Upon a Sea of Stars

by A Bertram Chandler

  Slowly the red haze cleared from the commodore’s vision as he stood there. Slowly he lowered his axe, and as he did so he realized that the Instructor had rolled over, was lying there, laughing up at him, was saying, “Easy, sir. Easy. You’re not supposed to kill me, sir. Or to ruin my matrimonial prospects.”

  “I’m sorry, Sergeant,” Grimes said stiffly. “But that was a dirty trick you played.”

  “It was meant to be dirty, sir. Never trust nobody—that’s Lesson One.”

  “And Lesson Two, Sergeant?”

  “You’ve learned that too, sir. You gotta hate. You officers are all the same—you don’t really hate the poor cows at the other end of the trajectory when you press a firing button. But in this sort of fighting you gotta hate.”

  “I think I see, Sergeant,” said Grimes.

  But he was not sorry when he was able to return to his real business—to see Freedom (or Destroyer) readied for her expedition into the Unknown.

  Chapter 11

  FREEDOM was commissioned as a cruiser of the Navy of the Rim Worlds Confederacy, but the winged wheel of the Rim Worlds had not replaced the embossed lettering of her original name or the crude, black-painted characters that had partially obscured it. Freedom was manned by spacemen and spacewomen of the Reserve and a company of Marines. But there was no display of gold braid and brass buttons—marks of rank and departmental insignia had been daubed on the bare skin of wrists and upper arms and shoulders in an indelible vegetable dye. Apart from this crude attempt at uniform, the ship’s complement was attired in scanty, none too clean rags. The men were shaggily bearded, the roughly hacked hair of the women was unkempt. All of them bore unsightly cicatrices on their bodies—but these were the result of plastic surgery, not of ill-treatment.

  Outwardly, Freedom was just as she had been when she suddenly materialized in her suicidal orbit off Lorn. Internally, however, there had been changes made. On the side that had been scarred by the blast, the weapons—the laser projectors and the missile launchers—had been repaired, although this had been done so as not to be apparent to an external observer. In a hitherto empty storeroom just forward of the enginerooms the sphere of anti-matter had been installed—the big ball of anti-iron, and the powerful magnets that held it in place inside its neutronium casing. And within the shell plating was the thick lead sheathing that would protect the ship’s personnel from lethal radiation when the nuclear device was exploded, the bomb that, Grimes hoped, would blow the vessel back to where she had come from. (The physicists had assured him that the odds on this happening were seven to five, and that the odds on the ship’s finding herself in a habitable universe were almost astronomical.)

  There was one more change insofar as the internal fittings were concerned, and it was a very important one. The tissue culture vats now contained pork, and not human flesh. “After all,” Grimes had said to a Biologist who was insisting upon absolute verisimilitude, “there’s not all that much difference between pig and long pig. . . .”

  The man had gone all technical on him, and the Commodore had snapped, “Pirates we may have to become, but not cannibals!”

  But even pirates, thought Grimes, surveying the officers in his control room, would be dressier than this mob. He was glad that he had insisted upon the painted badges of rank—the beards made his male officers hard to recognize. With the female ones it was not so bad, although other features (like the men, the women wore only breech clouts) tended to distract attention from their faces.

  Clothes certainly make the man, the Commodore admitted wryly to himself. And the women—although this very undress uniform suits Sonya well enough, even though her hair-do does look as though she’s been dragged through a hedge backwards. And it felt all wrong for him to be sitting in the chair of command, the seat of the mighty, without the broad gold stripes on his epaulettes (and without the epaulettes themselves, and without a shirt to mount them on) and without the golden comets encrusting the peak of his cap. But the ragged indigo band encircling each hairy wrist would have to do, just as the coarse burlap kilt would have to substitute for the tailored, sharply creased shorts that were his normal shipboard wear.

  He was concerning himself with trivialities, he knew, but it is sometimes helpful and healthy to let the mind be lured away, however briefly, from consideration of the greater issues.

