The idea dropped from him. His pulse beat high. Guthrie was his comrade in arms. "Muy bien," he said hoarsely. "Good hunting." In ancient style, they clasped hands. Fenn turned and went aft.
Guthrie harnessed his body into the control seat that had been modified to accommodate it. Some king-size boosts were in prospect, and he massed more than when he had been human.
The outercom flashed a red signal and chimed. He touched for direct play. A voice sounded from the speakers. He had last heard that emotionless musicality in a recording, with Luaine at his side. He wondered transiently if she bore him a grudge. Whether or not, he supposed she would lend strength of hers to whatever force the Proserpinans marshaled. She'd want in at the kill, unless they figured he'd be the one killed.
“Aou, scavaire ti sielle.''
"Acknowledging," he said.
The voice switched to Anglo. "Attention, spacecraft. You are approaching a gravitational lens facility. Unauthorized access is absolutely prohibited. Please change your vectors at once, identify yourself, and state your intentions."
"What if I don't?"
"If you are in need of assistance, inform us. We will render it to the best of our ability. Cease acceleration and we will rendezvous with you."
Deceleration, actually, Guthrie thought. Several hours to go yet at this rate, a couple of megaklicks. Not much compared to the stretch we've covered. "Sorry," he said. "This is an enterprise of great pith and moment."
"Explain your response."
Guthrie gestured expansively, though no one was on hand to see. "I am the captain of the Pinafore, and a right good captain too."
"That is a nonsense statement."
"Just checking up," Guthrie said.
As he'd expected, those craft were robotic. Sophotects would have been more flexible—asked questions, for instance. Of course, they were high-order robots. For nearly every task that might fall to them, their algorithms were as effective as any conscious mind. Or better, being less subject to distraction. But he meant to give them a job that hadn't been foreseen.
"Warning," the voice told him. "If you do not promptly cooperate, forcible measures will be necessary."
"Hold on a minute," Guthrie said.
Dagny's instruments had been taking in data throughout, her computers integrating them and passing the information on to her own robotic brain. As he talked, he had been keyboarding in his personal assessments of the situation, for whatever they might be worth. He leaned a bit forward in his harness, needlessly, and whispered, also needlessly, "Think we can take "em?"
He and the ship had often spoken together when he was alone with her. She had no awareness, but she had a personality. (He remembered sailboats—oh, he a boy out in the wind and sun-glitter of the Strait—and a battered Jeep that carried him around the Andes and a spacecraft named Kestrel, long ago, long ago.) "Uwach yei," she said. The traditional toast: "Aloft." Hers was a Lunarian program, with Anglo added on for his sake.
"Good girl!" he murmured, and was glad he had re-christened her Dagny.
"This is your final warning," said the voice. "If you do not change vectors and obey further orders, we must fire on you. We will try simply to disable your vessel, but injury or destruction are probable. You have one more minute of grace."
The cybercosm abhorred bloodshed—if abhorrence, or any human emotion, meant anything in its connection. That gave Guthrie a quantum of leverage. Both vessels had grown clear in his screens. Unmagnified, they were faint stars, lost in the horde save for their drift across its background. Enlarged and enhanced, the images were of lean cylinders, smaller than Dagny and possibly less well armed. They certainly weren't prepared for anything like her. More important, they weren't prepared for outright warfare. Even the Proserpinans hadn't gotten to that stage ... yet.
Guthrie had been making ready all along. Observations and computations were in progress, the launchers were loaded and follow-ups in place, he need only touch the proper key. "Go," he muttered as he did.
Boost ceased around him. He hung weightless for an instant, then felt the recoil. Dagny had flung a missile toward the nearer ship, at kilometers per second. Imme-diatelv she whipped about—centrifugal force strained Guthrie against his harness—and leaped off under a full teng.
She. Machine though he also was, he could never have controlled such energies and speeds. But he was more integrated with her than a truly human pilot could have been; he could make the basic decisions and issue the basic commands. Together, they fought.
