“Destroy the battleships first,” ordered the toymaker. I decided that constructing the toys in such a way that they would respond to his every order was nothing but sheer vanity. Simple loyalty would have been more than sufficient.
My mind was still following Pia, and I felt obliged to say something to draw, or rather to keep, attention away from her.
“What was the fleet in the Time Gap?” I asked.
Heljanita looked round. “I don’t know,” he said. “But they were smashed. They must have been mad to come back again and attack six thousand ships with only eighty.”
“Six thousand ships in combat,” I reminded him. “Remember the battle of the Kamak system. Slavesdream carved up the Human fleet the same way.”
An expression of great and sudden enlightenment descended upon Heljanita’s face. “That’s where they came from!”
“Kamak?” I asked, a little foolishly.
“They came out of time,” he said. “There’s nowhere else they could have come from. That’s why no such fleet exists! They came from the future.”
“The power required to shift a fleet…” began the toy at the far end of the high-omega link, still listening to every word that was said.
The toy by the door exploded in a bath of incandescent metal and the white glare of omega radiation. Both the guns in its hands went off. Darkscar and I were already moving, but the Falcorian was too slow. Comarre’s head fell off as his neck and torso disappeared into viscous smoke. Darkscar hit the ground, clutching his badly burned arm and directing a frantic appeal to me.
I jumped for Heljanita, and the edge of my right hand came down at the toymaker’s with all the force I could muster from the diving lunge. But Heljanita had moved too. His hand had twisted, bringing the gun up from its relaxed position. Instead of my hand hitting his wrist, it hit the hammer of the gun. The stock was still braced against the console of the high-omega, and I felt the bone in my little finger snap in two. The blast of pain jolted my arm rigid and twisted my body as my momentum shoved both Heljanita and myself into the switchboard. But he did not drop the gun.
Instead, he whipped it round into my stomach. I folded at the waist and contorted my body as much as I could, sweeping my left hand across to knock the barrel aside before the gun went off. I was still holding the barrel when Heljanita fired, and the bullet went clean through the palm of my hand, grazed my hip and ricocheted off the floor.
Both Heljanita and I crashed to the floor, sprawling and struggling. Somehow I had clenched the fingers of my left hand as the bullet went through it, and I was pushing and wrenching at the pistol. But with a great hole in the middle of my hand, I couldn’t muster the strength to get the gun away from him. But I pressed his hand to the floor and trapped it under my forearm. His other hand was clawing at my face, while I tried to fend it off with my other hand.
Then Darkscar grabbed his wrist and jerked it back, and I rolled my body over on to the toymaker’s, pinning him to the floor. He was the bigger man, but he lacked the strength to throw me off. Using the thumb and forefinger of my less damaged hand, I relieved him of the gun, and slipped my own finger inside the trigger guard.
I got up. One glance at the smoking ruin of Comarre’s chest assured me that there was no help for him. Pia was still lying on the floor, her hands still pointing the rifle at the toy. Judging by the extent of the damage sustained by the robot, she had continued to spray it with the beam for some time after it had ceased to be necessary.
I picked her up.
I could feel her weakness in the absolute laxity of her posture. It had been all that she could manage to pull the trigger. She didn’t say anything, and she never opened her eyes again. I felt a slight tremor as she died, but that was all.
I didn’t even feel particularly sorry. I’d watched so many people dying that it had ceased to have any impact on me emotionally. Perhaps none of us who participated in the massacre in the House of Stars can feel any sort of emotion when his friends die. That day’s scar was still sore.
I put her down again beside Comarre and turned back to Darkscar and Heljanita. Neither of them had been able to get up yet. They looked so absurd. Two supermen, from ten thousand years away, stretched out on the floor without the power to stand on their own feet.
“Get up,” I told them both, assuming command again. After all, I held the gun. Darkscar struggled up, supporting himself on his good arm, and then reluctantly pulled the toymaker up after him.
Darkscar looked at my shattered hand and saw the crooked finger of the hand which held the weapon. “I’ll take the gun,” he said.
I shook my head.
He just looked at me. The gun was still pointed at Heljanita not at him, but I was making it quite clear that from now on it was my war, and I was siding with neither of them. The balance of power was in my hand, and it was staying there.
Heljanita also sensed what was happening. “So no one owns your soul,” he said. “Well, now your side has won the war, what are you going to do with it? It’s all very well to take no part, but now you’ve won, you have to have an interest. What now, Lord Chaos?” There was more than a trace of mockery in the toymaker’s voice.
“Give me the gun,” commanded Darkscar, injecting all the authority he could into his voice. I didn’t bother to reply. “You have to make some decision,” he continued steadily. “You can’t just stand there.”
And I realized that he was right. The whole decision was in my hands, and I had to make a decision. Now I had control, I had to do something.
But I didn’t know what to do.
MEANWHILE
The battle of Saraca was balanced. The toys had not yet lost, but their victory was not by any means clear.
