As Flandry watched, a man stiffened in his seat. His hands shook a little when he ripped off a printout and gave it to his pacing superior. That officer strode to an intercom and called the command bridge. Flandry listened and nodded.
"Tell me," Dragoika begged. "I feel so alone here."
"Shhh!"
Announcement: "Now hear this. Now hear this. Captain to all officers and men. It is known that there are six Merseian warships in Saxo orbit. They have gone hyper and are seeking junction with the two bogies in pursuit of New Brazil. We detect scrambled communication between these various units. It is expected they will attack us. First contact is estimated in ten minutes. Stand by to open fire upon command. The composition of the hostiles is—"
Flandry showed Dragoika the tank. Half a dozen sparks drove outward from the luminous globelet which represented her sun. "They are one light cruiser, about like our Umbriel, and five destroyers. Then ahead, remember, we have a battleship and a quite heavy destroyer."
"Eight against five of us." Tendrils rose behind the faceplate, fur crackled, the lost child dropped out of her and she said low and resonant: "But we will catch those first two by themselves."
"Right. I wonder . . . ." Flandry tried a different setting. It should have been blocked off, but someone had forgotten and he looked over Captain Einarsen's shoulder.
Yes, a Merseian in the outercom screen! And a high-ranking one, too.
"—interdicted region," he said in thickly accented Anglic. "Turn back at once."
"His Majesty's government does not recognize interdictions in unclaimed space," Einarsen said. "You will interfere with us at your peril."
"Where are you bound? What is your purpose?"
"That is of no concern to you, Fodaich. My command is bound on its lawful occasions. Do we pass peacefully or must we fight?"
Flandry translated for Dragoika as he listened. The Merseian paused, and she whispered: "He will say we can go on, surely. Thus he can join the others."
Flandry wiped his brow. The room felt hot, and he stank with perspiration in his suit. "I wish you'd been born in our civilization," he said. "You have a Navy mind."
"Pass, then," the Merseian said slowly. "Under protest, I let you by."
Flandry leaned forward, gripping a table edge, struggling not to shout what Einarsen must do.
The Terran commander said, "Very good. But in view of the fact that other units are moving to link with yours, I am forced to require guarantees of good faith. You will immediately head due galactic north at full speed, without halt until I return to Saxo."
"Outrageous! You have no right—"
"I have the right of my responsibility for this squadron. If your government wishes to protest to mine, let it do so. Unless you withdraw as requested, I shall consider your intentions hostile and take appropriate measures. My compliments to you, sir. Good day." The screen was blanked.
Flandry switched away from Einarsen's expressionless countenance and stood shaking. There trickled through the turmoil in him, I guess an old-line officer does have as much sense as a fresh-caught ensign.
When he brought Dragoika up to date, she said coolly, "Let us see that tank again."
The Merseians ahead were not heeding the Terran order. They were, though, sheering off, one in either direction, obviously hoping to delay matters until help arrived. Einarsen didn't cooperate. Like a wolf brought to bay, New Brazil turned on her lesser pursuer. Murdoch's Land hurried to her aid. On the other side, Umbriel and Sabik herself accelerated toward the Merseian battlewagon. Antarctica continued as before, convoying the scoutboats.
"Here we go," Flandry said between clenched jaws. His first space battle, as terrifying, bewildering, and exalting as his first woman. He lusted to be in a gun turret. After dogging his faceplate, he sought an exterior view.
For a minute, nothing was visible but stars. Then the ship boomed and shuddered. She had fired a missile salvo: the monster missiles which nothing smaller than a battleship could carry, which had their own hyperdrives and phase-in computers. He could not see them arrive. The distance was as yet too great. But close at hand, explosions burst in space, one immense fireball after another, swelling, raging, and vanishing. Had the screen carried their real intensity, his eyeballs would have melted. Even through airlessness, he felt the buffet of expanding gases; the deck rocked and the hull belled.
"What was that?" Dragoika cried.
"The enemy shot at us. We managed to intercept and destroy his missiles with smaller ones. Look there." A lean metal thing prowled across the screen. "It seeks its own target. We have a cloud of them out."
