‘Right.’ One Eye scanned his one eye over the sheet of figures.
‘Including my own fleets, say a hundred and ten starships, about two-thirds of which will be military.’
They looked at each other briefly. Provincial though they were, the number still sounded faintly small.
‘It is ample,’ you said confidently.
They turned to the formidable problem of rations. The fleet could reckon on being vacuum-borne for two weeks before reaching the margins of the Region; another two and a half weeks to reach the heart; another three days to the pivotal world of Yinnisfar itself.
‘And that allows no time for delay caused by evasive action or battle,’ Welded said.
‘They may capitulate before we reach Yinnisfar itself,’ you said.
‘We must have a safety margin,’ Welded insisted. ‘Let’s call it a six-week journey, eh? And we’ll be five and a half thousand strong …’ He shook his head. ‘We can cope with air supply. The calorie intake is going to be the snag. Those men’ll eat their heads off in that time; there’s just not that amount of food on all Owlenj. Deep freeze is our only answer. Everyone below the rank of major not on essential ship’s crew travels frozen. Get me Medical, orderly. I want to speak to the physician general.’
The orderly hastened to obey.
‘What’s next?’ Welded asked. He was beginning to enjoy himself.
‘Weapons,’ One Eye said. ‘First, fissionable material. My forces can’t help much there. Our stocks happen to be lower than usual.’
‘Here’s a report on our holdings as of last week,’ Welded said, tossing a stereoed list over. ‘Stocks are meagre, I’m afraid.’
You glanced at the list over One Eye’s shoulder.
‘It is ample,’ you said encouragingly.
4
At first it must have seemed as if the scheme might succeed. Again the feeling must have assailed you that you lived in an unlikely dream whose scenery you could puncture with a finger, as you sat in the flagship with the two commanders. You had no nerves; you did not worry. Welded and One Eye, in their individual ways, both showed strain now that they were embarked on the journey. The captain of the ship, Fleet Commander Prim, had to endure much quiet nagging.
The early days passed uneventfully. Beyond the ports, space hung becalmed, its blazing stars mere specks in the distance, its ancient splendours nothing more than points to navigate by. The other ships were not visible to the unaided eye; the flagship might have been travelling alone. When they had blasted from Owlenj, the ships in the invasion fleet had numbered 117; by the end of the first week five had had to give up and limp home again, their too hastily contrived light-drives burned out. It would take them, under normal thrust, half a year to regain port; by then, their crews would be asphyxiated or the survivors breathing the oxygen of murdered men. The rest of the fleet sailed on, holds full of soldiers in suspended animation, all neatly stacked and racked like bottles.
They had been vacuum-borne sixteen days, and were past those stars generally regarded as outposts of the empire of Yinnisfar, when they were first challenged.
‘A station calling itself Camoens II RST225,’ the communications chief reported, ‘asks us why we have passed Koramandel Tangent Ten without identifying ourselves.’
‘Let it keep on calling,’ you said.
Other challenges were received and left unanswered. The fleet stayed silent as it startled to life the worlds about it. Communications began to intercept messages of alarm and warning between planetary stations.
‘Galcondar Sabre calling Rolf 158. Unidentified craft due to pass you on course 99GY4281 at 07.1430 Gal. approx – ’
‘Acrostic I to Schiaparelli Base. Look out and report on fleet now entering Home Sector Paradise 014 – ’
‘Peik-pi-Koing Astronomical to Droxy Pylon. Unidentified ships numbering 130 approx now crossing Scanning Area. Code Diamond Index Oh Nine – ’
‘All stations on Ishrail Link Two. Procedure BAB Nine One into operation immediately – ’
One Eye snorted his contempt.
‘We’ve certainly set these provincial globes in a flutter,’ he said.
As the hours passed, he grew less easy. Space, almost silent a watch ago, now became murmurous with voices; soon the murmur grew into a babel. The note of curiosity, at first indicating little more than mild interest showed a corresponding rise through irritation into alarm.
