by John Dalmas
From the side, her jaw looked set and her eyes intent. There was no sign that she knew I'd come over, though I'm sure she did. I looked the instrument panel over; most of it, though not all, was familiar from the cutters dad had owned. Neither Deneen nor I should have any trouble flying it, and she was doing fine.
She'd have to take us out the better part of a million miles before shifting to FTL mode; otherwise, the stresses would tear the ship apart.
In spite of everything, dying wasn't something I wanted to do for a while, and neither did Deneen, I was sure.
Neither had Piet a few minutes ago, nor Jenoor. Nor the marine sergeant who'd laid his life on the line to help us get away, and lost it.
I told myself I wouldn't waste the chance they'd given us.
The array of stars I could see through the wraparound for'rd window didn't mean much to me, so I turned my eyes to the instrument display. We were already 63 miles out; the right-hand digits were a blur, and even the tens were changing too fast to read. At the hundreds position, a 4 replaced the 3 almost at once, followed quickly by a 5, then a 6. Pretty soon, I told myself, the hundreds would be changing too fast to read, too. Short seconds later we turned over 8,000.
I wondered if it was possible we might get away unattacked. There had to be patrol craft on picket around Evdash, between the hard radiation belts, probably piloted by some of the more reliable people the Imperials could identify, or maybe by Imperials themselves. They were sure to have been warned by now that we were outbound fugitives. There were monitor screens above the window that ought to show any approaching hostiles, if I could figure out how to turn them on. Without them, we couldn't take evasive action.
Not that Deneen or I was anything approaching a fighter pilot, but we ought to be able to do something. It might make the difference between getting away and getting blown out of the sky. Without the monitor screens on, all she could do was keep accelerating at maximum for mass-proximity mode, the computer holding us on the curving course that gave us the greatest momentary distance from Evdash.
Above the more familiar console section was a sort of shelf with key rows that probably controlled things such as the monitor screen, but they were marked only by initials or symbols. Let's see, I thought, if I can call up a keyboard diagram on the computer.
But first I reached for something I did recognize- the radio switch-and turned it on. Through the weird distortion effect of an accelerating mass-proximity drive, a demanding voice spoke from it, ordering: "… at once, we will destroy you! Fugitive scout! If you do not…"
Deneen's hand reached up and cuffed the switch on her side, overriding mine and turning it off. She didn't even glance over at me. "I'm flying this," she said tightly.
"Right." I could see her point: she didn't need the distraction. We both knew what our situation was, and all we could do was try to run through it. Letting threats pour into our ears wouldn't help, and she could do anything at the control console that she thought needed done.
The accent had been Evdashian, though. That had been apparent, even through the distortion And despite the threatening words, that was at least a little bit encouraging. The pilot might not be as zealous to kill or capture us.
I looked around for Bubba and didn't see him. Had he run back outside for some strange reason before Deneen got the door closed? It didn't seem possible; he was one of the most rational people ever born. But it was out of character for him to go hide somewhere. Then I realized-he was with Tarel; he had to be.
Meanwhile, if somehow we managed to get far enough to jump to FTL mode, the scout would have to be our home for as long as it took us to get somewhere. I got up and started to explore it.
She was a lot larger than our family cutter. Built for a patrol crew of six, she actually had two little restrooms; six tiny cabins, each just big enough to get in and out of the narrow bunk, a shower; and a snug little galley. The food storage compartment was a little worrisome, though. It had been stocked for maybe a ten- or twelve-day patrol, and anywhere we decided to go would probably be farther than that. There was an emergency store of dried foods, but I didn't have a good feel for how long stuff like that would last us.
While I was snooping through the galley, I felt a swerve: Deneen had made an evasive move. I jumped up and went back out to the controls area. Tarel came out, too. The monitor screens were on now, and I could see why she was taking evasive maneuvers. The mid-line starboard screen showed a blip that was trying to center on it-Sock Onto us-and we were sliding to port to keep it off center. There was also a blip on the midline port screen, but it looked a lot smaller, which should mean a lot farther away. On the instrument screen, the hundreds digits were blurred now, and the thousands digits said ninety-seven. Ninety-eight.
