Catch the Star Winds

by A Bertram Chandler

  "This contains the decode. TOP SECRET—YOUR EYES ONLY. To Be Destroyed By Fire Before Reading—and all the rest of it. When it comes to playing childish games the Admiralty is at least as bad as anybody else. And this message concerns us all in this vessel.

  "Navy has an intelligence service, you know. According to Sonya it's not a patch on the intelligence branch of the Federation Survey Service, but its officers do flap their ears and twitch their little pink noses now and again. Unluckily Admiral Kravitz didn't get his paws on their reports concerning the Duchy of Waldegren until after we'd sailed."

  "Waldegren?"

  "Yes. It seems that our people managed to plant some monitor buoys in the territorial space of the Duchy. I've heard those gadgets described as miracles of miniaturization. See all, hear all, and punch it all back to Port Forlorn on tight-beam Carlotti in one coded parcel before the automatic self-destruction. And that, of course, occurs when anything approaches within ten kilometers.

  "Well, there's been something going on around Darnstadt—the fortress planet, so-called. There's a photograph of a lightjammer under sail. There are monitored signals—both Carlotti and NST." He tapped the sheet of paper. "Kravitz sent me translations of some of the messages. 'Clear of atmosphere, making sail.' 'Arrange berthage for prize.' The sort of things you send just after departure and just prior to arrival."

  "I don't take any prizes, Commodore."

  "You might yet." Grimes looked at his watch. "Time we went to see Mr. Fowler get a prize for good shooting."

  "Didn't you specialize in gunnery yourself, sir, when you were in the Survey Service?"

  "At one time, yes. But I never had a practice shoot at point eight the speed of light. This should be interesting."

  "Surely no more so than any other practice shoot, Commodore. As far as the target rocket and the ship are concerned, there'll be no great relative velocities. The target will just run parallel to us once it's been launched. If it took evasive action it would drop astern too fast for Fowler to get a shot at it. We're still accelerating, you know."

  "Mphm?" Grimes locked away the message. "Let's go to watch the fireworks."

  * * *

  THE watchkeeper—Denby, the second officer—and all off-duty officers were in the control room. Sonya was there, too, as was Sandra. Major Trent was there, accompanied by his sergeant. Wallasey, the third officer, was assisting Lieutenant Fowler. The gunnery officer sat at his fire control console. Young Wallasey was at the smaller set of controls, part of the ship's normal equipment, from which signal and sounding rockets were handled. He was managing to look at least as important as Fowler.

  "Let battle commence!" whispered Grimes to Sonya.

  Fowler overheard this and scowled. But he said nothing. Commodores, even commodores on the Reserve List, were entitled to their pleasantries at the expense of mere lieutenants.

  "Targets in readiness, Mr. Fowler," reported Wallasey.

  "Thank you, Mr. Wallasey," replied Fowler stiffly. Then, to Grimes: "Permission to commence practice shoot, sir?"

  "This is Captain Listowel's ship, Mr. Fowler," said Grimes.

  The young man flushed and repeated his question to Listowel. "Carry on, Mr. Fowler."

  "Fire one," he ordered.

  "Fire one," repeated Wallasey.

  Grimes, looking aft with the others, saw the gout of blue flame, intensely bright against the black backdrop with its sparse scattering of stars, as the missile was ejected from its launching tube. It fell away from the ship on a slightly divergent course, pulling ahead, but slowly, at first.

  "Open the range, Mr. Wallasey," ordered Fowler.

  "Range opening. One kilometer. Two. Four. Ten—"

  The rocket now was only a bright spark against the darkness.

  Fowler worked at his console. Abaft the control room but forward of the masts and sails the quadruple rods of the starboard laser battery turned and wavered like the hunting antennae of some huge insect. "Fire—" muttered Fowler to himself. A faint glow showed at the tips of the rods, nothing more. Here there was no air, with its floating dust motes, to be heated to incandescence. Out to starboard the bright spark persisted, neither extinguished nor flaring into sudden explosion.

  Fowler muttered something about the calibration of his sights, then ordered, "Close the range."

  "Range closing, Mr. Fowler. Ten. Nine. Eight—damn!"

  "What's wrong?"

  "Burnout." The bright spark had vanished now.

  "All right. Fire two."

  "Fire two."

  The second missile was thrown from its tube.

  "Range, Mr. Wallasey?"

  "One kilometer. Opening."

  "Hold at one kilometer." Then, to himself: "It's right in the sights. I can't miss—"

  "But you're doing just that," remarked Grimes.

  "But I can't be!" Fowler sounded desperate. "With a single cannon, perhaps. But not with a battery of four. And the sights can't be out."

  Grimes grunted thoughtfully. Then: "Tell me, Mr. Fowler, has anybody ever tried to use laser in these conditions before?"

  "From a lightjammer, you mean, sir? From a ship traveling at almost the speed of light?"

  "Yes."

  "You know that this is the first time, sir."

  "And it's been an interesting experiment, hasn't it? Oh, I could be wrong, but I have a sort of vision of photons being dispersed like water from the spray nozzle of a hose. Perhaps if the ship were not accelerating the tight, coherent beam would be maintained. . . Is there a physicist in the house?"

