The Queen of Space, page 19
“Lass, have you lost your mortal mind?” His yellow face reflected outraged scorn. “Just the precious four of us. Adrift in a wicked alien starship. Without a chart to guide us. Without a blessed weapon. Without food a mortal hog would eat.”
“Giles—”
“Listen, lass!” His whine rose higher. “You speak of recovering the secret of AKKA as if it were mortal simple as picking up a pebble. Even if we could fly the wicked ship, we’d never find Miss William. Not with a thousand fearful worlds to search.”
“We’ll do what we can.” Jil turned to Kynan Star. “She’s important to the shadowflashers. They’re probably taking her to some strong point. Perhaps the same planet where they’re making arms and building starships. If we could locate that—”
“If we were shining supermen.” Giles Habibula shrugged and shook his head forlornly. “The sort I used to fly with—”
“Lord Archy—” She turned to him. “You worked with Miss William. Did you learn facts about the nebula from her?”
“Affirmative, Miss Three.”
“Do you know facts about the shadowflashers?”
“Affirmative, Miss Three.”
“Do they have a master planet?”
“We request definition of master planet.”
“Their home world? The planet where they build ships and weapons?”
“Data lacking, Miss Three.”
“Have you any facts that might help us find Miss William?”
“Data lacking on her present location, Miss Three. Data lacking on destination of the S.S. Purple Empress. Data lacking on recent military operations in nebular space. No relevant data discovered.”
“Keep looking, please.” Jil frowned. “Do you know Miss William’s history? Anything about her native planet?”
“Affirmative, Miss Three. Data available on her planet of origin.”
“What is it?”
“Planet orbits single component of triple sun located beyond nebular core. Concealed from human worlds by thick nebular dust. Consequently not shown on human star charts.”
“Mortal far from here,” Giles Habibula muttered uneasily. “And mortal far from where old Ben Gyrel picked her up.”
“Have you more data?” Jil asked. “About how she got so far from home?”
“Affirmative, Miss Three. Her race was symbiotic. Her own kind lacked mobility. Their symbionts were highly mobile. Union rated extremely beneficial to both. Miss William informed us that they flourished in association. They had developed sophisticated starcraft and spread their culture across many planets before the shadowflashers came.
“Miss William was engaged in development of tachyonic defenses against the shadowflashers. The arrival of the shockwave terminated that development.
“It also terminated the war. Though Miss William’s people can endure intense radiation, their symbionts could not. They died. Lacking them, most of her people perished. The shockwave also terminated the shadowflasher expansion, because it had killed the organic hosts they require for reproduction.”
“What happened to Miss William?”
“Data, Miss Three. Miss William informed us that the shockwave caught her far from home. Rated a child, she still possessed some slight mobility, which enabled her to survive. Yet she had no way to leave the planet. She was there when Dr. One landed.
“We established alternative avenues of contact, first sonic, then radio and tachyonic. She wished to return to her home world to search for other survivors there. Dr. One promised to aid her, but he died before we could reach the triple sun.”
“Thank you, Lord Archy.”
“No gratitude required.”
“If she should escape, I imagine she’d try to go home.” Jil turned to the men. “I think we should try to reach her people. If they were fighting the flashers before the shockwave hit, they might have something useful for us.”
She tried to smile into Habibula’s doleful gloom.
“The best chance I see—”
“If you want to toss our precious lives away.”
“The only chance.” Star was nodding soberly. “Let’s inspect the ship.”
They separated. Habibula went down to check the geodesic drive and came back to investigate the galley. When at last they gathered again on the command deck, he wambled to the pilot’s seat and sank into it feebly, moaning as if with hopeless despair.
“The geodynes?” Jil whispered. “Can’t you run them?”
“No problem, lass,” he puffed. “Not with the mortal geodynes. They’re great clumsy things, built with sledgehammers. Power enough to smash a precious planet when you try to take us up. Unless you’re mortal careful! Here’s the wicked problem.”
He showed her a little brown brick.