Again and again energies ran wild. One blast almost knocked Flandry off his feet. His ears buzzed from it. He tuned in on damage control. The strike had been so near that the hull was bashed open. Bulkheads sealed off that section. A gun turret was wrecked, its crew blown to fragments. But another nearby reported itself still functional. Behind heavy material and electromagnetic shielding, its men had not gotten a lethal dose of radiation: not if they received medical help within a day. They stayed at their post.
Flandry checked the tank once more. Faster than either battleship, Umbriel had overhauled her giant foe. When drive fields touched, she went out of phase, just sufficient to be unhittable, not enough that her added mass did not serve as a drag. The Merseian must be trying to get in phase and wipe her out before—No, here Sabik came!
Generators that powerful extended their fields for a long radius. When she first intermeshed, the enemy seemed a toy, lost among so many stars. But she grew in the screen, a shark, a whale, Leviathan in steel, bristling with weapons, livid with lightnings.
The combat was not waged by living creatures. Not really. They did nothing but serve guns, tend machines, and die. When such speeds, masses, intensities met, robots took over. Missile raced at missile; computer matched wits with computer in the weird dance of phasing. Human and Merseian hands did operate blaster cannon, probing, searing, slicing through metal like a knife through flesh. But their chance of doing important harm, in the short time they had, was small.
Fire sheeted across space. Thunder brawled in hulls. Decks twisted, girders buckled, plates melted. An explosion pitched Flandry and Dragoika down. They lay in each other's arms, bruised, bleeding, deafened, while the storm prevailed.
And passed.
Slowly, incredulously, they climbed to their feet. Shouts from outside told them their eardrums were not ruptured. The door sagged and smoke curled through. Chemical extinguishers rumbled. Someone called for a medic. The voice was raw with pain.
The screen still worked. Flandry glimpsed Umbriel before relative speed made her unseeable. Her bows gaped open, a gun barrel was bent in a quarter circle, plates resembled seafoam where they had liquefied and congealed. But she ran yet. And so did Sabik.
He looked and listened awhile before he could reconstruct the picture for Dragoika. "We got them. Our two destroyers took care of the enemy's without suffering much damage. We're hulled in several places ourselves, three turrets and a missile launcher are knocked out, some lines leading from the main computer bank are cut, we're using auxiliary generators till the engineers can fix the primary one, and the casualties are pretty bad. We're operational, though, sort of."
"What became of the battleship we fought?"
"We sank a warhead in her midriff. One megaton, I believe . . . no, you don't know about that, do you? She's dust and gas."
The squadron reunited and moved onward. Two tiny green flecks in the tank detached themselves and hastened ahead. "See those? Our scoutboats. We have to screen them while they perform their task. This means we have to fight those Merseians from Saxo."
"Six of them to five of us," Dragoika counted. "Well, the odds are improving. And then, we have a bigger ship, this one, than remains to them."
Flandry watched the green lights deploy. The objective was to prevent even one of the red sparks from getting through and attacking the scouts. This invited annihilatio
n in detail, but—Yes, evidently the Merseian commander had told off one of his destroyers to each of Einarsen's. That left him with his cruiser and two destroyers against Sabik and Umbriel, which would have been fine were the latter pair not half crippled. "I'd call the odds even, myself," Flandry said. "But that may be good enough. If we stand off the enemy for . . . a couple of hours, I'd guess . . . we've done what we were supposed."
"But what is that, Dommaneek? You spoke only of some menace out here." Dragoika took him by the shoulders and regarded him levelly. "Can you not tell me?"
He could, without violating any secrecy that mattered any longer. But he didn't want to. He tried to stall, and hoped the next stage of combat would begin before she realized what he was doing. "Well," he said, "we have news about, uh, an object. What the scouts must do is go to it, find out what it is like, and plot its path. They'll do that in an interesting way. They'll retreat from it, faster than light, so they can take pictures of it not where it is at this moment but where it was at different times in the past. Since they know where to look, their instruments can pinpoint it at more than a light year. That is, across more than a year of time. On such basis, they can easily calculate how it will move for the next several years to come."
