“Yes, sir, unless it can brake much quicker than we can.”
“Her master’s suspicious. He must intend to whip by in a hurry, lest we throw things at him. That’s not unnatural. I’d be nervous of any enemy destroyer myself, if I were in a converted freighter or whatever she is. When he sees we’re amiable, he’ll take station — by which time, with luck, we’ll be another ten or fifteen thousand kilometers out and talking to the scientific lads.”
“Aye, sir. Have I the captain’s permission to order screen fields extended at full strength?”
“Not till we’ve located Port Frederiksen. They’d bedbug the instruments. But otherwise, except for the detector team, absolute combat readiness, of course.”
Am I right? If I’m wrong — The loneliness of command engulfed Flandry. He tried to fend it off by concentrating on approach maneuvers.
Eventually Asieneuve was falling free around Dido. The cessation of noise and quiver was like sudden deafness. The planet filled the starboard screens, dazzling on the dayside, dark when the ship swung around into night, save where aurora glimmered and lightning wove webs. That stormy atmosphere hindered investigation. Flandry found himself gripping his chair arms till he drove the blood from his fingernails.
“We could observe the other ship optically now, sir,” Rovian said, “were this disc not in between.”
“It would be,” Flandry said. The exec’s uneasiness had begun to gnaw in him.
An intercom voice said: “I think we’ve found it, sir. Latitude’s right, infrared pattern fits a continent to east and an ocean to west, radar suggests buildings, we may actually have gotten a neutrino blip from a nuclear installation. Large uncertainty factor in everything, though, what with the damned interference. Shall we repeat, next orbit?”
“No,” Flandry said, and realized he spoke needlessly loud. He forced levelness into his tone. “Lock on radar. Pilot, keep inside that horizon while we ascend. We’ll go synchronous and take any further readings from there.” I want to be under thrust when that actor arrives in his deaf-mute role. And, oh, yes, “Maximum screen fields, Citizen Rovian.”
The officer’s relief was obvious as he issued commands. The ship stirred back to life. A shifting complex of gravitic forces lifted her in a curve that was nearer a straight line than a spiral. The planet’s stormy crescent shrank a little.
“Give me a projection of the rendezvousing craft, soon as you have a line of sight,” Flandry said. I’ll feel a lot cheerier after I’ve eyeballed her. He made himself lean back and wait.
The vision leaped into the screen. A man yelled. Rovian hissed.
That lean shape rushing down the last kilometers had never been for peaceful use. She was simply, deceptively not of Imperial manufacture. The armament was as complete as Asieneuve’s, and as smoothly integrated with the hull. Needle nose and rakish fins declared she was meant to traverse atmosphere more often than a corresponding Terra warship … as for example on her way to loot a town—
Barbarians, flashed in Flandry. From some wild country on some wild planet, where maybe a hundred years ago they were still warring with edged iron, only somebody found advantage — military, commercial — in teaching them about spaceflight, providing them with machines and a skeleton education … No wonder they haven’t responded to us. Probably not one aboard knows Anglic! “White flare,” he snapped. “ ‘Pax’ broadcast.” They must recognize the signals of peace. Hugh McCormac couldn’t have engaged them, as he doubtless had, unless they’d been in some contact with his civilization. The order was obeyed at once.
Energy stabbed blue-white out of the mercenary. Missiles followed.
Flandry heard a roar of abused metal. He struck the combat button. Asieneuve’s response was instant. And it was the ship’s own. At quarters this close, living flesh could not perceive what went on, let alone react fast enough. Her blaster cannon discharged. Her countermissiles soared to meet what had been sent against her. A second later, tubes opened to release her big birds. Nuclear detonations raged. Electromagnetic screens could ward off the sleet of ions, but not the heat radiation and X-rays, nor the thrust of energy lances and the assault of material torpedoes. Negagrav forces could slow the latter, but not stop them. Interceptors must do that, if they could.
The barbarian had the immense advantage of high speed and high altitude relative to the planet. She was the harder target to come near, her defenses the harder to penetrate if you did.
Nonetheless, Rovian’s work of years bore fruit. Abrupt flame seethed around the enemy. White-hot shrapnel fled from a place where armor plate had been. Twisted, crumpled, blackened, half melted, the rest of the ship whirled off on a cometary path around the world and back toward outer space.
But it was not possible that the Terran escape free. Tactical experts reckoned the life of a destroyer in this kind of fight as less than three minutes. Firebeams had seared and gouged through Asieneuve’s vitals. No warhead had made the direct hit that would have killed her absolutely; but three explosions were so close that the blast from their shaped charges tore into the hull, bellowing, burning, shattering machines like porcelain, throwing men about and ripping them like red rag dolls.
Flandry saw the bridge crack open. A shard of steel went through Rovian as a circular saw cuts a tree in twain. Blood sheeted, broke into a fog of droplets in the sudden weightlessness, volatilized in the dwindling pressure, and was gone except for spattered stains. Stunned, deafened, his own blood filling nose and mouth, Flandry managed to slam shut the faceplate and draw on the gloves he had forgotten about, before the last air shrieked through the hole.
Then there was a silence. Engines dead, the destroyer reached the maximum altitude permitted by the velocity she had had, and fell back toward the planet.
VIII
No boat remained spaceworthy. Where destruction was not total, crucial systems had been knocked out. Time was lacking to make repairs or cannibalize. One of the four craft offered a weak hope. Though its fusion generator was inoperative, its accumulators could energize the two drive cones that seemed usable; and the instruments and controls were undamaged. An aerodynamic landing might be possible. Every rated pilot was killed or wounded — but Flandry had flown combat aircraft before he transferred to the Intelligence Corps.
The engineers had barely finished ascertaining this much when it became urgent to abandon ship. They would soon strike atmosphere. That would complete the ruin of the hull. Struggling through airlessness, weightlessness, lightlessness, hale survivors dragged hurt to the boat housing. There wasn’t room for all those bodies if they stayed space armored. Flandry pressurized from tanks and, as each man cycled through the airlock, had his bulky gear stripped off and sent out the disposal valve. He managed to find stowage for three suits, including his — which he suddenly remembered he must not wear when everyone else would be unprotected. That was more for the sake of the impellers secured to them than for anything else.
Those worst injured were placed in the safety-webbed chairs. The rest, jammed together down the aisle, would depend for their lives on the gee-field. Flandry saw Kathryn take her stand among them. He wanted wildly to give her the copilot’s chair; the field circuits might well be disrupted by the stresses they were about to encounter. But Ensign Havelock had some training in this kind of emergency procedure. His help could be the critical quantum that saved her.
A shudder went through boat and bones, the first impact on Dido’s stratosphere. Flandry shot free.