“Best not,” Ydwyr counseled. “The danger is considerable. We deal with a desperate being.”
“Maybe I can help you,” Djana said.
“Your help would be to Merseia,” Ydwyr reproved her.
Flandry pounced. “That’s what you are to him, girl,” he exclaimed in Anglic. “A tool for his damned planet.” In Eriau: “Move, you!”
The girl shook her head blindly. It wasn’t clear which of them she meant. Forlorn, she trudged out behind the tall nonhuman figure, in front of the man’s weapon.
High and distant, little more in the naked eye than a glint, the enemy ship held her position. Magniscreens would reveal that three left the house for the boat—but not their species, Flandry hoped. Just three sent out to fetch something…The gangway clattered to boots.
“Aft,” Flandry directed. “Sorry,” he said when they were at the bunks, and stunned Ydwyr. He used the cord to secure his captive and urged Djana forward. Her lips, her whole slight body trembled.
“What will you do?” she pleaded.
“Try to escape,” Flandry said. “You mean there’s a different game going?”
She sank into the seat beside his control chair. He buckled her in, more as a precaution against impulsive behavior than against a failure of interior grav, and assumed his own place. She stared blankly at him. “You don’t understand,” she kept repeating. “He’s good, he’s wise, you’re making such a terrible mistake, please don’t.”
“You want me brainscrubbed, then?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know. Let me alone!” Flandry forgot her while he checked the indicators. Everything seemed in order, no deterioration, no vandalism, no boobytraps. He brought the engine murmurous to life. The gangway retracted, the airlock shut. Goodbye, Talwin. Goodbye, existence? We’ll see. He tickled the console. The skill had not left his fingers. Jake floated aloft. The village receded, the geysers, the mountains, he was skyborne.
The outercom blinked and buzzed. Flandry ignored it till he was lined out northward. The other spacecraft swung about and swooped after him. Several kilometers off, she proved to be a corvette, no capital ship but one that could eat a scoutboat for breakfast. Flandry accepted her call.
“Saniau to Terran vessel. Where are you bound and why?”
“Terran vessel, and she is a Terran vessel, to Saniau. Listen with both ears. Dominic Flandry speaks. That’s right, the very same Dominic Flandry who. I’m going home. The datholch Ydwyr, Vach Urdiolch, nephew to the most exalted Roidhun and so forth, is my guest. If you don’t believe me, check the native town and try to find him. When he recovers from a slight indisposition, I can give you a visual. Shoot me down and he goes too.” Pause.
“If you speak truth, Dominic Flandry, do you imagine the datholch would trade honor for years?”
“No. I do imagine you’ll save him if you possibly can.”
“Correct. You will be overhauled, grappled, and boarded. If the datholch has been harmed, woe betide you.”
“First you have to do the overhauling. Second you have to convince me that any woe you can think of betides me worse than what does already. I suggest you check with the qanryf before you get reckless. Meanwhile,” and in Anglic, “cheerio.” Flandry cut the circuit.
At his velocity, he had crossed the Hellkettle Mountains. The northlands stretched vast and drear beneath, gleaming ice, glittering snow, blots that were blizzards. He cast about with his instruments for a really huge storm. There was sure to be one somewhere, this time of year…yes!
A wall of murk towered from earth to high heaven. Before he had pierced it, Flandry felt the thrust and heard the scream of hurricane-force winds. When he was inside, blackness and chaos had him.
A corvette would not go into such a tempest. Nothing except a weathership had any business in one; others could flit above or around readily enough. But a small spaceboat with a first-class pilot—a pilot who had begun his career in aircraft and aerial combat—could live in the fury. And detectors, straining from outside, would lose her.
Flandry lost himself in the battle to keep alive.
Half an hour later, he broke free and shot into space.
Talwin rolled enormous in his screens. Halfway down from either pole coruscated winter’s whiteness; the cloud-marbled blue of seas between icecaps looked black by contrast. Flandry waved. “Goodbye,” he said anew. “Good luck.”
Meters shouted to his eyes of patrol ships waiting for him. You didn’t normally risk hyperdrive this near a planet or a sun. Matter density was too great, as was the chance of gravitation desynchronizing your quantum jumps. The immediate scene was scarcely normal. Flandry’s hands danced.
Switchover to secondary state in so strong a field made the hull ring. Screens changed to the faster-than-light optical compensation mode. Talwin was gone and Siekh dwindling among the stars. The air droned. The deck shivered.
After minutes, a beep drew Flandry’s attention to a tell-tale. “Well,” he said, “one skipper’s decided to be brave and copy us. He got away with it, too, and locked onto our ‘wake.’ His wouldn’t register that steady a bearing otherwise. We’re faster, but I’m afraid we won’t shake him before he’s served as a guide to others who can outpace us.”
Djana stirred. She had sat mute—lost, he thought when he could spare her a thought—while they ran the polar storm. Her face turned to him beneath its heavy coif of hair. “Have you any hope?” she asked tonelessly.
He punched for navigational data. “A stern chase is a long chase,” he said, “and I’ve heard about a pulsar not many parsecs off. It may help us shed our importunate colleagues.”
She made no response, simply looked back out at space. Either she didn’t know how dangerous a pulsar was, or she didn’t care.
Chapter XIX
Once a blue giant sun had burned, 50,000 times more luminous than yet-unborn Sol. It lasted for a bare few million years; then the hydrogen fuel necessary to stay on the main sequence was gone. The star collapsed. In the unimaginable violence of a supernova, momentarily blazing to equal an entire galaxy, it went out.
Such energies did not soon bleed away. For ages the blown-off upper layers formed a nebula of lacy loveliness around the core, which shone less white-hot than X-ray hot. Eventually the gases dissipated, a part of them to make new suns and planets. The globe that remained continued shrinking under its own weight until density reached tons per cubic centimeter and spin was measured in seconds. Feebler and feebler did it shine, white dwarf, black dwarf, neutron star—
Compressed down near the ultimate that nature’s law permitted, the atoms (if they could still be called that) went into their final transitions. Photons spurted forth, were pumped through the weirdly distorted space-time within and around the core, at last won freedom to flee at light speed. Strangely regular were those bursts, though slowly their frequencies, amplitudes, and rate declined back toward extinction—dying gasps.
Pulsar breath.
Djana stared as if hypnotized into the forward screen. Tiny but waxing among the stars went that red blink…blink…blink. She did not recall having ever seen a sight more lonely. The cabin’s warmth and glow made blacker the emptiness outside; engine throb and ventilator murmur deepened the eternal silence of those infinite spaces.
She laid a hand on Flandry’s arm. “Nicky—”
“Quiet.” His eyes never left the board before him; his fingers walked back and forth across computer keys.
“Nicky, we can die any minute, and you’ve said hardly a word to me.”