Again dread stirred behind her eyes. "They can reach over time itself?" she whispered. "To the past and its ghosts? You dare too much, you vaz-Terran. One night the hidden powers will set free their anger on you."
He bit his lip—and winced, for it was swollen where his face had been thrown against a mouth-control radio switch. "I often wonder if that may not be so, Dragoika. But what can we do? Our course was set for us ages agone, before ever we left our home world, and there is no turning back."
"Then . . . you fare bravely." She straightened in her armor. "I may do no less. Tell me what the thing is that you hunt through time."
"It—" The ship recoiled. A drumroll ran. "Missiles fired off! We're engaging!"
Another salvo and another. Einarsen must be shooting off every last hyperdrive weapon in his magazines. If one or two connected, they might decide the outcome. If not, then none of his present foes could reply in kind.
Flandry saw, in the tank, how the Merseian destroyers scattered. They could do little but try to outdodge those killers, or outphase them if field contact was made. As formation broke up, Murdoch's Land and Antarctica closed in together on a single enemy of their class. That would be slugfest, minor missiles and energy cannon and artillery, more slow and perhaps more brutal than the nearly abstract encounter between two capital ships, but also somehow more human.
The volleys ended. Dragoika howled. "Look, Dommaneek! A red light went out! There! First blood for us!"
"Yes . . . yes, we did get a destroyer. Whoopee!" The exec announced it on the intercom, and cheers sounded faintly from those who still had their faceplates open. The other missiles must have been avoided or parried, and by now were destroying themselves lest they become threats to navigation. Max Abrams would have called that rule a hopeful sign.
Another Merseian ship sped to assist the one on which the two Terrans were converging, while New Brazil and a third enemy stalked each other. Umbriel limped on an intercept course for the heavy cruiser and her attendant. Those drove straight for Sabik, which lay in wait licking her wounds.
The lights flickered and died. They came back, but feebly. So there was trouble with the spare powerplant, too. And damn, damn, damn, Flandry couldn't do a thing except watch that tank!
The cruiser's escort detached herself and ran toward Umbriel to harry and hinder. Flandry clenched his teeth till his jaws ached. "The greenskins can see we have problems here," he said. "They figure a cruiser can take us. And they may be right."
Red crept up on green. "Stand by for straight-phase engagement," said the intercom.
"What did that mean?" Dragoika asked.
"We can't dodge till a certain machine has been fixed." It was as near as Flandry could come to saying in Kursovikian that phase change was impossible. "We shall have to sit and shoot."
Sabik wasn't quite a wingless duck. She could revert to sublight, though that was a desperation maneuver. At superlight, the enemy must be in phase with her to inflict damage, and therefore equally vulnerable. But the cruiser did, now, possess an extra capability of eluding her opponent's fire. Sabik had no shield except her antimissiles. To be sure, she was better supplied with those.
It looked as if a toe-to-toe match was coming.
"Hyperfield contact made," said the intercom. "All units fire at will."
Flandry switched to exterior view. The Merseian zigzagged among the stars. Sometimes she vanished, always she reappeared. She was a strictly spacegoing vessel, bulged at the waist like a double-ended pear. Starlight and shadow picked out her armament. Dragoika hissed in a breath. Again fire erupted.
A titan's fist smote. A noise so enormous that it transcended noise bellowed through the hull. Bulkheads split asunder. The deck crashed against Flandry. He whirled into night.
Moments later he regained consciousness. He was falling, falling, forever, and blind . . . no, he thought through the ringing in his head, the lights were out, the gravs were out, he floated free amidst the moan of escaping air. Blood from his nose formed globules which, weightless, threatened to strangle him. He sucked to draw them down his throat. "Dragoika!" he rasped. "Dragoika!"
Her helmet beam sprang forth. She was a shadow behind it, but the voice came clear and taut: "Dommaneek, are you hale? What happened? Here, here is my hand."
"We took a direct hit." He shook himself, limb by limb, felt pain boil in his body but marveled that nothing appeared seriously injured. Well, space armor was designed to take shocks. "Nothing in here is working, so I don't know what the ship's condition is. Let's try to find out. Yes, hang onto me. Push against things, not too hard. It's like swimming. Do you feel sick?"