Their formation was utterly smashed. The ghost ships and the Human ships were slowly losing their effect, but as that threat faded, the threat of the regrouping Confederacy fleet grew. And while the toys were never willing to accept combat against the odds or at equal odds, the Beasts launched themselves into the attack without bothering to count. And they were surprisingly successful. The toys could not understand it. Had the toys been prepared to accept even chances, to attack rather than retreat, then they might have slaughtered the Beasts. But they did not. They ran and scattered, waiting for their moment. And they were harried and herded. Their moment was a long time in coming.
Their methods were logical, but they were continually surprised by their opponents. With mechanical stubbornness, they clung to the path of reason. And they could not be beaten. But the battle dragged on and on…
The toys concentrated their attention on the battleships, and in particular, on the Falcor. These were the only dangerous opponents. These were the killers. The toys decided to eliminate the battleships, and orders directly from Heljanita forbade their thinking of any other way of action
With a cold,, logical chain of reason, they decided that it would be possible to take over the Falcor. They could not shoot it down, apparently. But they could board it. They chose the Falcor because of the damage it had sustained in the tail section. There were always vulnerable points on spaceships, because shields could not cover everything. The trouble with a shield was that it not only kept things out, it also kept things in. And so the shield had to be perforated to allow omega beams out of the ship. And it had to be perforated to allow the spacedrive motors to work. The tiny holes through which beams were fired were negligible. But on a ship the size of the Falcor, which carried vast banks of spacedrive propulsors, the shield’s space-drive outlets were of an appreciable size. On the Falcor, whose shield had suffered a gross distortion after the hit which had gone through the hole, the outlets were of a size which would permit a man to walk through.
Ordinary, this would be irrelevant. Men could not walk in space let alone hyperspace. But toys could.
The robots massed all the strength they could to en-globe the Falcor. They dared not fire, and hence took a great deal of punishment without troubling Deathdancer in the lea
st. But it was the toys that needed time now, and they were prepared to pay for it in ships.
The toys abandoned their ships to their inevitable destruction. They drifted, carrying all the weapons they could. They did not have to breathe. They could float in hyperspace and remain quite untroubled. All that they needed was the energy to allow them to change their position in hyperspace. There was no distance to cross. It was simply a matter of applying a force in the right direction and hoping.
This was the difficult part, the dangerous part. Trying to alter their position by too much could splatter them all over the Falcor’s shield. Too little would leave them in the same predicament; they would be no “nearer.” And the Falcor was changing position all the time. Relative to space, it was traveling at some 200,000 miles per second. It was not, of course, actually traveling faster than light speed, because the ship was not in space, but in hyperspace where there were no miles.
The toy ships were so large on the screens that Death-dancer was sure they were going to ram. His panicking gunners shot them down in dozens. The Falcor claimed over a hundred enemy ships in less than one minute.
But there were four hundred toys—unshielded and invisible—in space, powering themselves from place to place using the omega-rifles. Most of them never reached the Falcor. But some of them did actually reach the skin of the ship, and one or two got through the hole in the shield and into the cocoon of space which the Falcor carried around its skin. Once they were inside the shields, they were safe. Out of four hundred toys, only six eventually finished up inside the shields. Once back in space, on the hull of the battleship, the toys did not have to use the rifles any longer. They could crawl. If they drifted away from the metal hull, they simply bounced back again off the screen.
The safest thing to do would have been to burn their way through the hull and let all the air out of the ship. But this was not the logical thing to do. It would announce their presence and give the Beasts inside a chance to fight back. In addition, there was a grave risk that they might damage the ship, and they did not want to do that.
So they went in the easy way, through the door. The airlock was carefully designed so that the inner door could only open when the outer one was shut. And so the air stayed inside the ship.
Once inside the ship, it was simply a matter of systematic slaughter. All the gunners were in little, individual pods. They saw nothing, suspected nothing, until they were dead. Only in the control room was there any substantial number of men, and most of those died in open-mouthed amazement without attempting any action.
Only Judson Deathdancer reacted quickly enough. He never paused to wonder what could have happened or to doubt the evidence of his eyes. He simply left the keyboard and charged.
A pistol beam seared him across the face, burning him badly and taking away his consciousness. His massive body hurtled on, and the toys stood out of the way. His massive body went straight through the door, struck one of the robots a glancing blow, bounced out on to the metal platform outside the control cabin, went straight over the guard rail and into emptiness between the central column and the outer cabins. The emptiness was a long, narrow gap which went all the way along the ship to the omega-engines right at the end of die tail. Unfortunately, such was the arrangement of the artificial gravity that the whole extension of the gap was down, and Deathdancer began to fall.
The toys watched him go, their red eyes informing them that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, Deathdancer could not trouble them again.
Then they took over at the controls.
With luck, they might have taken the Aurita in similar fashion. But without the aid of the distorted screens, the possibility seemed remote. In any case, the taking of the Falcor had cost them two hundred ships and many more than that number of toys. It was much cheaper and much more logical to destroy the Aurita the easy way.
Using the Falcor to do it.
DUEL
The cloud of silver dots was beginning to dwindle and dissociate. For a few moments after the first flash of hope. Cain Rayshade would not permit himself to believe it. But it was true.