  Williams—lately Mr. Williams, Mate of Rim Mamelute, now Commander Williams, Executive Officer of Freedom—had the con. Under his control the ship was riding the beam from Lorn back to the position in which she had first been picked up by Orbital Station 3. It was there, the scientists had assured Grimes, that she would stand the best change of being blown back into her own continuum. The theory seemed to make sense, although the mathematics of it were far beyond the Commodore, expert navigator though he was.

  The ship was falling free now, her reaction drive silent, dropping down the long, empty miles towards a rendezvous that would be no more (at first) than a flickering of needles on dials, an undulation of the glowing traces on the faces of monitor tubes. She was falling free, and through the still unshuttered ports there was nothing to be seen ahead but the dim, ruddy spark that was the Eblis sun, and nothing to port but a faint, far nebulosity that was one of the distant island universes.

  To starboard was the mistily gleaming galactic lens, a great ellipse of luminosity in which there were specks of brighter light, like jewels in the hair of some dark goddess.

  Grimes smiled wryly at his poetic fancies, and Sonya, who had guessed what he had been thinking, grinned at him cheerfully. She was about to speak when Williams’ voice broke the silence. “Hear this! Hear this! Stand by for deceleration. Stand by for deceleration!”

  Retro-rockets coughed, then shrieked briefly. For a second or so seat belts became almost intolerable bonds. The Executive Officer emitted a satisfied grunt, then said, “spot on, Skipper. Secure for the Big Bang?”

  “You know the drill, Commander Williams. Carry on, please.”

  “Good-oh, Skipper.” Williams snapped orders, and the ship shivered a little as the capsule containing the nuclear device was launched. Grimes saw the thing briefly from a port before the shutters—armor plating and thick lead sheathing—slid into place. It was just a dull-gleaming metal cylinder. It should have looked innocuous, but somehow it didn’t. Grimes was suddenly acutely conscious of the craziness of this venture. The scientists had been sure that everything would work as it should, but they were not here to see their theories put to the test. But I must be fair, Grimes told himself. After all, it was our idea. Mine and Sonya’s. . . .

  “Fire!” he heard Williams say.

  But nothing happened.

  There was no noise—but, of course, in the vacuum of Deep Space there should not have been. There was no sense of shock. There was no appreciable rise of the control room temperature.

  “A missfire?” somebody audibly wondered.

  “Try to raise Lorn,” Grimes ordered the Radio Officer. “Orbital Station 3 is maintaining a listening watch on our frequency.”

  There was a period of silence, broken only by the hiss and crackle of interstellar static, then the voice of the operator saying quietly, “Freedom to Station Three. Freedom to Station Three. Do you hear me? Come in, please.”

  Again there was silence.

  “Sample the bands,” said Grimes. “Listening watch only.”

  And then they knew that the bomb had exploded, that the results of the explosion had been as planned. There was an overheard dialogue between two beings with high, squeaky voices, similar to the voice that had been recorded in Freedom’s signal log. There was a discussion of Estimated Time of Arrival and of arrangements for the discharge of cargo—hard to understand at first, but easier once ear and brain became attuned to the distortion of vowel sounds.

  When the ports were unscreened, the outside view was as it had been prior to the launching of the bomb, but Grimes and his people knew that the worlds in orbit around those dim, far suns w
ere not, in this Universe, under human dominion.

  Chapter 12

  “WHAT’S THEIR RADAR LIKE?” asked Grimes.

  “Judging by what’s in this ship, not too good,” replied Williams. “Their planet and station-based installations will have a longer range, but unless they’re keepin’ a special lookout they’ll not pick us up at this distance.”

  “Good,” said Grimes. “Then swing her, Commander. Put the Lorn sun dead ahead. Then calculate what deflection we shall need to make Lorn itself our planetfall.”

  “Reaction Drive, sir?”

  “No. Mannschenn Drive.”

  “But we’ve no Mass Proximity Indicator, Skipper, and a jump of light minutes only.”

  “We’ve slipsticks, and a perfectly good computer. With any luck we shall be able to intercept that ship coming in for a landing.”

