Battle for the Stars Read online

  The one exception, who wore only a plain coverall, stood directly in front of Birrel, a lean, dark iron-faced man with very alert eyes, and the easy, dangerous manner of one who enjoys his work because he is so admirably well fitted for it, as a cat enjoys hunting. He smiled at Birrel and said, “My name is Tauncer.

  Birrel had never seen the man before, but the name was enough to tell him the full depth of this disaster. On more than one world he had heard this name and had seen the work of this man, the most famous of Solleremos’ agents.

  He said, “I should feel flattered, shouldn't I?"

  Tauncer shrugged. “We all do what we can, Commander. Each in his own way. Please sit down."

  Birrel sat down in one of the carven stone chairs. His feet barely touched the floor, making him feel ridiculously like a child in an adult's chair. He looked toward the door, but none of the tall natives had come in after leading him neatly right into this.

  He wanted to glance at his chrono, but he did not dare. Tauncer was watching him, and he did not think that those insolent, amused, black eyes missed much. The other men lounged, not watching him, not doing anything, but Birrel was sure their weapons would come out in a burry if he grabbed for his porto. He would have to stall as long as he could.

  "Just as a matter of curiosity,” he said, “how did you set it up with these people? They're famously hostile to strangers."

  Tauncer nodded. “That's right. Only I'm not exactly a stranger. We all, in these days, have mixed ancestry from many worlds — you have it, I have it, everyone. Well, I happen to have a trace of this people's blood. Not much, but enough."

  He added casually, “By the way, Commander, you might as well look at your chrono, if you want to. I can see that you want to very much."

  His white teeth showed, and Birrel felt a rising anger. Tauncer was enjoying himself. He was good at this, very good, and he was going to have fun with the honest clod he had trapped. Well, perhaps that fun could be spoiled.

  He did look at his chrono, saying, “Of course, you know that I wouldn't walk in here with my eyes shut. My men have their instructions."

  Tauncer's tone was almost soothing. “I'm sure they have. And don't feel too badly about this, Commander. This was all set up on a minute study of your psychology and past record. It would have been almost impossible for you to act other than you have. All we had to do was wait."

  It confirmed, for Birrel, what he had already guessed. The rumor about Orion ships basing in this cluster had been purposely leaked so that he would walk right into Tauncer's hands. He cursed himself for his bad judgment. Garstang had been right, he should have brought the squadron in.

  "I suppose,” he said, “that all of this is for some good reason.

  "Naturally,” said Tauncer. I just want the answer to one simple question."

  He walked closer and stood in front of Birrel and looked at him keenly. He asked his question.

  "What is Ferdias planning to do about Earth?"

  There was a long moment of complete silence, during which Birrel simply stared at Tauncer, and Tauncer probed him with a gaze like a scalpel.

  On Birrel's part, it was a silence of sheer astonishment. No question could have taken him so unexpectedly. He had been prepared to be grilled about squadron dispositions, forces in being, bases, all the things that the men of Orion would like to know about Lyra. But this—

  It didn't make sense. Earth was not part of the present-day star struggle. That old planet, so far back in the galaxy that Birrel had never been within parsecs of it — it was history, nothing more. It had had its day, its sons long ago had spread out to the stars and their blood ran in the veins of men on many worlds, in Birrel himself. But its great day had long been done, and the Sector governors, who played the cosmic chess-game for suns, paid it no heed at all. No, Birrel decided swiftly, the question was merely a fake, a cover-up for something else, some other line of attack.

  "I'll repeat,” said Tauncer. “What's Ferdias planning to do about Earth?"

  "I haven't,” said Birrel, “the faintest idea what you're talking about."

  "Possibly,” said Tauncer. “But I've been given the job of making the inquiry, and I'll need more than your word and an expression of innocence. Where's Karsh?"

  He shot out the last question so suddenly that it almost caught Birrel off guard, but he maintained his blank look.

  "Karsh?"

  Tauncer sighed. “Well, these formalities are just delaying us. Dow!"

