The Sky is Filled With Ships

by Richard C. Meredith

  When she jumped up from the bench where she had been sitting, Janas saw that Enid had made concessions to the current terrestrial fashions. She wore a sparklingly iridescent frontless blouse, the shimmering, translucent cloth that covered her arms, shoulders and, he assumed, her back, dancing through a spectrum of colors as she moved. Her high, firm breasts jutted defiantly from between long, decorative lapels and high, arched collar. Her skirt, of the same material as the blouse, came almost to her knees, but its translucence left little of the shape of her hips and thighs to the imagination. Low-cut white boots and a tiny cap of the same color completed her costume. All in all Janas found himself pleased but somewhat jealous—he did not want other men to see that much of her.

  Swinging in toward the curb Janas brought the grav-car to a stop less than a meter from the spot where she stood. He leaped out and swept her into his arms.

  “Bob!” Enid gasped after half fighting away from his hungry kiss. “Not out here.”

  “Get into the car then.”

  “Yes, master,” she answered, and climbed into the vehicle while he held the door open. Janas entered behind her, seated himself, and in a moment the grav-car was moving again.

  “Where to?” he asked.

  “Anywhere.”

  “Supper?”

  “Okay.”

  “Know of a good place?”

  “Gaposchkin’s.”

  “Where is it?”

  While Enid directed, Janas piloted the grav-car through the streets toward the restaurant.

  “You seem to know your way around,” Janas said a few minutes later, thoroughly lost in the maze of streets.

  “I’ve had nothing to do for the past few weeks but study the city,” Enid answered. “It’s surprising how much you can learn in that short a time if you really put yourself to it.”

  “Found a job yet?”

  “Not really. Haven’t been looking. Waiting for you to come.” She gave him a pixyish look and said, “I thought you might keep me off the streets and try to make an honest woman of me.”

  Before Janas could think of a good reply he found himself at the restaurant that Enid had suggested.

  During the meal they talked the pointless yet significant, the almost-but-not-quite-nonsense talk of lovers who have been separated. It was not until they sat back, refusing dessert but ordering coffee, that the matter that had been hanging over them like an impending storm was brought up. It could not be avoided, not something that huge, that significant.

  “Have you seen Altho Franken, Bob?” Enid asked, accepting Janas’ offered cigarette.

  Janas nodded.

  “What did he say?”

  “About what I expected him to say once I knew what he’d done,” Janas said slowly. “He’s committed the STC and he’s not going to back down.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  They were silent for a few moments. A tiny, plump waitress, dressed in a too-revealing costume for her figure, brought their coffee.

  Enid sat looking into the steaming cup of blackness for a while, as if seeing in the liquid some terrible vision of the future.

  “Rod’s going to kill him, Bob,” she said at last, her voice weak and hollow, like a distant and all but forgotten echo.

  “Altho?” Janas asked suddenly.

  “No,” Enid said, looking up from her coffee. “Herrera.”

  “The Chairman?”

  “Yes. That’s why he came to Earth. He’s joined some organization—I’m not sure of their name—Sons of Liberty or something adolescent like that. But, Bob, they plan to assassinate Herrera.”

  “Your brother’s an idiot.”

  “I know,” the girl answered slowly. “He volunteered to do the shooting himself.”

  “What does he hope to accomplish?”

  “I don’t know,” Enid answered weakly. “I don’t even know if he knows.”

  “It’s stupid,” Janas told her. “That won’t accomplish a thing. Kill Herrera and there’ll be two more worse than he is ready to take his place. Does Rod have any idea how many times in history men have killed tyrants and discovered that they’ve made martyrs out of them and dictatorship that much more certain? Hasn’t he ever heard of Julius Caesar—and does he know what became of Rome after his assassination?”

  “I’ve told him that but he won’t listen.”

  “If it were a well-organized coup, something ready to wipe out all the underlings who support Herrera and take the Federation into strong hands, well, then it might be different. But just a harebrained scheme to kill him—that can’t accomplish anything.”

  Enid sighed but did not speak.

  “When do they plan to act?” Janas asked.

  “I don’t know,” Enid said. “Soon, but I don’t know when.”

  “We probably don’t need to worry,” Janas said, feeling a hard, cruel smile play across his face. “They’ll probably never pull it off. In a few days, a few weeks, it won’t matter much anyway—Herrera will be dead or far out of Rod’s reach.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Federation’s not going to last much longer. I’m not sure, but I think the rebels are closing in for the kill now. Their fleet is massed and headed for Earth. There wasn’t a single rebel warship in the Cluster when I left, and most of the Federation fleet left Luna yesterday.”

  “I didn’t know it was going to be that soon,” Enid said slowly. “I mean, it’s been going on for so long now. I didn’t expect it to end this suddenly.”

  “It won’t end suddenly, darling,” Janas told her softly. “It started long before I was born, and that was a long time ago, and the end of it won’t come until long after I’m dead.”

  “But the Rebellion.”

  “The Rebellion will end soon, with a rebel victory. I’m sure of that. It’s what’s coming after that scares me.

  Enid seemed to sense something of the fear that Janas expressed; it reflected in the deep pools of her eyes, mirrored in the hard tightening of her lips.