"No. I feel as in a dream, nothing else." She got the basic technique of null-gee motion fast.
They entered the corridor. Undiffused, their lamplight made dull puddles amidst a crowding murk. Ribs thrust out past twisted, buckled plates. Half of a spacesuited man drifted in a blood-cloud which Flandry must wipe off his helmet. No radio spoke. The silence was of a tomb.
The nuclear warhead that got through could not have been very large. But where it struck, ruin was total. Elsewhere, though, forcefields, bulkheads, baffles, breakaway lines had given what protection they could. Thus Flandry and Dragoika survived. Did anyone else? He called and called, but got no answer.
A hole filled with stars yawned before him. He told her to stay put and flitted forth on impellers. Saxo, nearly the brightest of the diamond points around him, transited the specter arch of the Milky Way. It cast enough light for him to see. The fragment of ship from which he had emerged spun slowly—luck, that, or Coriolis force would have sickened him and perhaps her. An energy cannon turret looked intact. Further off tumbled larger pieces, ugly against cold serene heaven.
He tried his radio again, now when he was outside screening metal. With her secondary engines gone, the remnants of Sabik had reverted to normal state. "Ensign Flandry from Section Four. Come in, anyone. Come in!"
A voice trickled through. Cosmic interference seethed behind it. "Commander Ranjit Singh in Section Two. I am assuming command unless a superior officer turns out to be alive. Report your condition."
Flandry did. "Shall we join you, sir?" he finished.
"No. Check that gun. Report whether it's in working order. If so, man it."
"But sir, we're disabled. The cruiser's gone on to fight elsewhere. Nobody'll bother with us."
"That remains to be seen, Ensign. If the battle pattern should release a bogie, he may decide he'll make sure of us. Go to your gun."
"Aye, aye, sir."
Dead bodies floated in the turret. They were not mutilated; but two or three roentgens must have sleeted through all shielding. Flandry and Dragoika hauled them out and cast them adrift. As they dwindled among the st
ars, she sang to them the Song of Mourning. I wouldn't mind such a sendoff, he thought.
The gun was useable. Flandry rehearsed Dragoika in emergency manual control. They'd alternate at the hydraulic aiming system and the handwheel which recharged the batteries that drove it. She was as strong as he.
Thereafter they waited. "I never thought to die in a place like this," she said. "But my end will be in battle, and with the finest of comrades. How we shall yarn, in the Land of Trees Beyond!"
"We might survive yet," he said. Starlight flashed off the teeth in his bruised and blood-smeared face.
"Don't fool yourself. Unworthy of you."
"Unworthy my left one! I plain don't intend to quit till I'm dead."
"I see. Maybe that is what has made you vaz-Terran great."
The Merseian came.
She was a destroyer. Umbriel, locked in combat with the badly hurt enemy cruiser, had inflicted grave harm on her, too. Murdoch's Land was shattered, Antarctica out of action until repairs could be made, but they had accounted for two of her fellows. New Brazil dueled yet with the third. This fourth one suffered from a damaged hyperdrive alternator. Until her sweating engineers could repair it, which would take an hour or so, her superlight speed was a crawl; any vessel in better shape could wipe her from the universe. Her captain resolved he would go back to where the remnants of Sabik orbited and spend the interim cleaning them out. For the general order was that none but Merseians might enter this region and live.
She flashed into reality. Her missiles were spent, but guns licked with fire-tongues and shells. The main part of the battleship's dismembered hulk took their impact, glowed, broke, and returned the attack.
"Yow-w-w!" Dragoika's yell was pure exultation. She spun the handwheel demoniacally fast. Flandry pushed himself into the saddle. His cannon swung about. The bit of hull counter-rotated. He adjusted, got the destroyer's after section in his cross-hairs, and pulled the trigger.
Capacitors discharged. Their energy content was limited; that was why the gun must be laid by hand, to conserve every last erg for revenge. Flame spat across kilometers. Steel sublimed. A wound opened. Air gushed forth, white with condensing water vapor.
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