They, too, recognized Arran. Each time he arrived, they approached the partition to greet him, as if they understood that nothing within his power could alter their unfortunate circumstances—did they know he was helpless to alter his own?—yet appreciated his attentions nonetheless. He had never touched one of the things, and was never to know, until much later, how, in their own way, they had touched him. As far as the boy was concerned, he was finished with an onerous task and now at liberty to ascend to the gundeck, where, in his view, something interesting was about to happen.
General Quarters shrilled while Arran was in the ladderwell.
Chapter XXII: The Jendyne Corsair
Bells rang, lights the color of blood flashed within the well as Arran dodgea the hurtling forms of crewbeings hurrying to battle stations.
The alarm was deafening, voices of bell and siren stirring themselves into those of the crew scattering to take their places. By the time he emerged onto the gundeck, the drill he had looked forward to, thoughts of which had preoccupied him belowdecks, was transformed, by wayfarer's fortune, into a matter of survival.
"Belay that racket!" Beside a projectible with a huge "01" stenciled upon its curved back, Krumm was in command, his voice carrying above all others. Dressed in little besides worn trousers torn off at the knees—even with his belly overhanging their waist he cut an imposing figure—strapped to his muscle-corded forearms as if he were an Oplyte, he affected a pair of thrustibles heavy enough to have been taken from one of the giants, if such were possible. Someone behind him lunged for switches, silencing the shrill. Crewbeings ceased their top-of-the-lungs chatter to hear what he would tell them. Arran was at his appointed place, that of projecteur's helper and third alternate at the fifth projectible. Three deep about the ladderwell, where they would be out of the way unless needed as a desperate resort, dozens of untrained, nervous replacements stood by as a reserve.
Krumm spoke again. "Medears, here be little Gyrfalcon mindin' her own business in the black heart of the Deep. Now, as a reward for her virtue, she finds herself pursued by a corsair of the Jendyne Empery-Cirot!"
A buzz arose among the crew. Krumm permitted it. Had they not been thus occupied, they would have had too much to think upon. Arran knew a corsair carried the same number of yardtiers as a carrack, the same count of starsail,
but of greater area, spaced further apart, upon a mast half again as long. Their enemy was a sleek, swift hunter-vessel commissioned by a rival imperium-conglomerate which, for centuries, had been at times inimical to the Monopo-lity—whenever the two were not at truce, allied against some third.
One thnistible glittering, Knimm raised an arm, motioning them to silence again. "Findin* ourselves unable to outhaid the Jenny killer, we're obliged t'trade broadsides with her in self-defense. We'll test her legs, then heave to with all rags aback an' deliver our surprise!" At this, someone a couple of stations from Arran started a cheer. He, like the murchanman whose fate they shared, was alone. The solitary cheer tapered off and seemed to die of embarrassment. "That sounded like a Navy man," Krumm snorted, "anxious t'be killed as t'be killin'. When you so hastily abandoned Ceo's bed and board, ye shoulda left such crap behind ye 'pon the pentagram!" Laughter followed all round, nervous, but hearty with relieved tension. "But he's right, messmates! We'll get through this, by hook or crook, t'lie an' swear we're heroes afterward! Somebody hand me a darthelm 'fore I hand 'em their head!" He had not given them time to cheer his words. A hiss of indrawn breath replaced the buzz of speculation which had not diminished altogether. All conjecture was done with. The battle for survival was about to begin.
The ship's fifteen projectibles did not resemble the personal weapons whose basic principle they shared. Each of the nine disposed at intervals about the gundeck, directed toward an oval "window" (differing from the rest of Gyrfal-con's fabric in that, woven in concentric ellipses, it was transparent to the energies of her weaponry), stood two measures tall and consisted of the axis itself—an enormous cone, its apex pointed outboard, capped at the back with a massive hemisphere—and its caliprette. This was a pair of trapezoidal slabs, thick as Arran's waist, among few artifacts aboard not mesh-constructed, between which the cone was trunnioned. Armored conductiles from a boss in the center of the hemisphere disappeared between the uprights into a run beneath the deck. Upon the outside of each caliprette-half, a chair and neckrest were bolted for the backward-facing pro-
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jecteurs, along with a "glove box*' from which a smaller conductile ran to the sighting helmet or darthelm, referred to with typical irreverance as the "head box." One of these contrivances was doflfed by a projecteur at the 01 projectible and handed to Krumm. The first officer placed it over his head.
