The Sky is Filled With Ships

by Richard C. Meredith

  The Alliance of Independent Worlds was very nearly destroyed during that battle. Decimated and scattered, their few remaining ships sought sanctuary. In Geneva, the Chairman dismissed the Alliance from his mind; the threat was over, he thought.

  Having learned the lesson well from their first encounter with the Federation, the rebels avoided open battle for the next seventy-five years. During that time, striking, raiding, plundering, recruiting and growing, the Alliance of Independent Worlds slowly and secretly swelled in power, becoming more and more prepared to again challenge the power of the Federation.

  During this time, the Solar Trading Company stood outside the politico-military arena, condemned by each side for trading with the other but too powerful for either to challenge. Formed during the age of the Terran city-states, the STC carried something of the ethos of a nation; those within it had come to consider themselves as citizens of no country save the STC. And the STC, ancient, fiercely proud, fiercely independent, fiercely dedicated to its own private goals, considered itself outside, if not above, political competition. Like the Switzerland of an earlier era, the STC followed its own course, oblivious of the varying opinions of mankind.

  In the year 919 of the Federation Era, the Alliance took to the field again, confident of its newly gained strength, plunging its virgin fleets toward Earth, sweeping out of the Rim toward the capital of the Federation. The fleets of the TF confidently rose to meet them, sure of their superiority—but it was not so. The Federation fought the rebels to a standstill but could not gain a clear-cut victory.

  Shocked by the rebel strength, perhaps even frightened, the Chairman and his advisors realized that mankind was due for a long, protracted war, one that would be waged all across the Spiral Arm, and prepared to meet the task.

  Volumes could be written about this second stage of the Great Rebellion, as it came to be called, about the First and Second Battles of the Cluster, about the Skirmish of the Nebula, about the Meeting of Deneb, about the Defense of Rama: for seventy-five more years the Federation grew weaker and the Alliance grew stronger, and the day of final reckoning grew closer and closer.

  Knowing that time was on the side of the enemy, the Chairman of the Federation, then Jonal Constantine Herrera, decided that nothing more could be wasted in indecisive battles, that no more offers could be made. The rebels must be driven back, destroyed, deprived of their will to fight. Wipe them from the universe, he told his commanders, use every means at hand; hesitate at nothing—this is no longer a gentleman’s war!

  And his commanders knew what he meant—rape, butcher, bomb cities and towns, devastate whole planets if necessary, but, in the name of the Federation, win!

  One of his most gifted, most highly respected general officers refused to fight such a war of genocide and mass atrocity. Grand Admiral Henri Kantralas resigned from the Federation Space Force and was immediately placed under house arrest awaiting his trial for treason. Rescued by rebel sympathizers, spirited away to the Rim, Kantralas became an anathema to the Federation and a rallying point for the Alliance.

  Fired by a new hope, led by a man they had respected as an enemy and now idolized as an ally, the rebels prepared to meet the worst that Herrera could deal them—and did.

  Sweeping into the Cluster and pouring down on Odin, citadel of learning and culture, Federation soldiers, led by the new Grand Admiral, Abli Juliene, placed the planet under martial law and began to exact their vengeance on its inhabitants. Women and girls were brutally raped in the streets of the cities of Odin; young men barbarically tortured to death for information they frequently did not possess; children butchered before their parents’ eyes; fathers and mothers shot down in their homes for suspected disloyalty. Terror and madness settled over Odin.

  Dozens of parsecs away, Antigone, formerly neutral, was repelled by Federal brutality and declared for the Alliance. Again Federation ships swept in, brushing aside the feeble resistance that the rebels were able to mount in what time there was, and bathed Antigone in nuclear fire, leaving it a stark, blackened witness to Herrera’s anger.

  The rebels replied in kind, for the long, bitter war had reduced both sides to something less than human. Attacking and defeating the Federation stronghold on Cassandra, the rebel general Carman Dubourg returned rape for rape, murder for murder, atrocity for atrocity, finding new and still more horrible ways of maiming and killing the enemies of the Alliance. “Butcher” Dubourg gained his place in history, side by side with Attila the Hun and Adolf Hitler.

