Dilullo considered, his hands poised over the controls. "The shields won't hold for long, you know. We aren't a heavy."
"They won't have to hold long if you go fast enough."
"I may kill some men doing it."
"You're the skipper," Chane said. "You asked, I'm only answering. But they'll die anyway if the Starwolves get hold of you. And maybe not so cleanly."
"Yes," said Dilullo. "I guess you don't have to be an expert to know that, either. Full power, Bollard. And good luck all."
He brought his hands down onto the keys.
Braced against the girder, Chane felt the acceleration slam against him, driving his spine back into the steel. The fabric of the ship moaned around him, quivered, shuddered, swayed. He thought, She's breaking up! and tensed himself for the whistle of air through riven plates and a sight of the nebula above his head before he died. Through the viewplate he could see the fiery veils curling past, whipped like sea-mist over their onrushing bow. Something struck them. The ship jarred and rolled. Brush lightning burned blue inside the bridge room and there was a smell of ozone. But the shield held. The ship rushed on, gaining speed. There were brutal sounds of men in agony. Chane watched Dilullo. A second blow struck. Bollard's voice, thick and choking, said, "I don't know, John. Maybe once more."
"Hope for twice," said Dilullo.
Now there was something ahead of them, dark and solid in the glow. A Starwolf cruiser, diving in to block them.
"Their reactions are faster than ours," Dilullo said in a strange half-laughing voice, and drove straight toward it.
Chane was standing now, bent forward, his belly tight and his blood pounding gloriously. He wanted to shout, Go ahead; do it the Starwolf way! Drive, because they won't believe you have the strength or the guts to do it! Make him step aside; make him give way!
The next two blows hit them head on. Chane could see them coming, buds of destruction loosed by the Starwolf ship to burst into full bloom against their shield. He could picture the man guiding that ship ... man, yes, human, yes, but different, shaped by the savage world of Varna to a sleek-furred magnificence of strength and speed ... the face high-boned, flat-cheeked, smiling, the long slanted eyes, cat-bright with the excitement of the chase. He would be thinking, "They're only men, not Varnans. They'll turn back. They'll turn back."
Somebody was shouting to Dilullo, "Sheer off; you'll crash him!" Several people were shouting. The small cruiser seemed to leap toward them, heading straight for the eyebrow bridge and the viewport. In a couple of seconds they would have it in their laps. The cries reached a peak of hysteria and lapsed into hypnotized silence. Dilullo held course and velocity, so rigidly that Chane wondered if he was dead at his post. The Star-wolf cruiser was so close now that he thought he could almost make out the shape of the pilot behind the curved port, and he tasted something in his mouth, something coppery, and knew that it was fear.
He thought he saw the face of the Starwolf pilot soften into disbelief, into belated understanding....
In a sudden swerve that would have killed any other living thing, the cruiser went aside past their starboard bow. Chane waited for the grinding crunch of a sideswipe, but there was none.
They were out of the globe, and clear.
The viewport blanked as they passed over into jump velocity, became again a viewscreen. Dilullo leaned back in his chair and looked at Chane, his hard face looking broken in the fireglow, mottled dark in the hollows and squeezed white over the bones.
"Respite," he said. "They'll come again." His voice was harsh and reedy, his lungs laboring for breath.
"But you're alive," said Chane. "It's only when you're dead that there isn't any chance at all." He stared at Dilullo and shook his head. "I've never seen anything better done."
"And you never will," Dilullo said, "until I kill you." He half fell out of the chair, looked at Gomez, shook him, then jerked a thumb at the controls. "Take over while I check the damage."
Chane sat down in the pilot's chair. The ship was slow and heavy under his hands, but it was good to feel any kind of a ship again. He sent it plunging deeper into the nebula, threading the denser clouds where it might be a little harder to follow.
Dilullo came back and took the controls again until Gomez could relieve him. One man was dead, and there were four sickbay cases, including General Mar-kolin. No one but Morgan Chane was in good shape.