“All the mortal monsters had for their blessed slaves to eat.” He made a dismal face. “Foul swill. I tried it in the galley. Soaked and boiled, baked and fried, crushed and broiled. Every way is worse. We’ll famish, lass.”
“You may come to like it better.” She grinned at him. “When we get hungry enough.”
The air system had been copied from Legion equipment. It seemed to be in working order. The water tanks were nearly empty, but the condensers would at least yield drinking water.
“Controls inspected, Miss Three,” Lord Archy pealed. “Ship’s intercom and signal equipment remain functional, but sabotaged map tank and flight computer cannot be repaired.”
“So we’re blind!” Giles Habibula croaked. “Trapped and starving in a mortal coffin.”
“Not quite blind,” Jil said. “The conning hood does show the sky, though the telescopic functions and computer graphics are gone. Here on the planet, I can’t feel anything outside the ship. But my sense of space will come back when we get up—I hope.”
She had turned to the consoles, and Giles Habibula heaved himself uneasily upright to give her the pilot’s chair.
Kynan Star followed her to it.
“Jil, you understand the hazards.” His tone showed doubt that she did. “The geodesic field propels a ship by non-Newtonian forces, canceling space ahead and creating new space behind. The danger comes from interference with Newtonian mass and force. Gravitic or magnetic fields. That’s why the Legion has always required auxiliary rockets for takeoffs and landings.”
Settling herself beneath the conning hood, she managed not to say she had learned all that long ago from her instructors back on Alpha III.
“Giles,” she called, “please energize the drive.”
“Lass, lass!” He blinked at her forlornly. “Must you kill us all? Trying a stunt that would send any mortal Legion pilot to criminal reconstruction?”
He shook his head when he got no answer.
“Aye, lass.” She heard his reluctant wheeze. “Better to do it now than endure the mortal waiting.”
He waddled into the elevator.
29
Star gave her a lean-jawed grin.
“Standing by—and I love you, Jil!”
Habibula’s quaver came over the intercom.
“Power’s up, lass. If you want to risk our blessed lives on these mortal geodynes.”
She slid into the seat beneath the blank conning screen. The Legion-patterned consoles around it had made her feel almost at ease, but they burned red with warnings when she pulled the wheel to the lift position.
PILOT ERROR!
FLIGHT COMPUTER OUT!
MAP TANK OUT!
NO FLIGHT PLAN FILED!
Gingerly she pushed the wheel.
Something mauled her, crushed her breath out, dragged her hand off the wheel, slammed the seat down to the deck. The ship spun around her. She was falling into a well of icy blackness, where she couldn’t move or see or think. Trying to breathe, she caught a nauseous bog-rot reek.
“Lord of space!” Habibula’s moan came faintly over the intercom. “Let me die!”
Light came abruptly back. The seat lurched and creaked, lifting her back to the consoles. Gasping for breath, she peered into the conning screen. Though all the astrogation aids were gone, it held a visual image of the nebula.
Gas clouds glowing, cold green and smoldering red. Blobs and streaks of dense black dust. Haze-veiled mascons. All of it brighter toward the core, where the hot blue pulsar throbbed like a heart, a little slower than her own.
Sharper than sight, her returning space perceptions began to reveal the planet they had left. The canyon below Freeholm, now a sea of purple shadow. The wide white curve of the icecap, 300 kilometers below. A great fountain of shattered ice and broken rock lifting out of a ragged crater where the starcraft had stood, spreading with a strange deliberation, raining slowly back.
A booby trap exploding?
She wondered for a moment before she understood what it was: stuff caught and flung spaceward by leakage from the ship’s poorly shielded geodesic field. Appalled by the uncontrollable power of it, she was almost afraid to touch the controls again.
But they were up!
Alive! Climbing fast! As they lifted farther out of the planet’s gravity well, her space perceptions cleared. She found Gamma, a faint orange glow toward the human periphery, and the denser clouds around the nebular core. Suddenly, she felt at home in the nebula.
