“So what?”
“I’m suggesting that when the last fleet left — the second or the third or the fourth, it doesn’t matter — some protectors stayed behind. We assume they were the ones without breeder descendants. They stayed behind partly to save room on the ships, and partly because they might do some good on Pak.”
“On an empty world? How?”
“They could build a scout fleet.”
It was not the first time Roy had worried about Brennan’s sanity. The changes in his physiology, plus twenty-two decades alone… but if Brennan were insane, he might be too bright to give it away.
Gently Roy pointed out, “But your scout fleet would be at least five hundred years behind the rest.”
“Sounds silly, does it? But they’re free to experiment. They don’t have to use a proven design, because they’re only risking themselves. They don’t need a cargo pod. They could take three gravities forever, I think; I know I could. That cuts down on their supply weight, because the trip takes less time. With the breeders gone they can do all kinds of things… like making new metal mines by setting up eruptions in the crust of Pak.”
“You’ve got quite an imagination.”
“Thank you. What I’m getting at is that they could plan to pass the first wave of refugee ships about where the Pak telescopes aren’t good enough to scout the territory any further. From there on they lead the fleet. Still bored?”
“No. You’re daydreaming, though. They might never have built these hypothetical ships. Whatever sent them scurrying out of the galactic core might have caught the scouts.”
“Hell, it could have caught the third wave and brushed the second. Or the scout ships might have blown up. Or — lest you miss the point of all this — they could be arriving now.”
“You haven’t found them?”
“What, with a whole sky to search? They wouldn’t just come down our throats; they’d converge on Sol from random directions. I would, if I were doing it. Remember what they’re expecting to find: a world of Pak protectors running a civilization two hundred years old. That’s enough time to build up a virgin world, starting with a population of… oh, thirty million breeders of all ages would have given Phssthpok about three million newly changed protectors. The scouts wouldn’t want to give away the position of their fleet.”
“Uh huh.”
“There is something I can do, but it’ll take a few days of work to make the tools. First I’m going to make sure you can fight this ship. Let’s go back to the lifesystem pod.”
A directed magnetic field would churn the interstellar plasma as it was guided into a Bussard ramjet. As a weapon it might be made to guide the plasma flow across the ship itself. The gunner would have to vary his shots, or an enemy pilot could compensate for the weapon’s effect. If the local hydrogen density were uneven, that would hurt him. If the plasma were dense enough locally, the enemy could not even turn off his drive without being cremated. Part of the purpose of the ram fields was to shield the ship from the gamma ray particles it was burning for fuel.
“Hit him near a star, if you get the choice,” said Brennan. “And don’t let him do that to you.”
The laser was surer death, if it hit a ship. But an enemy ship would be at least light-seconds away at the start of a battle. It would make a small, elusive target, its image delayed seconds or minutes. The thousand mile wings of a ram field would be easier to hit.
The guided bombs were many and varied. Some were simple fusion bombs. Others would throw bursts of hot plasma through a ram field, or carbon vapor to produce sudden surges in the burn rate, or half a ton of pressurized radon gas in a stasis field. Simple death or complicated. Some were mere decoys, silvered balloons.
Roy learned.
The wreck of Kobold was almost three months behind them, and Roy was at war. Lately he had come to enjoy these simulated battles, but he wasn’t enjoying this one. Brennan was throwing everything at him. The Pak scouts had used a three gee drive until they crossed his wake, and then Wham! Six gees and closing. Some of his missiles were going wild; the scouts were doing something to the guidance. The pair dodged his laser with such ease that he’d turned the damn thing off. They’d used lasers on him, firing not only at his ship but at the field constriction behind him where hydrogen atoms met and fused, so that Protector surged unevenly and he had to worry for the generator mountings. They threw bombs at unreasonable velocities, probably through a linear accelerator. He had to dodge in slow random curves. Protector was not what you’d call maneuverable.
Three days he’d been in the lifesystem module, eating and drinking there and using pep pills instead of sleep. Playing Brennan’s game. He was mad clean through. Within ships he could infer only from instruments, he imagined hard faces like Brennan’s.
Two scouts closing from behind, and finally he hit one with the directed magnetic field and watched its ram field flare and dissipate.
That was when he realized that there were two pairs of ships in tandem. Damn Brennan anyway! He’d hit a lead ship, but the trailing ship was still there… and slowing. Somehow the loss of the lead ship had slowed it. Roy concentrated on the second team, which was still closing.
He tried a turn. Two ships linked should be less maneuverable than one… and an hour later he knew that they were. He’d turned only a fraction of a minute of arc, but they had turned less. He could keep up his dodging and still turn inside them.
He tried some of his weaponry on the lone ship behind him.
Then half his weapons board was red, and he had to guess what had exploded in the trailing pod. Probably that idiot projector: he’d been trying to punch a hole in the lone ship’s ram field. He bet his ship he was right, and gambled further that the explosion had wrecked his laser, which might otherwise have been of some use. He fired a flurry of bombs from the side of the cargo pod opposite the explosion. The lead ship of the remaining pair flared and died.
That left two, each the trailing ship of a pair, making less than his own acceleration. He dithered a bit, then ran for it. He continued to dodge missiles and laser beams.
The scouts fell away. He watched them dwindling… and then one wasn’t dwindling… and it finally dawned on him that that one had picked up acceleration somehow and was coming up from behind at something like eight gees.
Roy’s first impulse was to scream, “Brennan! What are you trying to pull?”
He’d done that before. This time he restrained it. Because he’d guessed the answer: the second ship was burning Protector’s own exhaust! Never mind how: that was it, that was why they moved in tandem.
He dropped two half-tons of radon with the drives disconnected.
Radon has a short half-life: it has to be kept in stasis. The generator was outside the bomb shell, and was partly soft iron. The enemy’s ram field tore it apart. A minute later the radon was in the constriction, and incredible things were happening: radon fusing to transuranian elements, then fissioning immediately. The constriction exploded. The ram field sparkled like a department store Xmas tree gone manic. The Pak ship flared into a small white point, fading.
The last Pak ship was far behind.
Coming out of it was a slow process. Roy had to keep telling himself: this isn’t real, this is only pretend. He jumped violently when Brennan’s alien head poked through the twing.
Then he shouted, “What the hell was that about, him burning my exhaust?”