"There she be for a fact!" he exclaimed, glancing about helm-blinded and intent. "Hard astern an' comin* up as fast as every measure squared can carry her, stunsails in the bargain. Brace yourselves, for I believe—"
A titanic thump! lifted the deck beneath Arran's naked feet, tumbling the startled boy onto his back. Mesh imprinted a grid pattern into his flesh but did not break skin. The air about him darkened with raised dust. He coughed, staring openmouthed and empty-minded. The carrack groaned and shuddered as her §-field soaked up punishment inflicted upon them. Did she survive the ordeal, this energy would be flung back at the foe. The vessel slewed, or perhaps her inertia-canceling fields faltered, and steadied. From underfoot to overhead, the gundeck filled with curses. Arran chmbed to his feet.
"Stand by your projectibles!" Krumm grinned like a skull, his big feet—he had stayed upon them—splayed over the deck, toes dug into the mesh. "Numbers four, five, six! Look sharp, projecteurs, make each thrust count! They've the legs of us, and a stern chase is to their advantage!" This time knowing what to expect, Arran braced himself at the caliprette awaiting the next thrust whether issued by carrack or corsair. He watched his projectible and its starboard operator, trying to anticipate the needs of machine and man, for the darthelmed projecteur was as blind to events within the murchanman as Krumm, and for the same reason. All upon the gundeck tensed.
Each projectible consisted of three subsystems for which projecteurs' helpers were responsible. At its heart, deep within the hemispheric shield, lay a bundle, larger than the boy's head, of four half-twisted coils, each wound at right angles to the others. Tachyonic currents flowing through the tortured microcontinuum they created were required by an insane geometry to do impossible things in impossible directions. They protested by emitting pseudoquanta of
kinetic energy. The thruster core, a transparent, wrist-slender cylinder, ran through the coil bundle, down the center of the mechanism to its pointed tip. A single crystal of rare elements, it was here that energies extorted from the mo-ebius coils—finding no other avenue of release within the interlapping fields—were coUimated into a narrow beam.
Encircling the length of the core was the equivalent of a thrustible*s designator. Similar in operating principle—in an earlier era, against a less-defended foe, it might have been an effective weapon itself—the age which had invented it, preferring the counterfeit profundity of acronyms, had dubbed it "DARTACEP": "Detection and Ranging through Tachyon Amplification by Coerced Emission of Pseudo-uanta." Now it was referred to as the "dartjacket" which, through the darthelm, gave the projecteur eyes outside the ship.
The final component, an internal, torroidal cryopacket, helped make up, after the fact, for inefficiencies arising in the alteration of scale from thrustible to projectible. Without it, residual "recoil," transmuted into heat, would soon have converted the system into shimmering slag. It was the most vital—and most failure-prone—of the subsystems.
Arran's task was to replace failed components, including the projecteur himself if need be. In the boy's hands, damp and trembling with what he hoped was anticipation rather than terror, he clutched a sheaf of spare conductiles, fabricated below specification in order to serve as fuses, ready to tear old ones loose and s
ocket new ones in. Bins within reach about him contained half a dozen crystalline thruster cores, parts for the cryopacket, replacement modules for the dartjacket, and one spare precious coil assembly.
Oily sweat streaming the visible portion of his face, Krumm shouted another warning. Gyrfalcon staggered again. As she yawed, he bellowed "Thrust!" Projectibles four, five, and six discharged as they bore, slewing within their caliprettes to prolong engagement with the enemy. Valiant helpers hopped back and forth, trying to stand close by their projecteurs and at the same time leap out of the way of the heavy, quick-moving machinery.
