to an oscillating needle, he heated the edge of the access plate to a dull glow, welding it shut.
Meanwhile, Dangerous Pat had slid down to his side, breathing hard but grinning. “Mr. James’s compliments, sir, and the vessel is secured aloft. Those as we let live are confined in the fore tier platform, tied by their own cabelles.”
“Very well, will you be so good as to inform Mr. James that his presence is required upon the liftdeck? You will enter with Mr. Lukes’s party and cast off.”
Although the look she gave him was poignant with worry, she snapped him a cadet’s salute. “That I will, Captain. And I presume you will be joining us, sir?”
“You presume too bloody much,” he told her, as he must, but was privately flattered by her concern. “Gather up Nadja and O’Brien, too. Now get you aloft!”
In minutes, James—Arran saw with gratitude that his crew had all come with him—had vanished belowdecks. He had no report of Mr. Lukes’s success, but had given him too few men to spare for that. Like refuse canisters, the lubberlift could be cast off without disintegration. Unlike most lubberlift trips, this one would take place without the cabelle being secured to the liftdeck.
Of a sudden, the enemy starship lurched, there being no one at the helm to assist Phoebus in keeping the two vessels properly aligned, and the §-field intersection became an eye-watering cobalt circle once again as they drifted apart.
Arran swore to himself. As oxygen began replacing normal gases, he had planned to find the captain to gain some knowledge of his enemy. But here was a warning that it was too late. All he had time for was to hurry to the helm and turn the steering ball under his palm until the starship was aimed for the small fleet whose captains idiotically believed that they were coming to her rescue.
The §-field intersection dwindled dangerously to a dazzling circle merely measures wide. Rotating a handwheel, Arran locked the steering ball in place. Feeling the thump of the lubberlift depart, Arran ran to the taffrail to seize a line. Aiming aloft, he thrust at a mainsail, being rewarded with the sight of another circle—fiery yellow—eating its way outward, from his point of aim.
He leapt for the Osprey as the azure circle closed, collapsing with a bang!
CHAPTER XXXII:
THE BUTCHER’S BILL
Where was Arran?
A worried Krumm watched the azure-bounded area of §-field intersection dwindle.
Where in the name of the Ceo was Arran?
Phoebus had held the Osprey upon station as long as he could, given the condition he suspected her to be in. Whatever course the enemy vessel pursued was gradually but inexorably tearing her away, despite his best efforts to the contrary. Still, he watched both §-field and binnacle, and fought the tiller ball.
From time to time Osprey’s many projectibles still roared, shaking her fabric, as the weapons came to bear and their operators believed they had the range. At this distance there was no way to tell whether they were having any effect.
Where, he asked himself, in the name of the Ceo’s bloody bowel movement, was Arran?
At the opposite curve of the quarterdeck, across the expanse of maindeck that it encircled (vast or cramped as it seemed by turns to those who worked and lived upon it) Jan Cipra, a member of his own crew from the Tease, waved at him and whistled, calling hi
s preoccupied attention to certain colorful signs and portents visible within the §-field to those who knew to look for them.
“Red field behind,” the starsailor’s doggerel ran unbidden through his thoughts, “lends peace of mind; red field ahead, mark it with dread.” Like a lot of starsailing lore, it didn’t mean a damned thing, but had been passed from old hand to fresh for centuries. He’d heard they gave a written exam for the master’s certificate upon Hanover. He wondered if that meant anything, either.
Phoebus nodded broadly so that Cipra could see that he understood. The indications, much more complicated than any old starsailor’s rhyme might lead its listener to believe, were that the remaining seven vessels of the enemy fleet had finally managed to turn, sort themselves into what they no doubt fancied was a tight attack formation, and were now bearing down hard upon the Osprey.