The shockwave walled it, darkness beyond. The core burned ahead, like a fire floating at the center of a cave. Its flames shone red and green, and the dust was its black smoke. She searched for the triple sun. In vain. It was lost somewhere beyond the fire, but she saw the long curve they must trace to bring it into view.
Nerved again, she seized the wheel, pushed it cautiously. Though she felt no motion now, the planet dropped fast. The space ahead was suddenly aglow with orbital remnants of the solar cloud, too much mass for the drive. She had to pull the wheel back and look for open lanes through the cometary drift.
“A mortal mauling, lass!” The whimper of Giles Habibula came faintly from the intercom. “Broke every bone in my blessed body. Left us wrecked to freeze and starve and perish on the wicked ice—”
“We’re in space,” she told him. “On our way!”
“Lass!” his plaintive wheeze reproached her. “Don’t lie to a dying man. I want the fearful truth.”
“Data, Mr. Two,” Lord Archy’s bell voice rang from the intercom. “Reporting confirmation that we are in space.”
With a final moan, he fell silent. Feeling out the way with perceptions she might never understand, she searched out a flight path and kept them on it. Star dropped down the ladder well to inspect the craft again. He came back whistling the Legion march.
“Jil, I think—I hope—we really do have a chance! Lord Archy reports no damage to the hull. Giles admits the geodynes are running mortal well. No new hazard that I can find. And we’re back in non-Newtonian flight.”
His haggard head shook slowly.
“Can’t quite believe it. I’d been beaten, Jil. Too far down to try anything again. I—” His tired voice caught. “Jil, you’ve let us live again.”
Touched by his emotion, she turned to look at him. Stooped and balding, swaying as if only stark effort kept him straight. Lean and drawn from killing strain, his green Legion cosmonalls soiled and tom, black beads of drying blood along an untended scratch across his grizzled cheek. A glow of feeling for him warmed her.
“Kynan—” Her own voice quivered. She wanted to reach out to him, to tell him what she felt, yet something checked her. This was not the moment. Afraid to trust her own emotion, she tried to smooth it from her tone. “I’m—I’m glad we’re together.”
Star was never able to fly the craft. To his eyes, to normal human senses, the screen showed only the dust-patched nebular glow, the pulsar’s slow, blue beat and a few haloed stars.
Lord Archy had different perceptions. Not so sharp as hers, they were keener than Star’s. At times when the dust and gas were not too thick, when no threatening mascon loomed, he could spell her at the consoles.
When Giles Habibula whimpered to be relieved from famine and fatigue, the little robot spelled him too. Driven to the slave rations, he came up from the galley with a pan of yellowish mush for her.
“Horrid slop!” he whined. “A mortal hog would run from it to preserve his precious health, but we must force it down. Aye, lass, we must eat the evil mess to save our blessed lives.”
Uncertainly she tried it. The taste was strange, a little bitter, but not much worse than the synthetic protein dehydrates in the Legion space ration. She ate a few more bites and gave the pan back to him. With a wry face, he began spooning at it eagerly.
“Foul swill! But we must stay alive.”
Sometimes she needed all her skill to thread them safely through the drift, but there were endless watches when the space ahead seemed almost clear. Without the spur of danger, her own fatigue became a hazard, and she was always glad when Kynan could be with her on the deck.
They talked. She told him more about her grandfather and her childhood at Hawkshead Pass, about the cruel times after Shon Macharn returned, about yawara. He seemed wistfully happy when they recalled their first meetings, back at the Pass.
“Another world.” He sighed. “I wish I believed we might someday see it again.”
He spoke of his own youth. His father had been lost in space the year he was born. “But not to the flashers.” His wan smile showed his feeling for her own loss. “He was racing a one-man starcraft. For a famous trophy the Stars had been winning for three generations.”
He had grown up in the homes of aunts and uncles. “All of them Stars. Living in penthouses and villas and mansions. Sportsmen and statesmen and Legion admiral-generals. Cherishing great traditions and enjoying special privilege. Perhaps that sounds like paradise, but the price was high.