A fleeting sense of treachery disappeared. He hadn't been parleying under a flag of truce. Besides, those things yonder were smart, but they weren't aware, they weren't animate. The trick would be to keep himself and Fenn alive.
The missile accelerated on jets. The target vessel detected it and attempted evasive action. Blue-white fire blossomed in the screens. A shaped-charge nuclear warhead had detonated. The blaze died away and the stars shone on twisted wreckage.
Dagny dropped boost to three g, in a new direction. That was partly to spare Fenn, mainly to confuse the survivor. Her instruments picked up a missile from it, which she barely eluded; it came near enough that Guthrie saw it in a screen, a pencil poised to scribble his death sentence. He saw it start a maneuver, seeking him. Jets couldn't match field drive in that respect. On the other hand, it had lots less mass; and if it was also a nuke, it didn't need to get much closer.
It glowed white-hot and sped on inert. Dagny had lasered it.
Glitterlets flashed free of the remaining enemy. It had launched the rest of its missiles in a barrage. Poor judgment. Or maybe not, Guthrie thought grimly. Dagny swung about and discharged hers, one, one, one, one. Viewscreens filled with incandescence, stopped down till it was only lurid. He felt the hull tremble, heard the thud of impacting fragments. Radiation readings shot high. The screen field warded off charged particles, but gamma rays got through, and a billow of heat.
The hellishnss faded. Glints danced against black space. His fireballs had knocked out control circuitry and turned the oncoming weapons into junk.
The image of the other craft swelled. It was swiftly drawing near. Dagny might or might not be able to out-accelerate it, but the effort would crush Fenn. Guthrie saw a furnacelike glow where a laser took aim at her. He could reply in kind, but at best, an exchange would leave both ships crippled.
"Go for it!" the old animal in him bayed. Dagny closed, matching vectors. At short range, her machine guns opened up. A sleet of bullets ripped into the laser lens. The enemy had nothing like that. The projector went dark.
The robot sought to flee. Metal groaned under stress as Dagny worked around to its other side and shot out its other laser. Meanwhile her own beams were slashing and searing. She could not afford to let it escape. If nothing else, it might well turn around and try to ram her.
Guthrie struggled to ignore the voice from the speaker. Passionless though it was, it made him think of a child crying, hurt and not knowing why.
When the robot drifted dead, he sat for a spell, weightless and silent. Victory felt strange. It had been an abstract battle, a contest between machines; but exhaustion rolled over him like a tide.
It ebbed. He shook himself, as a man would have done. "Hoo-ha!" he said. "You okay, Dagny?"
"We have suffered no harm that I am not repairing," answered the Lunarian tone. "We shall arrive fully operational."
Guthrie thought of Dagny Beynac. She would have responded in that same spirit. Different words, of course, and the spirit would have been alive, not simulated.
Remembrance jarred him. Did the repairable damage include Fenn? "Good show," Guthrie said automatically. "Resume course for our goal. Take it easier, though. One g. We've time now." He unharnessed and went aft.
Fenn lay in the crew emergency section. His buffer couch billowed around him as he plucked awkwardly, with shaky hands, at the fasteners of the webbing. Sweat gleamed and reeked, plastered the yellow hair to the brow, dampened the beard, made dark patc
hes in the coverall. A trickle of blood from one nostril was drying in his mustache. Despite the protection, he had taken a beating that a Lunarian could scarcely have lived through.
Guthrie stopped at the foot end, willed a smile onto his image, and said, "We made it. We're on our way again."
"I heard on the intercom," Fenn croaked. "Slag and slaughter, what a doing!"
"How are you?"
"Sore, bruised all over, but nothing that stim and painkiller won't fix. I'm ready to go." Fenn sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the couch.
Guthrie hoped the only fire in him was of the soul. That radiation—Well, he might have had sufficient mass between him and it. That depended on how the ship was oriented at the time. Guthrie wasn't sure.
Clearly, whatever the dose, it wasn't immediately disabling. Dagny's sickbay could perhaps estimate it, and was well equipped to handle longer-term effects, not to mention lesser injuries. Come worst to worst, it could keep a patient under maintenance, even in cold sleep, till proper treatment was available.
