Or did she? The question flitted through the darkness at the back of her head. She was about to betray these two. “Adiós,” she gulped, and bounded up the ramp to the lock. She keyed it to open, the outer valve turned, she passed through, the valve closed on their faces.
Having sealed the lock, she glided toward the pilot section. Familiarity enfolded her, the acceleration couches stowed aside, the door to the minuscule lavabo, a hatch cover above the access to the forward hold, the unexpanded galley manifold, a closet for personal items, a family picture stuck to a pearl-gray bulkhead, a multi with vivifer, a hobby kit, surroundings in which she had fared among worlds and moons and comets, out to where the sun was no more than the brightest of the stars, her ship, her Kestrel, her second self.
Eagerness flared regret out of her. Was she really playing them false in L-5? She had simply not told Eiko that a better plan had come to her, because Eiko might then have refused to proceed further, holding that the risk to Kyra’s life was too great. She might not have understood how little that mattered, set against that which Kyra hoped for.
A change in tactics, nothing else. How much good would it actually do for her to land on Earth and tell her story?
They already had Guthrie’s account. She could merely attest that it was true. (And how much was, after Rinndalir’s machinations, whatever they were?) Days would pass while they wrangled on in the Assembly and maybe she, indeed, endured deep-quizzing. Meanwhile the enemy would not be idle and the torchcraft would hold Guthrie’s force at bay (if it was his) and L-5 hostage.
Eiko probably realized this. Had she set things in motion with the idea that there was little to lose?
Or—Kyra slammed to a halt—had she foreseen what her friend might choose once free, not wished to lay an obligation but provided an opportunity to assume one?
Kyra belled a laugh. “Could be!” she cried. “You’re shrewder than you let on, Eiko, querida.”
Anyway, the hood was off the falcon and the jesses about to be loosed. She jumped into the command seat, harnessed up, and ran fingers over the board. Lights came aglow, meters quivered, displays formed, systems purred to life. Within five minutes she saw the readings and felt the slight shudder that meant the moorings had released her.
Momentarily she floated weightless. It was like falling down the luminous shaft ahead to a hole of night at the bottom. Drive kindled; a feathery pressure nudged her back into the cushions; she was on her way. Direction and intensity shifted about, not much, but again and again. Under guidance, cautiously, cautiously, the ship left the harbor.
Star hordes gleamed. The Milky Way cataracted hoar across crystal black. In a corner of the viewfield before her Kyra saw the Magellanic Clouds. “L-5 Station Control to Kestrel, TF33,” she heard. “You are released and cleared for full thrust.”
“Gracias, and hasta la vista,” she answered, though the voice had been robotic. She wasn’t afraid, too damn busy for that, but it felt good to swap a few words before going into battle.
A hundred seconds of boost at one g took her about fifty klicks farther. She cut it off, not to build up an unwieldy vector, and looked around the heavens. The colony dwindled in sight, at a kilometer per second. Earth had waxed somewhat in phase since last she beheld it, Luna had waned.
“There’s another torch somewhere hereabouts,” she told the ship. “Find her.”
Radar swept through its arcs. Optical and infrared sensors scanned. Kyra searched among the stars as if human eyes had the same power. Where the ship’s neutrino tracer heard the rushing of an almost massless torrent and analyzed for eddies from nearby, her ears caught nothing but the susurrus of ventilators and the blood-beat within her.
“Yes, yonder,” said Kestrel. Computer-deduced, the lean image appeared in a screen. “North of L-5, in an orbit of similar dimensions but inclined ten seconds.” A holocube presented a diagram.
“That’d let him keep track of what goes in and out, bearing the spin in mind,” Kyra muttered, mostly to herself. “I expect he adjusts it from time to time.” She keyed the holocube controls. The diagram changed to show, enlarged, the segment that interested her, with a scale from which she read a distance of approximately a thousand klicks. Eight minutes at one-g—she rounded off the figures she evoked—and she’d gain a relative velocity of four-point-seven KPS. … Of course, the bandido wouldn’t sit still. “He must’ve spotted us. Let me know, the instant he boosts. Any more data?”
“His radar is locked on us,” Kestrel replied.