  One of the other men came forward. Tauncer spoke to him in a low voice and he nodded and went into another room. Birrel's pulse began to pound heavily. No more than fifteen minutes had elapsed since he entered the town. There was plenty of time left for mischief. Yet he said flatly to Tauncer, “You must know that you don't have much time."

  "All the time in the world, Commander. Your men aren't coming in after you."

  "You're pretty sure."

  "Yes, I'm sure. Can't you hurry that up, Dow?"

  "All ready.” Dow came back carrying a light tripod with a projector mounted on top of it. And now Birrel had a leaden feeling. He had seen that particular type of projector before. It was called a vera-probe and it beamed electric wave-impulses in a carefully controlled range that absolutely stunned and demoralized a man's name, and a half-forgotten one at that. Why should Earth occupy his mind? Why, Tauncer?

  How long is thirty minutes? How long does it take three cruisers to come from Point X to Target Zero? How long does it take for a man to realize he's through at last?

  Tauncer seemed to know his thoughts. “Time almost run out, Commander? I'm afraid that's not going to help you. Ready, Dow?"

  Dow said again, “All ready.

  Tauncer nodded. Dow touched a stud on the projector.

  As though that touch had done it, a dull and mighty roaring echoed from out in the desert — the full-throated cry of a heavy cruiser taking off.

  The men looked, startled, toward the open doorway. Desperately, Birrel tugged free of their hold, out of the unseen force that was already battering at the edges of his mind.

  "You out there!” he shouted at the doorway. “The men from outside will destroy you unless I go free! Call your lord—"

  Then Tauncer's men caught up to him and one of them hit him hard on the side of the jaw. Birrel shut up, hanging with blind determination to his consciousness. Forethought had provided this one chance. He would not get another.

  The cruiser came low over the town. Dust sifted out of the cracks of the stone walls. The men fell to their knees, covering their heads with their hands. The floor rocked under them, beaten by the rolling hammers of concussion, as the shock wave hit them.

  CHAPTER 3

  The ripped sky closed upon itself with a stunning, thundering crash. After a minute or two the noise and the shock wave ebbed away.

  Silence.

  The men began to get up again. But Birrel did not move.

  The cruiser came back. This time it was even lower. Garstang must have tickled her belly on the peaked roofs. Good God, thought Birrel, he's overdoing it. This time the stones were shaking loose, the whole town rocking from that tremendous shock-wave.

  When it was over, a long, thin shape came in through the doorway. it was the leader of the tall, native men who had brought Birrel here. He was not smug and secret now. His face was a mask of fear and rage as he spoke to Tauncer.

  "You said that if we helped you, you would keep all other outsiders away!"

  "We will,” said Tauncer. “Listen—"

  "Yes, listen,” mocked Birrel. “Listen to it coming back. It'll keep coming back, unless I walk out of here, until—"

  Dow hit him across the mouth to silence him. The tall man stood hesitating. Then the Starsong roared back over, and this time it did seem as though the roof was going. When it had passed, the man's hesitation was gone. With a kind of desperate haste, he grabbed Birrel's arm and shoved him toward the open doorway.

  "Oh, no,” said Taunce
r, starting forward. “You can't do that."

  The tall man turned on him a face livid with frustrated anger, and he took that anger out on Tauncer.

  "Shall the children of kings be destroyed to serve mongrels such as you? Shall I call my people in?"

  Birrel, heading toward the door, saw outside it the crowd of tall, pale-cloaked men who had gathered. Tauncer saw them too and he stopped, his face dark and wary.

  Still full of resentment at being so easily trapped, Birrel could not forego the gesture of flicking dust off his sleeves before he went through the door. Tauncer's dark eyes showed a gleam of amusement at this bit of bravado, but it stirred the man Dow to rage.

  He cried violently, “Are we just going to stand here and let him go?"

  Tauncer shrugged. “Why, yes, there are times when you just stand and do nothing and this is one of them."

