The trooper scrambled into the driver's compartment. Liosh and Chang went round to the rear of the vehicle. The Contact officer turned to open its double doors—and Chang, at last unwatched for an instant, drew his pistol and sapped the Zan behind the right ear.
Liosh fell bonelessly. The scout pilot raced back to the trooper, who was cursing as he tried to coax the machine's engine to life. The sight of the handgun froze him. "Out." Chang ordered. He clubbed the second alien into unconsciousness.
He paused for a moment over Liosh, pistol in hand. But shouts came echoing up from the mouth of the tunnel—and the Zan, after all, had been trying to save him. He turned and trotted toward the field. The smell of sap from crushed plants filled his nostrils.
He dug his handset from a pocket. "On my way!" he shouted.
"Took you long enough," Praise of Folly sail tartly. "Things have been lively out here." That, the scout pilot saw as he emerged from the undergrowth. was putting it mildly. Several armored vehicles blazed on the tarmac; they and the burning port buildings gave all the light there was. Chang ran past corpses of Zanat and Slayor flung every which way in death, past wrecked spacecraft. He knew a moment's relief when he realized the Praise of Folly had been away from the worst of the fighting. Then a bullet whistled past his ear and another sponged viciously from concrete, and he realized that the greater distance did nothing for his safety. Still, he was only one more shape moving through darkness, not likely to draw much fire and not a good target if he did. Praise of Fully stood tall a couple of hundred meters ahead. He did not spy the Slayor until almost too late. The local slashed at him with a sword—no rapier this, but a great two-handed claymore. The blow went wide. Chang fired a point-blank range. and also missed. He threw his pistol in that native's face. The Slayor went down, keening. Chang did not look back. He flew up Praise of Folly's boarding ladder three rungs at a time.
"Out of here!" he bawled the instant the airlock doors were sealed behind him. "They have more things to worry about now than us."
Praise of Folly outran the missiles that came streaking after her, sped toward free space. Chang whooped and punched for champagne.
His glee proved short-lived, for the Zanat spacecraft in orbital patrol were more alert than the distracted planetary forces. The radio crackled with challenges, which he ignored. Radar and contragrav detector warned of ship-to-ship missiles, faster and more deadly than ground-based weapons.
"Take 'em out," Chiang said, adding quickly, "Chemical warheads only. One day soon we'll have to deal with these people, and I don't want to be remembered for screwing up a whole planet with an electromagnetic pulse from our atomics."
But he did not want to be shot out of the sky, either, and did not tell Praise of Folly to degrade its countermissiles' performance. With better sensors and stronger contragravs, they easily destroyed the attackers. Small puffs of red and gold flame blossomed astern.
Far sooner than most pilots would have dared, he went over to hyperdrive. He was so exhilarated that the surge was over before he remembered he should have been sick. He gunned Praise of Folly for all the ship was worth, trying to get out of detector range before his pursuers went FTL. For most of an hour, he thought he'd done it. Then a point of light winked on in the detector display, far behind but indisputably there. He swore and shifted vectors. The enemy followed. He swore again. He had already seen that the Zanat had good FTL instrumentation.
"Just have to run them into the ground, then," he muttered. But the bogey refused to disappear. After awhile, another crawled onto the edge of the screen, and then two more. All were prominent echoes, warcraft for certain.
He tried to console himself with the truism fallen back on by every captain in trouble since the days of ships on Terran seas: a stern chase is a long chase. But when he looked at the detectors, he saw that it would not be long enough.
It was several days later, ship's time, when he and the computer finished commiserating with each other over his poor choice of drinking establishments. By then his lead, almost a light-year when he set out, had melted to hardly more than half an AU. The Zanat ships were maneuvering into englobement formation: if they surrounded him and touched his drive field with all theirs at once, they and he would be thrown into normal space together, with all the odds in their favor in the ensuing slugging match.
"I'll have to go sublight myself first," he decided unwillingly: the last resort of an outmatched pilot.
"Maybe," he added without much belief, "they'll lose me." If the ploy would ever work. the Nebula was the place for it. Gas and dust could play merry hell with gadgetry.
Any particularly thick patches close by?" he asked hopefully.
The computer was silent for nearly a minute while it searched its memory and added corrections for several centuries of proper motion. At last it said, "As it happens, yes. We're near a Herbig-Haro object."
"New one on me," the scout pilot admitted. "What is it?"
"A luminous nebula with a denser center that—"
"Say no more that's exactly what we need. They'll have to have their engines linked to their detectors and drop out of hyperdrive the moment we do, or else overshoot and lose me for good. FTL, half an AU is nothing. Set our course so that when we and they break out, they'll be smack in the middle of that denser center." Chang let his optimism run wild. "One of them might even emerge coincident with a rock, and lower the odds. Can we fight three?"
"Not with our store of missiles depleted as it is," the computer answered at once. The scout pilot sighed. Praise of Folly went on. "Reconsider your plan. Herbig-Haro objects are—" Chang was not about to be balked by mechanical mutiny. "Execute, and no chatter," he said harshly. "Override command."
The silence that fell had a reproachful quality to it. Praise of Folly changed course. Like hounds after a rabbit, the Zanat ships followed.
Chang's nails bit into his palms. His lead was a bare half-AU now, hardly seventy-five million kilometers. If this Herbig-Haro whatsit didn't show up soon, the Zanat would force him out of hyperdrive and fight on their own terms.
Praise of Folly gave a sudden, sickening lurch. Her normal-space instruments came back to life—and at that same instant, every alarm in the ship went off. Red lights flared, claxons hooted, bells jangled, a commotion to wake the dead.
Chang did not even notice it. His mouth hanging open, he was staring in disbelief at the view screens. "What the bleeding hell is a star doing there'?" he said in something like a whispered scream. A star it was, a crimson monster. Praise of Folly could hardly have been more than fifteen million kilometers from the edge of its chromosphere. Had Chang been on the surface of a planet at that distance, its great orb would have stretched across almost two-thirds of the sky. He could peer deep through the tenuous gases of its outer atmosphere, could gauge the temperature of the swirling currents by their colors: here a ruby so deep the eye almost refused to register it, there a coruscating up rush of brighter, molten red. It was like looking down on a stormy ocean of flaming wine. The sight held Chung fascinated until he absently wiped his hand across his forehead. It came away slick with sweat, As the alarms could not, that reminded him where he was. Another few seconds and he would cook, no matter how well-shielded the ship was. His finger jabbed the hyperdrive switch. The abused engines groaned, but the wrench that sent Praise of Folly FTL was the most welcome thing he had ever felt. The clamor of alarms faded away. Nothing whatever showed on the hyperdrive detector. Chang shivered. "One thing's certain, they never knew what hit'em." Moths in a blowtorch—