For a second, the collision warnings went into a howl. Then they stopped. The sudden silence felt louder than the alarms.
Gracias punched visual up onto the screens. He got a picture in time to see the other ship go by in a blur of metal too fast for the eye to track. From a range the scanners measured in mere hundreds of meters, the alien looked the size of a fortress—squat, squarish, enormous.
As it passed, it jabbed a bright red shaft of force at Aster’s Hope from point-blank range.
All the screens in the auxcompcom went dark.
“God!” Gracias gasped. “Scanners burned out?”
That was Temple’s province. She was still reeling from the shock, the knowledge that Aster’s Hope had been fired upon; but her hands had been trained until they had a life of their own and knew what to do. Hardly more than a heartbeat after she understood what Gracias said, she sent in a diagnostic on the scanner circuits. The answer trailed across the screen in front of her.
“No damage,” she reported.
“Then what?” He sounded flustered, groping for comprehension.
“Did you get any scan on that beam?” she returned. “Enough to analyze?” Then she explained, “Right angles to the speed of light isn’t the same direction for every force. Maybe the c-vector sent this one off into some kind of wraparound field.”
That was what he needed. “Right.” His hands went to work on his board again.
Almost immediately, he had an answer. “Ion beam. Would’ve reduced us to subatomic particles without the shield. But only visual’s lost. Scanners still functioning. Have visual back in a second.”
“Good.” She double-checked her own readouts, made sure that Aster’s Hope’s attempts to maneuver with the alien hadn’t done any urgent harm. At the same time, she reassured herself that the force of the ion beam hadn’t been felt inside the shield. Then she pulled her attention back to the screens and Gracias.
“What’s our friend doing now?”
He grunted, nodded up at the main screen. The comp was plotting another graph, showing the other ship’s course in relation to Aster’s Hope.
She blinked at it. That was impossible. Impossible for a ship that size moving that fast to turn that hard.
But of course, she thought with an odd sensation of craziness, there isn’t anything living aboard to feel g-stress.
“Well.” She swallowed at the way her voice shook. “At least we got their attention.”
Gracias tried to laugh, but it came out like a snarl. “Good for us. Now what?”
“We could try to run,” she offered. “Put as much distance as possible between us and them.”
He shook his head. “Won’t work. They’re faster.”
“Besides which,” she growled, “we’ve left a particle trail even we could follow all the way back to Aster. That and the incessant radio gabble— If that mechanical behemoth wants to find our homeworld, we might as well transmit a map.”
He pulled back from his board, swung his seat to face her again. His expression troubled her. His eyes seemed dull, almost glazed, as if under pressure his intelligence were slowly losing its edge. “Got a choice?” he asked.
The thought that he might fail Aster’s Hope made panic beat in her forehead; but she forced it down. “Sure,” she snapped, trying to send him a spark of her own anger. “We can fight.”
His eyes didn’t focus on her. “Got laser cannon,” he said. “Hydrogen torpedoes. Ship like that”—he nodded at the screen—“won’t have shields we can hurt. How can we fight?”
“You said they’re ordinary force-disruption fields. We can break through that. Any sustained pounding can break through. That’s why they didn’t build Aster’s Hope until they could do better.”
He still didn’t quite look at her. Enunciating carefully, he said, “I don’t believe that ship has shields we can hurt.”
Temple pounded the edge of her console. “Damn it, Gracias! We’ve got to try! We can’t just sit here until they get bored and decide to go do something terrible to our homeworld. If you aren’t interested—” Abruptly, she leaned back in her seat, took a deep breath, and held it to steady herself. Then she said quietly, “Key com over to me. I’ll do it myself.”
For a minute longer, he remained the way he was, his gaze staring disfocused past her chin. Slowly, he nodded. Moving sluggishly, he turned back to his console.
But instead of keying com over to Temple, he told the comp to begin decelerating Aster’s Hope. Losing inertia so the ship could maneuver better.