  “I don’t want to talk about it anymore, Bob.”

  “I don’t either,” Janas said, rising and opening his wallet to pay the check. He dropped half a dozen golden STC coins on the table. “Where can we get a drink?”

  An hour and a half and four Brajens apiece later, Janas and Enid returned to the grav-car parked outside the small, plush, dimly lit bar.

  “Where to now?” Janas asked as they seated themselves.

  “I don’t know, Bob,” Enid said, snuggling close to him as he revved the car’s generator. “Anywhere.”

  “Your apartment?”

  “No,” she answered suddenly. “Oh, it’s not that, Bob. I mean—” She smiled, “—it’s just that I don’t want to go there. I don’t like it there. Rod is in the same building, him and his friends, and I don’t want to see them."

  “We could leave the lights off,” Janas suggested jokingly, then realized how serious Enid was. “How about a cruise out over the Pacific?”

  “That sounds lovely.”

  Janas contacted the traffic control computer and obtained a flight plan to take them up, out of the Frisco Complex and its strict traffic patterns. Five minutes later the super-city was a dwindling mass of lights below and behind them. Before them the dark, glittering ocean reflected a fragment of moon. The lights of one of the undersea settlements on the edge of the Continental Shelf glimmered through the water.

  “It is pretty up here,” Enid said. “So far away from everything. None of it seems real now.”

  “It’s almost like being in space,” Janas said, his voice sounding far away even to himself.

  Below them, a huge floating city slowly drifted past.

  “Which one is that?” Enid asked, looking down.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe it’s Atlantis? she said. “I heard that it was coming toward Frisco this week.”

  “Probably is.”

  Enid slowly tu
rned her head, her face heavily shadowed in the dim light from the grav-car’s control panel. The look on her face showed that she knew that the time for talking had passed. Words were no longer necessary between them.

  Janas’ lips formed the words “I love you.” Enid’s eyes replied and she pressed herself closer to him, slipping out of her almost nonexistent blouse even as she did so. As Janas reached for her, she began working with the buttons of his shirt.

  *

  The sun was rising above the Pacific when the grav-car returned to the San Francisco-Oakland Complex.

  Enid had just finished dressing when they entered the surface traffic patterns. Janas smiled and told her that he couldn’t understand the need to put her clothes back on; she was just about as naked with them as without. Enid gave him a sidelong glance of feminine wisdom and adjusted her skirt.

  “How much money do you have?” he asked.

  “I don’t take money from men I like,” Enid said, looking slyly from beneath her auburn curls. “My rates are pretty steep for fat old men, though.”

  “I mean it,” Janas said seriously.

  “Enough.”

  “Enough to move into a new apartment?”

  “I suppose so, but why? I have a year’s lease on the one I’ve got, paid up. It’s good enough.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Why?”

  “They know where you live.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “I’m not sure. Federation men. Altho’s agents. Somebody following me. You’re caught between me and your brother, Enid, and either one of us could bring you trouble. I’ve been followed ever since I got back to Earth. I don’t want them, whoever they are, to be able to get their hands on you. Maybe I shouldn’t have come out here to Frisco at all, but Altho knew you were here.”

  “What should I do?” Enid asked, the shadowy fear of the evening before coming back to her face.

  “Hang around your apartment for a few hours,” he told her. “Behave normally. Then take what you can carry with you without looking too conspicuous, make sure you’re not being followed, and then find another apartment. Register under a false name. Don’t tell me where you’re going. It’s better if I don’t know.”

  “But, Bob…”

  “Don’t try to contact me for a few days,” he answered sternly. “Wait until you know it’s safe.”

  “How will I know?”

  “I’ll find some way of letting you know.”

  “I don’t understand all this, Bob.”

  “It’s just as well if you don’t,” Janas said. “But please, do as I say.”

  “Okay.”

  Janas brought the grav-car to a stop near her apartment. After a lingering kiss, Enid climbed out of the car, an expression akin to pain on her face.

  Looking back at her once, Janas pulled the car away from the curb and entered the traffic patterns. He did not look back again. He was afraid that he could not leave her if he did.

  Chapter X

  The enemy had begun to resolve on the scopes and screens of the warships of the Federation armada, and he was huge, far larger than anyone had expected. And it was muttered again, “We didn’t know that there were that many ships in the galaxy.”

  It was an odd, a strange, a motley fleet, that of the Alliance, composed of Federation warships taken over by the rebels, of merchant ships converted for warfare, of ships they had built themselves before Federation warships had found and destroyed their factories. It was a strange fleet, but it was huge and it was blooded, a battle-hardened armada. They had held off the Federation for decades as they grew, and now they had come again to fight, to take the war to the Federation’s home, to throw all their forces into one last battle to determine the future of mankind.

  The Salamis moved forward and the armada moved with her. The Federation had sent her ships on the same mission—settle it now; have done with it.

  Very near the center of the Federation battle formation was the fleet’s nerve center, the flagship, the TFSS Shilo. And on the bridge of the Shilo, sitting in the command seat, surrounded by his aides both human and electronic, was the man who was responsible for the fleet, Grand Admiral of the Federation Expeditionary Force, Abli Juliene.