They dropped back into normal space in the heart of a parsec-long serpent of flame that coiled across a dozen suns.
Bixel, who had had some rest and stopped his nosebleed, sat watching his radar screen. The men slept. Even Dilullo slept, stretched out on a bench in the bridge room. Chane dozed, while time crept by with a kind of dazed sluggishness ... so much time that Chane began to hope that the hunters had given up.
But it was only a hope, and it vanished when Bixel pushed the alarm button and cried out over the intercom, "Here they come again."
Well, thought Chane, it was a good try, anyway. A damned good try.
XIV
The bright relentless little sparks flew swiftly across the radar screen. Dilullo looked at them, a cold dull sickness at the pit of his stomach. Damn them. Damn Morgan Chane and his own smartness in keeping him alive. If he hadn't kept him ...
He would be in just as much trouble, Dilullo told himself. The wolfpack was never known to let any promising prey slip through its jaws, and a Merc ship could be carrying anything ... like, say, a fortune in lightstones for the payroll.
And yet ...
He looked at Chane through the doorway, sitting quiet in the bridge room, and considered what would happen if he dropped him out of a hatchway, suited and attached to a signal flare.
He looked at the spark again, racing towards him, and he was suddenly angry. He was so angry he shook with it, and the cold sickness in him was burned away. Damn these arrogant whelps of Starwolves. He wasn't going to give up anything. Not because he knew it wouldn't stop them anyway, but because he wasn't going to be pushed and knocked around like a little boy unable to defend himself against the big boys. It was too humiliating.
He strode back to the pilot's chair and strapped in, his body protesting in every fiber as he did so. He told it to shut up.
Gomez protested, and he told him to shut up, too.
"But, John, the men can't take any more. Neither can the ship."
"Okay," said Dilullo. "Then let's see to it that there's not one shred of bone or meat left for those wolves to snap their teeth on." He shouted over the intercom to Bollard: "Full power and never mind the shields."
He could see the ships now. Over his shoulder he said to Chane, "Come on up here, where you can get a good view."
Chane stood behind him, against the girder. "What are you going to do?"
"I'm going to make them destroy us," Dilullo said, and pressed the keys.
The Merc ship leaped forward, toward the oncoming squadron.
Bixel's voice blasted over the intercom. "John, I've got another one, a heavy. A heavy! Coming up on our tail!"
It was a moment before that registered. Dilullo was committed now to angry death, his whole attention fixed on the Starwolf ships. He heard Bixel all right, and he heard others shouting at him, but they were somewhere beyond a wall.
Then Morgan Chane's fingers closed on his shoulder in a grip so painful that he couldn't ignore it, and Chane was saying, "Heavy cruiser! It must be Vhollan ... the guard force Thrandirin talked about. They must have been looking out for us ... picked us up when we came within range of their probes."
Dilullo's mind broke out of frozen rage and began to work at full speed. "Get a fix!" he snapped to Bixel. "Estimated course and velocity." He looked at the Starwolf ships again, this time with a kind of fiendish pleasure. "Shields up, Bollard! Shields up! We're going to give our Starwolf friends something big to play with. Gomez ... hit that aft monitor screen."
He could see the formation of little Starwolf ships ahead of him very clearly. It was shap
ing into a flying U, the wings stretching out almost fondly to enfold him.
Below the viewport a screen flickered to life bringing him a picture of what was behind him. A big starcruiser loomed out of the nebula drift, closing fast. He wondered what the skipper was thinking as he saw and recognized the Starwolf squadron. He thought it must be something of a shock to him, having come after one small Merc ship only to find that the Vhollans' private preserves had been invaded by a much more numerous and deadly enemy.
It must be something of a shock to the Starwolves, too ... seeing a heavy cruiser where they had expected only an exhausted prey.
. The ship-to-ship band sprang to life. A man's voice shouted in sputtering galacto, "Mercs! This is the Vhol-lan cruiser. Cut power immediately or we'll disable you."
Dilullo opened his transmitter and said, "Dilullo talking. What about the Starwolves?"
