by Ben Bova
Her disapproving frown nettled me. I wanted to tell her what the Seljuks did to Christian women when they captured them, wanted to describe the villages we had seen where the women had been raped and then put to the sword hideously, where babies had been spitted alive and used as footballs, where fire and knives were used for torturing helpless children.
But I said nothing. Because I was ashamed. My own troops had done much the same to the Moslem villages we had sacked.
“They’re heathens,” the old man snapped. “Servants of the Antichrist. Killing them isn’t the same as killing a Christian. The Patriarchs of the Church have told us so. They’re not even human, really.”
“Their blood’s as red as ours,” I heard myself mutter.
“Good! Spill as much of it as you can.”
Leave as quickly as you can and return to the wars, he was telling me. And I resolved to do exactly that. This was not my home and never could be. As soon as my leg healed properly, I would go back to the fighting, I told myself.
After dinner, the two boys offered to share their bed with me. I laughed and told them that I had been sleeping on the ground for so long that a bed would probably keep me awake. So I unrolled my sleeping blanket and stretched out on the floor next to their bed in the upstairs room.
Just before I drifted to sleep, the older of the two boys said, “Next year I’ll be old enough to join the army.”
“Don’t,” I said. “Stay here and help your family.”
“There’s no glory in staying here.”
“There’s no glory in war,” I said. “Believe me. Nothing but pain and blood.”
“But fighting the Seljuks is doing God’s work!”
“Living is doing God’s work, son. Killing people is the work of the devil.”
“But it’s all right to kill the Seljuks. The priests have blessed the war.”
Yes, I thought wearily. They always do.
“The emperor himself—”
“Go to sleep,” I snapped. “And forget about the army. Only a fool goes to war when he doesn’t have to.”
That shut him up at last. I turned on my side and went to sleep, dreaming of the distant future when ships flew among the stars.
Chapter 27
I awoke in my quarters aboard the Apollo with Frede shaking my shoulder roughly.
“You’d better look at the imagery from our last navigation check,” she said, once I had opened my eyes and sat up in the bunk.
Blinking the sleep away, I pointed to the display screen set against the bulkhead. “Put it on the screen.”
There had been a pair of Skorpis warships among the stars.
“Did they detect us?” I asked.
Frede shrugged. “They had to. We were only at sublight for thirty seconds, but their sensors are as good as ours or better. They picked us up, all right.”
“Did they make any move to stop us?”
“In thirty seconds?”
I studied the alphanumeric data at the bottom of the screen. The Skorpis warships had been drifting along on minimum power.
“Looks like they were waiting for us to show up,” I said.
“The Hegemony must be covering as many of our potential reentry points as possible,” Frede said. “They want to know where we are and how soon we’ll reach the Giotto system.”
Swinging my legs off the bunk and reaching for my tunic, I asked, “How close to Loris can you put us? If we can come out of superlight well inside the system’s defenses we ought to be safe enough.”
“Their automated defenses will shred us within microseconds. Same as Prime and the Zeta system, remember?”
“Message capsules worked then. We could send out message capsules ahead of us, tell them we’re coming in.”
With a frown, Frede added, “And bringing the whole Skorpis fleet with us.”
“What choice do we have?” I asked.
She leaned her back against the hatch to the bridge and did not speak for several moments. I wondered if she did not know what to reply, or if she knew so well that she was rehearsing the words she would use before speaking them.
“We could change course,” she said at last. “Why do we have to go to Loris? Why put ourselves into the lion’s mouth? There are hundreds of other planetary systems, thousands of them. The Commonwealth—”
“We’ve got to bring our passenger to the Commonwealth’s leaders. They’re on Loris. That’s where we must go.”
“We could go to a thousand other planets and send word to Loris,” Frede countered.
“And if the Skorpis found us on one of those other planets?”
“The chances of that happening are so low—”
“But if they do, what are the chances of our surviving? Zero,” I told her, before she could answer. “At Loris we have all the defenses of the Giotto system on our side. We have a fighting chance.”
She looked utterly unconvinced. I could not tell Frede that my real reason for insisting on Loris was that Anya was dying. Even in cryosleep she grew weaker every day. Aten was killing her and the only way to make him stop was to confront him, to overpower him and the other Creators who had allied themselves with him. To kill him.
He would not come to a rendezvous at some out-of-the-way planet. He had made Loris his headquarters, the capital of the Commonwealth. So I had to go to Loris, I had to bring Anya there, I had to face the Golden One.
Frede’s expression made me realize that I was, in all probability, about to get all of us killed.
But I pulled myself up to my full height and gave the order, “Direct geodesic to Loris. No more evasions. We bore straight in.”
“And damn the torpedoes,” she muttered.
“What?”
“An old naval expression. From ancient history.”
With no external points of reference there was no way for our unaided human senses to get any feeling for our ship’s speed. The instruments told us we were hurtling along at many multiples of the speed of light, but for all we could tell the Apollo was sitting still in the middle of nothingness.
Yet the morning arrived when Frede said to me, “We’re within two days of the Giotto system. Time to start sending out message capsules.”
