The Ship Who Saved the Worlds

by Anne McCaffrey

  "So what does that leave?" Keff asked, feeling the tingle of excitement. "Another race? Another spacegoing alien race?"

  "It might be," Carialle said, cautiously. "It's a big universe. But first we must prove that the disappearance of this ship wasn't mere accident, and that it wasn't bad engineering that slew three Cridi vessels."

  They explored the outer reaches of the heliopause. Space was pointedly, echoingly empty. Carialle picked up faint traces of engine trails, some ages old by the pattern of their decay. It seemed that most of the Cridi missions, at least as far back as they'd used an ion drive, had exited the system in this direction. It led, not incidentally, directly toward Ozran and away from the bulk of the Central Worlds. Her entry into the solar system was a quarter of the way anticlockwise around the sun, so the new wake she was forming behind her was clear and undisturbed. She used it to check the strength of the trail she was following.

  "Aha," she said, as they arced out toward a group of jagged moonlets dancing along in the asteroid belt. "Now I am picking up fresh indications from another kind of space drive. Not Cridi."

  Keff stared at the astrogation tank. Tall Eyebrow wriggled up next to him to see. Carialle put the view on full light spectrum analysis. The brawn darted a finger toward the lines that sprang into relief, criss-crossing the holographic display like spider web.

  "I see it. There are hundreds of them!" he exclaimed. "Someone else is in this system."

  "Very strange," Tall Eyebrow signed. "They've been traveling through here for years, but no one has ever made contact with the second planet. They must have been able to tell someone was living there. The noisy airwaves alone would have told them that, even if they couldn't understand the transmissions."

  "They wouldn't exactly come visiting if their only motive was robbery," Keff said. "Wait, these are all cold. They're years old."

  "Not these," Carialle said, illuminating three traces that converged on an asteroid cluster. "Those are new."

  Keff peered closely at the faint image in the tank, then pounded a hand flat on the console. He had spotted movement.

  "Cari, reverse course! Quick!"

  Almost before the words were out of his mouth, Carialle had looped the ship around. She was heading for cover behind a pocked moonlet before they could sense her. Three strange ships flew out of crevices and holes in one of the asteroids, and were making straight for them. She kept video cameras aimed aft as she looked for a hiding place. Keff studied their pursuers.

  The ships' design looked familiar: long, tapered cones bracketed with emplacements for landing gear, communications, and weaponry, but all were old and in poor repair. Flying junkheaps, he thought, with a sniff. His monitors still didn't show a sensor lock from their pursuers. Their sensors showed radiation leak from two of their engines. One was nearing critical point as it poured on power to catch up with them. They were almost ridiculously undermaintained, but Keff felt no urge to laugh.

  "Hurry, Cari!"

  By comparison, the CK-963 was an angel on the wing. Carialle cornered wide around two halves of a broken rock ten times her size, then hugged in close behind a flattened sphere, searching for a ravine or a cave she could duck into. The sphere's sides were solid. She tried slipping past it unseen, to another huge rock shaped like a flatiron. One of the intruders was waiting just beyond the great wedge's lip. Carialle grimly turned as sharp an angle as she could in the opposite direction.

  A red light, infinitesimally small, bloomed on the pursuer's hull.

  "Brace!" Carialle cried out as the energy bolt struck her amidships.

  The blast tore straight through her shields as though through cellophane. Painful heat ran along her sensors, which then mercifully shut down. Damage control monitors showed her an elongated oval tear in her dorsal hull. Whoops sounded as the alarm went off in the cabin. Emergency systems kicked into operation at once.

  Keff kept himself from being thrown across the control console by gripping the crash couch's armrests and hanging on with all his great strength. Tall Eyebrow, hovering, had nothing to grab onto, but pivoted deliberately in the air and somersaulted into the padding of the other couch. The straps rose up and surrounded him like an octopus seizing prey.

  "Wish I could do that," Keff said, between gritted teeth. Tall Eyebrow whistled an apology. The pilot's couch engulfed Keff in safety harness. He expelled his breath in a long sigh and let go his grasp on the armrests.

  "Thanks. How bad is it?" Keff asked the air.