  Birrel went out through the door and through the scared, angry crowd outside it. They glared their hatred at him, but no one stopped him, no one followed him. He snatched the porto out of his pocket and talked fast to Garstang. Then, without trying to make a dignified exit, he stretched his legs and ran like the devil toward the desert.

  The cruiser dropped down ahead of him, as black and big against the stars as a falling world. The lock yawned open, and Garstang was inside it to meet him. He started to ask what had happened, but Birrel pushed him bodily away down the corridor, heading for the bridge.

  "Get in there and do your stuff, Joe. We've got three Orionid cruisers coming this way up the planet's radarshadow, and I don't know how close they are."

  Garstang's square face got dismal, but his step quickened and his voice crackled orders as they went past the radar and calc-rooms to the bridge. The intercom went suddenly crazy and men jumped at the controlbanks. The last thing Birrel heard before the howling roar of take-off drowned everything was Garstang observing complainingly that this sort of thing was hard on a ship.

  They went up and away from the planet. Garstang's orders had been designed to shove them out on a course exactly opposite from the course the Orionids must be using to come up, just as those others were using the planet's radar-shadow to sneak in undetected, so the Starsong was using the opposite radar-shadow to sneak out. But the cone of shadow would pinch out very soon.

  "Less than a half-hour,” said Garstang, looking through a filter-port at the blazing peacock sun that was sliding back as they pulled out. “It's pretty close quarters yet, but we'd better hit it and get all the start we can before they spot us-we can't jam three of them."

  Birrel nodded, grimly agreeing. Ultra-light-speed missiles, with their deadly warheads, each had their own independent radar to home on their targets. A cruiser's defense against them was not armor, but incredibly powerful shafts of electromagnetic force that jammed the radar of oncoming missiles and sent them wandering astray. You could jam against the fire of one ship, maybe even two if you were lucky. You could not jam against three. They would inevitably saturate and smother your defense.

  Garstang gave the order for full acceleration schedule, the sirens wailed warning. Despite the unseen autostasis that cradled frail human bodies against impossible pressures by swaddling them in a matrix of force, they felt a wrenching deep in their brains and guts as the Starsong plunged ahead.

  At fantastically mounting speeds the ship raced toward the two red binaries that guarded the entrance to the channel. The scanners and ultra-radar had come into play, replacing normal vision, making their cunning illusion of sight. Birrel watched the two red double stars hungrily. Then on the intercom radar-room said dismally, “They've come on the ‘scope, sir. Three N-16s, overhauling us at a five to three-point-six ratio."

  Birrel glanced at Garstang. “It figures. Tauncer would have messaged them to keep right after us. They didn't have to land and then take off again."

  Garstang nodded silently. Now the Starsong was beginning to pass between the two huge red binaries into that thicker sprawl of stars through which the channel led. He glanced at the tell-tales, then ordered their acceleration schedule cut back. There was, Birrel knew, nothing else he could do. The channel ahead was not straight and you could not take it too fast — in that swarm of suns the fabric of a ship could be torn apart in some deadly resultant-point of gravity drags, or vaporized in collision. The only thing was that the Orionids were still coming up on them.

  But Birrel said nothing. This was Garstang's job and he let him do it. The enormous pairs of red suns flashed past them on either side and were gone, and they were in the channel. Under his feet he could feel the Starsong quiver, wincing and flinching like a live thing now and again as some new combination of gravitic forces wrenched at her. On either side of them now the overhanging cliffs of stars seemed to topple toward them. He looked upward at the nebula, like a glowing thundercloud roofing the channel, and then down at the shoaling suns below.

  Garstang said flatly, “We didn't get away quite fast enough. They'll be barrelling in here after us and they'll have us in range before we ever get through the channel."

  "As far as I can see,” said Birrel, “we've got only one way out of it."

  He looked up at the screens again, at the vast glow of the nebula overhead.

  Garstang was silent for a moment. Then he said, “I was hoping you wouldn't think of that."