Softly, she let a sigh of relief through her teeth.
While Aster’s Hope braked, pulling Temple against her momentum restraints, and the unliving alien ship continued its impossible turn, she unlocked the weaponry controls on her console. A string of lights began to indicate the status of every piece of combat equipment Aster’s Hope carried.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this, she thought to herself. She’d never imagined it like this. When/if the Asterin mission encountered some unexpected form of life, another spacegoing vessel, a planetary intelligence, the whole situation should’ve been different. A hard-nosed distrust was to be expected: a fear of the unknown; a desire to protect the homeworld; communications problems; wise caution. But not unprovoked assault. Not an immediate pitched battle out in the middle of nowhere, with Aster itself at issue.
Not an alien ship full of nothing but machinery? Was that the crucial point?
All right: what purpose could a ship like that serve? Exploration probe? Then it wouldn’t be hostile. A defense mechanism for a theoretically secure sector of space which Aster’s Hope had somehow violated? But they were at least fifty light-years from the nearest neighbor to Aster’s star; and it was difficult to imagine an intelligence so paranoid that its conception of “territorial space” reached out this far. Some kind of automated weapon? But Aster didn’t have any enemies.
None of it made any sense. And as she tried to sort it out, her confusion grew worse. It started her sliding into panic.
Fortunately, Gracias chose that moment to ask gruffly, “Ready? It’s hauling up on us fast. Be in range in a minute.”
She made an effort to control her breathing, shake the knots of panic out of her mind. “Plot an evasive course,” she said, “and key it to my board.” Her weapons program had to know where Aster’s Hope was going in order to use its armament effectively.
“Why?” he asked. “Don’t need evasion. Shield’ll protect us.”
“To keep them guessing.” Her tension was plain in her voice. “And show them we can hit them on the run. Do it.”
She thought he was moving too slowly. But faster than she could’ve done it he had a plot up on the main screen, showing the alien’s incoming course and the shifts Aster’s Hope was about to make.
She tried to wipe the sweat from her palms on her bare legs; but it didn’t do much good. Snarling at the way her hands felt, she poised them over the weapons com.
Gracias’ plot stayed on the main screen; but the display in front of her gave her visual again, and she saw the alien ship approaching like a bright metal projectile the galaxy had flung to knock Aster’s Hope out of the heavens. Suddenly frantic, as if she believed the other ship were actually going to crush her, she started firing.
Beams of light shot at the alien from every laser port the comp could bring to bear.
Though the ship was huge, the beams focused on a single section: Temple was trying to maximize their impact. When they hit the force disruption field, light suddenly blared all across the spectrum, sending up a rainbow of coruscation.
“Negative,” Gracias reported as Aster’s Hope wrenched into her first evasion shift. “No effect.”
Her weight rammed against the restraints, the skin of her cheeks pulling, Temple punched the weapons com into continuous fire, then concentrated on holding up
her head so that she could watch the visual.
As her lasers turned the alien’s shields into a fireworks display, another bright red shaft of force came as straight as a spear at Aster’s Hope.
Again, the screen lost visual.
But this time Gracias was ready. He got scanner plots onto the screen while visual was out of use. Temple could see her laser fire like an equation on a graph connecting Aster’s Hope and the unliving ship. Every few seconds, a line came back the other way—an ion beam as accurate as if Aster’s Hope were stationary. “Any effect yet?” she gasped at Gracias as another evasion kicked her to the other side of her seat. “We’re hitting them hard. It’s got to have an effect.”
“Negative,” he repeated. “That shield disperses force almost as fast as it comes in. Doesn’t weaken.”
Then the attacker went past. In seconds, it would be out of reach of Temple’s laser cannon.
“Cancel evasion,” she snapped, keying her com out of continuous fire. “Go after them. As fast as we can. Give me a chance to aim a torpedo.”