  The wait was intolerable. Though his eyes and ears were flooded with incoming data, Admiral Juliene felt strangely apart, isolated from the events surrounding him, and he knew, deep inside him he knew, that the fate of the battle really did not rest in his hands but in the hands of another, a man who had once been his friend and superior officer—Commander-in-Chief of the Military Forces of the Alliance of Independent Worlds, General Henri Kantralas.

  In his mind’s eye Juliene could see Kantralas now, a little older perhaps, a little wiser, but still a huge hulking bear of a man, full-bearded and monolithic, a childhood vision of the Jehovah of the Old Testament. That was the man he had come to fight, to destroy if he could, this man who had taught him most of what he knew of the arts of war, this man who was never at a loss, who was always confident, always right. Juliene shifted uneasily in his seat, feeling so small, so tired, so insignificant, and wondered how he could challenge such a man as Henri Kantralas.

  But he did.

  The first shot of the battle that would be remembered as long as men survived to remember it was delivered by the Salamis. Her great firing tubes slid open and vomited into the grayness of Non-space half a hundred nuclear tipped missiles. Force screens came up, enfolding the ships of both fleets in shimmering cocoons of energy. They met.

  In that gray formlessness, lit by no stars such as Man’s continuum is, the two colossi came together, warring with flame and lightning the likes of which the primeval gods could never have imagined. Forces that would have reduced a dozen Earths to smoldering cinders flickered and flashed, blasted and beamed between the ships. Ragnarok and Armageddon had come together, at one time, at one place. Limbo was filled with fury.

  More than one rebel ship had died because of the Salamis when a barrage of energy cannon beams ripped open her shield of force. Nuclear missiles found their way toward the huge battle cruiser, but were met by energy cannon and exploded harmlessly still tens of kilometers from their destinations. The Salamis struck back, her own cannon and missiles returning the fire of the enemy. Another rebel starship vanished in atomic flame, though moments later the first-level energy cannon blasts of her companions reached the naked hull of the Salamis.

  A direct energy beam ripped across her bow, searing into the thick hull plating, boring through into the ship—great gouts of white air puffed into space as if from a broken steam line. Liquid, glowing metal splattered outward. While sheets of electric fire shimmered across the starship’s hull, the incoming blast reached her nerve center, her bridge. Bulkheads buckled; decks vanished in vapor; bank after bank of equipment ceased to exist. The captain of the Salamis and his bridge officers died.

  Salamis fought on, commanded now from her auxiliary bridge, striking out in fury like a wounded animal. As her force screen returned she plunged still deeper into the heart of the motley rebel fleet, filling space around her with energy blasts and missiles, tearing into those who had come to menace the Earth that had made her. Other Federation ships followed her spearhead drive.

  An enemy missile exploded in space during an instant when her screens were down to allow her own weapons to fire back. The nuclear explosion was some distance from the Salamis, but close enough to open her hull in another place, to send more of her precious air into the vacuum, to destroy the rest of the men who commanded her. The handful of surviving officers manning her auxiliary bridge died as heat and flame exploded around them, died holding fast to their controls, died returning the fury of the enemy.

  For a moment the Salamis was like a dead thing, an empty, floating hulk to be destroyed or captured as the enemy saw fit. But that did not endure for long. The designers of the Salamis had done their work well; she did not die easily.

  Deep within the starship’s hull he
r master computer still functioned. The computer, in its quiet, mechanical way, tried alternate channels, called the command stations and received no answers. Relays clicked; tapes spun; electrons raced through circuit modules. The computer paused for a nanosecond, “read” its orders, then switched to “free-will” self-programming. The Salamis was still alive, perhaps more alive than it had ever been, for now it truly was a wounded animal, a mechanical animal with a mind of its own. The Salamis fought on.

  Chapter XI

  On his way back to STC Central, Robert Janas carefully watched the glint of metal that followed him in the morning sunlight. Whether it was the same craft that had been with him on his way out to San Francisco the afternoon before he did not know, nor did it matter. The same man or another, his purpose was the same—watch and mark every movement that Robert Janas makes. Nor was Janas sure whom his follower represented, and perhaps that was not significant either. There were two men who would want to know of his activities—Altho Franken of the STC, and Jonal Herrera, Chairman of the Federation. And which of them had sent this man—these men—to follow him did not matter for, in Janas’ mind, Franken had come to equal Herrera, Herrera Franken; their goals and purposes matched in this at least.

  Swinging down across the mountains, Janas brought the grav-car onto the landing deck atop the STC Officer’s Hostel. Turning the craft over to an attendant, Janas went into the hostel to his suite, where he shaved and bathed, then to the canteen for a quick breakfast. Returning to his suite he undressed, darkened the room, and climbed into bed.

  Late in the afternoon the unconscious clock in his brain awakened him. Shaking the sleep from his eyes, Janas called Jarl Emmett and confirmed the meeting to take place at his home that evening. After the call Janas dressed, had supper in the hostel’s canteen, and then ordered a hovercab to take him to Emmett’s home. He arrived there shortly before twenty o’clock.