It would be some considerable time before they got here. What kind of idiots were these? Their tactics were generations obsolete. Clumped together like that, the fools made a tempting target. He licked his lips, idly wishing he had one of those atomic bombs that Arran had once used against a pursuing enemy. It had been a self-destruct device, as he recalled, wrenched from the fabric of the ship that bore it, and used instead, to destroy a predator. Remind us to ask Derabendsvater for half a dozen next Gesellschaftsnacht, he grinned to himself. Then, for a moment, he wondered: might the tiny fusion reactor of a steam launch be made to explode like such a weapon?
Only in very badly written fiction, he decided.
But where was Ar—without warning another kind of explosion caused him to whip his head about. He was gratified that one of the projectibles had not burst, as he had believed might be the case (he had seen them do that). The bitter-edged circle of the §-intersection had suddenly closed itself with a bang!
More concerned than ever, now, for Arran’s well-being, Phoebus was about to interrogate himself once again—obscenely—regarding the whereabouts of his captain, when he was suddenly struck a blow across the full width of his broad torso so powerful and unexpected that it sat him straight down upon the deck.
“Permission to come aboard?” Lying beside him, an embarrassed expression upon his face, was Arran, having been blown at Phoebus like the cork from a bottle.
“Ceo blind me, boy,” Phoebus roared, “if y’still don’t know how t’make an entrance! Reminds me of that adventure we had upon what you called the Glass Planet!” With less effort than might have been expected of a man of Phoebus’s age and weight, the Osprey’s muscular first officer regained his feet upon the deck, gave his fundament a rub, and, with a shoulder-wrenching jerk—the shoulder being Arran’s, not his own—assisted his young captain in regaining verticality.
“Now there’s a story the Explored Galaxy is not yet ready to have told.” Arran laughed for the sheer joy of being alive. Like many another man, he was able to forget, for a brief moment in combat, the grim situation they found themselves in, as well as the death of his daughter. “Are all of my people safe?”
Freed at last of the drag of the enemy vessel, the Osprey required some considerable retrimming of her sails—a task that was greatly complicated by the damage she had lately suffered—which Phoebus attended to with a couple of shouts aloft and a spin of the tiller ball before he gave his captain an answer.
“Aye, yer boardin’ party’s safe an’ sound an’ well ahead of yer esteemed self. We’ve just recovered ’em in that castoff lubberlift of theirs. Clever, that—how can y’miss thirty-odd thousand klommes of cabelle afloatin’ through the Deep?” He nodded toward the discolored §-field, of a sudden growing sober. “An’, we’ve company comin’. I take it, then, that the ugly deed is done.”
Arran nodded, ritualistically dusting off his hands. He looked about the main- and quarterdecks, assessing the destruction and approving what was being done for it. His vessel was like an insect colony that had been kicked over, in the manner that her relatively tiny denizens hastened over her, restoring her to her previous condition. “The ugly deed is done. We should be seeing the spectacular—if regrettable—results any moment. Ceo, how I hate killing a starship! Although it still remains to be seen whether I timed it right.”
As they spoke, a giant, ragged-ended fragment of yardarm came crashing down onto the maindeck, followed by a feeble and belated, “Look out below!” Arran shook his head in astonishment, disbelief, and amusement—and caught Phoebus in the corner of his eye with precisely the same expression upon his face. “I expect the flyin’ pies’ll be next, sir,” the first officer wryly observed.
Arran shook his head again, and laughed, despite himself.
The Osprey’s tens of dozens of energetic crewbeings scurried this way and that, repairing the damage aloft, clearing the quarter- and maindecks of battle debris, doing needful work belowdecks, and otherwise attending to the many hurts done to their gallant vessel in the desperate struggle she had just survived—as quickly as they could before she was called upon to survive another. Some few lined up to let the ship’s surgeon—in fact, the ship’s cook, Mr. Curry—glue and bandage their minor injuries. It was a testimony to them—or perhaps even more, to the captain they served—that having been treated, they returned immediately to the task of setting the starship to rights.
