“Why so hurried?”
Brennan looked sideways at him. “Have a heart, Roy. I’ve been sitting out here for longer than your Greatly ’Stelle was alive.” He activated the vision screen.
They floated within the hole in Kobold’s donut.
Brennan stabbed a button.
Kobold receded violently. “I’m giving us a running start,” Brennan said. “We’ll get root two times the velocity.”
“Good.”
Kobold slowed, stopped, then came up like a wargod’s fist. Roy yelped. He couldn’t help it. They were through the hole in an instant, and black space ahead.
Roy turned his chair for a rear view, but Kobold was already gone. Sol was a star among stars.
“Let’s magnify that,” said Brennan. Sol became much larger — the view expanding over a rectangular section of the vision screen — and there was Kobold, receding. The magnification jumped again, and Kobold filled the screen.
Brennan pushed a red button.
Kobold began to crumple in on itself, as if an invisible hand were wadding it up. Rock churned and began to glow yellow-hot. Roy felt queasy in his soul and in his belly. It was as if someone had bombed Disneyland.
He said, “What did you do?”
“Shut down the gravity generators. I couldn’t leave it out here for the Pak to find. The longer it takes them to find artifacts around Sol, the better off we are.” Kobold was all yellow-hot and melted, and tiny. “In a few minutes it’ll all be plated across that eight foot ball of neutronium. When it cools it’ll be practically unfindable.”
Now Kobold was a blinding white point.
“What happens next?”
“For a year and two months and six days, nothing. Want to inspect the ship?”
“Nothing?”
“By which I mean that we won’t be doing any accelerating for that long. Look.” Brennan’s fingers flashed over the control panel. The vision screen obeyed, showing a tridee map of Sol and her neighborhood out to twenty-five light years.
“We’re here, at Sol. We’re on our way to here. That point is just between Alpha Centaurus and Van Maanen’s Star. When we fire up the Pak ship we’ll be heading directly into the Pak fleet. They won’t be able to get our velocity toward them without knowing our exhaust velocity, and they won’t know our transverse component at all. They’ll have to assume I’m coming from Van Maanen’s Star to Alpha Centaurus. I don’t want to lead them back to Sol.”
“That makes sense,” Roy admitted reluctantly.
“Let’s take that tour,” said Brennan. “Later we can go into detail. I want you able to fly this ship if anything happens to me.”
The Flying Dutchman, Brennan called it. Though there were ships within it, it was hardly a ship. “If you wanted to be picky about it, I could claim we’re sailing,” Brennan said cheerfully. “There are tides, and photon winds, and shoals of dust that could chew us up.”
“But you did all our steering at takeoff.”
“Sure, but I could spin us a light-sail if I had to. I don’t want to. It would make us more visible.”
The Flying Dutchman was a matrix of rock, mostly hollow. Three great hollows held the components of a Pak-style Bussard ramjet ship. Brennan called it Protector. Another had been enlarged to house Roy Truesdale’s cargo ship. Other hollows were rooms.
There was a hydroponics garden. “This is off limits,” said Brennan. “Tree-of-life. Don’t ever go in here.”
There was an exercise room. Brennan spent some time showing Roy how to adjust the machines for a breeder’s muscles. Gravity was almost zero aboard the Flying Dutchman. They would both have to exercise.
There was a machine shop.
There was a telescope: big, but conventional. “I don’t want to use gravity generators from now on. I want us to look like a rock. Later we’ll look like a Pak ship.”
Roy thought that was unnecessary. “It’ll be half of a hundred and seventy-three years before the Pak find any trace of what we’re doing now.”
“Maybe.”
And there was Protector.
For the first several weeks of the voyage they did little besides train Roy Truesdale to use that ship. He was drilled in the differences between Phssthpok’s ship and Brennan’s. “I don’t know how long we’ll want to keep up the camouflage,” Brennan told him. “Maybe for keeps. Maybe never. It depends.”
So Brennan turned the control pod into a training room by hooking sensors to the control systems and monitoring the inputs from outside. Roy learned to maintain a constant point nine two gee. He learned to feather the fields to smear the exhaust a bit. Phssthpok’s drive had not been as precisely tuned as Brennan’s, due to its thirty-one thousand light year voyage.
The control pod was much bigger than Roy had expected. “Phssthpok didn’t have this much room, did he?”
“Nope. Phssthpok had to carry food and air and recycling equipment for something like a thousand years. I don’t. We’ll still be crowded… but we’ll be entertained. Phssthpok didn’t have our computer technology either, or didn’t use it.”
“I wonder why.”
“A Pak wouldn’t see the point of taking a machine to think for him. He thinks too well already… and likes it too much, for that matter.”
The inside of the teardrop-shaped cargo pod was nothing like that of the alien ship that had come plowing into the solar system two centuries ago. Its cargo was death. It could sprout heavy attitude jets and fight itself. Its long axis was an X-ray laser. A thick tube parallel to the laser would generate a directed magnetic field. “It should foul up the fields in a monopole-based Bussard ramjet. Of course that might not hurt him enough unless your timing was right.” When Roy had learned how to use it — and that took time; he knew little about field theory — Brennan started drilling him on when.
That was the point at which Roy rebelled.
The past two months hadn’t been particularly pleasant. Roy was back in school, the only student of a full-time teacher who could not be snowed or evaded. He didn’t like being a child again. He missed the open spaces of Earth. He missed Alice. Hell, he missed women. And it was going to go on for five years!
Five years, and the rest of his life on Wunderland. He didn’t know that much about Wunderland, but he knew that its population was small and thinly spread, its technology just adequate. A pastoral paradise, perhaps; a nice place to spend one’s life… until Brennan arrived. Then Wunderland would go on a war footing.
“The Pak fleet is a hundred and seventy-three years away,” he pointed out now. “We’ll be at Wunderland in five years. What makes you think you need a gunner? What am I doing here, anyway?”
Brennan took a handhold at the rim of a fusion bomb’s rocket nozzle. “You could say I’ve learned some humility. I thought of looking for a Pak fleet, long ago, but I didn’t. The probability was just too low. Well, I’ve stopped taking chances.”
“What chances? We know where the Pak fleet is.”
“I didn’t want to worry you. It’s a long shot.”
“Worry me! I’m bored!”
“All right, let’s go back a bit,” said Brennan. “We know where the first fleet is, and how big it is. The second fleet wasn’t launched for another three-hundred-odd years. All I’ve found of it is a patchy source of those same chemical exhausts, off center to the first fleet and moving a bit faster. They wouldn’t follow directly behind the first fleet. It’d be eating up too much of their fuel.”
“How big?”
“Smaller. Order of a hundred and fifty ships, assuming they didn’t change the design, which they may have. I can’t tell.”
“Is there a third fleet?”
“If there is, I’ll never detect it. They had to go out for new resources to build the second fleet. They may have had to mine worlds in nearby systems and build the ships there. How long would it take them to build a third fleet? If it’s there, it’s too far away for me. But the point is that there had to be a last fleet.”