Starhammer

by Christopher Rowley

  "The laowon will be blinded," Jon said with renewed respect. The Elchite showed himself to be a dangerous prey once again.

  "For a little while. Now, Mr. Iehard, you must study these screens. When we are aboard the Churchill your posting will be in the engine room. The men you so unfortunately shot, M'Nee and Riley, are our engineers for the next lap. They have spent years studying the layouts of the engine room, but now they are incapacitated, so you must help them in their tasks."

  Panels with hundreds—thousands—of colored switches appeared on the small screens built into their seats. There were banks of buttons and arrays of indicators. Iehard was appalled at such antiquated looking stuff. "They must have been crazy. Why didn't they let the computers handle it?"

  "They were religious, Panhumanists. Did without computers wherever possible," Eblis Bey said.

  "An odd extreme."

  "Testament was a proud system. They believed solely in the exalted human spirit, in particular their own. They forsook advanced computers in favor of intense mental preparation of their own children. They were a headstrong folk, and refused to heed the calls of other systems. They took their ships out to the galactic arm, and brought the laowon down upon us."

  "The laowon would have found us anyway," Jon objected.

  "Most likely, but if all human systems had had the Baada drive, with hundreds of ships, we could have fought them off. Their empire is precarious, torn by huge warring factions. It might have split into warring Seygfan and chaos. We could have drawn a line, written very different treaties! Instead we are a defeated people, a race edging into perpetual slavery. There is much to curse the Testamenters for."

  The Orn plunged on toward the hydrosphere of William, where the North Hemisphere Vortex caused a ten-thousand-kilometer hurricane in the dense clouds of green ammonia ice hurtling on helium winds. At the rear of the vortex a small region of stability lay between the circulating walls of blue clouds, warm from the volcano that was still churning lava and ice thousands of kilometers below, and the eddying wind storms howling around the oval vortex.

  Like a dark tear, an upwelling of liquid water dripped from the great blue eye of the Piston, and at the crest of the hundred-kilometer-high wave form the Bey expected to find a twenty-kilometer-wide sphere of pressure-ice and steel, enclosing a pair of giant Baada drives.

  Strapped into his acceleration couch Iehard tried to concentrate on the displays of switches and lights that he would soon have to operate, and fought the urge to look at that enormous storm, the walls thousands of kilometers high, whirling past at seven hundred kilometers an hour.

  The darkness grew quickly, and yet they could still see dimly that the ramparts of cloud ahead were moving very fast, whirling around the hot material upthrust from the lower depths.

  "Computer Approach program now running sir," someone said.

  They tensed. Absolutely nothing was to be seen on the screens but whirling darkness and the computer's simulation graphic, which showed the Orn as a small red dot, and the Churchill as another, with cross hairs on its center.

  The ship had slowed to a crawl, falling now through a thickening mist of icy ammonia and water vapor, tossed out of the inferno far below.

  Steadily, the two dots grew closer and with perfect precision the software delivered the Orn to a docking position with the Testamenter battleship, nuzzling up to the bigger ship's north pole.

  Outside the Orn, temperatures had risen fast as they ploughed into the heatsink of this near fluid layer in the atmosphere. The pressure on the hull was fast approaching a ton per square inch and would only increase. Then Jon noticed that the ship's motion had slowed greatly but he still felt a heavy drag as if under deceleration.

  "You feel the planetary gravity now, Mr. Iehard." Eblis Bey said with a grim little chuckle.

  "Of course," Jon said. He noticed the mote was resting in the Bey's hand. He wondered idly if it was warming itself too.

  Voices continued passing information to and from the bridge.

  "Computer says approach read out is as expected, sir. No obstruction of the docking channel visible."

  "All right, prepare the docking tube. Officer Bergen, are you ready to make the tube secure?"

  "All ready, sir."

  The Orn shuddered and there was an audible bump.

  "Outer lock is opening sir," someone said, and then they all heard it, a demonic howl, echoing through the structure of the ship, the roar of vast planetary rage from the enormous storm.

