The mate looked pained. "What'll we do then, Captain?"
"We'll have to try," said Trent sardonically, "to think of something."
But it didn't look promising. The pirate had a gun. The Yarrow hadn't. The pirate had an intact overdrive coil, permitting it to appear and disappear, to depart and return, and which would automatically blow out the Yarrow's corresponding unit if Trent tried to make use of it. The pirate had lost a good half of its crew in the lifeboats. Perhaps two-thirds. It definitely would not go away and leave the Yarrow to its own devices. The only unusual thing the Yarrow had displayed was resolution and a furious willingness to fight. That amounted to a tactical surprise.
But the pirate was now recovered from it. It reappeared. With a raging deliberation, it lay off some two miles from the Yarrow and began to pound it with solid shot. When the Yarrow charged, the pirate went into overdrive again. The Yarrow could have followed, of course, but at the cost of blowing its coil before it had completed the conversion from normal space. It could only remain in the glaring, terrible unshielded sunshine of the double sun. When the pirate appeared, the Yarrow dashed at it. But the Yarrow had no weapon but itself that could do its enemy damage, and its defense was only partial, and even that, only when it was driving head-on for its antagonist. Sooner or later its bow-armor of cargo bales must fail it.
The sequence of a desperate charge while the pirate pounded it with its cannon, and the disappearance of the freebooter into overdrive, then its reappearance elsewhere to throw more solid shot became almost routine. Trent turned the Yarrow over to the mate and went to check damage. It is always interesting and sometimes useful to put oneself mentally in an enemy's position. He began to imagine vaguely what he'd be able to do with spaceboats if he used them otherwise than as the pirate had.
He began to count up possibilities. Spaceboats would be very poor targets for a gun firing solid shot. But they'd have to get to actual contact to be able to explode a shaped charge usefully. And if the pirate went into overdrive at such a moment it would take the boat with it. And the spaceboat might come back to normal space lightyears from any ship or planet or… anything. It would never be heard of or seen in all the centuries and millennia still to come.
Trent would have risked it, for himself. But the Yarrow and the men aboard it—
The engine room was still air filled. Trent went around to the tiny emergency lock intended to allow of passage to another of the ship's compartments even if one or more of them lost air.
He came out of the airlock in the cargo hold next astern. He saw the huge crate the freight-broker had practically dumped aboard while the mate was in a state of total confusion.
He looked at it. And if his many-times-great-grandfather, that Captain Trent of the Napoleonic period, or any one of his numerously-great-grandfathers could have seen the situation and followed Trent's reasoning, why, Captain Trent's ancestors would have been pleased.
VII
The Yarrow swarmed with activity as soon as he'd worked out what to do. It was the simplest imaginable solution to his problem as soon as it was seen. Only the Yarrow's engineer was bitter about it. Twice he had attempted to use his gadget. Each time it had blown itself out with exhaustive thoroughness as soon as Trent tried to charge its capacitors. Now Trent had men hacking at the monster crate containing an overdrive unit intended to be delivered to Loren. Trent had had the sardonic idea that it was meant to be installed in a privateer intended to be the companion of the Bear. He disapproved. But now, suddenly, he had an idea that he could put it to better use.
A solid shot hit the Yarrow's bow. There was the feel of a full-power Lawlor dash at the pirate ship. The Yarrow's mate was not an imaginative person, but he could carry out orders he understood. The orders to be carried out just now were perfectly understandable. Gain time.
Parts of the shipped overdrive coil became exposed. Trent wielded an axe himself, to get the crate cleared away. The engineer, muttering bitterly, brought out cables from the engine room stores. With Trent watching sharply, he welded them to that perfection of contact needed when currents in the tens of thousands of amperes were to be carried. He led the cables forward to the engine room. With Trent checking every move, he connected the overdrive coil in the cargo hold to the overdrive coil in the engine room. He installed a cutoff switch.
The Yarrow now had two overdrive coils connected in parallel. Each of them was designed to perform a very special feat, most simply if not lucidly expressed as making a hole in the cosmos around the ship, enclosing the ship in that hole, and then pulling the hole inside itself. With two such devices in parallel, when they were turned on together they should make a much larger hole than one alone. They should, together, have more power per ship-and-cargo ton of mass than the pirate ship could possibly have. If the pirate ship and the Yarrow were in overdrive at the same time and as near to each other as they were now, one overdrive coil would have to blow. Originally, it would have been the Yarrow's. Now it should be the pirate's.
Trent made his way back to the control room. The mate greeted him with relief.
"Another bow compartment's lost air, Captain," he said worriedly. "The old Yarrow's likely to get hurt before long. I've had a man for'rd checking, but it looks like if we rammed her now we'd get all smashed up—if we could ram her."
"We can," said Trent briefly.
He surveyed the situation. It appeared to be the same as before. The pirate ship winked into existence where nothing had been. It swung about, so its gun would bear on the Yarrow. The Yarrow rushed at it. The gun got three solid shot into the Yarrow's bow, and the pirate vanished into overdrive. There it was unreachable.
Trent said deliberately, "Overdrive coming. Three, two, one, zero."
The Yarrow vanished into overdrive.
The yellow double sun poured out its intolerable light and heat. As a double sun, it could not have planets or satellites of any other kind. There were no comets, no asteroids, no meteor streams. The only objects that could ever orbit it, even temporarily, were spaceships. Moments ago there had been two of them. Now, quite suddenly, there was only one. It came out of nowhere. For a long time it was quite alone. Then the other came out of nothingness.
This second ship now lay still, miles from the one that had broken out first. The second ship was damaged. There were shot-holes in its bow-plating. Some of them ran into one another. There was a deep dent where a shell had hit a hull-frame behind the plating and had not penetrated but had made a deep depression which spoiled the symmetry of its form.
It was, of course, the Yarrow. It had gone into overdrive immediately after the pirate ship. It had stayed there. The drive detector which told of another ship also in overdrive flickered and ceased to register anything. That meant, of course, that there was no other operating overdrive nearby. The pirate's drive had blown out. Now the Yarrow had come out of overdrive and could go back into it at pleasure. The pirate ship was in normal space and now could not leave it again. But it still had a gun. That weapon flamed furiously and solid shot moved through space toward the Yarrow. Trent shifted the Yarrow's position. At this distance it would take many seconds for the despairing pirate's missiles to reach the place where the Yarrow had been.