“Here we go,” Flandry said between clenched jaws. His first space battle, as terrifying, bewildering, and exalting as his first woman. He lusted to be in a gun turret. After dogging his faceplate, he sought an exterior view.
For a minute, nothing was visible but stars. Then the ship boomed and shuddered. She had fired a missile salvo: the monster missiles which nothing smaller than a battleship could carry, which had their own hyperdrives and phase-in computers. He could not see them arrive. The distance was as yet too great. But close at hand, explosions burst in space, one immense fireball after another, swelling, raging, and vanishing. Had the screen carried their real intensity, his eyeballs would have melted. Even through airlessness, he felt the buffet of expanding gases; the deck rocked and the hull belled.
“What was that?” Dragoika cried.
“The enemy shot at us. We managed to intercept and destroy his missiles with smaller ones. Look there.” A lean metal thing prowled across the screen. “It seeks its own target. We have a cloud of them out.”
Again and again energies ran wild. One blast almost knocked Flandry off his feet. His ears buzzed from it. He tuned in on damage control. The strike had been so near that the hull was bashed open. Bulkheads sealed off that section. A gun turret was wrecked, its crew blown to fragments. But another nearby reported itself still functional. Behind heavy material and electromagnetic shielding, its men had not gotten a lethal dose of radiation: not if they received medical help within a day. They stayed at their post.
Flandry checked the tank once more. Faster than either battleship, Umbriel had overhauled her giant foe. When drive fields touched, she went out of phase, just sufficient to be unhittable, not enough that her added mass did not serve as a drag. The Merseian must be trying to get in phase and wipe her out before—No, here Sabik came!
Generators that powerful extended their fields for a long radius. When she first intermeshed, the enemy seemed a toy, lost among so many stars. But she grew in the screen, a shark, a whale, Leviathan in steel, bristling with weapons, livid with lightnings.
The combat was not waged by living creatures. Not really. They did nothing but serve guns, tend machines, and die. When such speeds, masses, intensities met, robots took over. Missile raced at missile; computer matched wits with computer in the weird dance of phasing. Human and Merseian hands did operate blaster cannon, probing, searing, slicing through metal like a knife through flesh. But their chance of doing important harm, in the short time they had, was small.
Fire sheeted across space. Thunder brawled in hulls. Decks twisted, girders buckled, plates melted. An explosion pitched Flandry and Dragoika down. They lay in each other’s arms, bruised, bleeding, deafened, while the storm prevailed.
And passed.
Slowly, incredulously, they climbed to their feet. Shouts from outside told them their eardrums were not ruptured. The door sagged and smoke curled through. Chemical extinguishers rumbled. Someone called for a medic. The voice was raw with pain.
The screen still worked. Flandry glimpsed Umbriel before relative speed made her unseeable. Her bows gaped open, a gun barrel was bent in a quarter circle, plates resembled sea-foam where they had liquefied and congealed. But she ran yet. And so did Sabik.
He looked and listened awhile before he could reconstruct the picture for Dragoika. “We got them. Our two destroyers took care of the enemy’s without suffering much damage. We’re hulled in several places ourselves, three turrets and a missile launcher are knocked out, some lines leading from the main computer bank are cut, we’re using auxiliary generators till the engineers can fix the primary one, and the casualties are pretty bad. We’re operational, though, sort of.”
“What became of the battleship we fought?”
“We sank a warhead in her midriff. One megaton, I believe … no, you don’t know about that, do you? She’s dust and gas.”
The squadron reunited and moved onward. Two tiny green flecks in the tank detached themselves and hastened ahead. “See those? Our scoutboats. We have to screen them while they perform their task. This means we have to fight those Merseians from Saxo.”
“Six of them to five of us,” Dragoika counted. “Well, the odds are improving. And then, we have a bigger ship, this one, than remains to them.”
Flandry watched the green lights deploy. The objective was to prevent even one of the red sparks from getting through and attacking the scouts. This invited annihilation in detail, but—Yes, evidently the Merseian commander had told off one of his destroyers to each of Einarsen’s. That left him with his cruiser and two destroyers against Sabik and Umbriel, which would have been fine were the latter pair not half crippled. “I’d call the odds even, myself,” Flandry said. “But that may be good enough. If we stand off the enemy for … a couple of hours, I’d guess … we’ve done what we were supposed.”
“But what is that, Domma-neek? You spoke only of some menace out here.” Dragoika took him by the shoulders and regarded him levelly. “Can you not tell me?”
He could, without violating any secrecy that mattered any longer. But he didn’t want to. He tried to stall, and hoped the next stage of combat would begin before she realized what he was doing. “Well,” he said, “we have news about, uh, an object. What the scouts must do is go to it, find out what it is like, and plot its path. They’ll do that in an interesting way. They’ll retreat from it, faster than light, so they can take pictures of it not where it is at this moment but where it was at different times in the past. Since they know where to look, their instruments can pinpoint it at more than a light-year. That is, across more than a year of time. On such basis, they can easily calculate how it will move for the next several years to come.”
Again dread stirred behind her eyes. “They can reach over time itself?” she whispered. “To the past and its ghosts? You dare too much, you vaz-Terran. One night the hidden powers will set free their anger on you.”
He bit his lip—and winced, for it was swollen where his face had been thrown against a mouth-control radio switch. “I often wonder if that may not be so, Dragoika. But what can we do? Our course was set for us ages agone, before ever we left our home world, and there is no turning back.”
“Then … you fare bravely.” She straightened in her armor. “I may do no less. Tell me what the thing is that you hunt through time.”
“It—” The ship recoiled. A drumroll ran. “Missiles fired off! We’re engaging!”
Another salvo and another. Einarsen must be shooting off every last hyperdrive weapon in his magazines. If one or two connected, they might decide the outcome. If not, then none of his present foes could reply in kind.
Flandry saw, in the tank, how the Merseian destroyers scattered. They could do little but try to outdodge those killers, or outphase them if field contact was made. As formation broke up, Murdoch’s Land and Antarctica closed in together on a single enemy of their class. That would be a slugfest, minor missiles and energy cannon and artillery, more slow and perhaps more brutal than the nearly abstract encounter between two capital ships, but also somehow more human.