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"And thrust again!" The noise was such that the ears disbeheved it, a throbbing echo of the energies they hurled forth as the carrack's projectibles discharged, the residuum more felt than heard, experienced in each cell of the body as a kind of anguish fundamental, as if the stuff of space itself were being stretched toward some catastrophic limit, and at any moment might be torn asunder. To Ar-ran, his hair soaked with perspiration running into eyes already watering and half-blind with smoke and dust, the sensation was—
"Belay thrusting!" The vessel straightened, taking the full-powered projectibles upon her gundeck out of play, an unfortunate necessity brought about by equally necessary ship-design. It was a situation often commented upon, but about which, it seemed, nothing could be done save the obvious ploy Krumm had described. Elsewhere, the higher, less painful thrumming of Gyrfaicon's stem chasers could be sensed through her fabric like the prickling, Arran thought, of restored circulation in a limb.
"Stand by your projectibles, three, four, five!" To Arran this meant the ship had begun rolling, perhaps to spell some of her weapons or—perish the thou^t—distribute whatever damage the corsair was inflicting. By setting her fore-and-aft rigged staysails astagger, she could be induced to spiral about the axis of her mast. Even through her §-field damping, the boy could feel a slight pull, away from the deck beneath him, outboard toward the hull.
He braced himself again, watching his projectible. A thin, bluish wisp issued from the boss upon the hemisphere which, in part, acted as a heat sink. This phenomenon was normal, it was the conductiles he concerned himself with. At present, in his estimation, they showed scant sign of—
The carrack stumbled, this time without warning. Alarms clanged. Men and metalloid fabric shrieked as an enormous section of the hull bulged inward a full measure, glowing with kinetic energy it could not shed. For the first time in his life, Arran smelt the odor of burning human flesh. A crewwoman at the second projectible had ventured too close to the hull. Arms flung wide, she screamed and staggered backward to lie smoking upon the deck, jerking in pain-induced convulsions, branded bone-deep with the pattern of the mesh. She was far
from the only individual injured thus. Arran saw many forms writhing upon the deck, lifeblood streaming into the thirsty mesh to be filtered and recirculated, he supposed, as drinking water. Horrified, he could not tear his eyes away. It seemed impossible, yet the dinted hull-section, visible to his adrenaline-tunneled vision dulled by stages in color and brightness, pulled back into shape by inforged memory and powerful hull-fields. "Thrust three, four, five!" Krumm bellowed. "Stand by two, three, andfijur!"
Siemmes from Arran's unprotected face, something popped and sizzled. Compulsion broken, he watched one of the flexible conductiles at the hemispheric breech of his projectible flare into pyrotechnic life and bum through its shielding. Not stopping to think, he whipped at the conductile with the spares in his hand, snapped it from the boss, bent and jerked it from its socket in the caliprette, and replaced it. Above him, something heavy or fast-traveling struck the hemisphere a blow he felt through the deck, showering his back with searing fragments.
Jimiping up, he whistled at the glittering powder splashed upon the hemisphere. Peering into smoke which, reeking with excrement and smoldering pungency, now filled the deck, he calculated that the hot debris had been hurled across a long chord from the eighth projectible, whose thrusting he had not heard ordered. All of the machine's conductiles had volatilized upon the first attempted thrust, this minor and foreseeable disaster being far from the worst. The heavy boss now flapped from stop to stop upon its thick, invisible hinge like the storm-ravaged door of a flimsy building. Behind it, the thruster core had failed, as they were inclined to do, unpredictably obedient to the complex laws of §-proba-bility, having upon this occasion shivered into useless powder, dangerous because it occupied hundreds of times the volume of the solid core, exploding through the rear of the weapon killing both helpers, one of their projecteurs, and coming close to settling Arran's prospects. His own projecteur was dead, jeweled with a lethal and prismatic encrustation.
At the same moment, operators at the next projectible screamed and jittered, spewing malodorous fluids from every orifice as their sphincters failed. A microfracture in the core
192 HENRY MARTYN
of their weapon had allowed a fraction of its energies to seep into the DARTACEP circuitry. As helpers struggled to free them, a pair of dull explosions inside their helms preceded a gush about their shoulders of superheated blood, boiling spinal liquid, and pureed brains. Arran vomited into the deckmesh until he was emptied and aching.