“They’re withdrawing!” gasped one of the men behind him.
We’ve beaten them, prayed Rayshade, raking his cut lip with his top teeth. We held them off!
“Look!” said a voice close to his ear.
“Get back to your place,” snapped Rayshade, without bothering to turn to see who it was.
He looked.
The receding pattern of silver dots had broken up, and he could see the whole chaotic battleground. He watched a tiny formation of pale dots swimming through the silver ocean, scattering the toy fleet.
There are only a hundred! thought Rayshade. Whose ships are they? How can a hundred ships scatter six thousand?
Then he saw the second formation, even smaller, but still tight and still cutting a path through the toys. His bleeding lips tried to form words, but he had no thoughts to put into them for the moment. Eventually, he said, “Thirty more. No more than that.”
But they’re withdrawing! the exultant thought crashed through again. They’re retreating! We’ve won.
The whole scene seemed to hang on die screen as if it was waiting. The tiny, frantic movements of the ships were almost canceled out by the scalar distortion of the screen, which tried to enforce some concept of range and distance on the hyperspatial relationship between the positions of the ships. The analysis of the dimensional relationships was far beyond Rayshade. He thought on the analogue level of “closeness” and “farness.” In terms of shooting and flying they came to much the same thing in the end.
Rayshade turned to the blond man wearing the headphones, who had been calling out damage reports which went largely unheard.
“Sum of the damage?” he called.
“The outer screen’s gone completely. The other two are up, but I don’t know how much more they can take. Some damage to the wings and spacedrive shells. Three guns out of action, all at the stem end. We still cover the whole sky and we still have firepower. A lot of the guns might burn out before much longer though. I calculate less than a quarter hours’ efficient combat left in us, but it’ll still take a lot to knock us out after that.”
“All right,” cut in Rayshade. He grabbed the microphone and shouted into it. It was more encouragement than orders. He had been out of contact too long, and Skywolf had the command now.
He assumed that the toys were trying to regroup and began to hope that Skywolf could do it better, but he felt less and less confident in his assumption as he watched the screen. The battleship was not under attack. Indeed, the toys seemed to be deliberately keeping out of the way. Something was wrong.
They’re ignoring me and going after the rest, he thought. They’re afraid of me! Well then, if thirty ships can carve them up, this monster should be able to do it as well. We’ll carry the fight to them.
A pale dot in the dead center of the screen grew steadily larger, but he did not notice. He was conditioned to ignoring the proximity of his own vessels.
“Deathdancer!” he snapped into the microphone.
There was no answer.
“Judson!”
Nothing.
The pale dot grew while Rayshade was wondering why Deathdancer did not answer. His eyes were dragged to it, his attention captured by the sheer size of the thing.
The damn thing’s on top of us! Panic raced through his mind, and then he guessed. It’s not big because it’s close, it’s big because it’s big! It’s the Falcor!
“Judson!” he yelled.
Then the battleship rocked. The image on the screen blurred for a moment.
“Dead hit,” screamed the man with the headphones. “Mid section damage bad. Second screen going mad. It won’t hold.”
“Fire!” yelled Rayshade. “Blow the thing to pieces.”
“But it’s the Falcor,” complained a faint, startled voice.
“It’s the toys. The toys have the Falcor!”
The Aur
ita rocked and spun.
“Blast it!” cried Rayshade, holding tight to the stalk of the microphone to avoid being spilled on the floor.
“Second shield gone. One up. Another hit and we’re dead.”
Rayshade ran his fingers over the keyboard, shouting “Never mind me. Tell the gunners to shoot the thing!”
“They are shooting,” came back the reply. Rayshade bumped the speed control with his elbow. The power column screamed, and the ship picked up velocity. But the enemy battleship was still large in the screens. It was still growing, and he could not keep it away.
“Shoot it!” he was yelling still.
“We’re hitting it with all we have left,” came back a reply. “It’s taking it. We can’t hope to land a shot like the first one it got at us. We’re moving too fast.”
The Aurita swung and swayed. Rayshade shoved the speed control hard, halfway over to full extension, while his fingers were still slapping and smashing the keyboard. The power column shrieked and the ship bounced. The shriek turned to a low boom.
“Damage to the column,” said the man in the headphones. “We’re going to blow!”
“It’s got to keep going,” snarled Rayshade.
“It can’t!”
“Then we blow!” Rayshade was screaming again in anger and frustration. But he pulled the lever back and the shrieking died down.
“Hit again. Guns out. Two of them.”
Don’t his guns go? wailed Rayshade silently. How did it happen? How could they take over a ship in hyperspace? They don’t care; they can look. But how do they move out there?
We could have won! he sobbed inwardly. Two of us and three and a half thousand others against six thousand. It was our battle! We were winning from the moment their formation broke. We had it in our hands.
His fingers still ran furiously over the keyboard. He hardly cared what he was asking the ship to do, where he was trying to take it. Just as long as he could get it out of the way of the Falcor …
Day of Truth Page 13