They did the same with the cable that towed the weapons pod. Roy worked his two-gravity muscles with adrenalin flooding his system. He was well aware of the radiation sleeting through his body. This was war… but with something missing. He could not hate the Pak. He did not understand them well enough. If Brennan could hate them, he could have caught it from Brennan; but Brennan didn’t. No matter that he called it war. What he was playing was high stakes poker.
Now the three main sections of Protector floated end to end. Roy boarded the Belt cargo ship for the first time in years. As he took his place at the controls, green light flooded the cabin. He dropped the sun screens fast.
Brennan came through the airlock shouting, “Foxed ’em! If they’d done that half an hour ago we’d have been cooked.”
“I thought they’d used up their stored power.”
“No, that would have been stupid, but they must be pretty low. They thought I’d wait to the last second before I took the ships apart. They don’t know what I am yet!” he exulted. “And they don’t know I have help. All right, we’ve got about an hour before we have to go outside. Get us lined up.”
Roy used attitude jets to put the Belt ship fourth in line, behind Protector’s weapons pod. It felt good to be handling controls, to be doing something constructive in Brennan’s war. Through the sun screens the components of Protector glared green as hell. They were already drifting apart in the reaching tides of the mass ahead.
“Have you named that star yet?”
“No,” said Brennan.
“You discovered it. You have the right.”
“I’ll call it Phssthpok’s Star, then. Bear ye witness. I think we owe him that.”
NAME. Phssthpok’s Star. Later renamed BVS-1, by the Institute of Knowledge on Jinx.
CLASSIFICATION: Neutron star.
MASS: 1.3 times mass of Sol.
COMPOSITION: Eleven miles diameter of neutronium, topped by half a mile of collapsed matter, topped by perhaps twelve feet of normal matter.
SURFACE GRAVITY: 1.7x1011 G, Earth standard.
REMARKS: First nonradiating neutron star ever discovered. Atypical compared with many known pulsars; but stars of the BVS type would be difficult to find as compared with pulsars. BVS-1 may have started life as a pulsar, with a radiating gas shell, one hundred million to a billion years ago, then transferred its rotation to the gas shell, dissipating it in the process.
They were going to go past Phssthpok’s Star damn fast.
The four sections of Protector fell separately. Even the Pak cable would not have held them together. Worse: the tidal effect would have pulled the sections into line with the star’s center of mass. The four sections with their snapped cables would have emerged on wildly different orbits.
This way the self-maneuvering cargo ship could be used to link the other sections after perihelion. But he and Brennan could not ride it out here. The Belt ship’s cabin was in the nose of the ship, too far from the center of mass.
Roy knew this intellectually. Before they left the ship he could feel it.
Protector had been three receding green dots before the Pak laser finally went out. Then they were invisible. And the neutron star was a dull red point ahead. Roy felt its tides pulling him forward against the crash webbing.
“Go,” said Brennan.
Roy released the webbing. He stood up on the clear plastic of the nose port, then climbed along the wall. The rungs were made for climbing in the other direction. Maneuvering himself into the airlock was difficult. Minutes from now it would have been impossible. More minutes, and the tides would have crushed him against the nose port, a beetle beneath a heel.
The hull was smooth, without handholds. He couldn’t wait here. He hung from the jamb, then dropped.
The ship fell away. He saw a tiny humanoid figure crouched in the airlock. Then four tiny flashes. Brennan had one of the high-velocity rifles. He was firing at the Pak.
Roy could feel the tides now, the whisper of a tug hiside his body. His feet came down to the red dot ahead.
Brennan had dropped after him. He was using backpac jets.
The tug inside was stronger. Gentle hands at his head and feet were trying to pull him apart. The red dot was yellowing, brightening, coming up at him like a fiery bowling ball.
He thought about it for a good hour. Brennan had intimidated him to that extent. He thought it through backward and forward, and then he told Brennan he was crazy.
They were linked by three yards of line. The line was taut, though the neutron star was a tiny red dot behind them. And Brennan still had the gun.
“I’m not doubting your professional opinion,” said Brennan, “But what symptom was it that tipped you off?”
“That gun. Why did you shoot at the Pak ship?”
“I want it wrecked.”
“But you couldn’t hit it. You were aiming right at it. I saw you. The star’s gravity must have pulled the bullets off course.”
“You think about it. If I’m really off my nut, you’d be justified in taking command.”
“Not necessarily. Sometimes crazy is better than stupid. What I’m really afraid of is that shooting at the Pak ships might make sense. Everything else you do makes sense, sooner or later. If that makes sense I’m gonna quit.”
Brennan was hunting for the cargo ship with a pair of binoculars. He said, “Don’t do that. Treat it as a puzzle. If I’m not crazy, why did I fire at a Pak ship?”
“Dammit. The muzzle velocity isn’t anything like good enough… How long have I got?”
“Two hours and fifty minutes.”
“O-o-oh.”
They were back aboard Protector’s isolated lifesystem by then, watching the vision screens and — in Brennan’s case — a score of instruments besides. The second Pak team fell toward the miniature sun in four sections: a drive section like a two-edged ax, then a pillbox-shaped lifesystem section, then a gap of several hundred miles, then a much bigger drive section and another pillbox. The first pillbox was just passing perihelion when the neutron star flared.
A moment ago magnification had showed it as a dim red globe. Now a small blue-white star showed on its surface. The white spot spread, dimming; it spread across the surface without rising in any kind of cloud. Brennan’s counters and needles began to chatter and twitch.
“That should kill him,” Brennan said with satisfaction. “Those Pak pilots probably aren’t too healthy anyway; they must have picked up a certain amount of radiation over thirty-one thousand light years riding behind a Bussard ramjet.”
“I presume that was a bullet?”
“Yah. A steel-jacketed bullet. And we’re moving against the spin of the star. I slowed it enough that the magnetic field would pick it up and slow it further, and keep on slowing it until it hit the star’s surface. There were some uncertainties. I wasn’t sure just when it would hit.”
“Very tricky, Captain.”
“The trailing ship probably has it worked out too, but there isn’t anything he can do about it.” Now the flare was a lemon glow across one flank of Plissthpok’s Star. Suddenly another white point glowed at one edge. “Even if they worked it out in advance, they couldn’t be sure I had the guns. And there’s only one course window they can follow me through. Either I dropped something or I didn’t. Let’s see what the last pair does.”
“Let’s put Protector back together. I think that must be the drive section ahead.”
“Right.”
They worked for hours. Protector was fairly spread across the sky. Roy worked with his shoulders hunched against deadly green light, but it never came. The second pair of Pak scouts was dead.