by Diane Carey
“He’ll read the flow and won’t know we’re crippled. Never let the other guy know you’re tired. It gives him confidence.”
“You’re crazy, but . . . flow confirmed—”
“Now turn us to port, using the aft and port thrusters on reverse.”
“But that move doesn’t make any sense.”
Marvin shook his head. “I’m not even sure I can do it!”
“Yeah, I know. Try anyway.” Dogan sneered an evil grin at the attacking fighter on the main screen. “They loved me in tactical class.”
“Here he comes again,” Grady warned.
“Phasers at three-quarters,” Dogan ordered.
“Is he trying to kill us or just drive us off?” Pashke asked. “What if he thinks he owns something around here? Maybe it’s his moon.”
Roib turned colors. “It’s my moon!”
“It’s our moon,” Dogan confirmed.
Lindsay looked around and asked, “Why you got the phasers scaled back?”
“I don’t want to kill somebody if he thinks he’s just defending some rock and he thinks it’s his rock.”
“It’s my rock,” Roib muttered.
In the grip of tension they watched the struggling main screen as the mustard-colored ship wheeled its long bow around and speared toward them, coming in close.
“Look at him,” Dogan barked. “He can’t measure distance any better than we can—hold on!”
At the last instant the fighter strafed their starboard side with its flashing white weapon. The surveyor jolted severely, but there was no significant reading of power loss, and no alarms lit. The fighter had hit systems that were already damaged.
“Yah!” Dogan howled in victory. “Keep him off balance! Make him waste energy! Yah! Yah!”
“Beautiful!” Grady shouted. “He guessed wrong!”
Dogan launched his truncated body forward and clasped Lindsay behind the knee. “Shoot, Linds, point-blank! Destroy his hips! Go! Go! Yaaah!”
Lindsay’s shoulders hunched over the weapons controls while the enemy ship was still in short-range. The surveyor buckled sharply under them, but this time the jolt wasn’t from an attacking strike. It was instead the surveyor’s own phasers built up and suddenly releasing one gut punch.
On the screen, red streams bolted from the array and joined the two ships in a deadly pirouette. The mustard ship’s long bow heaved upward as if it’d come up on rocks. Then it just kept going up, up, and all the way over. Even from here, even without sensors, they could see the other ship shudder violently.
“Direct hit!” Pashke gasped.
The crew cheered. Dogan crowed, “Haaaah, that one gave him the hippy-hippy-shakes! See, boys? Technique wins over strength every time. Keep varying your moves, that’s the trick. Make him waste energy!”
Sweating and grinning, Grady cast him a sustaining glance. “We gotta get a mat back under you again someday, Barrel.”
Dogan indulged in a wink of gratitude. “When the good times come again.”
As his words worked on the men during the brief rest from attack while they gathered for another strike, he tried to think reasonably about solving the problem before it got any worse. Why were they being attacked? Nothing like this had happened in three years of surveying in this star cluster. They hadn’t even seen another ship for a year and a half—and that was just passing in the distance.
“We got no reports on hostiles coming in here, do we?” he took a moment to ask. “What about those last dozen communiqués I didn’t bother reading? Did anybody look at ’em?”
Grady’s gap-toothed grimace met him as the first officer shook his head. “Wasn’t nothing about hostiles. I don’t know who this guy thinks he is, but he’s packin’ for trouble. He’s overarmed for his size.”
“Maybe not for his space force, whoever they are,” Dogan corrected. “We got no way to judge. When you don’t know the other guy’s manager, you gotta deal with what you see.”
“Maybe he’s not a space force,” Roib suggested nervously. “Maybe he’s a rogue or a mercenary.”
Dogan wagged his head in thought at a new idea. “Let’s go off a couple hundred kilometers and see if he leaves us alone.”
Emil Pashke turned, worried. “That’s taking a big chance with the sensor blackout.”
“Just go slow,” Dogan warned, “but do it quick.”
Pashke’s flat lips almost disappeared, though he made no comment. He hunched to his controls.
As they pulled back, the stunned yellow fighter grew smaller on the screen. Many seconds passed. They watched, unable to take any action. Firing weapons would be guesswork as the distance expanded. Only ultra-close range could possibly make for anything better than a lucky hit. He was done trusting to luck.