"We'll take care of them."
"That's nice," Dilullo said. "Thanks. But may I remind you that I have Thrandirin and two generals aboard. I wouldn't want to take any chances with their safety."
"Neither would I," said the Vhollan voice grimly, "but my orders are to stop you first and worry about your hostages second. Is that clear?"
"Perfectly," said Dilullo, and notched his power up two steps. The ship jumped forward and he began to yaw it back and forth so that it ran toward the Star-wolves the way a fox runs, never giving a clean target for a shot. It was hard on the ship, hard on the men, but not nearly so hard as the licking force-beam of the cruiser that missed them because of it.
The Starwolf formation was breaking up and scattering, so as not to provide a bunched-up target for the cruiser. It was almost in the nature of an afterthought that they fired at the Merc ship. It bucked and rolled twice as the missiles impacted on its screen, and then it was through the squadron, going away and going fast, and the monitor screen showed behind him the big Vhollan cruiser and the Starwolf ships locked in battle, the swift wicked little ships darting and snapping at the huge heavy like dogs around a bear.
Dilullo glanced up and saw Chane's black eyes fixed upon the monitor, his expression both relieved and regretful.
Dilullo said, "I'm sorry we can't stay around to see who wins."
The battle faded, left behind in the glowing mists, and then even the mists were left behind as the Merc ship climbed into overdrive.
Chane said, with a ring of pride he could not quite conceal, "They'll keep that heavy busy, all right. It has the weight, but they have the speed. They won't try to crush it ... but if nobody else interrupts, they'll just sting it to death."
"I hope they all have fun," said Dilullo edgedly, and spoke into the intercom. "Bixel, did you get an ECV?"
"I'm feeding it into the computer now. I'll have the backtrack in a minute."
They waited. Dilullo saw that Chane was studying him with a new expression ... what would you call it? Respect? Admiration?
"You were really going to do it," Chane said. "Make them destroy us so they couldn't get anything."
"These Starwolves," said Dilullo, "are too sure of themselves. Somebody, someday, is going to stand up and surprise the life out of them."
Chane said, "I wouldn't have believed that once, but now I'm not so sure."
"Here it is," said Gomez, the computer tape chattering out under his hand.
Gomez studied the tape and set up a pattern on the sky-board. "Extrapolating from estimated course and velocity, the cruiser probably came from this area." He punched the identifying coordinates and a microchart slid over the magnification lens and filled the area bounded by the pattern. Dilullo leaned over to study it.
The area was part of the coiled fire-snake, that part that might be likened to the head. At about the place where a parsecs-long fire-snake might have an eye, there was a star. A green star, with five planetary bodies, only one of which was large enough to be rightfully called a planet.
Dilullo became aware of somebody looking over his shoulder. It was Bollard, his round face still placid in spite of some ugly blotches that might be bruises or burst veins.
"Everything okay in engineering?" Dilullo asked.
"All okay. Though we don't deserve it."
"Then I suppose we'd better have a look at that."
Bollard frowned at the green star, the baleful eye of the fire-snake.
"Might or might not be the place, John."
"We'll never know till we look, will we?"
"I won't even answer that. Do you think you can sneak in behind that cruiser while it's busy with our Starwolf friends?"
"I can try."
"Sure you can try. But don't get too biggity just because you bulled down a Starwolf. One cruiser found us, but if one cruiser was all they had on guard they'd never have sent it away to look. There must be another one waiting planetside, watching to see if we slip by. And they'll know by now that we have."
"Thanks, Bollard," said Dilullo. "Now go back down and encourage your drive-units."
He set the course for the green sun.
They dropped back into normal space dangerously near to a band of drift between the two little outer worlds of the system of the green star, and they hid there, pretending to be an asteroid circling lazily with all the others in the misty, curdled light, the thick nebula gases glowing icy green here instead of the warm gold around the yellow stars. It made Dilullo feel cold and oddly claustrophobic. He found himself gasping for breath and wondered what was the matter with him, and then he remembered how once when he was a child he had lain drowning at the bottom of a pool of still green water.