I got the feeling that out there in that blank nothingness surrounding us, the entire Skorpis battle fleet was riding along with us, waiting for us to slow down to relativistic velocity once again, their weapons primed and ready to blast us into an expanding fireball of ionized atoms.
Tension on the bridge grew tighter with each passing moment. We fired off every message capsule we possessed, then used the ship’s matter transceiver to make still more of them, converting some of our food stocks to do so.
“We won’t need more than two days’ worth of food,” I told the transceiver crew. “In three days’ time we’ll be having our meals on Loris.”
“Or in hell,” grumbled one of the technicians when he thought I was too far down the passageway to hear him.
When I returned to the bridge I asked Frede, “How close to the planet can you put us?”
She looked up from her navigational screens, bleary-eyed from concentration and lack of sleep. “Fifty planetary diameters,” she answered. “Half a million klicks. Right smack in the middle of their major defense belt.”
“Good,” I said. “Perfect.”
Then she added, “If the ephemeris data in our computer’s memory files is up-to-date.”
“It should be,” I said.
With a sardonic grin she replied, “Right. It should be.” She put a slight but noticeable accent on the word should. “If it’s not we could hang our asses on the wrong side of the planetary system. Or crash into the planet’s surface.”
Pleasant possibilities.
The ephemeris data was correct and Frede’s navigation was practically flawless. The only factor that we did not foresee—could not have foreseen—was that the Skorpis had decided to attack Loris without waiting for us to appear.
We slowe
d out of superlight and into the middle of a full-scale battle. The sky was filled with warships and orbital battle stations slashing at each other with laser beams and nuclear-tipped missiles.
Apollojounced and shuddered as a Skorpis dreadnought loomed directly before us, firing its main battery at a Commonwealth orbital station, but turning its secondary laser banks squarely upon us.
I barely had time to yell, “Battle stations!” Control of the ship automatically went to my command chair; the keyboards set into the ends of my armrests now directly controlled all the ship’s systems. The rest of the bridge crew were there strictly as backup for me.
My intention was to get to the surface of Loris, but in the midst of this battle that was going to be impossible. The planet’s defensive shields were up, powered by every mega-joule their ground-based generators could produce.
Swiftly I took in the situation. The Skorpis attackers were not bothering with the planet. They were trying to knock out the belts of defensive stations that orbited Loris. With fanatical bravery they had come as close to the planet as we had before slowing below superlight, risking collisions and even crashes into the planetary surface in their eagerness to surprise the Commonwealth defenders.
Their tactic had worked. They had bypassed the outer rings of defenses, farther out in the Giotto system. Those massive battle stations were in fixed planetary orbits tens of millions of kilometers from Loris. They could be moved, but it would take most of the power they needed for their weapons to activate their propulsion systems and bring them into the battle. And it would take time, too much time for them to make a difference in the battle’s outcome.
Most of the Commonwealth fleet was elsewhere, fighting the war on other fronts. The Skorpis had gambled virtually every ship they possessed, as I feared they would, for this one killing stroke at the Commonwealth’s capital. Now they were fighting to knock out Loris’s belts of defenses and the few ships that the planet could send up. Neutralize the Common-wealth’s orbital defenses and the planet itself lay open to bombardment and invasion.
No telling how long the battle had been going on. In the display screens I saw the hulks of blasted ships drifting lifelessly, saw an orbital station riddled with holes, its spherical hull ripped open and bubbling hot metal. Fragments of shattered ships and stations swirled past us; some of them might have been the bodies of humans or Skorpis, they blew past us too fast for me to tell.
I saw a Skorpis dreadnought slugging it out with an orbital station, laser beams lancing back and forth, splashing off their defensive screens in wild coruscations of light. I slipped the Apollo under the giant Skorpis warship’s belly, probing with our sensors for a weak section in her screen. They were putting most of their power into the forward screen, where they faced the orbital station.
I found a weak spot and fired our one and only bank of lasers at it. The screen went blank and the hull of the dreadnought began to blacken and peel back, curling like leaves in a flame. The dreadnought shuddered; then a huge explosion racked its innards and it stopped firing. The orbital station kept on blasting at it, and the dreadnought broke apart into molten chunks of metal and plastic and flesh.
We had killed it like a foot soldier slips his stiletto between the armor plates of a mounted warrior.
“Six o’clock high!” sang out one of the sensors as the ship shuddered from a direct hit. Our screen held, barely, as a deadly battle cruiser sailed past us, firing another salvo. We fired back, to no effect.
The battle lost all semblance of cohesion. It turned into a thousand separate fights between individual ships and the massive orbital stations. I saw one of the few Commonwealth warships capable of maneuver exchanging shots with two Skorpis dreadnoughts at the same time; it bloomed into a brilliant flare of radiance as it exploded. Then one of the dreadnoughts was caught in a crossfire from two orbital stations. The heavy laser beams carved up the Skorpis vessel and left it drifting helplessly. Another ship burst apart in a titanic explosion.