  “You aren’t wasting any time, John,” said Sonya, approval in her voice. The Commodore could see that she was alone in her sentiments. The other officers, including the Major of Marines, were staring at him as though doubtful of his sanity.

  “Get on with it, Commander,” snapped Grimes. “Our only hope of intercepting that ship is to make a fast approach, and one that cannot be detected. And make it Action Stations while you’re about it.”

  “And Boarding Stations?” asked the Major. The spacegoing soldier had recovered his poise and was regarding his superior with respect.

  “Yes. Boarding Stations. Get yourself and your men into those adapted spacesuits.” He added, with a touch of humor, “And don’t trip over the tails.”

  He sat well back in his chair as the gyroscopes whined, as the ship’s transparent nose with its cobweb of graticules swung slowly across the almost empty sky. And then the yellow Lorn sun was ahead and Sonya, who had taken over the computer, was saying, “Allowing a time lag of exactly one hundred and twenty seconds from . . . now, give her five seconds of arc left deflection.”

  “Preliminary thrust?” asked Williams.

  “Seventy-five pounds, for exactly 0.5 second.”

  “Mannschenn Drive ready,” reported the officer at the Remote Control.

  Grimes was glad that he had ordered the time-varying device to be warmed up before the transition from one universe to the other had been made. He had foreseen the possibility of flight; he had not contemplated the possibility of initiating a fight. But, as he had told the Admiral, he was playing by ear.

  He said to Sonya, “You have the con, Commander Verrill. Execute when ready.”

  “Ay, ay, sir. Stand by all. Commander Williams—preliminary thrust on the word ‘Fire!’ Mr. Cavendish, Mannschenn Drive setting 2.756. Operate for exactly 7.5 seconds immediately reaction drive has been cut. Stand by all. Ten . . . Nine . . . Eight . . . Seven . . . Six . . . Five . . .”

  Like one of the ancient submarines, Grimes was thinking. An invisible approach to the target, and not even a periscope to betray us. But did those archaic warships ever make an approach on dead reckoning? I suppose that they must have done, but only in their infancy.

  “Four . . . Three . . . Two . . . One . . . fire!”

  The rockets coughed briefly, diffidently, and the normally heavy hand of acceleration delivered no more than a gentle pat. Immediately there was the sensation of both temporal and spatial disorientation as the ever-precessing gyroscopes of the Drive began to spin—a sensation that faded almost at once. And then the control room was flooded with yellow light—light that dimmed as the ports were polarized. But there was still light, a pearly radiance of reflected illumination from the eternal overcast, the familiar overcast of Lorn. That planet hung on their port beam, a great, featureless sphere, looking the same as it had always looked to the men and women at the controls of the ship.

  But it was not the same.

  There was that excited voice, that shrill voice spilling from the speaker: “Whee eere yee? Wheet sheep? Wheet sheep? Wee sheell reepeert yee. Yee knee theer eet ees feerbeedeen tee eese thee Dreeve weetheen three reedeei!”

  “Almost rammed the bastards,” commented Williams. “That was close, Skip.”

  “It was,” agreed Grimes, looking at the radar repeater before his chair. “Match trajectory, Commander.” He could see the other ship through the ports now. Like Freedom, she was in orbit about Lorn. The reflected sunlight from her metal skin was dazzling and he could not make out her name or any other details. But Sonya had put on a pair of polaroids with telescopic lenses. She reported, “Her name’s Weejee. Seems to be just a merchantman. No armament that I can see.”

  “Mr. Carter!”

  “Sir!” snapped the Gunnery Officer.

  “See if your laser can slice off our friend’s main venturi. And then the auxiliary ones.”

  “Ay, ay, sir.”

  The invisible beams stabbed out from Freedom’s projectors. In spite of the dazzle of reflected sunlight from the other’s hull the blue incandescence of melting, vaporizing metal was visible. And then Grimes was talking into the microphone that somebody had passed to him, “Freedom to Weejee. Freedom to Weejee. We are about to board you. Offer no resistance and you will not be harmed.”