“Batten down, everybody,” he ordered, determined to fill the uneasy silence with something, anything, even if only his own rough squawl. “Fire up the intermix in case we gotta go to warp. Tell Wayne to check the deuterium flow. Secure the driver coils and EPS power distribution.”
“This is insane,” Roib stammered. “We’ve never fought a real battle! We’re surveyors!”
Dogan sneered at the negativity. “We gotta remember how to be efficient real sudden-like. We’re all trained. We’ll go by the book.”
“We never read the book!”
“My book, desperado. The Handbook of Mitch Dogan. Like this from Chapter Two—when he shoots, aim right at the weapon stream. Ignite it in space before it gets to us.”
“Shouldn’t we hail again?” Roib asked. “Find out why he’s doing this?”
“I don’t care why he’s doing it,” Dogan proclaimed. “Keep your bloodshot eye on his weapon port, Linds. Don’t look away. Don’t sneeze.”
“Don’t get an itch,” Grady added.
Lindsay’s eyes watered. “Cram it!”
Nearer and nearer the other ship surged, gaining speed with every meter, until it was racing down upon them, ports glowing and some kind of attack wing spread wide behind what Dogan guessed to be the pilot’s cockpit. Through a darkened floral arrangement of coated plexi windowports he imagined the face of the pilot who was after them. Was it a face he would be able to understand? Would it have eyes? Did it breathe? Did it have an ex-wife in Beta Aurigae it was still in love with?
“He’s serious, Dogan.” Grady grimly studied the rapid approach. “Look at the angle.”
“Yah, I’m gettin’ the idea.” Dogan stomped halfway around the ramp to show that things had just changed. “That’s it! If he wants a turf war, he’s gonna get one. No sympathy! Let’s blow this no-good bum from now to September! Double shields front! Lindsay, full phasers! Arm photon torpedoes!”
“We haven’t got any photon torpedoes left. We used ’em all to clear asteroids.”
“Good. No complications. Just phasers. Never cross your feet. I like it. How’re those thrusters?”
“We got port side, aft and forward. Starboard’s a corpse.”
“Turn the bow just a little bit to starboard so he doesn’t come down that side again.”
They stopped asking questions and just did what he said. That was better. He saw their perplexed eyes racing to him and away again. Here came the yellow ship, running for their port side, which Dogan was now teasingly presenting. Sure, the other guy thought he’d already hit the starboard side, which he had, and could be baited to the port side.
“Okay, here’s the strategy,” he began. “He’s coming in. When he gets to pretty close range, we’re gonna enable the forward and aft thrusters and we’re gonna do it quick and mean. Linds, keep your hand on that firing control.”
“He’s packin’,” Grady warned. “Coming in hot! Look at those energy ports glow!”
“That’s our guts you see glowing out there.” Lindsay’s voice quavered with raw and undisguised fear. “He means to kill us.”
“Get ready,” Dogan snapped, and met Lindsay and Roib’s terrified eyes with an eager glower he hoped would be reassuring.
He gave them a pretend growl and flexed his barrels.
“Here he comes!”
“When do you want me to shoot?” Lindsay quavered.
Dogan launched from the ramp and slammed flat on both feet to the lower deck. “Put me up on your chair!”
Lindsay spun out from the tactical seat at the helm, scooped Dogan up under the arms, and hoisted him feet and all onto the chair. Dogan took the weapons controls himself, and fixed his small eyes on the approaching fighter as it changed angle slightly to bear down on them.
Closer, closer . . . they could see the bolts in the yellow plates when Grady broke. “Dogan!”
“Keep your underwear on,” Dogan growled, and kept ticking off seconds. “This is gonna be a photo finish.”
The other ship wasn’t taking any chances on missing. He was coming in low, trying to avoid the surveyor’s phaser array, but he could only avoid it so much. If he wanted to shoot at that speed, that angle, he’d have to come into the firing cone. Any second now.
Dogan tried to think like a fighter pilot—no, no, wrong, guessing would get them killed. Do what you know and know what you’re doing—
“Dogan,Dogan,Dogan . . .”Grady’s teeth were gritted, but sound still came out.