For just an instant the nearer blip slid into the central ring, but apparently it could only lock on us when it was perfectly centered. At that instant Deneen swerved us sharply to starboard, and the bogey slid out. At the speed we were moving, a swerve like that took us miles off line in a second. If the scout hadn't been encased in its own little quasi-space at the time, we'd have been smeared all over the bulkheads. Or actually, we would have been long before, simply from acceleration.
Tarel and I just stood there, watching. The bogey would get close to the ring, sometimes actually getting into it, while Deneen did her best to keep him from centering. It seemed as if a lot of time was passing, but it wasn't, really. The mileage on the instrument screen passed 300,000-distance from planetary mass, actually. We had a long way to go yet before we dared shift into FTL mode. Twice again the bogey almost centered- once it seemed it must have-and we slipped away. I couldn't help but think that its pilot wasn't trying as hard as he could. He'd hardly dare do any more than be just slightly slow of reflexes though, a tiny bit short on coordination. The whole chase would be recorded on his computer, and if we got away, there'd almost surely be a board of review. I could imagine the Imperial Military Administration on Evdash making an example of her commander and pilot-maybe her whole crew.
That's when I really realized how much others were risking for us. I told myself silently that if we got away, we wouldn't disappoint them.
By 430,000 miles, I'd begun to feel almost optimistic. That's when I noticed that the second blip was getting closer. I didn't know how close it needed to be to have us in range, but it had gotten close enough to identify as a light cruiser, which probably meant it was Imperial. A light cruiser could launch twin-seat chasers when he was near enough, and we couldn't hope to evade them all.
"Any time you want me to take over-" I told her.
She shook her head without speaking, her hands semi-relaxed on the control arm. I'd expected that, and she could pilot as well as I could. So I just stood by, not distracting her anymore. I was ready if needed, or as ready as I could be, and she knew it. She kept evading our nearest pursuer, and we kept getting farther and farther from Evdash, but the cruiser kept getting nearer.
Then the cruiser launched three tiny blips-chasers- and I discovered what it looked like to be really gained on. Their launch position had already been gaining on us, and to that velocity they added their own-not too great at first, but it would increase fast. My glance flicked to the instrument screen-614,000, 615,000, 616,000-and back to the monitor. Deneen's principal attention was still on our original bogey-had to be-as he slipped and swerved around the ring, but mine was on the chasers. They were getting closer. And now there were three rings in the midline port screen, each with a little bogey in or near it. As soon as any one of them was near enough to lock on us, that would be it. Their torpedoes would follow us unshakeably, even into FTL if need be.
My eyes had just read 622,000 when Deneen hit the FTL key. I didn't see her do it, but the monitors went blank and so did the for'rd window. And we hadn't come apart! The instrument screen read "all systems ftl-mode normal, PSEUDOVELOCiTY i." The chasers hadn't launched torpedoes before we jumped; launch would have shown on the monitor. Which meant we were
safe from them.
Deneen got up as if she could hardly move, and without looking at me, said, "The old survey cube is in my attache case." It lay on the deck beside the pilot seat, and she poked it with a foot.
"The old survey cube?" I stared at her. "You want to go to Fanglith?"
"Why not? We don't have anywhere else. Take over. I'm going to take a shower and lie down for a while. We can talk later."
Without waiting for an answer, she went aft to one of the sleeping rooms.
Fanglith! Still, this was not the time to overrule or argue with her. I slid onto the pilot's seat, took the survey cube out of the case, and inserted it in the computer. The computer was standard and the main menu format familiar. At my instruction it gave me the menu for the survey cube, then read off the coordinate equation for Fanglith and wrote it into astrogation. Deneen was right. We could talk about it after she'd unwound a bit, and decide on some other destination, if for no other reason than that we didn't have enough food to get to Fanglith.