  Jon shivered involuntarily. A habitat dweller for nine years, he'd forgotten bad weather, and this was the worst wind storm he had ever heard.

  The moan it made was uncanny; the vibration cut right through the huge mass of the Orn as if it simply wasn't there. It set everyone's teeth on edge. It was terrifying.

  "Coupling is complete," Officer Bergen said in a surprisingly calm tone. The sound of engines whining down could be heard faintly and the wind roar was suddenly diminished.

  "Churchill's airlock is opening now, sir. I have readings showing a breathable atmosphere, but temperature is low—things will be pretty damn cold in there for a while."

  "Thank you, Officer Bergen. Well done, everyone. May I suggest that we disembark? The Computer says the Orn's hull is breached now, and that unless we get out within eight minutes we'll be operating in an atmosphere of ten percent methane at a temperature of less than three hundred degrees below zero."

  They all unstrapped and began making their way to the airlock, moving carefully because of the one point five gee gravity. The temperature inside the Orn was dropping fast, and there was a strange smell in the air.

  Jon went to the sick bay and took charge of Meg once more, easing her into the wheelchair. He trundled her sleeping form down to the airlock and into the elevator. Around him were Dahn, Bergen, M'Nee and Chacks. The elevator shifted into gear with a whine and moved out of the protective security of the Orn's airlock.

  Frost icicles dangled down the walls. It was very cold in the connector tube and they could hear the wind outside, louder than ever, a roaring demon that tugged at the massive spaceships and shifted them, perceptibly, every so often. It was a long ten-second ride before they reached the open airlock of the Winston Churchill and stood inside an immense metal cup. They waited, shivering; the temperature was sliding rapidly downward. The air in the tube was painful to breathe.

  The inner lock opened at last and they pushed through to an immense empty space, where a few dim lights pointed out the size of the place but did little more to penetrate the dimness. It was very cold, but still a little warmer than the tube. They could breathe more easily.

  Then lights came on with a blaze, dozens of bar lamps that were set in the vaulted ceiling. They were in a large room with a domed roof. Heavy machinery humped ungainly out of walls and floor. The walls were of raw-looking puff-concrete.

  Clearly the Testamenters didn't waste energy on design beyond a sense of strict utilitarian purpose.

  Pumps were whining into life. Captain Hawkstone and Eblis Bey came through with the last of the crew and the airlocks closed behind them.

  Officer Bergen had floor plans of the ancient warship. She directed Jon to an elevator that deposited him on a floor with medical ideographics on the wall. He manhandled Meg into a bunk and strapped her in. She remained quiet, in deep sedation. Then he went to find the engineering section where he'd been posted. To get there he rode a hand-operated elevator to the center of the sphere.

  He emerged in a vast space, a kilometer across perhaps. He stood on a platform that cut the space into hemispheres. Great shapes were snugged around one another beneath the platforms. Staircases lead down into the depths. On the main floor was set up a V-shaped bank of screens and panels. The equipment had a weird, lumpy look about it. The metal surrounds were raw cut, with no attempt to polish them up. Cables and wires in thick profusion trailed out of the back of the cabinets and ran to three wide access ports cut in the wall.

  Finn M'N
ee and Officer Chacks, another young Elchite, joined him. M'Nee hid his dislike of Jon long enough to brief him on what they would have to do.

  Jon already knew that the four major sections on the left side of the display were controls for one drive and the four on the right were for the other. The pair of central panels were the computer crew interfaces, plus diagnostics and emergency systems. In addition, there were controls for the ship's immense chemical rockets, used for docking maneuvers and short distance trips within planetary systems.

  Jon took up station on the left. M'Nee went to the right. Chacks stood in the center. Under M'Nee's instruction they began flicking red toggles up and green ones down. The toggles had to be moved in groups of seven, set out in arrays of twenty lines apiece.

  By the time they'd completed one bank there was something different about the ship: A deep vibration had begun.

  "The drives!" yelled Jon.

  "Yes, Mister Iehard, we have the drives on full power. Now do you believe?" Eblis Bey spoke over the intercom PA.