‘Perhaps we ought to answer them,’ One Eye suggested. ‘Couldn’t we spin them some tale to keep them quiet? Tell them we are going to pay homage, or something?’
‘You need have no worry about the messages we can understand,’ Prim said. ‘We are picking up several in code now; they are the ones which should cause us most concern.’
‘Haven’t we some sort of yarn to keep them quiet?’ One Eye repeated, appealing to you.
You were looking out into the darkness, almost as if you could see through the veil of it, almost as if you expected to see the messages flashing like comets before the ports.
‘The truth will emerge,’ you said, without turning around.
Two days later, the parasond picked up the first ship they had detected since leaving Owlenj.
‘It can’t be a ship!’ the communications chief was saying, waving a flimog with the report on it.
‘But it must be,’ his sub almost pleaded. ‘Look at its course: you plotted it back yourself! It’s definitely turning. What but a ship could manoeuvre?’
‘It can’t be a ship!’ the chief repeated.
‘Why can’t it be a ship?’ Prim asked.
‘Beg pardon, sir, but the thing’s at least thirty miles long.’
After a silence, One Eye asked, ‘Which way’s it coming?’
The sub spoke up. He alone seemed delighted at the fish they had caught on their screen. ‘It has turned since we had it under observation through thirty to thirty-two degrees northerly from a course about due nor’-nor’ west with respect to galactic quadrature.’
One Eye grasped the back of the sub’s couch as if it were the sub’s neck.
‘What I want to know,’ he growled, ‘is if it’s going away or coming towards us.’
‘Neither,’ said the sub, looking at the screen again. ‘It now seems to have finished turning and is moving along a course which is … at ninety degrees to ours.’
‘Any signal from it?’ Prim asked.
‘Nothing.’
‘Put a shot across its bows,’ One Eye suggested.
‘You are not grovelling along the streets of Owlenj now, taking pot shots at all and sundry. Let it go!’
One Eye turned angrily, to find Welded there. The latter had come up on the bridge early. He stood and watched the blob fade from the parasond screen before he spoke again. Then, beckoning One Eye aside and looking to make sure you were not then present on the bridge, he said in a low voice, ‘My friend, I have something to confess to you.’
He looked anxiously and with distaste at One Eye’s whiskery countenance before continuing.
‘My early fears are coming back to me,’ he said. ‘You know I am a man of courage, but even a hero does wisely to be afraid at times. Every hour we dive deeper into a hornet’s nest; do you realise that? Why, we are only two and a half weeks from Yinnisfar itself! I cannot sleep for asking myself if we are not running into something from which there will be no escape.’
Reluctant as he was to agree with an old enemy, One Eye could not miss this chance of confiding his own anxieties.
‘Ships thirty miles long!’ he exclaimed.
Nodding mysteriously, Welded persuaded the other to come down to his cabin before he would say more. Then he thumped the bulkhead.
‘Only a watch’s journey from here,’ he said, thumping again for emphasis, ‘are many rich planets. They will be as plunder-worthy as the planets in the heart of the Region – but less well guarded. Can’t you just picture them at this very moment: loaded with plump semiblondes with rings on every finger
, and fat little men dallying with big bank accounts? They’re wide open! Defenceless! Why go on to Yinnisfar, where undoubtedly we shall meet with resistance? Why not stop here, plunder what we can, and get back to Owlenj while the going’s good?’
One Eye hesitated, his lip thrust out. He liked the suggestion every bit as much as his ex-enemy had expected he would. But there was one major obstacle.
‘He’s set his heart on getting to Yinnisfar itself.’
‘Yes! I think we’ve put up with him long enough,’ Welded replied.
They did not need to mention your name. When away from the aura of your presence, their misgivings about you were mutual. Welded crossed to a cupboard, taking out a small and tightly stoppered bottle.
‘This should solve that problem,’ he said.
It contained a deadly venom; to smell one drop of it a yard away would give a man headaches for a week.
‘Something to flavour his wine with tonight,’ Welded said.