Grinder maybe-the place Piet had talked about- where dad and mom were likely to go if they got off Evdash.
PART TWO
THE MEDITERRANEAN
EIGHT
Deneen's nap was a long one-about four hours. Not that I kept track of the time. Now that the pressure was off, it was as if I'd been hit by a sandbag, and for a while I sat around in a sort of daze. I'd lost Jenoor, and Piet, and maybe my parents to the Empire, yet I didn't feel hate or anger or anything with enough juice in it to call grief. I guess desolation would be the word. Anyway, when Deneen came back out and I looked at the chronometer, four hours had passed.
Tarel woke up a little later, and the three of us discussed destinations. We decided to go to Fanglith after all. It wasn't that Deneen argued me into it; she'd have preferred Grinder, too, but the ship's astrogation cube had nothing on a planet named Grinder. Nothing at all. And neither did the one that dad had left us, nor the old survey cube, of course. A nickname, I thought. Grinder was a nickname. And Piet wasn't there to tell us what its real name was. So I ran a computer search for the name Grinder, hoping that somewhere in data storage it might be mentioned and cross-referenced to an official name. But there wasn't a single place in all our cubes where "grinder" occurred with a capital G.
There were coordinates for probably all the old colonies, of course, but we didn't know enough about them to make intelligent guesses on which ones the Imperials might leave alone for a while. Or where they might already be. Going to any of them would take time, during which we'd be using up our food supplies, and we could find ourselves arriving somewhere to find an Imperial flotilla sitting there. While Fanglith-Fanglith was probably the last place the Empire would ever get around to. And while Fanglith had lots of dangers, at least they were dangers we knew something about- dangers we were at least somewhat prepared for.
Also, as Deneen pointed out, dad had left us a copy of the old survey cube, as if he'd wanted us to have Fanglith as an option. The medkit contained a broad-spectrum immunoserum, especially important on a world like Fanglith that didn't have significant medical facilities. It didn't take more than half an hour to talk it all out. Then I went aft to sleep, and found out I had juice enough for grief after all. I don't believe I'd cried since I was ten; now I cried hard enough in five minutes to more than make up for it. Then I slept-for more than six hours, and without a dream, so far as I could tell. When I woke up, I was functional again.
Fifty-seven days was a long trip. The library cubes mom and dad had left in the package helped-especially Tarel. He studied the files on primitive felid worlds that had helped Deneen and me prepare for Fanglith on our first trip, plus the debrief I'd recorded-I'd entitled it Fanglith-describing my experiences there.
There was the problem of food, of course. Even Tarel, with his "something out of nothing" metabolism, wasn't in any danger of getting fat. The ship's stocks- ten days of food for six-came out to fifteen days for four, of course. At normal consumption rates, plus there were some dried emergency rations. What made the trip feasible was the chest Deneen and Bubba had dragged aboard-the one we'd supposedly gone to the landing field to deliver. It had extra marine field uniforms and a few other things, but also it had dried field rations. After an hour of reading packages, recording the data on a note cube, and instructing the computer, it came out that we had about thirty days' worth of dried food to go with the scout's regular rations.
Deneen, Tarel, and I lived pretty much on the dried rations, because whoever had put our field rations together had overlooked one thing-canid food. Most of the dry stuff wasn't suitable for Bubba's system, so he got most of the regular food-and even that wasn't really suitable for him-while none of us ate more of anything than we had to.
It could have been worse. The ship's log told us that the life support systems had been inspected and okayed just the day before we'd stolen her, so air and water were no problem. And there was an exercise machine. Also, Deneen and I recorded all we could remember, which was most of it, of the mixture of Norman French and Provencal we'd used on Fanglith. Then Tarel, using the learning program, learned to speak it, too-with our mispronunciations, of course.
One thing that surprised me was how well all of us stood the trip, especially considering how it had started. After my heavy grief surge that first day, the only time I got really depressed was a couple of days later. That's when it hit me really thoroughly that Jenoor was truly gone-that I'd never see her again. After that, I rarely even fantasized that she was with me.