“Right,” he responded. And a second later g-stress slammed at her as all the ship’s thrusters went on full power, roaring for acceleration.
Aster’s Hope steadied on the alien’s course and did her best to match its speed.
“Now,” Temple muttered. “Now. Before they start to turn.” Her hands quick on the weapons board, she primed a whole barrage of hydrogen torpedoes. Then she pulled in course coordinates from the comp. “Go.” With the flat of her hand on all the launch buttons at once, she fired.
The comp automatically blinked the c-vector shield to let the torpedoes out. Fired from a source moving as fast as Aster’s Hope was, they attained attack velocity almost immediately and went after the other ship.
Gracias didn’t wait for Temple’s instructions. He reversed thrust, decelerating Aster’s Hope again to stay as far as possible from the blast when the torpedoes hit.
If they hit. The scanner plot on the main screen showed that the alien was starting to turn.
“Come on,” she breathed. Unconsciously, she pounded her fists on the arms of her seat. “Come on. Hit that bastard. Hit.”
“Impact,” he said as all the blips on the scanner came together.
At that instant, visual cleared. They saw a hot white ball explode like a balloon of energy rupturing in all directions at once.
Then both visual and scan went haywire for a few long seconds. The detonation of that many hydrogen torpedoes filled all the space around Aster’s Hope with chaos: energy emissions on every frequency; supercharged particles phasing in and out of tardyon existence as they screamed away from the point of explosion.
“Hit him,” Gracias murmured.
Temple gripped the arms of her seat, stared at the garbage on the screens. “What do you think? Can they stand up to that?”
He didn’t shrug. He looked like he didn’t have that much energy left. “Wouldn’t hurt us.”
“Can’t you clear the screens? We’ve got to see.”
“The comp’s doing it.” Then, a second later: “Here it comes.”
The screens wiped themselves clear, and a new scanner plot mapped the phosphors in front of him. It showed the alien turning hard, coming back toward Aster’s Hope.
The readout was negative. No damage.
“Oh, God,” she sighed. “I don’t believe it.” All the strength seemed to run out of her body. She sagged against her restraints. “Now what do we do?”
He went on staring at the screens for a long moment while the attacking ship completed its turn. Then he said, “Don’t know. Try for collision again?”
When she didn’t say anything, he gave the problem to the comp, told it to wait until the last possible instant—considering Aster’s Hope’s poor maneuverability—and then thrust the ship into the alien’s path. After that, he keyed his board onto automatic and leaned back in his restraints. To her surprise, he yawned hugely.
“Need sleep,” he mumbled thickly. “Be glad when this shift’s over.”
Surprise and fear made her acid. “You’re not thinking very clearly, Gracias.” She needed him, but he seemed to be getting farther and farther away. “Do you think the mission can continue after this? What do you think the chances are that ship’s going to give up and let us go on our way? My God, there isn’t even anybody alive over there! The whole thing is just a machine. It can stay here and pound at us for centuries, and it won’t even get bored. Or it can calculate the odds on Aster building a c-vector shield big enough to cover the whole planet—and it can just forget about us, leave us here, and go attack our homeworld because there won’t be anything we can do to stop it and Aster is unprotected. We don’t even know what it wants. We—”
She might have gone on; but the comp chose that moment to heave Aster’s Hope in front of the alien. Every thruster screaming, the ship pulled her mass into a terrible acceleration, fighting for a collision her attacker couldn’t avoid. Temple felt like she was being cut to pieces by the straps holding her in her seat. She tried to cry out, but she couldn’t get any air into her lungs. Her damage readouts and lights began to put on a show.
But the alien ship skipped aside and went past without being touched.
For a second, Aster’s Hope pulled around, trying to follow her opponent. Then Gracias forced himself forward and canceled the comp’s collision instructions. Instantly, the g-stress eased. The ship settled onto a new heading chosen by her inertia, the alien already turning again to come after her.
“Damn,” he said softly. “Damn it.”
