At one point in his wild flight his scanning radar picked up an unidentified object almost directly in his course. He dodged it, and his floodlights picked out the battered hull of another Spacer S-80 tumbling end-over-end on a witless course, with a gaping hole torn in her side—a derelict that would ultimately take up its own orbit around the Earth like a discarded first-stage shell.
Later he picked up the tentative probing of an Earth spy satellite, one of the crudely instrumented space vehicles that Earthmen had thrown up in an attempt to identify approaching Spacer craft and provide target information to assault weapons on the surface. Those vehicles had never done their job very effectively, but this one was a real threat now, pointing a sure electronic finger at Ben’s ship and proving stubbornly tenacious when Ben tried to baffle its detection apparatus with maneuvering. The little S-80 lurched and bucked; Tom and Joyce Barron clutched the rails of their cots as Ben used his ship’s side jets and null-grav units in combination to try to shake off his tormentor. Finally, in desperation, he fired three of his few remaining homing shells, hoping that in the confusion of objects to detect the satellite’s detecting mechanism would break down. Luck was with him; one of the shells took the spy satellite out of the sky with a flash of blue light, and Ben shifted course a dozen times in the next ten minutes in hopes of losing the followup missiles that were bound to come.
His instruments had calculated the approximate rendezvous point. As the hours passed, Ben knew he must be closing in on it, yet when he broke radio silence he could hear no response except disorganized chatter. Presently even the chatter grew more sparse. He began to feel strangely alone, as though he were the only ship left in the sky.
Then, abruptly, there was a signal from close at hand and another Spacer ship hailed him. It was a twenty-man cruiser, one of the largest in the raiding fleet, and it was moving in at a tangent to Ben’s S-80.
“Sound off and identify,” the signal came.
“Unit 4, Squad 7,” Ben returned. “Are you the command ship?”
“This is Unit 17, Squad 1,” the voice came back. “We’re taking command.”
“What’s happened?” Ben said.
“We’ve been booby-trapped, that’s what’s happened.”
“But what about the orbit ship?”
“It took three shells. We had to abandon it, cargo and all. The Raid Commander is aboard here now.
Better stand by for briefing.”
There was a pause and some static. Then the commander’s voice came across. “Unit 4? Is that Ben Trefon?”
“Yes, sir. My squad leader didn’t make it, I’m told. What happened?”
“No data yet,” the commander said. “All we know is that we’ve been hit hard. They’ve actually destroyed half the raiding fleet, either on the ground or spaceborne. We’ve lost our orbit ship and its cargo as well.”
It was worse than Ben had dreamed. No raid in centuries had lost more than five per cent of its ships.
“They must have known the strikepoint,” he said.
“There’s more to it than that,” the commander returned. “I’m afraid this has been a minor skirmish, so far.”
“I don’t understand, sir.”
“I mean we’re at war,” the answer came back. “Somehow they’ve raised an armada into space, and it’s bypassed our raiding fleet altogether. Right now it’s headed out for the Rings. That means they’re actually going to try to fight us in space. And from the count we have of their ships, we’ve got a war on our hands, not just a dog fight.”
For a long moment Ben was silent. It was true, then. The shadows had been ships—Earth ships. He felt a cold knot in the pit of his stomach. “What are my orders, sir?”
“Until we know what they intend to do, each ship in this raid squadron should go back to its home post, as quickly as possible. The Council and your father should be briefed without delay; that will be your job. Do you have any prisoners?”
“Too many prisoners,” Ben said sourly, and reported what had happened.
“Well, I’m afraid you’re hung with them until you get back to Mars,” the commander said. “This ship is already full of casualties.”
“That’s all right,” Ben said. “I can handle them.”
“Then get moving, and good luck,” the fleet commander said. “Stand by for further orders when you get there. And my greetings to your father, Ben. I’m afraid he was right about this raid.” The signal snapped off, leaving unsaid the thing that loomed largest at Ben Trefon’s mind. With the limitations of short-wave transmission, there was no means of swift communication between planets.
That meant that if an armada of Earth ships was moving out toward the orbits of Mars and the asteroids, there would be no warning of their approach until the first fragments of the raiding fleet limped home.
But if this were really an all-out war, one of the first targets of an Earth armada would be the Spacer outposts on Mars. Swiftly Ben Trefon began plotting his course for the fastest powered flight to Mars that his fuel supply would allow. It was up to him to get word to his father and the other Mars outposts—and he knew that with all the speed he was capable of, he might still arrive too late.
4. The Black Belt
SWIFT AS IT was in elapsed hours, the journey to Mars was the longest journey across space that Ben Trefon had ever experienced.
With the little scout ship’s nuclear engine providing fuel for a high-energy orbit outward, and with the null-gravity units working to make high accelerations tolerable to those inside the ship’s cabin, hardly more than eighteen hours passed before the great rusty red planet with its gleaming polar caps was looming large in the ship’s view screens. But to Ben every hour seemed like ten, and a thousand phantoms rose in his mind as he thought of the house he had left behind on the Martian desert, defenseless unless warning came in time.
Worst of all was the simple fact that Ben Trefon could not comprehend the idea of a full-scale war between Earthmen and Spacers, no matter how hard he tried. His mind balked at the thought; there was nothing in his experience, nor in his knowledge of Spacer history, that could account for such a thing being possible. As a result, he had the continuing feeling that it wasn’t really true at all, that it was merely a bad dream from which he would awaken at any moment. And the more he considered the idea the more incredible it became.
Of course he knew of the long centuries of animosity that had existed between the people who lived on the surface of the mother planet and the wandering band of outcasts who made their homes in space, on the outer planets or in the Asteroid Belt. He also knew that this animosity had flared into violence from time to time, ever since the beginning of the Spacers’ long exile from Earth. The periodic raids on the mother planet, so critical to the Spacers’ survival, never failed to whip the Earthmen into heights of frustrated rage, all the more intense because their efforts to fight off the raiders proved so feeble. This rage was reflected in the viciousness and cruelty Earthmen displayed on the rare occasions when they attempted to send out retaliatory missions against their tormentors. Space ships had been destroyed, men killed and maukis taken back to Earth in chains during those skirmishes, but to the Spacers the occasional Earth pirates had been nothing more than one of the unpleasant facts of their life in space, just another adverse condition that the Spacer clan had had to put up with in order to survive in their nomadic life.