"Don't be too eager," he cautioned. "I want you to get a quick physical checkup and then all the rest you can. We're not out of the woods yet."
"Mainly, I'm hungry."
"Uh, better go easy on food too. It's wise to have an empty stomach before combat." Fewer complications in case of a gut wound. That wouldn't occur to people nowadays. It belonged to the ghastly past.
Fenn blinked. "Combat? Who's left to fight?"
"I don't know," Guthrie said. "Maybe no one. We'll find out."
In their last several hours, braking toward the lens, they had nothing to do but talk. Fenn felt vaguely surprised at the gentleness of it. They sat in the saloon, where the overhead no longer displayed space and the screens carried a slow succession of pictures: old paintings by the likes of Ruisdael and Hiroshige, old photographs from living Earth, sea and meadow and white-browed mountains. The music was also archaic, violins, harps, pianos, horns; but the fresh scents in the air were of flowers beneath another sun.
Hitherto, Fenn had sheered off whenever conversation turned to his future after this mission. Now he found he was more willing to discuss it, if only because he might not have any. The effects of the radiation did not appear to be worse than modern medicine could cure, but without such care, in a few days he would fall sick and the chance of recovery would be poor. That need led to consideration of longer-term prospects.
In the course of it, Guthrie rephrased what he had said once or twice before: "If our luck holds, the Synesis won't be able to prove you were involved here as well as on Mars, or at least will figure it's not expedient to pursue the case. But there won't be any reasonable doubt, and you won't be exactly their fair-haired boy."
"I'll manage," Fenn said.
"Um, we've got to face the possibility that you will be accused, and prepare against it. The Proserpinans would take you in without any notions about correcting your antisocial ways. They've done it for a few rebellious Terrans in the past. And you'd be a hero of sorts among them, and useful for various jobs."
"Especially in space, I should think." Fenn had given it plenty of thought.
"But almighty lonely," Guthrie said low. "Yes, assorted Lunarians, including women, would find you interesting. Some might actually get to like you, sort of. But never any real fellowship. Down underneath, you'd be more alone than if you had nobody around."
"I always have been alone." Fenn scowled and thumped a fist on the table. "No, flame it, I'm not self-pitying. It was what I chose. I had my opportunities to be otherwise, and threw them away of my own free will."
Annoyance yielded to a sudden tenderness. Wanika, he thought. May she fare well. I'm sorry if I hurt her.
"In spite of everything—or because of everything, if we carry this business off—they may make you welcome again on Mars," Guthrie suggested.
Fenn sat still for a moment. "No," he said very quietly. "Not Mars. Not ever."
Both fell silent, looking off from one another. The "Moonlight Sonata" rippled and chimed in the background.
"I wonder—" Guthrie said, unwontedly hesitant, "this last bit of time we've got, we two—I made my long trip to find out what's what in the Solar System, and I've really learned so little. More from you than from anyone else. Mind if I ask you a few more questions?"
Fenn recognized his friend's intent, and warmed to it. "By all means, do."
"I've quizzed you a lot about Luna and the Lahui Kuikawa—I was in on their beginnings, you remember— and, uh, Mars—but you know, you've mentioned vacations in Yukonia. I took a few during my first life, in the part of it we called Alaska. Tell me what it's like these days."
To recall the bioreserves, woods and heights, wildfowl clamorous above wind-shivery lakes, aurora fluttering in a night so cold that it seemed to ring, the majesty of a caribou trek or a solitary Kodiak bear silhouetted on a ridge against heaven—such things healed. Once Fenn thought in passing: We do have the machines, the cybercosm, to thank for saving this. Earth is alive in a way that Mars may someday be, but Luna or Proserpina never. They're not big enough. Could I really live happily nowhere but in space, forever barred from walking through wild land and breathing wild winds?
He hastened to lose himself in the memories.
But when Dagny was almost at journey's end and Guthrie had finished helping Fenn get outfitted, as they stood in the cramped metal enclosure at the starboard auxiliary airlock, the man's helmet not yet closed, he asked abruptly, "When you go home, back to your stars, will you do something for me?"