The enemy was nearly upon them, couldn’t have been more than two hundred meters and closing. Any second they could reach out and grab him. He was holding back till the last instant and so was Dogan.
Roib let out a senseless squawk as the yellow ship’s weapons ports glowed blindingly and let loose on them at point-blank range.
“Lateral thrust right now!” Dogan shouted to Marvin, and leaned on the weapons controls.
The surveyor ship skidded sideways like a toboggan on an icy hill, moving a critical two meters—just enough to be missed by the point-blank energy blast from the other ship. At the same instant, Dogan fired the phasers, but not at the other ship. Instead, he aimed directly at the ball of energy blast coming at them. The salvo, whatever it was, detonated.
While the survey ship and its shields were more or less a cocoon-shaped bauble presenting its rounded side to the blast, the fighter was pointed and flat-edged and coming right at the wash. Eruption blanketed both ships.
Dogan felt his block-like body flip off the chair, felt his feet leave the cushion, and had a detached idea of the faces of his astonished crewmates turning like billiard balls, bonking off each other and spinning toward the corner pockets. A drop in cabin pressure stole the air from his lungs. Rivets popped and spewed past his ears as if he’d ruptured a bee’s nest.
He bounced off the port roof, bunched into a knot, and landed on top of the environmental-control console, wedged between the scanners and the keypads. The whine of emergency manual override told him that somebody other than himself was still conscious.
With a push from one elbow Dogan rolled across the keypad and dropped to the deck. Gravity still working, at least.
Beside him, a knotwork of spirals and coils, Roib blinked in shock.
On the main screen, a fireworks of sparks and glowing hulk of the attacking fighter powered out of control, spewing fuel and atmosphere, driving headlong into the moon.
Dogan heaved himself to his feet and wobbled up to the ramp in a cowl of smoke. Around him, his crew shook themselves. One by one they came upright.
He spiked both arms into the air beside his ears and jumped up and down in a victory dance.
“Waddya know!” he crowed. “We lived! Yah! Yah! Yah!”
“Yah! Yah!” The crew shook themselves and joined him in a ringside hoot and holler.
Roib crawled to the edge of the ramp and wrapped one limb around Dogan’s cylindrical ankle. Dogan looked down at the science analyst who’d given them something to fight for and said, “Told you the good times would come, squid. Now you got something to tell when we get settled down and build ourselves a town. You got a real space story to tell. What’sa matter? You scared or what? We won!”
Roib shuddered, regained control, swallowed a couple of times, then blinked.
“What’s a photo finish?” he asked.
A million pieces of shimmering matter raced to the nearest three moons within thirty seconds, traveling faster than natural objects ever could. Sharp-edged debris sprayed into the golden volcanic flow. The quake moon sputtered and blushed as if accepting the gift of passion. Blast-driven, the debris bored into the moon’s crust as effectively as industrial drills, blowing away plumes of ejecta a mile into the cloak of space around the moon.
Dogan saw the difference. An unnaturally brilliant lime-green fan of active matter, looking more like the neon blaze of an exposed warp core than anything volcanic. Green? What was that? Some kind of reaction with whatever that fighter was made of?
Everyone stared at the sight. Even damage control went waiting. Before them the Fourth of July opened up as the brilliant blue sparkles changed happily to crystal green, and then to a completely unexpected and unexplainable sunset red.
Green to blue . . . to red?
Stayed red, too. Didn’t fade or lose its inner glow, but sprayed past the surveyor ship and continued out into space without losing a bit of light or potency. How could that be? The cold of space alone . . .
“Hey, spud,” Dogan began, “you getting a reading on that stuff?”
Back at his station, Roib vultured over his equipment as the sensors accepted readings of the material blowing into space. Gamma Night was lifting. The sensors were beginning, sluggishly, to work again, to pick through the veil and distill information again.
He blinked and blinked. Seemed like he couldn’t believe what he saw. Then a sudden suck of breath made everybody look at him.