  And then the shrill voice, hysterical now, was screaming to somebody far below on the planet’s surface. “Heelp! Heelp! Eet ees thee Deestreeyeer! Eet ees the sleeves! Heelp!”

  “Jam their signals!” ordered Grimes. How long would it be before a warship came in answer to the distress call? Perhaps there was already one in orbit, hidden by the bulk of the planet. And there would be ground to space missiles certainly—but Carter could take care of them with his laser.

  Somebody came into the control room, a figure in bulky space armor, a suit that had been designed to accommodate a long, prehensile tail. For a moment Grimes thought that it was one of the rightful owners of the ship, that somehow a boarding had been effected. And then the Major’s voice, distorted by the diaphragm in the snouted helmet, broke the spell. “Commodore Grimes, sir,” he said formally, “my men are ready.”

  Grimes told him, “I don’t think that our friends out there are going to open up.” He added regretfully, “And we have no laser pistols.”

  “There are cutting and burning tools in the engineering workshop, sir. I have already issued them to my men.”

  “Very good, Major. You may board.”

  “Your instructions, sir?”

  “Limit your objectives. I’d like the Log Books from her Control, and any other papers, such as manifests, that could be useful. But if there’s too much resistance, don’t bother. We may have to get out of here in a hurry. But I shall expect at least one prisoner.”

  “We shall do our best, sir.”

  “I know you will, Major. But as soon as I sound the Recall, come a-running.”

  “Very good, sir.” The Marine managed a smart salute, even in the disguising armor, left the control room.

  “Engaging ground to space missiles,” announced the Gunnery Officer in a matter of fact voice. Looking out through the planetward ports Grimes could see tiny, distant, intensely brilliant sparks against the cloud blanket. There was nothing to worry about—yet. Carter was picking off the rockets as soon as they came within range of his weapons.

  And then he saw the Marines jetting between the two ships, each man with a vapor trail that copied and then surpassed the caudal appendage of his suit. They carried boarding axes, and the men in the lead were burdened with bulky cutting tools. He watched them come to what must have been a clangorous landing on the other vessel’s shell plating and then, with an ease that was the result of many drills, disperse themselves to give the tool-bearers room to work. Metal melted, flared and exploded into glowing vapor. The ragged-edged disc that had been the outer valve of the airlock was pried up and clear and sent spinning away into emptiness. There was a slight delay as the inner door was attacked—and then the armored figures were vanishing rapidly into the holed ship.

  From the speaker of the transceiver that was tuned to spacesuit frequency Grimes heard the
Major’s voice, “Damn it all, Bronsky, that’s a tool, not a weapon! Don’t waste the charge!”

  “He’d have got you, sir. . .”

  “Never mind that. I want that airtight door down!”

  And there were other sounds—clanging noises, panting, a confused scuffling. There was a scream, a human scream.

  In the control room the radar officer reported. “Twelve o’clock low. Two thousand miles. Reciprocal trajectory. Two missiles launched.”

  “Carter!” said Grimes.

  “In hand, sir,” replied that officer cheerfully. “So far.”

  “Recall the Marines,” ordered Grimes. “Secure control room for action.”

  The armored shutters slid over the ports. Grimes wondered how much protection the lead sheathing would give against laser, if any. But if the Major and his men were caught between the two ships their fate would be certain, unpleasantly so. And it was on the planetary side of the ship, the side from which the boarding party would return, that the exterior television scanner had been destroyed by the blast that had thrown the ship into Grimes’ universe. That scanner had not been renewed. The Commodore could not tell whether or not the Major had obeyed his order; by the time that the Marines were out of the radar’s blind spot they would be almost in Freedom’s airlock. Not that the radar was of much value now, at short range; Freedom was enveloped in a dense cloud of metallic motes. This would shield her from the enemy’s laser, although not from missiles. And the floating screen would render her own anti-missile laser ineffective. Missile against missile was all very well, but the other warship was operating from a base from which she could replenish her magazines.