He shook the nightmare away, reminding himself that his father had come in time to save him, but that Daddy wasn't here now and it was up to him.
He went into the navigation room to check with Bix-el. There was a lot of clutter on the long-range probe scanner screen. It took a while to sort things out, but there was no doubt about the result.
"Another heavy cruiser," Bixel said. "On station by the planet, flying an intercept patrol pattern. We haven't got a chance of getting past him."
"Well," said Dilullo, "at least we know we're in the right place."
He went back into the bridge room, shoving past Bollard in the doorway. Bollard said, "What now?"
"Give me five minutes to think up a brilliant plan," Dilullo said.
Chane beckoned to him. He was standing beside Rutledge at the radio control center. Rutledge had opened the ship-to-ship channel, and Dilullo could hear voices crackling back and forth in Vhollan.
"That's the two cruisers—the one fighting the Star-wolves and the one at the planet ahead," Chane said. "They're doing an awful lot of talking." He smiled, and again there was that touch of pride only half hidden. "They sound pretty upset."
"They have a right to be," said Dilullo. "Not only us invading their privacy, but a flock of Starwolves. Go get Thrandirin up here. He can translate."
Chane went out. Dilullo listened to the voices. They did sound upset, and increasingly so. Because he had made the relatively short jump in overdrive, the actual lapse of time since they left the battle was not great, and it sounded as though it was still going on... the two cruiser captains were shouting back and forth at each other now, and Dilullo grinned.
"Sounds like one of 'em is yelling for help and the other one is telling him he can't come."
He fell silent as Chane came in with Thrandirin. He watched the Vhollan's face, saw his expression change as he heard the heated voices on the radio.
"The Starwolves are giving your cruiser a hard time, aren't they?" he asked.
Thrandirin nodded.
"Will the one at the planet go to help him?"
"No. The orders are quite clear. One cruiser is to remain on station at all times, regardless of what happens."
The voices on the radio stopped yelling and one of them said something in a cold, hard matter-of-fact tone. After that there was a silence. Dilullo watched Thrandir-in's face, not unaware of Chane standing behind the Vhollan
with a half-smile on his mouth and his ears pricked forward.
The second voice answered in what sounded like a brief affirmative. He could almost see the face of the man making jt, a man heavily burdened with decision. And Thrandirin said angrily, "No!"
"What did they say?" asked Dilullo.
Thrandirin shook his head. Dilullo said, "Well, if you won't tell us we'll wait and see."
They waited. There was no more talk from the radio. The bridge room was quite silent. Everybody stood or sat like statues, not sure what it was they waited for. Then Bixel's voice came sharply over the intercom.
"John! The one at the planet is breaking out of pattern."
"Is he coming this way?"
"No. Heading off at an angle of fourteen degrees, with twice that much azimuth. Going fast." And then Bixel cried, "He's jumped into overdrive. I've lost him."
"Now," Dilullo said to Thrandirin. "What did they say?"
Thrandirin looked at him with weary hatred. "He has gone to help the other cruiser against the Starwolves. He had to make a choice ... and he decided that they were a far greater threat than you."
"Not very complimentary to us," said Dilullo. "But I won't quarrel, since it leaves the planet clear."
"Yes, it does," said Thrandirin. "Go ahead and land. There's no one to stop you now. And when our cruisers have finished with the Starwolves, they'll come back and catch you on the ground and stamp you flat."
Bollard said, "For once I agree with him, John."
"Yes," said Dilullo, "so do I. You want to turn back now?"
"What?" said Bollard. "And waste all the trouble that we've been through?"
He hurried off to his drive-units. Chane, full of private laughter, took Thrandirin away.
Dilullo took the Merc ship out of the drift and full speed in toward the planet.
XV
It would have been easier, Dilullo thought, if they knew what they were looking for. But they didn't, and they didn't even know how long they had to look for it, except that it might not be long enough. Dilullo had found a chance to speak to Chane alone.
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