  The Great Rebellion entered its third, most bloody, and final phase, its first part marked by three great battles, and the greatest of these was the Third Battle of the Cluster.

  Evenly matched, the fleets of the Federation and of the Alliance fought among the myriad bright stars—and none could say who won, for when it was over both sides retreated, swung back to their homes, the Federation ships to the Solar System, the rebels to the Rim, to lick their wounds and prepare for the next battle, one that both sides knew would be the greatest of all, and the last.

  So it was when October came to Earth in 979 FE, when the thousand-year neutrality of the Solar Trading Company came to an end, when the great fleets moved to meet each other there in Non-space, some seven and a half parsecs from Earth.

  Chapter IX

  Janas accepted Franken’s offer. If there were anywhere on Earth where he felt comfortable, it was in the Officer’s Hostel of STC Central.

  Following the fruitless conversation with Franken, Janas allowed Milton Anchor to locate him quarters that were suitable to his rank and years of service. Finding himself satisfied with his suite, Janas returned the borrowed hovercar to the Emmett home, got his luggage together, and called a cab to take him back to the hostel.

  Once established there, he called Jarl Emmett and told him where he would be.

  “I wish you hadn’t done that, Bob,” Emmett said.

  “I don’t want to be in your hair, Jarl,” Janas told him.

  “You’re no bother,” Emmett insisted. “Miriam wanted you to stay.”

  “I need some time alone, Jarl,” he said. “And Miriam’s got enough on her mind without an out-of-work starship captain under foot.”

  “Okay, have it your way,” Emmett said with a smile. Then his face darkened seriously. “Did you talk with him?”

  “Yes,” Janas replied. “You were right. He won’t listen.”

  “Do you have any other ideas?”

  “No, not yet.”

  Emmett was silent for a moment.

  “Look,” he said at last, “I’ll try to get together as many of the people as I can. Come over to my place about twenty tomorrow night.”

  Janas agreed to be there and broke the connection.

  For a few moments he sat looking out the bedroom window, feeling something akin to indecision. Through the thin, now unpolarized sheet of paraglas, Janas could see a portion of STC Central spread out below him, a fantastic yet somehow beautiful collection of buildings of virtually every architectural style of the past twelve hundred years, in itself a history of the STC for anyone who wanted to take the time to examine it. Mount Union towered almost directly south, its peak rising something over two thousand meters into the clear, southwestern sky. Even now, fourteen hundred years later, its peak was smooth and rounded, almost glass-like. It had stood several hundred meters higher before the bomb hit it, before the thermonuclear fireball, one of several intended for Phoenix, rested for its instant of life, burning off the top of Mount Union and showering the valleys below with atomic hell. They said that there were still spots up there that would make a Geiger counter run wild, but Janas had never checked it out himself.

  Turning away from the window, briefly hoping that there would never be another ball of fire rolling down the mountain slopes, hoping that the rebels would not find it necessary to bomb Central, Janas looked at the 3-V unit beside the bed. His indecision ended.

  He punched the 3-V’s Information key, waited a moment while In
formation clicked into the line, punched out the “Frisco Info” code. When it came in, Janas punched “C” and adjusted for medium scan. The names, address and call numbers of people in the San Francisco-Oakland Complex whose names began with “C” started to roll past within the tank; in a few moments the name “Campbell” had appeared and Janas slowed the rate of scan. When the name “Enid Campbell” came up, he stopped the scan and began to write down a list of numbers. Cutting out Information, he punched the code number and waited.

  A very attractive face, framed in auburn hair, appeared in the tank, the word “recording” superimposed over it.

  “I’m out right now,” the girl said, a pleasant smile on her face. “If you’ll leave your number I’ll call you back as soon as I get home.”

  “Record,” Janas said into the unit. “Enid, this is Bob. I got to Flagstaff last night but this is the first chance I’ve had to call. Give me a buzz when you can. My code is FLC-21-77015-35. Stop.”