  "You know there's not," said Sonya sharply.

  "Unfortunate, but true. So in these conditions our laser is about as effective as a searchlight and we've nobody to tell us what to do about it."

  Fowler was slumped in his seat, a picture of dejection. He was a gunnery officer whose weapons were as lethal as toy pistols. "Cheer up," Grimes told him. "I've a job for you."

  "But what is there for me to do, sir? As you've pointed out already, I'm not a physicist."

  "But you are a weapons specialist." Grimes turned to Wailasey. "How many rockets have you left?"

  "Six, sir."

  "Then I suggest that you and Mr. Fowler, assisted by the engineering staff, convert them into weapons."

  "What about warheads?"

  Grimes sighed heavily. "You'd never have made a living as a cannoneer in the early days of artillery, Mr. Fowler. Those old boys used to cast their own cannon and mix their own powder—and they didn't have the ingredients that we have aboard this ship. Ammonium nitrate, for example—one of the chemical fertilizers we use in the hydroponic tanks. We should be able to cook up something packing far more of a wallop than gunpowder."

  "You're convinced that we shall need weapons, John?" put in Sonya.

  "I'm not convinced of anything. But somebody once said—Cromwell, wasn't it?—'Trust in God, and keep your powder dry.' Furthermore, my dear, this vessel is rated as an auxiliary cruiser, a unit of the Rim Worlds Navy. Our lords and masters of the Admiralty have, in their wisdom, equipped her with weaponry. We have discovered that this weaponry is useless. So—we improvise."

  "I'm surprised," she said, "that you don't follow in the footsteps of your piratical ancestor and fit Pamir out with a couple of broadsides of muzzle-loading cannon."

  A slow smile spread over Grimes' rugged features. "Why not?" he murmured happily. "Why not?"

  * * *

  All deep space ships carry a a biochemist. In large passenger vessels and warships he is a departmental head, but usually he is one of the officers who has been put through a crash course and looks after the life-support systems in addition to his other duties. Pamir's biochemist was Sandra Listowel, who was also purser and catering officer. Even a fulltime, fully qualified biochemist is not an industrial chemist. Sandra most certainly was not. Nonetheless, she succeeded—losing her eyebrows and a little more than half of her blond hair in the process—in brewing up a batch of what Grimes referred to as sort-of-kind-o
f amatol. After all, cooking oil is not toluene. Lieutenant Fowler, given the freedom of the engineer's workshop, was told to produce a half-dozen impact fuses. He was a good worker and not unintelligent but sadly lacking, Grimes concluded, in initiative. He was a good gunnery officer only when he had all the resources of a naval arsenal behind him.

  Grimes, however, loved improvising. Many years ago, when he had been Federation Survey Service lieutenant, commanding the courier Adder, he had made some missiles, using large plastic bottles as the casings and black powder as the propellant. After a browse through the chemical fertilizers in the "farm's" storerooms he decided that he had the necessary ingredients for more black powder. He wanted something relatively slow-burning for the weapons he had in mind.

  He had seen Pamir's manifest of cargo on the completion of loading. One item was a consignment of metal piping with a bore of 100 millimeters. Fortunately this was easily accessible in the hold. It was backbreaking work to lug the heavy sections out of their stowage and to the ship's workshop, but Major Trent's marines were able to accomplish this without too much grumbling. The pipe sections were cut to size, each two and a half meters in length. One end of each of the tubes was sealed with a heavy, welded flange. The crude cannon, eight of them, were beginning to take shape.

  There was no time to introduce too many refinements. Pamir had broken through the light barrier, was well away on the second leg of her voyage. It was when she decelerated, to complete the passage to Llanith under sail, that the pirate would strike. This was a probability if not a certainty. The evidence indicated that this was what had happened to Lord of the Isles and to Sea Witch.

  Grimes discussed the prospect with Listowel, Willoughby, Major Trent and Sonya. He said, "Let's face it. The principles of our lightjammers aren't secret. We're the only people who have had such ships simply because we're the only people with inhabited antimatter systems in our sector of space. But there have been articles aplenty in both scientific and shipping journals. And the Waldegrenese can read."

  "Waldegren?" asked Trent.

  "Yes. Waldegren. The Duchy has a bad record of harboring pirates," He spread a chart on Listowel's desk. "Now, just suppose that Waldegren is monitoring our traffic with Llanith on the Carlotti bands. Oh, I know that the beam between our two systems doesn't pass near any of the worlds of the Duchy—but a small relay station, possibly fully automated, could have been planted anywhere along the line of sight, if we knew just where to look for it we could find it. Mphm. Well, one of our lightjammers lifts off from Lorn. The routine message is sent. ETA and all the rest of it. Cargo such and such, consigned to so and so. Then the pirate—a lightjammer, of course—lifts off from Darnstadt. . . So far I've told only two people of the contents of the signal I received from Admiral Kravitz—Captain Listowel, of course, and Sonya. She helped with the decoding. But it all ties in. There has been lightjammer activity in the Duchy—and what would Waldegren want lightjammers for?"

