The Mammoth Book of SF Wars

by Ian Whates

  Planoforming was sort of funny. It felt like—

  Like nothing much.

  Like the twinge of a mild electric shock.

  Like the ache of a sore tooth bitten on for the first time.

  Like a slightly painful flash of light against the eyes.

  Yet in that time, a forty-thousand-ton ship lifting free above Earth disappeared somehow or other into two dimensions and appeared half a light-year or fifty light-years off.

  At one moment, he would be sitting in the Fighting Room, the pin-set ready and the familiar solar system ticking around inside his head. For a second or a year (he could never tell how long it really was, subjectively), the funny little flash went through him and then he was loose in the up-and-about, the terrible open spaces between the stars, where the stars themselves felt like pimples on his telepathic mind and the planets were too far away to be sensed or read.

  Somewhere in this outer space, a gruesome death awaited, death and horror of a kind which man had never encountered until he reached out for the interstellar space itself. Apparently the light of the suns kept the Dragons away.

  Dragons. That was what people called them. To ordinary people, there was nothing, nothing except the shiver of planoforming and the hammer blow of sudden death or the dark spastic note of lunacy descending into their minds.

  But to the telepaths, they were dragons.

  In the fraction of a second between the telepaths’ awareness of a hostile something out in the black, hollow nothingness of space and the impact of a ferocious, ruinous psychic blow against all living things within the ship, the telepaths had sensed entities something like the dragons of ancient human lore, beasts more clever than beasts, demons more tangible than demons, hungry vortices of aliveness and hate compounded by unknown means out of the thin, tenuous matter between the stars.

  It took a surviving ship to bring back the news – a ship in which, by sheer chance, a telepath had a light-beam ready, turning it out at the innocent dust so that, within the panorama of his mind, the dragon dissolved into nothing at all and the other passengers, themselves non-telepathic, went about their way not realizing that their own immediate deaths had been averted.

  From then on, it was easy – almost.

  Planoforming ships always carried telepaths. Telepaths had their sensitiveness enlarged to an immense range by the pin-sets, which were telepathic amplifiers adapted to the mammal mind. The pin-sets in turn were electronically geared into small dirigible light bombs. Light did it.

  Light broke up the dragons, allowed the ships to reform three-dimensionally, skip, skip, skip, as they moved from star to star.

  The odds suddenly moved down from a hundred to one against mankind to sixty to forty in mankind’s favour.

  This was not enough. The telepaths were trained to become ultrasensitive, trained to become aware of the dragons in less than a millisecond.

  But it was found that the dragons could move a million miles in just under two milliseconds and that this was not enough for the human mind to activate the light beams.

  Attempts had been made to sheath the ships in light at all times.

  This defence wore out.

  As mankind learned about the dragons, so too, apparently, the dragons learned about mankind. Somehow they flattened their own bulk and came in on extremely flat trajectories very quickly.

  Intense light was needed, light of sunlike intensity. This could be provided only by the light bombs. Pinlighting came into existence.

  Pinlighting consisted of the detonation of ultra-vivid miniature photonuclear bombs, which converted a few ounces of a magnesium isotope into pure visible radiance.

  The odds kept coming down in mankind’s favour, yet ships were being lost.

  It became so bad that people didn’t even want to find the ships because the rescuers knew what they would see. It was sad to bring back to Earth three hundred bodies ready for burial and two hundred or three hundred lunatics, damaged beyond repair, to be wakened, and fed, and cleaned, and put to sleep, wakened and fed again until their lives were ended.

  Telepaths tried to reach into the minds of the psychotics who had been damaged by the dragons, but they found nothing there beyond vivid spouting columns of fiery terror bursting from the primordial id itself, the volcanic source of life.

  Then came the partners.

  Man and partner could do together what man could not do alone. Men had the intellect. Partners had the speed.

  The partners rode their tiny craft, no larger than footballs, outside the spaceships. They planoformed with the ships. They rode beside them in their six-pound craft ready to attack.

  The tiny ships of the partners were swift. Each carried a dozen pinlights, bombs no bigger than thimbles.

  The pinlighters threw the partners – quite literally threw – by means of mind-to-firing relays directly at the dragons.

  What seemed to be dragons to the human mind appeared in the form of gigantic rats in the minds of the partners.

  Out in the pitiless nothingness of space, the partners’ minds responded to an instinct as old as life. The partners attacked, striking with a speed faster than man’s, going from attack to attack until the rats or themselves were destroyed. Almost all the time it was the partners who won.

  With the safety of the interstellar skip, skip, skip of the ships, commerce increased immensely, the population of all the colonies went up, and the demand for trained partners increased.

  Underhill and Woodley were a part of the third generation of pinlighters and yet, to them, it seemed as though their craft had endured forever.

  Gearing space into minds by means of the pin-set, adding the partners to those minds, keying up the minds for the tension of a fight on which all depended – this was more than human synapses could stand for long. Underhill needed his two months’ rest after half an hour of fighting. Woodley needed his retirement after ten years of service. They were young. They were good. But they had their limitations.

