“Petrel is to rejoin Admiral Varley’s squadron. There is a special mission lined up for her and thereafter the tour of duty in this quarter is over. Relief is on the way, and leave which is overdue will be taken in an I.G.O. planet, probably Physcoa.”
Hocker muttered audibly, “What’s wrong with Earth Planet?”
Fletcher turned round in his seat and found the man directly behind him and not a metre distant. Xenia in the next seat watched as if at a NO play. “Button it up, spaceman. You’re here to listen. You’ll be asked for your opinion if and when it becomes essential to have it.”
Eyes met for a count of three and Hocker turned deliberately away to look along the row at the rest of the crew. He got no support.
Fletcher let it go. It was going to take time, but he had made his attitude clear.
Duvorac went on, “It is important that Petrel leaves today. I have negotiated the move at a high level, but once it is known, there may be other groups who would put in injunctions for delay. Therefore, I want her out as soon as it can be done. Command of Petrel has been given to Commander Fletcher. I have the commissioning authority and sealed orders to give him. Crew will be brought up to strength when she rejoins the squadron. When is the soonest you could lift off Commander?”
“Preliminary checks will take up to an hour; but I believe she is ready to go. After that a sixty minute countdown. Provisionally I would say eighteen hundred hours. Do you agree that, captain?”
Cotgrave said, “I have not been aboard for over a month. But we finished the minor repairs. She was ready to rejoin on signal at that point. I agree it is possible.”
Duvorac said, “Very well. I had everybody attend to hear the official appointment. Now I will speak alone to Commander Fletcher for a few minutes. Transport to the launch pad will be along at once.
Thank you for your services to I.G.O. and good luck on this enterprise.”
When they were alone, he said, “There is an additional matter. Perhaps the crew should not know of this.
Xenia will accompany you. She is too well known to be of further use in intelligence work on Garamas.
Another post has been found. But she could not leave by passenger flight. The squadron will soon be in Physcoa and she can move on from there.”
“There is no hiding place on a corvette. The crew will have to know.”
“She is a sound mathematician. Perhaps you could give her an operational role. Later, she would transfer to Europa, where there is special accommodation.”
“Very well. The Scotians have planted a pick-up on the hull. I shall brief the crew and leave it there.
What they hear will confirm that it is a simple rejoining operation.”
Xenia, stuck with a non-speaking role sat at the communications desk between Johnson and Ledsham.
Anonymous, in the smallest space suit carried in the locker, she was passed over like a lay figure. But she could appreciate Fletcher’s problem. The crew had expected Cotgrave to take charge and they resented a new hand on the tiller.
She heard Hocker, by-passing the general net, on a direct link to communications, say to Ledsham,
“We’ve got a right staff fairy here Tom. For godsake check the data. It may be only a delivery run for that silver crumpet; but he ditched Terrapin and nobody yet knows the how and why.”
They did their work. The years of training saw to that. Lift off was a copy-book manoeuvre; but Fletcher could feel that he was not handling a team. In an engagement he would be hard pressed.
Petrel felt right. She was a later marque than Terrapin. Handier and more powerful. Potentially a crack unit. Get the human element right and he could take her anywhere at all.
It was a relief to be away from Garamas into a world he knew and could manipulate. Xenia saw the change in him and prolonged her Trappist silence even after the link with the Scotian was broken. When the Squadron came up as a tiny glowing jewel in the zoom lens of the main scanner, she was almost glad to think that there would be a change of company.
Then it began to dawn on her that the rest of the crew shared a serious doubt whether they would make it at all.
Ledsham asked for a report of the Commander’s last transmission and even filtered through the intercom, there was a harmonic of simple disbelief. It was echoed in one way or another all round the net and Fletcher said it again with cold clarity.
Swinging in unison with his co-pilot on the tiny command island, he said, “Hold fast on the auto chain. I’ll take her in on manual.”
Xenia working her E.S.P. link in a private bid to know what it was all about, homed in on Ledsham. He was registering a kind of reluctant awe. Course changes involved would mount as much G as a primary blast off and rate split second calculation. The computers could handle it; but a fractional loss of concentration from a human operator and Petrel could hurl herself like a bomb into Europa’s slab sides.
Now the screen was showing the squadron as discrete units. Five craft, set silver beads on a black velvet display pad, Europa in the centre with four pencil-slim corvettes outriding in a protective screen.
She tried Fletcher and got a blank. He was utterly committed to the mathematics of navigation, mind working like a machine.
The duty officer in Europa’s control room had picked up the tiny speck of the hurrying corvette and locked on tracking computers. Linked on the same net, Falcon, Drake, Heron and Hawk trained major armaments in concert.
When Petrel was a pea-sized globule, she was the focus of destructive power that could disperse her as a faint nimbus of glowing gas. Five computer-based tracking systems monitored the oncoming craft.
Coded recognition signals punched out and cleared the air.
McCool on Europa took his finger from the general alert button. Then he was looking at an empty screen and by reflex thumbed down the stud, which sent alarm bleeps to every corner of the cruiser.