  A light flashed within the tank, indicating that the message had been recorded. Janas smiled and broke the connection.

  After having a quick, solitary lunch in the hostel’s canteen, Janas returned to his suite, ordered a chilled bottle of overly expensive Clytesian wine, and undressed. Before going to his bed to grab a few minutes of much needed sleep, he took the pen-like detector from his attaché case and carefully went over the clothing he had been wearing. He was not very surprised when he found another bead-like transmitter clinging to the cloth of his pants.

  Snatching the “bug” from the fabric, Janas went into the bathroom and dropped the object into the toilet. As he flushed it, he thought with a smile; now let them figure out how I managed to go down the drain.

  Once satisfied that no other “bugs” had been planted on his garments, he lay back on the bed and lit a cigarette. Gazing at the ceiling, taking an occasional sip of wine, he had nearly fallen asleep when the 3-V unit beside his bed chimed.

  Rolling over, almost spilling the wine, Janas punched the receiver button.

  “Bob,” a sparkling, feminine voice said before Janas was able to get into position to see the unit’s tank, “are you there?”

  “Yep,” Janas said, finally sitting up and turning the 3-V toward the bed.

  “In bed?” the girl asked. She was just as pretty as her recording. “This time of day?”

  “Alone, too,” Janas said smiling. “I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

  “When did you get in?”

  “I don’t know, Enid,” Janas said. “It must have been around midnight when the ferry landed.” He was silent for a moment. “You busy tonight?”

  “No, of course not. I’ve been waiting for you. It seems like ages since I last saw you on Odin.”

  “It has been,” Janas told her with a smile. “At least a million years. Look,” he went on suddenly, “I’ll rent a grav-car and buzz over this afternoon.”

  “You said you were tired.”

  “Not that tired.”

  “You know I want to see you, Bob,” Enid said softly.

  “I’ll pick you up around seventeen o’clock,” Janas said. “I have your address.”

  “I’ll be ready.”

  “Bye,” Janas said as he reached for the disconnect button.

  Enid blew him a kiss as her image faded from the tank.

  Downing the remainder of the Clytesian wine in his glass, Janas rose, took a clean uniform out of one of his suitcases, shook the wrinkles out, and began to dress.

  A few minutes later he called the hostel’s main desk and ordered a grav-car, telling the clerk that he would be using it for about twenty-four hours. Before leaving the suite he dropped a small signal-disrupting device that he had borrowed from Emmet into his pocket. He assumed that the grav-car would be “bugged” and he certainly had no intention of allowing anyone to listen to, or record, what was said and done between him and Enid. That was none of their business!

  When he ascended to the roof deck, an attendant pointed out a sparkling blue teardrop of steel and paraglas. The grav-car, its generators already running, hung quietly a few centimeters from the deck. A beautiful, luxurious and totally impractical means of conveyance, Janas told himself.

  He tipped the attendant, climbed into the grav-car and lifted from the roof deck of the STC Officers Hostel. The buildings of Central shrunk below him, soon merging with the rugged countryside. As he climbed, he could see the outlines of Flagstaff on his right and slightly to his rear. Behind him on his left was the huge, sprawling complex that marked the western terminus of the Phoenix-Tucson ribbon city, the vast conglomeration of buildings of Phoenix proper. Taking a last look at the scenery below, he headed the craft northwest, across Skull Valley and toward the western coast that lay beyond the curve of the planet.

  Under him, Janas caught a brief glimpse of light reflected from the rotors of a helicopter headed west, apparently coming from the east of STC Central. During the flight he kept looking, thinking he would catch another glimpse of the craft, but he did not. Nevertheless, Janas had the feeling that it was there, with him all the way to Frisco.

  Leveling the craft off at about fifteen thousand meters, Janas pushed it up toward its top speed, adjusted the auto-control to agree with his flight plan, and sat back to relax. Traveling at slightly over four hundred kilometers per hour, Janas anticipated reaching the San Francisco-Oakland Complex in just a little more than two hours. In the meantime, he planned to do very little other than look at the scenery below and remember the times he had spent with Enid on Odin.