“Too steep for me!”
His grin seemed oddly boyish.
“Any Star was expected to be superlative. I never measured up, never really wanted to. Too little muscle for most sports. No talent for music or art. No ambition for distinction in the Hall of Stars. No drive toward the top of my academic classes or genius for high command. Never any brilliant future in the Legion or outside it. Never many—many friends—”
His low voice had trailed away. Silent for a time, his rueful eyes resting on her, he sighed and shook his head.
“Jil—” His unsteady voice fell lower. “I was married once.”
His eyes still clung, dark with an unspoken appeal. “Her name was Keri. She thought I was destined to be another magnificent Star. Both disappointed. She wouldn’t live in the nebula and I’ve never served anywhere else. Ten Legion years since I saw her. She got what’s left of my father’s estate on old Terra.”
He sighed wearily and sadly.
“Jil, I had to tell you this, because you must understand why I can’t command us. I never aspired to be a Star. I’m no hero. Just one more man, born no better than the common run. Defeated all my life, because the name kept tossing me into roles too big for me to play.”
She saw his jaw twitch beneath the grimy stubble.
“Anyhow, Jil—” Something shook his voice. “That’s who I am. Beaten down too long to try a thing that can’t—that I know can’t be done.”
“Thank—” Her own voice quivered. “Thank you, Kynan.”
She wanted to take him in her arms, but above her head the conning screen was suddenly lit with a blurred purple-seeming glow that only she could see. She had to turn from him to the wheel.
“Something—something tachyonic!” she whispered. “Coming at us.”
She sat his startled glance at the screen, his shrug of dull futility. His thin body sagged. She heard his breath catch, as if he were going to speak. He said nothing, but she saw stark defeat staring dully from his eyes.
Pity for him stabbed her.
She probed the screen, straining her perceptions. Her own eyes could see no more than his. Dark dust and dimly shining gas and the hot, throbbing pulsar. Reaching, she focused and resolved that purple-seeming glow.
“An arrow shape,” she told him. “Formed of far-spaced blips. Coming the way this ship did from somewhere closer to the core. I think—I think I can count the blips. Nineteen. All moving together at a trans-Newtonian velocity.”
“A flasher fleet.” She felt his arm around her. “I’m sorry, Jil.”
“They haven’t got us yet.” She sensed the blips again. “In fact I think they’re heading for Ultima, not for our position here. Which would mean they don’t yet know we have the ship. They could be stopping there to pick it up.”
“But only on their way,” he muttered bitterly. “Out toward the channel to hit what’s left of the Legion—hit it with geodesic missiles!”
“We’ll let them pass us by.” She tried to rekindle his dying hope. “Shut down our own drive fields. Let the craft drift like another meteor. And count on the Gyrel luck to lead them on around us.”
“Jil!” His hard arm squeezed her to him. “Do you wonder why I love you?”
30
With the drive dead, they floated in free fall.
“Must we lie here, lass?” Giles Habibula shrilled through the intercom. “Hiding like mortal mice from a famished cat? Can’t we run?”
“And make a tachyonic wake for them to follow?”
“A mortal wake? Not if they could follow! Hide us, lass! Don’t show a sign of precious life.”
“I’ll check the reactors.” Kynan Star swung himself toward the elevator. “To be sure they’re fully damped.”
“I’ll send Lord Archy.”
He was below, and she called him on the intercom. “Affirmative, Miss Three,” his gong voice rang back. “We are competent to monitor reactors. We are acting at once.” The ship was still an alien thing, the air still tainted with that cold bog-rot reek. Though she could work the consoles and the conning hood, stranger machines lowered like hostile monsters all around the deck. Worn down by tension long endured, she couldn’t help a sense of silent menace, as if the machines were things like the drillers, waiting to take back the craft.
She wanted Star with her.
Yet when she returned to him for human comfort, he looked lonelier than she felt. Hollow-eyed and pale, his face was streaked with grime and long-dried blood, his thin shoulders bent from burdens too heavy, carried too long.