The voice was Kyra’s own. Most pilots preferred a distinct synthesis, often one that sounded like a person of the opposite sex, but she found that obscurely disturbing. After considerable thought, she had figured out why. It suggested, not in rational wise but to the primitive deep within her, that here was a mind like hers, a person, a soul.
And indeed the machine did more than conn and crew the ship of which it was a part, with capabilities orders of magnitude beyond hers. It observed and reasoned. It warned, advised, proposed, learned, adapted. For instance, it had just now noticed that she referred to the other as “he,” concluded that she meant whoever was aboard, and gone over to the same pronoun. When she wanted diversion, it provided music or spectacle or text or vivifer experience, it created original audiovisual abstractions, and it was a fairly good conversationalist if she didn’t demand ever to be surprised. You could quite reasonably call it Kestrel’s brain.
And Kyra loved Kestrel, the whole of the ship, as you may love a house or a sailboat or a work of art. This with which she spent so much of her life was unique, strong, subtle, a personality. But it was not a person. Guthrie’s program was, mapped off a living mind. Kestrel’s was not. It was the working out of an elaborate algorithm. No awareness responded to hers. She didn’t care to pretend otherwise, even by an individual voice for her to hear. It got lonesome enough anyway, yonder where the comets prowled.
Light-flash, chime, incoming call. Kyra closed that circuit.
The basso hit like a fist. “—departing L-5. Come in, pronto.”
Her guess had been right. Nevertheless she choked, “M-my God, is that you, jefe?”
“Anson Guthrie, yes. Identify yourself and explain what the hell you’re doing. Don’t you know this sector is interdicted?”
“By you.”
“Right. Somebody or something is impersonating me, allegedly on the Moon. I’ve got to defuse this before it blows up a million people and maybe Fireball as well. Okay, explain yourself.”
Kyra gripped the arms of her chair. “You did go to the Moon,” she said. “I helped you out of L-5.”
Silence ticked thrice.
“You did, personally?” asked Guthrie’s voice. “Give me a visual.”
Before she made the irrevocable move, Kyra wanted final confirmation. “You shouldn’t need any of me. But I will, when you tell me who traveled with us from the mainland to Hawaii. His real name.”
“God damn it, that’s enough!” the voice roared. “Obey or you’re dead!”
“Oh, no,” said Kyra most softly. “It’s the other way around.” Her skin prickled. “You clear out of these parts or you’re dead.”
“You gone loco? Who are you?”
“Makes no difference any more. We’ve settled the question of who you are. What you are.” Kyra broke the connection. Light and chime raged at her.
“Listen, Kestrel,” she said fast. “The object is to drive that thing away. We’ll make the neighborhood too unpleasant for him. Unless he catches us in his jet, which I guess he’ll try to do. I’ll direct maneuvers, you execute them, override me if you compute I’m ordering too big a risk but remember we have to take chances.”
“Understood,” her ship replied. “It’s like when we ran the Stream.”
“More ticklish, but—Ay! Scramble!”
The image of the Katana spat fire. The red spot on the orbital diagram surged forward.
Acceleration jammed Kyra back in her seat. Vision blurred and reddened
. Her skull hammered.
It eased. She floated free and in her view saw the Katana speed by not many kilometers off, a needle stitching across the stars. “Good show, Kestrel,” she muttered shakily. “How hard did he boost?”
“Ten gravities, to cross our probable path a short way in advance of us,” the ship told her. “I gave us a similar thrust, tangentially.”
“And he missed.” Had he not—no collision, which would have smashed both vessels. Instead, Kyra would have run into the plasma of his exhaust, not yet dissipated. That density of charge, turbulent magnetic fields, hard radiation would cripple her ejectors if they were operating at the moment. Then anti-Guthrie could return and, at his leisure, slice his jet straight through Kestrel.
Kyra scowled. He must have known the odds were against success. Her vessel had had a couple of minutes in which to leap aside. This wasn’t an aerial combat. Neither could swing smoothly around to outdance the enemy.
A warning? He’d made that whole dash at ten g. Any humans aboard were in poor shape, not fit for much till they’d had a while to recover. … Why should he carry them? What use to him? He, hooked in, was most likely his own crew; and stresses that would black her out didn’t bother him.