Varley, first in the command centre, still sealing up, with his visor hinged back, said, “What is it, Jock?”
“Petrel rejoining Admiral.”
“So?”
“Recognition okay; but now she’s evaded the tracking gear.”
“You believe she could be hostile?”
Enacted in every command centre of the squadron, there was the same question mark over Petrel’s off-beat manoeuvre.
Consequently, there was a full audience to see the corvette warp out of RT, as though by sleight of hand in the single blind vector on Europa’s port quarter and take up station with a flamboyant course change, which must have put her crew on the extreme edge of G. tolerance.
Her Commander’s level tones coming up on every net said simply, “I.G.O. corvette Petrel reporting for service with Red Squadron. Request instructions.”
Varley, clamping down on a richer text, at the cost of a near cerebral haemorrhage said thickly to Europa’s captain, for all to hear, “Get that maniac along to see me, Commander. Stand down, if you please.”
Chapter Six
Colonel Pedasun, racing for Petrel’s pad with a standfast order signed by the President no less and still liable to smudge, had to veer off to miss the fireball. Only his rank and visible, simmering temper had gotten him past the check point. Finally, the official had let him through on a reading of the situation, that if he burned himself to a crisp, he would be in no position to sound off and if he did not, he could not grumble either.
The latter angle was however pure speculation and Pedasun proved it false.
Incandescent gas flooded the blast trenches, hot updraughts set his police tender onto its beam ends, his pilot threw everything into a crash climb that pinned the crew to their bucket seats. A fresh air duct channelled a hot waft of sooty debris into the interior, as if Petrel had deliberately spat in his eye.
When he finally stepped onto firm ground on the apron in front of the reception block, he was fairly gagging with thwarted rage. Fear past made him vindictive. He stumped into the office, whacking left and right with his cane.
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The philosophical official, too slow off the mark to vacate his post for a subordinate, took the brunt of it.
“Why could I not contact the ship?”
“Land lines had been severed ten minutes ago, Colonel.”
“Who was responsible for that?”
“It is normal practice. Part of countdown procedure. The ship makes the break, when her Commander is satisfied that all is well.”
“You agreed.”
“There was no reason to do otherwise, Colonel. Your message came after the line was cut.”
“I am not satisfied. You will be interrogated. Take him to my car. Go back to headquarters. Send out my personal shuttle.”
Pedasun spent the ten minutes of his wait, stalking from room to room in the complex spreading angst.
Daylight wilted and ran symbolically into black night. He laid it on the line that no ship should clear the port without notification being sent in to his office thirty minutes before land communication was cut.
It was a useful security refinement that went some way to pay for his time, but he was still looking for a more solid payoff when a deferential orderly paged him with the news that his car was ready and waiting.
At the console, he dialled traffic control for a suburban trunk and sat back while the autopilot took him off. Fifteen minutes later, he crossed a darkened Stymphalus Park on a high lane, then cut the beam and took over on manual.
There was not much farther to go. Five kilometres on, he turned due East, over cultivated farmland now invisible and planed down into the well-lit courtyard of a trim commune, which was the centre of the district.
At this time of day, there was nobody to see him arrive. Farm machinery, parked in rows for the night, filled one side of the square. Most workers had taken the underground monorail to their homes in Kristinobyl. Only a handful of maintenance staff would be still on the site and those were taking the evening meal break.
A sensitive man would have felt the psychic pressure of the huge empty shell, a caravanserai set in a flat waste; architecturally, a relic of the past, when district centres were fortresses. But Pedasun walked quickly through an open arch and followed a covered way to a corner of the structure marked by a five storey block, solid as a keep.
Easy ramps lit by wall ports worked in an equiangular spiral up the outer wall and he went on to the top.
The last pitch was on the outside and looked out over the darkened countryside to distant clusters of light like asterisks in a lattice. For the first time, he was challenged. A Garamasian, in paramilitary rig with a carbine hooked on his left shoulder by its strap, stepped out of a shadowy alcove and said, “Garamas for Garamas.”
“Ring of Conquest.”
“The General is expecting you, sir.”
A door in the thickness of the wall slid away and Pedasun went through.
Now he was in a short corridor, brilliantly lit and floored edge to edge with blue thick-piled carpet. At the end it turned through a right angle and widened into a reception area with a desk, and a double-leaf door going on.
A young Garamasian woman in a trim black uniform with the interlaced ring symbols of Garamas over her flat diaphragm stood up and flipped a key on an intercom unit. “Colonel Pedasun is here.”
The reply was inaudible; but no doubt affirmative, because she went on, “You are to go straight in, sir.”
Inside, the low ceiling crossed by massive open beams made the room appear larger in floor surface than it really was. Twenty metres square, with no supporting piers it gave the illusion of going in every direction like an open field.
Pedasun had a clear walk to the far end where a group of at least a dozen were in session round a large oval table. Mostly they were Garamasians, but there was one Laodamian and a trio of Scotians sitting together below the salt plugged in to a language cracker. At the head of the board, General Hablon was sitting erect with an A.D.C. on his left and the manager of the complex on his right.