  "Hull breach, minor. Already being fixed," Carialle said shortly.

  The automatic repair system quickly pressurized the sector and filled it with self-hardening polymer/metal compound. Nothing vital had been damaged, but Carialle wondered how many of those hits they could take before being destroyed. Her nerve endings still stung. She fed somatotropins to the injured part, and increased her sugar levels slightly.

  Keff shook his hands to help the blood flow to the white and pinched palms, then slammed his fist down on the record button to send a message to CW.

  "Mayday. This is the CK-963. We are under attack by three vessels, origin unknown. I am uplinking video of these vessels, plus other data we have gathered regarding the disappearance of a Central Worlds ship in this sector. If we are unable to escape, send fleet ships to the Cridi system at once. We have already taken damage. I repeat, we are under attack—uh-oh!"

  The screen caught his attention as the red light on the enemy ship appeared again. "Cari, they're shooting again!"

  "I'm moving, I'm moving!" Carialle exclaimed. The ship zigzagged as well as it could to avoid the coming barrage, but she couldn't move far to any side. There was no way to dodge another blast. "Our shields aren't meant to take this."

  The Frog Prince once again put his newfound power into operation. His hands whisked back and forth in silent commands. Carialle felt the Core within her walls hum. Suddenly, her hull felt as if it had been dipped in transparent padding. The next bolt of energy, invisible to the naked eye, exploded in a burst of white light against her side. Keff and Tall Eyebrow were jolted around in their couches, but the ship sustained no damage.

  "Thanks, TE," Carialle said. "You just earned your keep." The globe-frog signalled a shaky "You're welcome."

  The enemy, obviously taken aback that its volley made no impact, sent half a dozen bolts in rapid succession. Carialle attempted to avoid them, but two of them hit her—one in the tail, and one close to the airlock. The white light from their impact momentarily blinded one of her cameras, and the cabin lights faded down for a second. Carialle took the moment of the blast to slide into a narrow alley formed by a winding DNA-strand of floating rocks. The next blast missed them, exploding a meteorite that peppered the hull noisily with sand. Carialle maneuvered through the belt, hoping to keep the distance between her and her pursuer. It vanished among the rocks.

  "How long will your shield hold?" she asked Tall Eyebrow.

  "I do not know," he said. "Perhaps long enough, but a sustained volley might overstrain it. Especially if they have a Core, too."

  "I'm sending that message to Simeon and the CW right now," Carialle said. "If we lose, no one will ever find us. It'll be weeks, if not months before the message gets home. Someone has to know about these people. They've obviously been using the outskirts of this system as a hideout for years, and no one knew about it."

  "You did," Keff said, grimly.

  "An unhappy surmise, unluckily turning out to be true. At present, that's no satisfaction," she said briskly.

  "Are these the ones?" Keff asked, with a concerned look at her pillar. "Are they your salvage squad?"

  "I don't know," she said. "I was blind then."

  "Do the engines match the configuration?" Keff asked. "Did they make physical contact? Can you recognize the vibration? Frequency emissions?"

  "I don't know. After the attack I know my sensors went skewiff, so I might have been filtering all I know through bad information. I'll only know if I can get one of them
to walk on me again. And I'm damned if I'll ever let that happen."

  She recognized that her voice had grown terse, and made an effort to pull herself together. The moment of indecision and resolution took only microseconds, but she knew Keff had noticed the hesitation.

  "I'm fine," she said, making the Lady Fair image appear on the wall. The peach-colored veil from her hennin floated softly around her face, which wore an expression of peace. Keff gave it a skeptical glance, but nodded. Both of them had to concentrate right now on survival.

  As they wove through the asteroids, two blips appeared ahead on long range scan. Carialle wondered if her new equipment was more sophisticated than theirs; could she see them before they saw her? It might mean the difference between escape and destruction. Carialle studied her telemetry. Where could she turn to avoid them? Nothing truly safe offered itself. A sharp turn in any direction threw her into the teeth of the celestial meat grinder. Suddenly, a gap opened to starboard. She took it, nipping in just before two bolts lanced through the space she'd been occupying.