5
When the wine went round the captain’s table after dinner, One Eye accepted his glass but could not drink. He felt sick with suspense, and with the sickness went a loathing for Welded; not only did he disapprove of poisoning, as a devious method of killing, but he understood clearly that the little bottle held more than enough to spare for him, too, should Welded feel like disposing of all his opposition at once.
You had no such qualms. You took your glass when it was filled, toasted, as you did every night, the success of the expedition, and drained down the wine.
‘This wine tastes flat,’ you said. ‘We will stock up with better vintages on Yinnisfar!’
Everyone around the table laughed with you, except for One Eye; the muscles of his face contorted. He could not even force himself to look at Welded.
‘What did you make of the thirty-mile-long object we sighted earlier?’ Prim asked you, taking his wine at a more sedate pace.
‘It was a Yinnisfar ship,’ you said easily. ‘But don’t worry about it. Evolution will take care of it, just as evolution took care of the prehistoric monsters that once roved Owlenj and other planets.’
The captain spread his hands.
‘For a practical man, that seems a strangely unpractical remark,’ he said. ‘Evolution is one thing, superships quite another.’
‘Only if you forget that evolution is nature’s scientific method, and starships, not being organic creatures, are a part of man’s evolution. And man himself is but a part of nature’s scientific method.’
‘I trust you don’t imagine, at this late date in time, that man is not the end product of evolution?’ he asked you. ‘We are constantly being told that the Galaxy is too old for anything but final extinction.’
‘I imagine nothing,’ you told him pleasantly. ‘But remember – what triumphs ultimately is something too vast for comprehension – yours or mine.’
You stood up, and the others followed suit. Soon the dinner room was empty except for two very puzzled conspirators.
For just over four weeks, the Owlenj fleet had been vacuum-borne. Now the craft were deep within the star-clotted heart of the Galaxy. Suns which carried as an incidental burden hundreds of millions of years of the histories and myths of man burned on all sides like funeral torches. The graveyard air was reinforced by silence over all wave bands, the chatter of alarmed planets had died away to nothing.
‘They’re waiting for us!’ One Eye exclaimed, not for the first time. He lived on the bridge of the flagship now, staring for hours at a time at the seemingly motionless spectacle of the universe.
Much to the captain’s unstated disapproval, the bridge had also become Welded’s living quarters. He spent most of the time lying on his bed with a fuser under his pillow, and never looked out of the ports.
You came frequently to the bridge, but seldom spoke to the two. You were detached; it might have been all a dream. Yet, for all that, you were at times noticeably impatient, speaking abruptly, sometimes clicking your fingers in suppressed irritation, almost as if you wished to wake from the tedium of your sleep.
Only Fleet Commander Prim remained completely unchanged. The routine of command stayed him. He seemed to have absorbed all the confidence One Eye and Welded had lost.
‘We shall ground on Yinnisfar in six days,’ he said to you. ‘Is it possible they intend to offer us no resistance?’
‘It is possible to think up excellent reasons for their non-resistance,’ you said. ‘Owlenj has been isolated from the Federation for generations and has little knowledge of current intellectual attitudes within the Region. They may all be pacifists, eager to prove their faith. Or, at the other end of the scale, their military hierarchy, without war to thin its ranks, may already have collapsed under our unexpected pressure. It’s all speculation – ’
At that second, the parasond exploded. An icy clatter rang along the floor as ruptured metal and glass showered out of the panel, while gusts of acrid smoke settled like mesh over the bridge. A babble of voices broke out.
‘Get the communications chief,’ Prim barked, but the chief was already on the job, calling over the intercom for a stretcher party and the electronics crew.
Welded was inspecting the damage, fanning away smoke, which still siphoned out of a red-hot crater in the panels. His spine arched as tensely as a prestressed girder.
‘Look!’ called One Eye. The hysterical edge to his voice was so compelling that even in this moment of crisis every eye present swivelled to where his finger pointed. Out, out they stared into the hard pageant of night beyond the ports. Their eyes had to probe and focus before they saw.