  So much depended on the choice of partners, so much on the sheer luck of who drew whom.

  2. The Shuffle

  Father Moontree and the little girl named West entered the room. They were the other two pinlighters. The human complement of the Fighting Room was now complete.

  Father Moontree was a red-faced man of forty-five who had lived the peaceful life of a farmer until he reached his fortieth year. Only then, belatedly, did the authorities find he was a telepathic and agree to let him late in life enter upon the career of pinlighter. He did well at it, but he was fantastically old for this kind of business.

  Father Moontree looked at the glum Woodley and the musing Underhill. “How’re the youngsters today? Ready for a good fight?”

  “Father always wants a fight,” giggled the little girl named West. She was such a little little girl. Her giggle was high and childish. She looked like the last person in world one would find in the rough, sharp duelling of pinlighting.

  Underhill had been amused one time when he found one of the most sluggish of the partners coming away happy from contact with the mind of the girl named West.

  Usually the partners didn’t care much about the human minds with which they were paired for the journey. The partners seemed to take the attitude that human minds were complex and fouled up beyond belief, anyhow. No partner ever questioned the superiority of the human mind, though very few of the partners were much impressed by that superiority.

  The partners liked people. They were willing to fight with them. They were even willing to die for them. But when a partner liked an individual the way, for example, that Captain Wow or the Lady May like Underhill, the liking had nothing to do with intellect. It was a matter of temperament, of feel.

  Underhill knew perfectly well that Captain Wow regarded his, Underhill’s, brains as silly. What Captain Wow liked was Underhill’s friendly emotional structure, the cheerfulness and glint of wicked amusement that shot through Underhill’s unconscious thought patterns, and the gaiety w
ith which Underhill faced danger. The words, the history books, the ideas, the science – Underhill could sense all that in his own mind, reflected back from Captain Wow’s mind, as so much rubbish.

  Miss West looked at Underhill. “I bet you’ve put stickum on the stones.”

  “I did not!”

  Underhill felt his ears grow red with embarrassment. During his novitiate, he had tried to cheat in the lottery because he got particularly fond of a special partner, a lovely young mother named Murr. It was so much easier to operate with Murr and she was so affectionate towards him that he forgot pinlighting was hard work and that he was not instructed to have a good time with his partner. They were both designed and prepared to go into deadly battle together.

  One cheating had been enough. They had found him out and he had been laughed at for years.

  Father Moontree picked up the imitation-leather cup and shook the stone dice which assigned them their partners for the trip. By senior rights he took first draw.

  He grimaced. He had drawn a greedy old character, a tough old male whose mind was full of slobbering thoughts of food, veritable oceans full of half-spoiled fish. Father Moontree had once said that he burped cod liver oil for weeks after drawing that particular glutton, so strongly had the telepathic image of fish impressed itself upon his mind. Yet the glutton was a glutton for danger as well as for fish. He had killed sixty-three dragons, more than any other partner in the service, and was quite literally worth his weight in gold.

  The little girl West came next. She drew Captain Wow. When she saw who it was, she smiled.

  “I like him,” she said. “He’s such fun to fight with. He feels so nice and cuddly in my mind.”

  “Cuddly, hell,” said Woodley. “I’ve been in his mind, too. It’s the most leering mind in this ship, bar none.”

  “Nasty man,” said the little girl. She said it declaratively, without reproach.

  Underhill, looking at her, shivered.

  He didn’t see how she could take Captain Wow so calmly. Captain Wow’s mind did leer. When Captain Wow got excited in the middle of a battle, confused images of dragons, deadly rats, luscious beds, the smell of fish, and the shock of space all scrambled together in his mind as he and Captain Wow, their consciousness linked together through the pin-set, became a fantastic composite of human being and Persian cat.

  That’s the trouble with working with cats, thought Underhill. It’s a pity that nothing else anywhere will serve as partner. Cats were all right once you got in touch with them telepathically. They were smart enough to meet the needs of the flight, but their motives and desires were certainly different from those of humans.

  They were companionable enough as long as you thought tangible images at them, but their minds just closed up and went to sleep when you recited Shakespeare or Colegrove, or if you tried to tell them what space was.

  It was sort of funny realizing that the partners who were so grim and mature out here in space were the same cute little animals that people had used as pets for thousands of years back on Earth. He had embarrassed himself more than once while on the ground saluting perfectly ordinary non-telepathic cats because he had forgotten for the moment that they were not partners.

  He picked up the cup and shook out his stone dice.

  He was lucky – he drew the Lady May.

  The Lady May was the most thoughtful partner he had ever met. In her, the finely bred pedigree mind of a Persian cat had reached one of its highest peaks of development. She was more complex than any human woman, but the complexity was all one of emotions, memory, hope, and discriminate experience – experience sorted through without benefit of words.

  When he had first come into contact with her mind, he was astonished at its clarity. With her he remembered kittenhood. He remembered every mating experience she had ever had. He saw in a half-recognizable gallery all the other pinlighters with whom she had been paired for the fight. And he saw himself radiant, cheerful, and desirable.