  He was interrupted by a coughing growl from four banks of heavy chemfuel boosters set into the ship's underside. They roared for a few seconds on the first test firing.

  "Seems we have full power on the boosters," M'Nee said.

  Jon flipped switches. He believed; he had the fervor of the newly converted. As they finished another bank, the ship gave a jolt.

  A red light flashed.

  "Vector performance in left Baada drive is compromised," said Chacks.

  "What is the degree?" M'Nee snapped.

  "Possibly one, one point five percent."

  "Is that statistically significant?"

  "Hard to say. This ship is a thousand years old. Who knows what that might mean? Perhaps nothing, perhaps everything."

  "Ask the diagnostic program. One slip and we'll all be subspace microparticles." Chacks continued his check.

  Captain Hawkstone suddenly broke in over the newly activated PA system. "Officer Dahn says the computer is operable and quite sane. Bergen says we'll have warmer air in about an hour."

  "Chemfuel engines are fully operational," contributed M'Nee. "We can ignite any time. The ship has refuelled itself from the exterior atmosphere, it seems, just as was predicted. The tanks are full."

  "What about the laowon though?" Jon voiced a nagging fear.

  "The laowon are in for a surprise," replied Hawkstone on the PA. "Everyone strap into the acceleration couches. Orn has begun final ascent. We will follow."

  In a few moments, the huge engines belched into life once more and began developing the billions of pounds of thrust they had been designed to generate. With a sudden jerk the ancient battleship shifted from her moorings and rose on four columns of white hot fury into the murky atmosphere. On board, they gripped the sides of their acceleration couches and stared grimly at the viewscreens.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  "We cannot regain that radar trace, Admiral."

  Admiral Booeej hunched grimfaced over the screen. The bright flashes that lit up his face were more of the damnable nuclear bursts used by the Elchites to hide their ship. The flashes sparked for a few seconds more, deep inside William's gray-green gas mantle.

  Booeej looked at a side monitor where a blip was frozen in the screen memory. Too big to be just a jumper. Booeej turned the problem over in his mind.

  The small jumper had plummeted into the atmosphere, under power, yet heading most certainly to total destruction. Jumpers just didn't have the powerful engines needed to escape the gravity of a gas giant. Orn would sink until it was crushed.

  Was this suicide then? Had the Elchites been thwarted in their mission by the presence of the fleet? And then chosen to die rather than be taken? Or...

  By the scales on the blue balls of Horg! Was it possible! Could he, Booeej of Red Seygfan, be wrong along with the rest of the Fleet High Command? Was Blue Seygfan correct, then, in maintaining that some truth lay behind the romantic human myths? Even in this legendary mare's nest? Yet, if they were just going to die in the depths, why were they placing so many probe-destroyers in their wake?

  His blood seemed to cool as the logic carried him into most unwelcome areas.

  If this was the hidden resting place of the last Testamenter ship then Booeej would have to proceed very carefully. His orders were straightforward: He was to capture any such ship that he might find.

  The loss of the Testamenter ships with their unique drives was still seen as the single greatest error in all history on the part of the laowon military. And those same revolutionary drives gave the Testamenter ships a big advantage. They were not affected by gravity spin the way laowon jumpers were. They could jump much closer to William than any laowon ship.

  Thus Booeej would have to disable any such ship the instant it appeared. And then, somehow, rescue it from the consuming gravity of William. Maneuvering so close to a gas giant, even a small one like William, was highly problematic. The battlejumpers were running through their fuel reserves at a prodigious rate.

  Booeej inquired again about the fleet of heavy tugs he had ordered from Ginger Moon. They were still minutes away.

  A Testamenter ship would be huge. That big blip on the probe radar had been at extreme range. Booeej grimaced. How was he going to keep the behemoth from falling back into the atmosphere?

  It could be lost forever, and Red Seygfan would fly alone at court. He would be accursed, the Imperial Family might even demand that he expiate before them on the chair.

  On the other hand, if he let it get away without an accurate fix on its destination, then his staff would join him in Expiation, probably on global television.

  "We have a radar trace, rising fast, vector three-oh-four."