Temple let herself rest against her restraints. We can’t—she thought dully. Can’t even run into that thing. It can’t hurt us. But we can’t hurt it. Aster’s Hope wasn’t built to be a warship. She wasn’t supposed to protect her homeworld by fighting: she was supposed to protect it by being diplomatic and cunning and distant. If the worst came to the very worst, she was supposed to protect Aster by not coming back. But this was a mission of peace, the mission of Aster’s dream: the ship was never intended to fight for anything except her own survival.
“For some reason,” Temple murmured into the silence of the auxcompcom, “I don’t think this is what I had in mind when I joined the Service.”
Gracias started to say something. The sound of frying circuitry from the speakers cut him off. It got her attention like a splash of hot oil.
This time, it wasn’t a jammer. She saw that in the readouts jumping across the screens. It was another scanner probe, like the one that had tried to break into the comp earlier. But now it was tearing into the ship’s unprotected communication hardware—the intraship speakers.
After the initial burst of static, the sounds began to change. Frying became whistles and grunts, growls and moans. For a minute, she had the impression she was listening to some inconceivable alien language. But before she could call up the comp’s translation program—or ask Gracias to do it—the interference on the speakers modulated until it became a voice and words.
A voice from every speaker in the auxcompcom at once.
Words Temple and Gracias understood.
The voice sounded like a poorly calibrated vodor, metallic and insensitive. But the words were distinct.
“Surrender, badlife. You will be destroyed.”
The scanner probe had turned up the gain on all the speakers. The voice was so loud it seemed to rattle the auxcompcom door on its mounts.
Involuntarily, Temple gasped, “Good God. What in hell is that?”
Gracias replied unnecessarily, “The other ship. Talking to us.” He sounded dull, defeated, almost uninterested.
“I know that,” she snapped. “For God’s sake, wake up!” Abruptly, she slapped a hand at her board, opened a radio channel. “Who are you?” she demanded into her mike. “What do you want? We’re no threat to you. Our mission is peacef
ul. Why are you attacking us?”
The scanner plot on the main screen showed that the alien ship had already completed its turn and caught up with Aster’s Hope. Now it was matching her course and speed, shadowing her at a distance of less than ten kilometers.
“Surrender,” the speakers blared again. “You are badlife. You will be destroyed. You must surrender.”
Frantic with fear and urgency, and not able to control it, Temple pounded off her mike and swung her seat. “Can’t you turn that down?” she raged at Gracias. “It’s splitting my eardrums!”
Slowly, as if he were half-asleep, he tapped a few buttons on his console. Blinking at the readouts, he murmured, “Hardware problem. Scanner probe’s stronger than the comp’s line voltage. Have to reduce gain manually.” Then he widened his eyes at something that managed to surprise him even in his stunned state. “Only speakers affected are in here. This room. Bastard knows exactly where we are. And every circuit around us.”
That didn’t make sense. It made so little sense that it caught her attention, focused her in spite of her panic. “Wait a minute,” she said. “They’re only using these speakers? The ones in this room? How do they know we’re in here? Gracias, there are three hundred ninety-two people aboard. How can they possibly know you and I are the only ones awake?”
“You must surrender,” the speakers squalled again. “You cannot flee. You have no speed. You cannot fight. Your weapons are puny. When your shields are broken, you will be helpless. Your secrets will be lost. Only surrender can save your lives.”
She keyed her mike again. “No. You’re making a mistake. We’re no threat to you. Who are you? What do you want?”
“Death,” the speakers replied. “Death for all life. Death for all worlds. You must surrender.”
Gracias closed his eyes. Without looking at what he was doing, he moved his hands on his board, got visual back up on the main screen. The screen showed the alien ship sailing like a skyborne fort an exact distance from Aster’s Hope. It held its position so precisely that it looked motionless. It seemed so close Temple thought she could have hit it with a rock.
Reave the Just and Other Tales Page 34