  "Piracy," said Listowel.

  "Still, we must be careful. We aren't at war with Waldegren. The evidence indicates, however, that Waldegren has built at least one lightjammer. After all, the essential guts of such a ship, a sphere of antimatter, aren't all that hard to come by. There are other antimatter systems besides the Llanithi Consortium. But where was I? Oh, yes.

  "The pirate lifts off from Darnstadt, sets course and adjusts speed so as to intercept our ship as she decelerates to sub-light velocity. She jams the Carlotti bands, attacks, seizes."

  "And what about the passengers and crew?" asked Listowel.

  "If they're lucky, Captain, they'll be prisoners on Darnstadt. That's why we want to take prisoners ourselves."

  "The pirate," said Trent, "will probably be armed with rockets, or projectile cannon. Not laser—unless the Waldegren scientists have worked out some way of making it effective at near-light speeds. Quick-firing cannon, I'd say."

  "Quicker than your muzzle-loaders," said Sonya to Grimes.

  "Almost certainly," he agreed. "But surprise is a good weapon."

  III

  As Pamir sped through the nothingness the work of arming her progressed. Ahead of her blazed the stars, those toward which she was steering and those whose laggard light she was overhauling. Filters and shields protected her crew from the dangerous radiations that were a resultant of her velocity. Yet there was still visible light, harsh, intensely blue, light that should not have been seen but that, nonetheless, seemed to penetrate even opaque plating.

  But apart from the watch officers nobody had time to look out into space. Those cannon had to be finished and mounted. There was black powder to be mixed and tested, the charges to be packed in plastic bags. There were the springs to be contrived to carry and dampen the recoil of the guns. There were bags of shot to be made up.

  Pamir, fortunately, was so designed as to make the mounting of archaic cannon practicable. As a lightjammer, handled inside a planetary atmosphere like an airship, she was fitted with ballast tanks which, of course, were emptied on lift-off. Grimes decided to place his batteries, each of four guns, in the port and starboard wing tanks. To begin with, two crude airlocks were made and welded to the manhole doors leading into the compartments. Spacesuited and carrying laser tools the chief officer and the engineer went into the tanks, first to cut the gunports, then to strengthen the frames to take the weight of the artillery, the thrust of the recoil. The gun mountings were then passed in and welded into place.

  The pieces themselves slid in cradles and, on being fired, would be driven back against powerful springs, locking in the fully recoiled position. Loading was fast enough—first the bag of powder, then the shot, with a ramrod to shove all well home. Firing would have to be deferred until the guns were run out again. For firing Grimes had first considered electrical contacts, then some sort of flintlock. He was amused by his final solution—touchhole and slow match. Even though hand lasers were the slow matches—within the confines of the ship they worked well enough—the principle was a reversion to the very earliest days of firearms.

  Then there was the drilling of Trent's marines. They took it all cheerfully enough, making a game of it.

  Finally Grimes was satisfied with the rate of fire—although none of the guns had yet actually been fired—under simulated conditions.

  Grimes checked personally the ready-use lockers for the bagged charges, the lockers for the improvised shot, the arrangements for passing more ammunition through into the tanks should it become necessary, and communications. But there was one more problem. A row of gunports, with the muzzles of guns protruding, is easily detectable. He decided that the cannon would be retained in the fully recoiled position until just before firing and the ports concealed by sheets of plastic. He ordered, also, that the laser batteries be withdrawn into their recesses. They were of no use, anyhow.

  * * *

  "Deceleration stations," Listowel ordered. "Make that action stations," said Grimes quietly. "I'm taking over now, Captain."

  "So I'm just your sailing master," Listowel commented, but cheerfully enough. "At your service, Commodore." He pressed the bell push. A coded clangor sounded and resounded, short long, short long, short long—the Morse A. Fowler fidgeted in his seat at the console, the one from which he would fire and, hopefully, direct the sounding rockets, each of which was now fitted with a high-explosive warhead. The batteries of muzzle loaders were manned. Spacesuited marines were standing by the drainpipe artillery, three to a gun. Handy to the airlocks over the manhole doors were the ammunition parties. "Cut reaction drive."

  "Cut reaction drive, sir," The muted thunder of the rockets suddenly ceased.

  Slowly, carefully, as though this were no more than a routine deceleration, Listowel trimmed his sails, pivoting them about the masts so that the light from the glaring Llanithi stars, almost dead ahead, was striking their reflecting surfaces at an oblique angle. It had to be done gradually. If Pamir were suddenly taken aback she would be dismasted. The Doppler Log was starting to
wind down. 25.111111 . . . 25.111110 . . . .25.111109. . . . The lower courses were turned to exercise full braking effect. The lower topsails next—the upper topsails—the top gallants. Speed was dropping fast. Inside the inertialess ship there was no sensory hint of the titanic forces being brought into play, forces that in a normal vessel would have smeared ship and crew across the sky in a blaze of raw energy.

  The log was still winding down, although the count was slowing.

  1.000007 . . . 1.000005 . . .

  1.000003 . . . 1.000001 . . .

  1.000001 . . .

  1.000001 . . .