He shrank below naked-eye visibility. She magnified and amplified, to see directly in the viewscreen how he turned and applied new thrust. He was coming back.
No flame-tail trailed him. That had been false color supplied by the computer. Close by, a human would see a wan blue glow, quickly lost in the star-field. A modern drive wasted no more energy than the laws of thermodynamics absolutely dictated; and it was the thermodynamics not of heat engines but of quarks, leptons, and photons.
He was bound for a return engagement, the real thing, unless she fled. Kestrel alone couldn’t deal with him for any length of time. The ship calculated vectors in micro-seconds and applied them in milliseconds, but lacked the creativity—imagination—cleverness—slyness—ruthlessness of a fully conscious mind. Kyra must supply that. And she was not coupled directly to her vessel like him, to sensors and computers and effectors. She must look through a pair of jelly globules, calculate with a wet sponge, send signals floating from synapse to synapse at molecule speed, make them known against the inertia of an organic soundbox and ten jointed sticks.
Yet she and Kestrel had run the Stream.
Her hands moved. They gave the basic commands, as they would at a wheel or a tiller. Words added: “We’ll boost so as to collide if he keeps on at his present rate. He’ll see, and throttle down. We’ll boost harder. Work our way in at him, whatever he tries. Transverse thrust at the last moment, of course, so he can’t keep from slamming into our jet.” An easy one gravity embraced her.
“Won’t he attempt the same?” The ship had that much capacity for independent thought.
“Sure. Whenever he changes vector, we will too, always close rather than wide, if we have a choice. Force him to expend mass. Wear him down.”
Thrust, free-fall, turn, thrust. The Katana swelled in view. Sunlight glared off a flank. Kyra breathed steadily. A grin widened her mouth. Reading her instruments and instincts, she gauged that anti-Guthrie had a better chance of blasting her than she did him. Her hands said, “Veer at two g’s” Kestrel modified the command into precision, swung herself around, and thrust. The enemy shot by, less than a kilometer away. L-5 swam into Kyra’s visual range, gone small. These maneuvers had borne her and anti-Guthrie a fair distance off. Excellent.
Deceleration. The adversaries must cancel their velocities before they could begin the next pass. It would take a little while. Kyra opened an audiovid broadcast on the general band. “Hello, L-5 and you two ships in orbit,” she called. “Do you read me? Kyra Davis, pilot for Fireball, aboard torchcraft Kestrel. I’m engaging the vessel that has illegally blockaded and endangered L-5, to make her cease and desist, but I could use some help. Come in, por favor.” She set the message to repeat.
The board informed her that anti-Guthrie wanted to talk again on the previous band. Kyra touched Record and received him. “Did you hear?” she asked. “Will you go away and stop bothering us?”
“No, you go away,” he answered. A bare hint of laughter “I like your spirit, lass, I truly do. Bet you’re hell on wheels in bed. I’d hate to kill you. Please flit off. I won’t pursue.”
So would the jefe speak. Her heart contracted with pain. Fury overcame it. “Listen, you,” she said between her teeth. “Scuttle off or you’re dead. If ‘dead’ is the right word. I’d enjoy shutting you down.”
“Be reasonable,” he urged. “I’ve got the boost of you. More than just what’s in my drive. I can take accelerations as high as this boat will go, for as long as she will. You can’t.”
“I know. Because I know what you are!” she spat. Cooler: “What of it? I can keep you in play, keep you dodging, till your tanks are dry and your orbit cold. Think what models of torch we fly. Think how you’ve been in space, skipping around, for many hours, while my craft’s fresh out of service bay. I’ve got the delta v of you, senor, and I intend to use it.”
“Spaceship Bruin, B56,” sounded from another speaker. “Captain Helledahl. With us, Jacobite, C45, Captain Stuart. We’re the two that came to relieve L-5—”
“Hold on,” Kyra said. She pressed switches. “Bueno, we’re all talking together now. Bruin, Jacobite, here’s the conversation I was just having.” Compressed, it transmitted in a millisecond. “I suppose you’ll want to check back with Luna, but myself, I see no reason why you can’t proceed to L-5.”
“I am the reason,” came starkly.