  Booeej's heart leapt. They came!

  A solid blip, large mass, moving rapidly upward on chemical boosters through the atmosphere of William. No jumper could carry enough fuel to reach escape velocity.

  "Lasers lock on this target," Booeej said in an urgent voice. By the Seygfan, this was it! Incredible!

  But the radar trace was merely the Orn, on her last voyage, boosting upward against William's gravity, consuming all the remaining fuel in a decoy run.

  The laowon were taken, though.

  And then the Orn's ship computer turned on the ship's gravitomagnetics and tried to jump. The laowon engines strained at the gravity potential around them and then they failed. The Orn shuddered out of the now of present space-time and then returned a moment later, but minus the protective bubble of the gravitomagnetic field—the mass of the ship intersected with a considerable volume of William's atmosphere; billions of atoms were directly converted into energy.

  The flash was vast, hundreds of kilometers across, a bright bubble of incandescent gas and vaporized metals that opened through William's cloud mantle.

  Aboard the battlejumpers, the laowons turned aside from their instruments in disgust. Booeej let out an aggrieved expletive.

  The ancient ship had blown up. Fourteen centuries resting in high pressure had been too much.

  When they turned their eyes back to the screens, the boiling vapors were rising into a pale chartreuse tornado amid the ice clouds and then they saw the black speck that had suddenly risen through the margin of the boiling clouds.

  On the big screen it opened toward them, twenty kilometers or more across, and ominous, a flattened black sphere, slowly rotating, featureless, the sure sign of a force field.

  "By the souls of dead Seygfan!" someone whispered.

  "Fire! It must not complete the turn! Fire, you fools!" Booeej called.

  Hands snapped to the laser controls but already the heavy spheroid was gone, twitched out of William's upper atmosphere on the force of the planet's own gravity potential.

  The purple drained from the admiral's face. In a strangled voice he snarled. "Get me a fix on that departure's singularity! Where the hell did they go?"

  It was apparent that the ship had traveled outward from William. Because of the gra
vity problem, it couldn't have reversed through the planetary mass. In fact, a quadrant of most probable destination was soon discernible, a sector covering only ten degrees on a side.

  "How many systems within thirty light-years in that sector?" Booeej barked after a swift perusal of the secret Superior Buro data running on his own monitor.

  "One hundred seventy-four" was the reply.

  In moments, lumpy battlejumpers had scrambled to jump points and hurtled out of the Nocanicus system.

  —|—

  Ulip Sehngrohn stared out the slit window high in the cliff of Bolgol. The raging blue-white fury was dimming, its tiny disk, which could only be observed through thick lead glass, cut the horizon, and a wild, purple dusk fell over the landscape.

  Tiny lights began to flicker on in the slit windows on the opposing cliffs of Razevkoy and Fernica. Above the cliffs, where the canyons met, the sky had become a lambent tapestry. Startling mauve clarity was threaded with golden shreds of cloud.

  The city of Quism was coming to life. Engines coughed into life in the garages by the Meridian Gate. Dozens of treasure expeditions were setting out on the trail to the south, heading for the dangers and potential wealth of the Oolite trail and the North Shore and the Boneyards.

  All through the long polar night, expeditions would continue to leave the city for the south. Caravans of armored hovercraft carrying eager-eyed prospectors and scientific groups.

  During the strange glories of dusk, the wealthy expedition patrons would traditionally throw banquets in those high cliff rooms that were left empty in the daylight. The Sunset Clubs would sip imported wine instead of the native bean distillate and watch the hovercraft wending southward. They would speculate happily on the likelihood of success, although all knew that one out of four expeditions would not return. Then the spectacular auroral displays would begin, the signal of the long polar night's true beginnings.

  Sehngrohn, however, had already been there for hours, and he watched more than just the sunset and the dust clouds above the departing convoys. For beyond the gap between Razevkoy and Fernica was the spacefield. Private shuttle companies ferried passengers and cargo up and down from orbital space once or twice every day. Their multicolor elevation balloons lined the field, like a set of enormous spansules in a giant's drug cabinet.