And still the enemy bore down upon them, slow but inexorable.
They watched in fascination as the boarded vessel, still lying nearby, became a sharply bounded sphere of fire, her incandescence tightly contained, so that she looked like a small white-yellow sun, or a child’s balloon brightly lit from inside. Neither had ever seen an electric lightbulb, which was what she most closely resembled; that technology was a millennium in their past.
The boarding party, now regathering upon the maindeck, presumably for further orders or dismissal, also watched the result of their handiwork, and with openmouthed awe. They had each understood, in a rough way, what their captain had been about, but had not had time or opportunity to visualize the thing fully. Almost despite themselves, each of them imagined the same thing happening to their own ship and shuddered at the horrible images it brought to mind.
Between them—before the boarding of the enemy vessel had commenced—Arran and Phoebus had laid plans to make their own starship appear much worse damaged and far more vulnerable than she truly happened to be. And from the enemy’s point of view, Arran’s venture must have appeared a failure, as well, followed as it had been by an exceedingly hasty retreat by all hands. This, quite naturally, had brought them in close. Arran had steered the captured vessel directly at the spot where he had reckoned the remainder of his enemy would gather before striking at the helpless Osprey in their cowardly (or sagacious—he supposed that it depended greatly upon how one looked at it) manner.
As usual, Henry Martyn the Scourge of the Known Deep, had guessed aright. Within minutes, the fireship—so she had been called in all of the ancient tales of ocean ship-battles in which Arran had first read of such a desperate and savage tactic—was in amongst her former sisters of the enemy fleet, her fiery §-field intersecting and coalescing with that of one unlucky vessel after another, spreading the hellish, horrible, contagious conflagration Arran had established within her own §-embrace, to her fellow starships. Of the seven remaining enemy ships, three turned and fled, one already in flames and doomed. His other four victims remained—two of them colliding—and burned.
And unnatural fire lit the otherwise eternal night.
The Osprey’s entire crew, upon deck and aloft, including the courageous men and women late of the boarding party now gathered at Arran’s feet, gave up an enormous cheer as the two colliding vessels exploded into an even greater ball of flame, unbounded by any confining §-field. Had they but stood a few klommes closer, those aboard the Osprey might even have heard the explosion as the gases that it liberated rushed past them. Deprived of oxygen, the fire quickly died away, but not before it had consumed every last molecule of both starships. A future astrophysicist or stellar chemist mig
ht stumble upon that cloud of oxidized particles and wonder what natural forces could have produced it.
With his giant first officer, Arran joined the cheering of his valiant crew both heartily and sincerely. It was true that he sorely hated killing a starship, but certainly not killing the murderers, slavers, and fools who had crewed it and its fleet sisters. This was merely something—exactly like spraying for the killer-mosses that sometimes spawned belowdecks—that had to be attended to from time to time, in order to make life possible for those others who troubled themselves to remain decent creatures and employ their intelligence.
In fact, he was hungry. He had neither his breakfast yet nor spoken to his wife. When he had assessed the toll upon ship and crew, he would see to both.
For his own part, Woulf had enjoyed the battle—for all that he had helped kill hundreds of officers and sailors in the attacking fleet who were nominally on his side. It was the first sizable engagement in which he had fought in a length of time that would have amazed those who thought they knew him.
It was not the first time he had killed hundreds of officers and sailors. That was the last time he had been revived and given, among other assignments in a remarkably busy period, the unlikely task of eliminating four hundred Jendyne cadets and making their prolonged, painful deaths appear to be a result of radiation poisoning.
The idea was to break the fighting spirit of Henry Martyn, who would blame himself for the demise of those he had pressed into ships using technology—superior to that of the Monopolity—which badly needed suppressing, as it threatened a balance Woulf’s keepers had depended on for centuries. It would also discourage cooperation between humans and the aliens who had developed it.
Coordinated Arm 02: Bretta Martyn Page 34