Kyra shook her head. “’Fraid not, un-Guthrie. You try to attack a third-party ship, and you’re meat for me. Go away, I told you.”
“You’ll grow tired. You’ll have to eat, go to the can, sleep. Delta v or no, I’ve got more active hours left than you do.”
“We’ll see about that. I’m hunting you, you know.”
“And meanwhile,” said a voice that must be Stuart’s, “the help you asked for should arrive.”
“It’ll arrive too late, and I’ll chop it up,” said anti-Guthrie. “Lass, I’m sorry, but now in earnest I’m hunting you.”
In the displays, his ship blazed.
“Intercept,” Kyra’s throat and hands directed again. Stars wheeled across her sight as Kestrel rotated. There went Orion, there went his hounds. Thrust pressed her back. It was gentle. Likewise the Katana’s, she read. When you fully meant business, you moved as slow as might be.
“If we want to be sure he doesn’t rake us, we should bend off at about five hundred klicks,” Kestrel told her. “Closer, he might with top acceleration acquire a vector that I can’t react to soon enough.”
“But probably you could, no?”
“Probably, yes.”
“Bueno, he’s right about the endurance of flesh and blood being less than his. Our best bet is to make him expend mass, lots of mass, in a hurry. Maintain vector.”
“Pilot Davis—” Helledahl began.
“Don’t pester me now,” Kyra snapped. “Get on the beam to Luna.”
The bearing did not hold steady, as for a collision course at sea or in the air. Both vessels were under boost. But the stars gleamed changeless before her—she was aimed at Andromeda, the sister galaxy a whirlpool off her starboard bow—and the diagram extrapolated two glitter-dots bound for a common point.
In the viewscreen the Katana became a spark flitting across the constellations. “Two minutes,” Kestrel warned.
“Steady as she goes,” Kyra ordered.
One or the other, or both, must give way, cut thrust, spin around, move sideways at such an angle and with such a force as to escape running into the energy sword of the enemy. Neither could know what the other would do, nor when.
It sped through Kyra: Anti-Guthrie didn’t intend mutual destruction. That would give her the victory. Not that she wanted to die. No, she hoped to kill. He’d realize that. He’d expect her to veer, in such a way tha
t her blast might catch him. Therefore he would do likewise. The first to leap aside had a disadvantage, in that rotation before reboost took time. But if she held her course for whole seconds longer than he guessed a live human would dare—
He loomed.
Cut drive. Blow spinjets, a bare few degrees. Fire while still turning. Gyrate crazily off.
—The knowledge reached Kyra that she was alive. “Give me picture,” she whispered into the hush. “Give me data.”
The Katana receded, a blade, a needle, a star, nothing. The readouts declared that she fell free, adrift on the tides of sun, Earth, Luna, universe. The image generated was of a hull unholed, but in it the drive assembly was only highlights and shadow. “Bring us about for a closer look,” Kyra said.
“Pilot Davis, Pilot Davis,” rattled in her ears from Helledahl, “I think you have—”
“Callate la boca.” She recovered her wits. “Sorry. No offense. But leave me be for a while.”
Acceleration surged. Kestrel overtook the enemy craft and matched velocities, a few hundred meters off. At that remove, the damage was plain to eyes as well as instruments. A flame hotter than a solar flare had burned across the stern. Metal curdled along the edges of a night-black wound. Gobbets of it, flung off, still orbited near, uneasy as dustmotes. Surely the thrusters inside were a ruin.
“Hola, hola,” Kyra called. “Are you there?” Silence hummed. She looked from the console, as if toward a face. Nothing but the stars met her gaze. “We may’ve knocked out his communications too,” she said without tone. “Or else he’s lying low.”
“Maybe he, the pilot, is defunct,” Kestrel said.
“Maybe. Though that’d have to be by radiation, and a plug-in is well shielded, you know. Hola, hola, Guthrie Two?”
After a while Kyra gave up. She felt no triumph, not yet, she was wrung out, and … and how quietly wonderful it was to be alive.
But how had this happened? She’d simply meant to make him flinch. She’d had no real expectation of slashing him. It was enough if he spent more mass than she did. Somehow he’d misgauged and she’d taken him. Strange.
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