Guthrie's wraith-eyes held steady upon him. "Anything I can."
Fenn groped for words. "Find some—some place beautiful—above a canyon, I think—and put a small monument there. Just a stone will do, with her name on it. Kinna Ronay."
"Sure." Guthrie's inorganic hand laid hold of the hand in a power glove. "If I make it back, that's a promise."
"Nothing fancy," Fenn told him. "She wouldn't have liked that."
"No, I understand. Juliana wouldn't have either. But good luck to both of us, huh?" Guthrie let go, turned about, and left Fenn at his station.
Fifty kilometers from her prey, Dagny took orbit. In these deeps, that distance made scant difference and there was hardly any drift. Poised in the open airlock, looking out as if from a cave, Fenn saw the lens against darkness as a golden spark among the stars, surrounded by an exquisite silvery-icy lacework as broad as Luna risen over Earth. He gripped a handhold, not to fall endlessly weightless, and heard the blood throb in his temples, the breath rustle through his lungs.
A voice resounded, eerily like the voice of the slain robot, but somehow stronger: "Tasairen voudrai!" Guthrie was relaying what he received and returned.
"Take it easy," the download said.
The voice went over to the same Anglo. "Attention. This facility is interdicted. If you are authorized to approach, give the proper recognition code."
"No, we don't have that."
"Warning, warning. A powerful magnetohydrody-namic field has been put in operation. Do not come closer. The field will disable your ship and equipment. No assistance for you is obtainable. Stay clear."
"Yeah, we know. We'll keep off. We have some business in this neighborhood to take care of."
That last sentence was the agreed-upon signal to Fenn. Here we go, he thought, released the bar, and sprang. He didn't soar forth as he would ordinarily do. The extra gear secured to him added so much mass that his legs pushed him to just two or three meters a second, while its bulk barely cleared the exit. The distribution set him slowly spinning, too. He corrected that with a minimal jet impulse and floated free. The ship fell away and the galactic river encompassed him. t
He didn't notice. Readouts in his helmet glowed across the constellations. He picked sightings as they went by and ordered them entered, "This.... This.... This...." The choices were more or less arbitrary, but, combined, they gave his suit's computer the means to calculate his vectors.
Genera
ting illusionary crosshairs, he centered them on his target. "Go—max!" His jetpack started him off at low boost, not to build up undue velocity. Beneath its murmur his earplugs still carried an obbligato of words. He wasn't in an inboard circuit any more, but he was in the beam between ship and lens.
"What are your intentions? You are evidently the vessel I was informed about. You were supposed to be intercepted. I have registered not only neutrino emissions from antimatter reactions, but the radiation of nuclear blasts. Our ships do not respond to my calls. You have harmed them, have you not? Your actions are unlawful."
"So you've deduced that. Well, you are a sophotect, not a robot, aren't you?"
"I have a mind dedicated to the observatory."
It was as if the cold around his armor, near absolute zero, struck through into Fenn. He had known of that electrophotonic brain, but only now did its 'inhuman isolation, its absolute unhumanness, become real for him.
He rallied. However powerful in its work, the intellect must be narrow and naive. Guthrie would try to keep it engaged. Fenn was a minor object, and though the instrumentation would doubtless register him before he arrived, he wasn't on a collision course at the moment. He ought to pass as a meteoroid—outrageously improbable in these hollow immensities, but no hazard, nothing to call to the sophotect's attention.
An alarm tone buzzed. His own instruments were picking up stray radiation from atoms encountering the defense field. He was about to enter it.
He switched off radio, jets, life-support systems, everything dependent on electronics, and hurtled through silence.
A faint tug, a faint sense of warmth—eddy currents, heating the metal he wore and bore, slowing him down. That effect was slight, but to a delicate control circuit, the induction would be like a boot crashing into crystal. En route, he and Guthrie had put in as much shielding as they were able to. Shut down, some of the modules might not be too badly damaged. Or they might be. There was no telling beforehand.
The Fleet of Stars Page 38