There were no sounds on the bridge except the beeping of sensors, the tight, quick breathing of my crew and the steady background hum of machinery. No one said a word, their eyes riveted to the display screens as ships fired, turned, exploded in the deathly silence of space.
I drove the Apollo through the thick of the battle, desperately trying to maneuver closer to the planet’s surface, but it seemed as if every ship in the Skorpis fleet stood in my way. I knew that we were no match for dreadnoughts, neither in firepower nor defensive shielding, yet the battle was raging all around us, whether we liked it or not.
We could try to run in the other direction, get away from the fighting and seek safety by accelerating back to superlight velocity. Then a new fear struck at me. If it appeared that the Skorpis were going to win this battle and then attack Loris itself, Aten might very well leave the planet, escape to some other point in the continuum, leaving the rest of us here. Leaving Anya weak and dying.
I had no choice. I had to stay and fight and try to help the Commonwealth win.
I dove the Apollo toward the nearest orbital station, a huge massive globular structure studded with sensors and weapons. Hoping that my ship’s automated identification signals would keep the orbital station from frying us, I maneuvered as close to the station as I dared, taking up a minutes-long orbit around it like a bee circling its own hive.
Three Skorpis warships approached, firing as they came. Two of them were battle cruisers, the third a dreadnought. While Frede and the rest of the bridge crew watched silently, I darted our ship down below the two battle cruisers and scanned their defensive shields. Just as I had expected, they were shifting power to ward off the heavy blasts coming from the orbital station’s main batteries. I located the weakest part of the first battle cruiser’s shield and poured everything we had into it. The cruiser veered away, exposing its weakened belly to the orbital station. One salvo from the station’s heavy guns blew the Skorpis warship to pieces.
But the second battle cruiser turned to engage us, jolting the Apollo with hits from its main battery. Leaving the orbital station to duel with the lone dreadnought, I raced through the swirling carnage of the battle with that determined battle cruiser on our tail, firing at us steadily. No matter how I jinked our ship back and forth that cruiser stuck to us, as if the only thing in its captain’s mind was to avenge its sister ship.
Stubbornness is not an asset to a captain. I checked the display screens and saw that the battle had concentrated on one side of Loris’s defensive belt. There were stations on the far side of the orbit that were not being attacked. This made good sense, from the Skorpis point of view. They were concentrating all their forces on a part of the Commonwealth’s defenses, intending to overwhelm them and then destroy the remainder afterward. The orbital stations could not maneuver quickly; those on the far side of the battle could never reach the attackers in time to do any good.
But I could bring at least one of the attackers to the idling stations on the far side, if the Skorpis captain did not suddenly acquire a dose of good sense.
She did not. She followed me, closing, firing, making the bridge rattle and our defensive screens buckle. But she followed me for a few seconds too long. I zoomed the Apollo into range of the quiescent orbital stations and three of them opened fire on the Skorpis warship at once. It blew up in a giant fireball, the scattered fragments like blazing meteors all across the sky.
“Battle damage,” reported Dyer, from her damage-control console. “Hull open to vacuum in starboard stern. Sections fourteen and fifteen of deck two have been automatically sealed off.”
“Anyone in there?”
“No, sir. Those are food lockers. We emptied them out to make extra message capsules.”
Frede giggled nervously. “We wanted to warn Loris that we were coming, so they wouldn’t fire on us, remember?”
It seemed like a million years ago.
“Looks like they didn’t need our warning,” I said as I turned the ship back into t
he battle.
I headed for one of the orbital stations, hoping to repeat my earlier tactic of gadflying one of the attacking ships to its destruction. But as we came closer to the fighting, swirling, exploding ships I saw that six Skorpis cruisers detached themselves from the battle to aim directly at us.
“Incoming message,” said Magro, the comm officer.
I tapped the comm key on my armrest board. A Skorpis commander appeared on the bridge’s main screen.
“ Apollo, I have orders to take your ship. You will surrender. You cannot escape us.”
At the velocity we were going now it would take more than an hour to build back up to superlight. The Skorpis ships could catch us and board us long before then.
“We will not surrender,” I said.
The commander bared her teeth. “My orders are to take you alive—if possible. If you will not surrender, you will die.”
Chapter 28
Six against one were impossible odds. Especially when the six were battle cruisers, twice the size and firepower of the Apollo.
I looked at the stricken faces of the bridge crew. They had been prisoners of the Skorpis once before.
“They’ll freeze us,” muttered Emon.
“And serve us for dinner,” said Jerron, trying to make a joke of it. No one laughed. They all looked grim, frightened.
“They’re not going to take us alive,” I told them.
“And that’s the good news,” Frede wisecracked. Everyone laughed, breaking the tension.
Our one chance was to make it down to the surface of Loris before the Skorpis ships could destroy us. I turned the Apollo in that direction, hoping that the orbiting battle stations could pick off some of the warships hounding us.
“Take power from the weapons batteries,” I told Jerron. “Put every bit of power we’ve got into the engines.”
Emon looked unhappy that his weapons were being drained. I started to say, “Keep the shields—”