  When Janas had arrived on Odin, shortly after the Third Battle of the Cluster, the bulk of the Federation forces had withdrawn from that planet, leaving only enough men behind to keep the distraught populace in check. Falling back toward Earth, the Federation had regrouped and prepared for the final assault, which was then still three years away. The rebels, like the Federation, not yet ready to be drawn into another major battle, pulled back from the Cluster, leaving behind them a political near-vacuum. A shaky peace settled over the planet, frequently broken by bloody riots, cruel lynchings, ambushes and uncounted atrocities. The soldiers of the Federation retreated into the protection of the cities, while the thin veneer of civilization crumbled under the rising tide of anarchy. This was the world into which Janas stepped after turning his ship, the STCSS President Regan, over to his first mate—the ruined hell of a once beautiful planet. There was, at least, one pleasant aspect to it all.

  Enid Campbell was the daughter of an official in the Federation Postal Service in University, the mail center for Odin. Ralph Campbell was in charge of incoming and outgoing extraplanetary mail, and in that capacity became acquainted with Janas, then Acting Manager of the Odin Major Terminal, and invited him into his home.

  Campbell, Janas remembered with a still vivid pain, had died in the street fighting in University during one of the many riots; a funny little man who made a foolishly heroic stand to guard the mails against both the soldiers of the Federation and the Odinese nationalists. No one knew which side killed him; perhaps it did not really matter. Campbell had died doing what he believed to be right, and those who had killed him had probably been acting under the same belief.

  Campbell had two children whom he had raised from near infancy after his term-wife’s tragic, improbable death in a hovercar accident. The elder child was Enid, a startlingly pretty girl who had been born on Earth but had grown to womanhood on Odin of the Cluster. Her brother, Rod, was two years her junior, an idealistic and quick-tempered young man. Rod had left Odin, where he had been born and raised, a year and a half prior to his father’s death. There were dark, secret purposes in Rod’s journey to Earth that Enid only half understood. In his only letter to Enid, Rod had told her that he was living in the Frisco Complex from which the Campbell family had originally come.

  As for Enid herself, Janas had found an immediate attractiveness in her, a girl young enough to be his grandchild or great grandchild in this age of two-hundred-yea
r life spans. Yet they had bridged the gulf between them, Janas and this bright-eyed, wise-for-her-age girl, and they had become lovers. Janas had thought often of contracting marriage with her but had always fallen back on the same reason—excuse?—that had prevented him from marrying before: a starship captain has no business with a wife. He had not taken out a contract—but he had never entirely dismissed the idea.

  For a brief span Janas relived his youth with Enid, starlit nights and laughter, but fate had other plans for him. There was a report forming in his desk, thousands of scraps of information that could help determine the future. And, too, the darkness was coming.

  When conditions on Odin reached the point of almost total collapse Janas ordered Enid to return to Earth, to join her brother Rod in San Francisco, which was about as safe a place as there was in the Spiral Arm. Enid had argued, but she finally consented when Janas told her that he would also be returning to Earth soon.

  The grav-car passed over the lower extremity of Lake Mede, afternoon sunlight sparkling on the expanse of water backed up by the huge new Jonal Herrera Dam. Soon he crossed the orchards of Death Valley, and the San Francisco-Oakland Complex came into view.

  The Frisco Traffic Control Computer broke into his reverie, asked his flight plan number. Janas’ computer replied, and was soon given instructions for coming out of high altitude flight down into normal traffic patterns. Minutes later, dropping to a fourth of his former speed, Janas was in the chopper lanes a few hundred meters above the building tops. Shortly he came down into the surface lanes and, manually guiding the grav-car like a hovercraft, he followed the traffic flow into the part of the city in which Enid had taken up residence.

  Strangely enough, Enid was waiting outside her apartment building for him. The chill of the morning had passed and the afternoon had brought a breath of spring-like air into the city, a forlorn, poignant attempt to hold off the coming of winter. Enid Campbell had dressed for the moment of Indian Summer that filled the megalopolis that sprawled along the Pacific coast.