  Birrel shrugged. “Have you got any better idea? Anyway, it's not an order. This is your ship."

  "Is it?” Garstang said sourly. “If it was, we wouldn't be here now. All right.” He turned back and spoke into the communicator. “New course, north and zenith thirty-eight degrees. Full autopilot."

  Young Vermeer, over at the control-banks, flashed a startled glance before he could compose his face. I know how you feel, thought Birrel. We're all scared, you're not alone.

  The Starsong shot upward, plunging high into an area so choked with stellar radiance that it made the channel seem like sunless space. The manual control banks went dark and dead. Now, from the calc-room back of the bridge, a new sound came, different from the normal, occasional bursts of chattering. This was a steady sound, a sound of authority, the voice of the Starsong speaking. She was flying herself now. The men aboard, commander and captain and crew, were her charges, dependent on her cold, mechanical wisdom and her vision and her strength. They had set up on the calculators what they wanted her to do and now there was nothing for them but to wait.

  The Starsong spiralled higher, her radar system guiding her on a twisting evasive path between the clotted stars. Then Birrel saw a great, glowing edge slide across the forescreen and grow into a vastness of dust and cosmic drift, illuminated by the reflected glow of the half-smothered stars it webbed.

  Radar reported that the three Orionid cruisers had come into the channel. But the Starsong was already skimming through glowing arms that reached like misty tentacles searching for more stars to entrap. Once in the cloud, she would be screened from the cruisers’ longrange radar by the most effective jamming device in space — the billions of billions of scattered atoms of the nebula itself.

  Effective. Yes. But potentially as dangerous as Orionid warheads. For in a place where radar would work only at frighteningly short ranges, you could be onto a chunk of cosmic drift before the beams had time to tell the computers about it. All you had in the nebula was a chance, and not even a particularly good one. But against three cruisers you did not even have that.

  Birrel went to the back of the bridge and strapped himself into a recoil-chair, beside Garstang and the others. Nothing moved now within the ship. The frail, breakable organisms of breath and heart and bone had abdicated their control. This was the hour of the ship, the hour of steel and flame and the racing electron, faster than human thought.

  The Starsong spoke to herself in the calc-room, and plunged headlong into the cloud.

  The universe was swallowed up in soft light, in racing, streaming tides of dust made luminous by reflection. Like an undersea ship of old, the Starsong raced with the gleami
ng currents and burst through denser, darker deeps, where the stars were faint and far away, to leap once more into a glory of wild light, where the dust-drowned suns burned like torches in a mist. And the metallic voices in the calc-room rose to an unhuman crying as the computers strained to take in the overwhelming surge of data from the short-range radar, analyze it, and send imperative commands to the control-relays.

  They had almost a sound of insane music to them, those voices, and the Starsong seemed to dance to the music, whirling and swaying between the fragments of drift that threatened her with instant destruction if she faltered for the fraction of a second. Three times before, in his service, Birrel had been through this ordeal, yet that did not keep him from feeling half-dazed, clinging to the chair and laboring for breath as he felt and listened. The same illusion gripped him now that had mastered him before when forced to run a nebula — the feeling that the suns and star-worlds were all gone, that he was enwrapped in the primal fire-mists of creation. Mighty tides seemed to bear the ship forward, everything was a whirl and boil of light, millrace currents seemed to rush them endlessly through infinity, with all space and time cancelled out. He wondered briefly, once, whether the Orionids had followed them in and then he forgot them. The agony, the intoxication and the terror were far too great to admit any petty worries about anything human.

  But at last, with almost shocking abruptness, they broke into clear space and the cloud was behind them and they were out in the fringe-edge of the cluster. Like men enchanted waking from a dream, Birrel and Garstang stood erect again, and the voice of the Starsong was stilled and human voices spoke once more.

  Birrel went into the com-room and made contact with his squadron far ahead. He gave orders, and then rejoined Garstang on the bridge.

  "Brescnik's on his way,” he said. “Can you keep clear?"