“I found it!” Roib suddenly gripped the edge of his board with four of his limbs. Every eye except the back one was fixed on his readouts, and the back eye spun with excitement. “Dogan, I know why the moon’s changing mass! I know why! I found it! That explosion, it ruptured the crust! I’ve got it! I’m not wrong! I’m right! Is the Dawn up? Can we send a message?”
Dogan waddled to Roib’s side, but from down there he couldn’t see the scanners that mattered. “What’s the matter with you? Whatcha see there?”
“Dogan . . .” Grady’s voice was soft, so quiet that everyone heard it. The single word, in that tone, cut through the reawakening sensor noise and the hiss of vents and attendance to anything Roib had just discovered.
Before them on the forward screen, a great shadow came to blot out the vision of the quake moon, a gargoyle-gray form eating up their view of some miracle they didn’t yet understand, something worth dying for.
With only enough time to lower his hand to Roib’s limb still coiled around his ankle, Dogan thought absurdly about taking a final breath just for the sake of dignity, but never got the chance.
The gargoyle shadow swallowed them, blanking out their screens so their last moment was dark except for the skyline flicker of bridge equipment, as if they were passing a city on some unapproached planet’s night-side. Dogan’s eyes focused on the forward screen as it cleared in one corner. The quake moon was no longer way over there. It was right here, inches away.
Life pods? Was there time?
The hull ruptured as jagged volcanic rock cleaved the ship into sheets. Heat poured through the torn skin. Dogan felt his body blowtorched and his bones begin to scorch. Through the instant of mindbreaking pain, he thought about the good times and understood that he’d lost a pretty decent crapshoot.
Chapter Four
“THE APPROACH is a Kauld battlebarge! He pulled the science ship into the middle moon!”
“Are you sure it’s Kauld? Your readings could be—”
“We should go for reinforcements!”
“At this distance? We could never escape. See if there’s a place to hide. Is he blazing us?”
“Not yet. Still on an approach triangle, on the other side of the middle moon. They blazed the surveyor ship and dragged them into the moon’s surface.”
“
Then maneuver into the Blind, quickly, before they notice us. Use the time to blend for Ulwen. Is there anything at all? Any signal?”
“Nothing . . . blend reads only melted debris. I’m very sorry for this, Shucorion. I’m sure it was my fault.”
“Dimion, this was my own poor judgment. I should never have let him volunteer. He was always too anxious to be first. This is my fault. Garitt, keep us very still. The battlebarge may yet not see us. Make no emissions. Dimion, keep looking for Ulwen. I’ll look also.”
Cryptic, as conversations often became on board a fighting vessel. Around the two men standing at the strip-screens on the cylindrical deck, the rest of the operative crew watched from overhead and both sides, held in place by the constant centrifugal spin of the tube-shaped ship.
Shucorion, avedon of this Plume, battled a grisly surge in the pit of his gut. From a hiding place behind a veil of astral dust they had watched the unlikely success of the alien surveyor ship against their better-armed and faster Savage. They had hidden effectively, not even bothering to activate the gravity cyclons, relying instead upon the rotation of the ship to keep them on their feet. They had expected Ulwen, in his Savage, to do the fighting for them today, but Ulwen had failed.
Interested only in their own fighter’s assault on the surveyor vessel, they hadn’t watched the rest of space. Now a Kauld Marauder was nearly upon them.
In the Blind, they still had a chance. The Marauder might not see them. He assumed the worst. His people had picked and picked at details for many generations, discovering ways to maneuver in the Blind. Hyperaccurate charting, unlimited patience, enduring work. Only this had given them their one advantage over Kauld in space. They could move, when Kauld could not.
But the Blind would rise soon. That would be the end.
Color drained from his sapphire complexion, leaving his cheeks papery. This annoyed him. He had always been on the poorer end of a poor civilization, and listened hungrily as his mother told him that his wealth came in good cheekbones, demonstrative eyes, and the brew-brown depths of his hair, which he allowed to grow until a long plait drained down his back to his waist. He had never seen the attraction she showed in her eyes, except in appealing pictures of his father which she relentlessly held before him as he grew from boyhood. The dark lashes making a striking ring around crescents of air-gray eyes, the fresh blue complexion and the sly intelligent smile—he hoped he looked like his father to others, but he had never seen it in himself.