The volleys ended. Dragoika howled. “Look, Domma-neek! A red light went out! There! First blood for us!”
“Yes … yes, we did get a destroyer. Whoopee!” The exec announced it on the intercom, and cheers sounded faintly from those who still had their faceplates open. The other missiles must have been avoided or parried, and by now were destroying themselves lest they become threats to navigation. Max Abrams would have called that rule a hopeful sign.
Another Merseian ship sped to assist the one on which the two Terrans were converging, while New Brazil and a third enemy stalked each other. Umbriel limped on an intercept course for the heavy cruiser and her attendant. Those drove straight for Sabik, which lay in wait licking her wounds.
The lights flickered and died. They came back, but feebly. So there was trouble with the spare powerplant, too. And damn, damn, damn, Flandry couldn’t do a thing except watch that tank!
The cruiser’s escort detached herself and ran toward Umbriel to harry and hinder. Flandry clenched his teeth till his jaws ached. “The greenskins can see we have problems here,” he said. “They figure a cruiser can take us. And they may be right.”
Red crept up on green. “Stand by for straight-phase engagement,” said the intercom.
“What did that mean?” Dragoika asked.
“We can’t dodge till a certain machine has been fixed.” It was as near as Flandry could come to saying in Kursovikian that phase change was impossible. “We shall have to sit and shoot.”
Sabik wasn’t quite a wingless duck. She could revert to sub-light, though that was a desperation maneuver. At superlight, the enemy must be in phase with her to inflict damage, and therefore equally vulnerable. But the cruiser did, now, possess an extra capability of eluding her opponent’s fire. Sabik had no shield except her antimissiles. To be sure, she was better supplied with those.
It looked as if a toe-to-toe match was coming.
“Hyperfield contact made,” said the intercom. “All units fire at will.”
Flandry switched to exterior view. The Merseian zigzagged among the stars. Sometimes she vanished, always she reappeared. She was a strictly spacegoing vessel, bulged at the waist like a double-ended pear. Starlight and shadow picked out her armament. Dragoika hissed in a breath. Again fire erupted.
A titan’s fist smote. A noise so enormous that it transcended noise bellowed through the hull. Bulkheads split asunder. The deck crashed against Flandry. He whirled into night.
Moments later he regained consciousness. He was falling, falling forever, and blind … no, he thought through the ringing in his head, the lights were out, the gravs were out, he floated free admidst the moan of escaping air. Blood from his nose formed globules which, weightless, threatened to strangle him. He sucked to draw them down his throat. “Dragoika!” he rasped. “Dragoika!”
Her helmet beam sprang forth. She was a shadow behind it, but the voice came clear and taut: “Domma-neek, are you hale? What happened? Here, here is my hand.”
“We took a direct hit.” He shook himself, limb by limb, felt pain boil in his body but marveled that nothing appeared seriously injured. Well, space armor was designed to take shocks. “Nothing in here is working, so I don’t know what the ship’s condition is. Let’s try to find out. Yes, hang onto me. Push against things, not too hard. It’s like swimming. Do you feel sick?”
“No. I feel as in a dream, nothing else.” She got the basic technique of null-gee motion fast.
They entered the corridor. Undiffused, their lamplight made dull puddles amidst a crowding murk. Ribs thrust out past twisted, buckled plates. Half of a spacesuited man drifted in a blood-cloud which Flandry must wipe off his helmet. No radio spoke. The silence was of a tomb.
The nuclear warhead that got through could not have been very large. But where it struck, ruin was total. Elsewhere, though, forcefields, bulkheads, baffles, breakaway lines had given what protection they could. Thus Flandry and Dragoika survived. Did anyone else? He called and called, but got no answer.
A hole filled with stars yawned before him. He told her to stay put and flitted forth on impellers. Saxo, merely the brightest of the diamond points around him, transitted the specter arch of the Milky Way. It cast enough light for him to see. The fragment of ship from which he had emerged spun slowly—luck, that, or Coriolis force would have sickened him and perhaps her. An energy cannon turret looked intact. Further off tumbled larger pieces, ugly against cold serene heaven.
He tried his radio again, now when he was outside screening metal. With her secondary engines gone, the remnants of Sabik had reverted to normal state. “Ensign Flandry from Section Four. Come in, anyone. Come in!”
A voice trickled through. Cosmic interference seethed behind it. “Commander Ranjit Singh in Section Two. I am assuming command unless a superior officer turns out to be alive. Report your condition.”
Flandry did. “Shall we join you, sir?” he finished.
“No. Check that gun. Report whether it’s in working order. If so, man it.”
“But sir, we’re disabled. The cruiser’s gone on to fight elsewhere. Nobody’ll bother with us.”
“That remains to be seen, Ensign. If the battle pattern should release a bogie, he may decide he’ll make sure of us. Go to your gun.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Dead bodies floated in the turret. They were not mutilated; but two or three thousand roentgens must have sleeted through all shielding. Flandry and Dragoika hauled them out and cast them adrift. As they dwindled among the stars, she sang to them the Song of Mourning. I wouldn’t mind such a send-off, he thought.
The gun was useable. Flandry rehearsed Dragoika in emergency manual control. They’d alternate at the hydraulic aiming system and the handwheel which recharged the batteries that drove it. She was as strong as he.
Thereafter they waited. “I never thought to die in a place like this,” she said. “But my end will be in battle, and with the finest of comrades. How we shall yarn, in the Land of Trees Beyond !”
“We might survive yet,” he said. Starlight flashed off the teeth in his bruised and blood-smeared face.
“Don’t fool yourself. Unworthy of you.”
“Unworthy my left one! I plain don’t intend to quit till I’m dead.”
“I see. Maybe that is what has made you vaz-Terran great.”
The Merseian came.
She was a destroyer. Umbriel, locked in combat with the badly hurt enemy cruiser, had inflicted grave harm on her, too. Murdoch’s Land was shattered, Antarctica out of action until repairs could be made, but they had accounted for two of her fellows. New Brazil dueled yet with the third. This fourth one suffered from a damaged hyperdrive alternator. Until her sweating engineers could repair it, which would take an hour or so, her superlight speed was a crawl; any vessel in better shape could wipe her from the universe. Her captain resolved he would go back to where the remnants of Sabik orbited and spend the interim cleaning them out. For the general order was that none but Merseians might enter this region and live.
She flashed into reality. Her missiles were spent, but guns licked with fire-tongues and shells. The main part of the battleship’s dismembered hulk took their impact, glowed, broke, and returned the attack.
“Yow-w-w!” Dragoika’s yell was pure exultation. She spun the handwheel demoniacally fast. Flandry pushed himself into the saddle. His cannon swung about. The bit of hull counter-rotated. He adjusted, got the destroyer’s after section in his cross-hairs, and pulled trigger.