I did fantasize a few good killing sprees though, the first few days. I butchered the Imperial Council all the ways I could think of-but not the marine gunners, Some Evdashian marines in a gun tower, following orders, had poured gunfire into some people they didn't know-strangers a couple of hundred yards away in the semidark. They'd had nothing against us, and chances are they'd wished they hadn't had to. Maybe they'd even tried to shoot a little wild. After all, Deneen and Bubba had escaped without even being wounded, which seemed to me to go beyond luck.
Whatever. The facts were the facts: Jenoor and Piet were dead; Deneen and Tarel and Bubba and I were alive. About mom and dad we could hope.
Deneen didn't talk much the first day or so out; after that, she seemed pretty much her usual self. Tarel did, too, most of the time. His one outsurge seemed to take care of his grief, too, and he'd been rational and decisive when it was needed-at just the time I'd gone momentarily crazy. On the trip he'd been quiet, but no quieter than usual. And although he'd never seen the controls of a spacecraft before, he was soon as familiar with them as Deneen and I were. He did dry runs on flying until he felt at ease with them. And we all familiarized ourselves with the ship's armament.
Bubba was the one who surprised me. Before this trip, his emotions had always seemed really healthy- more so than those of any human I'd ever known. Mostly, he'd been cheerful ever since dad had brought him home to live with us. He'd often been playful, in his way, and somber only rarely. When necessary, he'd been tough-all smarts and action-like when the Norman hunters and their hounds had chased him for hours as a native wolf on Fangiith. And when, days later, we'd had the run-in with the Federation political police in Normandy.
But for the first several days out from Evdash, he kept to himself a lot more than usual, seeming positively moody. I'd never seen him that way before. He knew when I first noticed, of course, and had gone into his own cabin and closed the door, so I never asked him about it. I figured if he ever wanted to tell me, he would. After about the third day, though, he got back at least to semi-normal, except that the diet got to him like it did the rest of us.
One of the things we got around to talking about, after a week or so, was what we'd do when we got to Fangiith. The surface was really dangerous there; it seemed as if fighting and wars were their most important activities, with robbery and murder pretty popular too. Actually, Fangiith was considerably more dangerous than Evdash under the Empire, a realization that kind of took me
by surprise. On Fangiith it seemed like a case of cultural immaturity. With the Empire it seemed more like cultural degeneracy.
On Fangiith there was also the problem of not blending in with the people there. Oh, for brief periods maybe, or to someone who wasn't really looking, but that was all. Physically we looked about the same, sure, but we thought and acted differently. Without realizing it, we did things they didn't, while we didn't know things that everyone else there knew. We didn't know how to be peasants or nobles, we had no skill with their weapons, we'd be in constant risk of saying or doing something that might outrage or insult them or mark us as fools.,. And, of course, every time we spoke, we were obviously foreigners.
So what could we possibly accomplish there? Our main reason for leaving Evdash, so far as I could see, was to foment revolution against the Glondis Empire. But the more I looked at it, the more impossible that seemed on Fanglith. It was the wrong kind of world, with the wrong kind of history and the most primitive technology. And actually, from what little I knew of it, their governments were worse than the Empire-at least some of them were.
Operating on Fanglith would be up to me, more than to anyone else. I was the oldest, and the only one with much experience on the surface there. And I was male- that was important on their world. I'd have to be the one to land, get provisions, make deals and arrangements.
So naturally, I was feeling pretty overwhelmed by the responsibility, and I told the others just how I felt about it. Deneen just leaned on the little galley table and looked me calmly in the eye.
"Brother mine," she said, "the last time you complained about how impossible things were was on Fanglith. I was a prisoner on a Federation police corvette, but I've heard you and mom and dad talk about it. And Bubba. You were all stuck down there on the surface of the planet with nothing more than hand weapons to work with-hand weapons and some Norman warriors who'd have happily cut all your throats to get hold of your pistols."