Even folded into a chair Hablon was impressive size-wise. Vertical, he would be all of two and a half metres. A throwback to the extinct class of war-lord baron that had carved up the Garamasian scene for centuries for mutual profit and entertainment, his round head was massive and expressionless as a marble artefact. Proving that it was not solid through, he made minimal mouth movements and said, “You are late, Colonel. I have already received reports from the local division.”
Well aware that he who excuses himself also accuses, Pedasun took an empty seat half way down the near side and inclined his head to the chairman in a composite signal which indicated that he had his reasons and was now ready for any ongoing business there might be.
Hablon took another sideswipe at him by saying to his right hand marker, “Read back a brief summary.
We will all wait until the Colonel is up-to-date on events.
Again Pedasun inclined his head. At this stage, the man was important enough not to cross openly. But he made a private note that in the fullness of time, the security branch would put itself outside the range of the political machine.
Most of it he knew well enough. There had been a set back at the distribution point in Stymphalus Park, but the agency was unknown. In spite of that, more than half the area was covered by a network of transmitters. A test run had been made with success. Supplies could be made good in under twenty-four hours since a Laodamian freighter had checked in with a full load of equipment. In the meantime, there was enough on the ground to do an adequate mind-bending job whenever the call came.
When the man had finished, Pedasun said, “Thank you. I was, of course aware of all those points. I believe that the fire in the depot was engineered by I.G.O. agents. I was getting close, but they evaded me a few minutes ago by leaving Garamas in an I.G.O. ship. That, gentlemen, is the sort of thing which will not happen when our administration takes office.
“For the rest, there is a civil rights movement among the students and technicians which is gaining some ground in that limited sector. There is no danger. I have informers at the heart of the group. I know that they have been asked to locate our equipment in the Kristinobyl area. False information will be fed to them, When the time is ripe the leaders will be arrested.”
“Why not now?”—Hablon made it sound as though only a fool would have an answer.
“They are well-connected with families sympathetic to the present administration. It is not impossible, but it is not advisable. Later, they will be no problem. We should not complicate the issue at this stage.
Selected broadcasts aimed at confusing the liberal position are easy enough. A man who sees too many sides of a question is already defeated.”
Hablon said, “What have our Scotian allies to say?” Whatever it was, was unintelligible taken neat. The leading hand of the trio began a staccato rattle of clicks and a speaker on the face of the console delivered it, with a short time lag, in Garamasian. “We are ready, General, at any time. Both ships are at stand-by alert. Crews can be flown in from the internment centre in shuttles which are held there.
Garamas will be welcomed by the Outer Galactic Alliance.”
Not everybody looked delighted. Pedasun made a mental note that the commune manager shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Even this small council was a microcosm of the larger society. Many supporters of the movement wanted the liberal administration out without necessarily wanting O.G.A. in.
For himself, it was essential. He had no intention of playing second fiddle to a reactionary group led by a military junta. With O.G.A. support, he could go for the top slot, a new man without attachments, who could be trusted. What he did later would be another matter.
As of now, he found a formula to please both sides. “Your help will be most valuable, Commander and Garamas will be generous. However, we aim, in the first instance, to seize power by popular acclaim.
Your task will be to neutralize any attempt by I.G.O. to interfere with our programme.”
Hablon stood up and his round c
rown was two centimetres from a ceiling beam. He said, “I will continue my tour of local headquarters. Tomorrow I shall be at the operations room in Velchanos, ready to take overall control. From then on be prepared to act. Garamas for Garamas.”
Except for the Scotians, who maybe took it as too narrow a slogan, he got a full due from the meeting all standing and slapping the right palm smartly to the left shoulder.
“Ring of Conquest!”
On Petrel, relief from tension was followed by a resurge of enthusiasm. Xenia picked it up on her psychic crystal and realized what Fletcher had been working at.
Probably only the navigators Bennett, Sluman and the co-pilot himself could appreciate the finer points of the exercise. To the rest it was simply a spectacular manoeuvre, which was a slap in the eye to the establishment. It paid for the long session on the beach. They were in business again as a crack outfit with a man in the top slot who had nothing to learn about handling a ship.
One divergent strand in the symposium, however, she traced to Hocker. He did not put it into overt speech, but the mental field could be listed as hostile. If she could have got him to verbalize it there would have been something like, “Crazy bastard. Gallery play. Looking for a pat on the head from Blood’n gut Varley. Too bloody clever by half. But you don’t fool me.”
Other than that, the calculated risk had paid off. As a new commander, he had aimed to short-circuit the powerful in-group feeling which had built up in the old crew. He had put himself on the same side in a line up against the top brass. Also, if there were any lingering doubts about the Terrapin affair, he had made it clear that it was not any failure of nerve or expertise on his part.
Fletcher’s own mind was still tightly closed to any E.S.P. probe, except that she judged he was waiting for something else.
When the summons from Varley came, as he had known it would, there was a brief surge of unease. He was not too sure how it would work out at that.
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