  He even thought he caught the edge of a longing—

  A very flattering and yearning thought: What a pity he is not a cat.

  Woodley picked up the last stone. He drew what he deserved – a sullen, scarred old tomcat with none of the verve of Captain Wow. Woodley’s partner was the most animal of all the cats on the ship, a low, brutish type with a dull mind. Even telepathy had not refined his character. He ears were half chewed off from the first fights in which he had engaged. He was a serviceable fighter, nothing more.

  Woodley grunted.

  Underhill glanced at him oddly. Didn’t Woodley ever do anything but grunt?

  Father Moontree looked at the other three. “You might as well get your partners now. I’ll let the Go-captain know we’re ready to go into the up-and-out.”

  3. The Deal

  Underhill spun the combination lock on the Lady May’s cage. He woke her gently and took her into his arms. She humped her back luxuriously, stretched her claws, started to purr, thought better of it, and licked him on the wrist instead. He did not have the pin-set on, so their minds were closed to each other, but in the angle of her moustache and in the movement of her ears, he caught some sense of the gratification she experienced in finding him as her partner.

  He talked to her in human speech, even though speech meant nothing to a cat when the pin-set was not on.

  “It’s a damn shame, sending a sweet thing like you whirling around in the coldness of nothing to hunt for rats that are bigger and deadlier than all of us put together. You didn’t ask for this kind of fight, did you?”

  For answer, she licked his hand, purred, tickled his cheek with her long fluffy tail, turned around and faced him, golden eyes shining.

  For a moment, they stared at each other, man squatting, cat standing erect on her hind legs, front claws digging into his knee. Human eyes and cat eyes looked across an immensity which no words could meet, but which affection spanned in a single glance.

  “Time to get in,” he said.

  She walked docilely to her spheroid carrier. She climbed in. He saw to it that her miniature pin-set rested firmly and comfortably against the base of her brain. He made sure that her claws were padded so that she could not tear herself in the excitement of battle.

  Softly he said to her, “Ready?”

  For answer, she preened her back as much as her harness would permit and purred softly within the confines of the frame that held her.

  He slapped down the lid and watched the sealant ooze around the seam. For a few hours, she was welded into her projectile until a workman with a short cutting arc would remove her after she had done her duty.

  He picked up the entire projectile and slipped it into the ejection tube. He closed the door of the tube, spun the lock, seated himself in his chair, and put his own pin-set on.

  Once again he flung the switch.

  He sat in a small room, small, small, warm, warm, the bodies of the other three people moving close around him, the tangible light in the ceiling bright and heavy against his closed eyelids.

  As the pin-set warmed, the room fell away. The other people ceased to be people and became small glowing heaps of fire, embers, dark red fire, with the consciousness of life burning like old red coals in a country fireplace.

  As the pin-set warmed a little more, he felt Earth just below him, felt the ship slipping away, felt the turning Moon as it swung on the far side of the world, felt the planets and the hot, dear goodness of the sun which kept the dragons so far from mankind’s native ground.

  Finally, he reached complete awareness.

  He was telepathically alive to a range of millions of miles. He felt the dust which he had noticed earlier high above the ecliptic. With a thrill of warmth and tenderness, he felt the consciousness of the Lady May pouring over into his own. Her consciousness was as gentle and clear and yet sharp to the taste of his mind as if it were scented oil. It felt relaxing and reassuring. He could sense her welcome of him. It was scarcely a thought, just a raw emotion
of greeting.

  At last they were one again.

  In a tiny remote corner of his mind, as tiny as the smallest toy he had ever seen in his childhood, he was still aware of the room and the ship, and of Father Moontree picking up a telephone and speaking to a Go-captain in charge of the ship.

  His telepathic mind caught the idea long before his ears could frame the words. The actual sound followed the idea the way that thunder on an ocean beach follows the lightning inward from far out over the seas.

  “The Fighting Room is ready. Clear to planoform, sir.”

  4. The Play

  Underhill was always a little exasperated the way that Lady May experienced things before he did.

  He was braced for the quick vinegar thrill of planoforming, but he caught her report of it before his own nerves could register what happened.

  Earth had fallen so far away that he groped for several milliseconds before he found the sun in the upper rear right-hand corner of his telepathic mind.

  That was a good jump, he thought. This way we’ll get there in four or five skips.

  A few hundred miles outside the ship, the Lay May thought back at him, “O warm, O generous, O gigantic man! O brave, O friendly, O tender and huge partner! O wonderful with you, with you so good, good, good, warm, warm, now to fight, now to go, good with you …”

  He knew that she was not thinking words, that his mind took the clear amiable babble of her cat intellect and translated it into images which his own thinking could record and understand.

  Neither one of them was absorbed in the game of mutual greetings. He reached out far beyond her range of perception to see if there was anything near the ship. It was funny how it was possible to do two things at once. He could scan space with his pin-set mind and yet at the same time catch a vagrant thought of hers, a lovely, affectionate thought about a son who had had a golden face and a chest covered with a soft, incredibly downy white fur.