Flies. Flies, rising in a cloud from a dark stream on whose surface sunlight glittered, so that between dark and light the insects were almost lost to view. But the stream was space itself and the glitter a spangle of suns, and the flies spread across them – a cloud of ships. The ancient forces of Yinnisfar were rising to the attack.
6
‘You can’t count them!’ One Eye said, glaring aghast at the swarm of ships. ‘There must be thousands. They blew out the instrument panel; it was a sort of warning. By Pla and To, they’ll blow us into eternity at any moment!’
Turning on a heel, he crossed the promenade and confronted you.
‘You brought us into this!’ he shouted. ‘What are you going to do to get us away? How do we save ourselves?’
‘Leave that to the captain and be silent,’ you said. You moved away before he touched you and stood by the captain.
The short wave was unimpaired, and he spoke rapidly to the squadron leaders of his fleet. On a live schematic above his head, the results of those orders immediately became apparent. The Owlenjan fleet was deploying into its individual squadrons, spreading into a fan parsecs wide. They moved towards the curtain of flies like an opening hand. At maximum speed they moved, straight for the enemy navies.
‘They’re too ready for us,’ Prim said to you out of the corner of his dry mouth. ‘There aren’t enough of us to be effective. It’s nothing but suicide.’
‘What else do you suggest?’ you asked him.
‘If every ship made for a planet, orbited it, held it under threat of demolition – No, they’d pick us off one by one …’ He shook his head. ‘This is the only possible way,’ he said quietly, again turning all his attention to the manoeuvre.
Further talk was impossible. The waiting ships and the handful of charging starcraft slid together. The gulf between them suddenly became trellised with blue flame – electric, blinding. Square links of force opened and shut like champing mouths. Whatever its power source, the drain must have been phenomenal, consuming the basic energies of space itself.
The Owlenjan ships found themselves on the defensive before evasion was more than a panicky thought. That chopping trellis flared before their ports, snapped, was gone, flared and snapped again, bathing every bridge in its eccentric luminance, dazzling, consuming. It was the last light thousands of eyes ever saw. The ships on which those blue jaws closed b
urned magnesium-bright; they burned, then sagged into limbo, leeched of life.
But the invaders were tearing through space at formidable speeds. Nor was the terrifying trellis properly in phase; whoever controlled it could not control its precise adjustment. Its scissor action was too slow – many ships hurtled through its interstices and into the ranks of the Yinnisfar fleet.
A glance at the schematic showed Prim he had only about forty ships left, raggedly out of formation.
‘Superfusers – fire!’ he roared.
No one in that immense mêlée of armour had ever been in a space battle before. The Galaxy in its tired old age had long since hung up its swords. Of all the astute minds following the rapid interplay of strategy, Prim’s was the quickest to seize advantage. The mighty ranks of Yinnisfar had placed too much reliance on their trellis device; they were temporarily numbed to find survivors on their side of it. Owlenj shook them out of their numbness.
Sunbursts of superfusers cascaded among them, leaping and feeding from ship to ship, coruscating with cosmu energy, while the attackers plunged through their devastated ranks and were away. The Yinnisfar vessels were also in rapid movement. In no time they had dispersed, safe from the fusion centre, where twenty score of their sister ships had perished.
‘We’re through!’ you said. ‘On to Yinnisfar itself. It will ransom our safety!’
The enemy fleet was not so easily outdistanced, however. Several units were already overtaking the invaders at staggering velocity. Among them was the thirty-mile-long craft they had sighted some days earlier.
‘And there are three more like it!’ Welder yelled from his position at the ports. ‘Look! How can anything travel that fast?’
Prim wrenched the flagship into a spin south. They altered course just in time; the overtakers launched a black mass like smoke directly ahead of their old position. The smoke was molecularised ceetee, capable of riddling the flagship like a moth in a carpet, leaving it mere gravel over the space-ways. In this manoeuvre, sight of the four giant vessels was lost. Then they spun into sight again, and with mind-wrenching turns formed the four points of an enormous square ahead of the flagship.
The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One Page 38