  "This was probably not a good idea," Carialle said. "One lone, unarmed ship doesn't have a chance against a force of three. We've got to get out of here."

  "We still have to find the DSC-902," Keff reminded her. "Even if we can just locate it before we get away, that'll be a help. I'd rather rescue them if we can."

  "I'm with you, O brave one, but we need to survive this mission to be of any use to them." She broke off to dodge the first ship, which appeared on the other side of a rock full of holes like Swiss cheese. It fired a few times, through one hole then another. Carialle avoided them all, but felt stone shrapnel ping against her hull. The enemy ship spurred after her. She fled, only to find the lone ship had radioed the other two, who appeared on either side of her at the next wide spot. Carialle calculated the period between spiralling rocks, and ducked upward. The three ships, unable to maneuver with her skill, plummeted forward.

  Carialle widened the gap between her and the enemy to half a dozen planet-widths by diving down and through the asteroid belt, and coming out "south" of the plane of the ecliptic. She made a note of where the three ships were, and turned back up and into the stone dance at some distance from them. Her sensors indicated that the enemy had figured out what she had done and were coming after her, but she was ahead of them now, scanning for traces of the DSC-902.

  "Do you know, they're fast, but their equipment is ancient," Carialle said. "I might be able to outlast them in hide-and-seek, if only we don't get in the way of sustained fire."

  "Your engines are better than any of these brutes," Keff said, anxiously watching the aft monitor. One of the ships, blip number two, was outside the belt now, pouring on velocity to catch up. "We can outdistance them. Maybe we can outclass them, too. TE, can we convince them we've got some heavy armament?"

  "How?"

  "Grab one of those rocks as we go past, and sling it backwards toward this fellow."

  The globe-frog looked worried. "It will mean relinquishing control of the shield," he said.

  "We'll have to chance it," Carialle said. "My shields are 92% intact, and none of those old pots can match me for maneuverability. Go ahead."

  The thick padding around her vanished suddenly, leaving her feeling chilled as if she was exposed to the cold of space. Hastily, she rebuilt her defenses. Carialle felt a momentary drag aft and to port as Tall Eyebrow hitched his power to a rock about three meters across and pulled it out of the dance. It sailed along behind them like a puppy. Carialle turned on all her dorsal thrusters in a sudden burst, and turned on her belly, heading back toward the pursuing ship. Tall Eyebrow made a pushing motion in midair. The rock spiraled up from Carialle's tail and flew in a tightening pattern around her body toward the enemy. With the extra momentum behind it, the missile appeared to elongate in flight.

  The enemy ship had only seconds to avoid collision. It veered to up and to starboard. Tall Eyebrow reached out to the end of his range to alter the rock's course to match. It got to within a hundred kilometers of the enemy before the lasers exploded it.

  "I missed," Tall Eyebrow complained.

  "Whew!" Carialle said. "They have got fast reflexes."

  "More, TE, more!" Keff shouted, as the pirate recovered itself and fired its weapons at them. The Frog Prince threw the shields back into place just in time. Carialle swept deeper into the asteroid belt, and let a cartwheeling rock take the brunt. In the meantime, Tall Eyebrow picked up more chunks of debris to use as weapons. They circled around Carialle's middle like a planetary ring.

  "The other two ships are coming," Carialle warned. "If we can disable this one, I can probably outlast the other two."

  "We might be able to rely on psychology," Keff said. "If we're wrong, and they don't have the Cores, seeing us throwing rocks around by remote control might make them back up."

  "We can only try it," Carialle said. "I'd better show my pretty face, then."

  She dove out of the belt, coming out above ship number two. One and three weren't far behind. Burning her thrusters for an extra burst of speed, she got ahead of Ship Two. Tall Eyebrow used the inertia to help launch a series of stone projectiles, one after another, spiraling them down over Carialle's tail and into the path of the other.

  The enemy snaked widely, shooting at the speeding rocks. Tall Eyebrow had chosen a good variety for his missiles. Some burst into gravel; some, with heavy metal content, slagged along the edges but kept spinning. One whirled with sawbladelike inexorability straight into the path of Ship One, which pulled straight up in an acute arc. The molten rock narrowly missed its tail fins.