The second alternate projecteur, the helper at the other side of Arran's projectible, stepped round the caliprette. Sharing the boy's grim silence, she assisted him in pulling the dead projecteur's smoking corpse from its place, took up his scorched but functional darthelm, and strapped herself in where, seconds earlier, her fellow crewbeing had been roasted alive. As the remaining projecteur's helper, it was up to Arran, now, to do the work of two. About him, the ship began to flail and vibrate like a tortured thing. The weakening fabric of the Gyrfalcon, bludgeoned again and again with increasing accuracy and effect by the swiftly approaching Jendyne foe, shrieked a funeral dirge to the fallen among her crew-beings. She did not keen without accompaniment. Rising to the overhead, the moaning of Arran's burned and mutilated comrades returned the compliment to the dying vessel.
"Stand by all projectibles!" Krumm bellowed. "Thrust the rapespawn as y'bear!"
Even so, Arran felt lucky, given the grisly alternatives represented by his wounded and dying messmates. At the same time, he was astonished, realizing that he was no longer frightened. Perhaps—his thoughts were analytical and cold —because he had been willing to consider death, since his first hour aboard the Gyrfalcon, if not desirable in itself, then a reasonable alternative to life as it had become; what remained for him to be afraid of now? Incredibly, as had been the case while caring for the slaves below, his thoughts turned again to his lessons.
Early §-fields being less than perfect (Krumm was unaware he repeated Lia's teaching), lasers served following peebies until §-fields improved. Krumm held that their efficacy had always been exaggerated. Materials ancient when mankind leapt to the stars reflected or absorbed them, sacrificing themselves for the sake of whatever they protected. However, in all but the most moribund of cultures, when means fail.
Others await. The thrustible had for some time constituted the last word in personal weaponry. Now larger "projectibles" arose, suffering none of the limits of atomics, peebies, or lasers, working as they did upon a subtler level of reality. Projectibles were expensive and unreliable scaled to vessel-size. They required a deal of training and their appetite for power was voracious. Thus a principal mode of ship-to-ship combat even now consisted of maneuvering "to windward" of an enemy, robbing her of headway, and putting armed parties aboard.
It was this, more than the ceaseless battering, which experienced officers and crewbeings feared. According to a saying more ancient than starsailing, a stem chase is a long chase. Yet the Jendyne predator's steady reach upon her Hanoverian prey was inexorable, each of the latter's counter-moves proving futile. Despite armament and power sufficient to most contingencies, the carrack, klomme by bitter-fought klomme, had begun to fail those aboard her. A moment had arrived for the most desperat
e, unprecedented measure to be afforded serious consideration. Arran discovered himself deep in furious concentration upon all he had learned aboard the miu'chan vessel, everything Old Henry and Mistress Lia had ever taught him. Something nagged at the edjge of his consciousness, something from his lessons which might be of use. Idea after idea surfaced in his inventive mind, only to be rejected.
What in Ceo's name was it? Boarding parties fit in somewhere, he was certain. Intersecting §-fields, as well. Parties could not board until fields coalesced. Something else... something Mr. Krumm had shouted only minutes—Deep take him, it had been hours before—about "all her rags aback." What was it about parlor tricks, the possibihty of initiating explosions by squeezing fissionables within a shrinking §-field? Arran was certain whatever idea was bothering him was something promising and important, but, in all this noise and smoke, steeped in the odor of death and dying, he could not quite fit it all together.
The first officer tore his darthelm off and cast it aside, bringing the small fingers of both hands to his lips. Arran thought his eardrums might burst with the shrillness of Krumm*s whistle. "Belay thrusting! All hands stand to! Stow
that noise and listen! Captain's belowdecks!" It was as if even the pursuing corsair heard and obeyed. Silence settled over the gundeck. Krumm had scarcely finished speaking when the moan came of a hatch-dog, followed by the scream of battle-stressed hinges. A stocky, cloak-swathed figure emerged from the oval ladderwell entrance, straightened, acknowledged the first officer's salute—Krumm's head bowed until his chin touched his chest, both wrists outstretched, palms upward—and stepped onto the mesh. Straining behind him, a pair of sinewy, sweating crewmen dragged a metal-bound chest from the ladderwell and set it upon the deck with a thud.
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