  Ship Two, wound too tightly among the asteroids to flinch, took a pair of fragments amidships. Carialle saw the leak of atmosphere escape from the side of the hull. It streamed out in a haze alongside the exhaust. For the first time she picked up transmissions from the raiders. She couldn't comprehend the language.

  "Keff, listen to this," she said. Keff tilted his head as she re-ran the recording and raised his eyebrows at the staccato rhythm of voices. He couldn't understand the deep voices, but he comprehended the urgency.

  "That's an SOS," he said definitely. "TE struck something vital."

  "Hit them again, TE," Carialle said. "Aim for the engines."

  The Ozranian continued his bombardment. Because of the limitations of the Core, he had to depend on a target maintaining its trajectory from the time he let go of a rock. With his superior grasp of spatial relations, Carialle only had to make certain he had a constantly updated overview in the astrogation tank. Keff, a fascinated but helpless bystander, led the cheering section each time one of Tall Eyebrow's missiles found its mark.

  Battered and leaking, Ship Two eventually dropped back and out of the race to nurse its damaged hull. Now that Carialle had proved that her ship wasn't helpless, the other two ships became cagey. They flew a wide pattern alongside her, peppering her with laser fire, trying to herd her into planetoids. Carialle's shields fell to 68%. Now they were engaged in what Keff recognized as a true space battle, fought with atlases instead of micrometers.

  Carialle focused her telemetry on what lay ahead. The going was more difficult here. If they picked up missiles to throw, she would have to remain on her own shields. Ancient comets had passed through this part of the belt again and again, chopping the asteroids into pieces ranging from those meters across to particles almost as small as dust. She worried that she might sustain a breach. On the good side, the cloud of dust seemed to cut off visuals of her to the other ships. On her scopes she saw them veer around uncertainly. Their medium-range sensors were nowhere near as good as hers.

  "We can't get them both at once just tossing boulders," he said. "Can we set up a kind of chain reaction? What if we spin a big rock, the biggest one TE can handle, into one heading the other way? Could we get it to ricochet back toward the Joy Boys back there? Then we can attack the other more directly."

  "I don't see why not," she said. She homed in on a set of nea
rly spherical fragments ahead, and bracketed them for Tall Eyebrow to see. "How are you at playing pool?"

  Carialle let herself be "seen" on the enemies' scopes by surfacing out of the dust clouds. The other ships obligingly took the bait, and spurred to catch up with her. All their strategy for keeping their distance from her was dropped. They meant to kill.

  "This had better work," Carialle said. "Otherwise, we'll have to run, and hope that the Core holds out until we can make Cridi atmosphere."

  With almost a casual deflection of power, the Frog Prince set his chain reaction in motion. The cue ball, a stone sphere twelve meters across, was set spinning into its fellows. Most of the rocks it hit split off in a dozen directions, obvious, easy for the ships following to avoid. The eight ball, a rock dark with magnesium oxide, cannoned forward, gaining velocity toward a quarter-planetoid raddled by the eternal passage of fragments. With delightful precision, Tall Eyebrow had aimed his shot toward an obliquely angled "valley." Carialle saw the eight ball hit one angle of the corner shot and deflect onward, and then she was past it.

  The other ships paid no attention to a rock that appeared to have missed. Tall Eyebrow had gathered up another stream of small rocks. He shot them at one ship then the other, in twos and threes, with varying degrees of success. It kept the enemy too busy to fire straight at Carialle, or to pay attention to where they were going. Carialle led them around and back along the trajectory she wanted them to follow. To make sure they could keep up, she dropped velocity slightly, daringly. They passed the alley down which the eight ball hurtled. Ship One was too intent upon Carialle, or perhaps its sensors were too confused by the dust and the flashes from its laser barrage, to pick up the huge rock until it rolled almost straight into its aft section.

  The two ventral engines imploded, setting off a chain reaction like the lit fuse on a stick of dynamite that destroyed the rest of the ship.

  Carialle heard an outcry on its audio frequency, then silence. Ship Three must have picked up that last, futile message, for it broke off its attack.