"I'm quite acquain... " e'Kraft was prevented from digging himself a grave by the appearance of one of his aides. The man's three-dimensional image flickered, then steadied.
"Pruissance, General." The aide bowed to Lal and then to e'Kraft. "Thirteen seconds ago we detected a gravitic disturbance near the sun. Someone has entered the system."
"So!" Lal fumed. When he got his talons into the insubordinate wretch that dared enter the combat zone without prior announcement--
The aide continued excitedly, "Puissance, it doesn't respond to our IFF. It's not one of ours."
Prince Lal turned sharply to Harl. "Could the Mush-faces be experimenting with interstellar drive?"
Unlikely, Puissance. The largest mass they've ever assembled in free fall was less than one hundred thousand tons. The smallest drive unit we have masses more than a billion."
That was the Dorvik's other trump. Without mass-energy converters, it was essentially impossible to hoist a drive unit into orbit, where it could operate.
The aide turned to look at someone outside of pickup range, and his excitement changed to pale and groveling terror. "The intruder is exactly one kill-radius from... from the sun!"
To convert a star-Lal gasped. While he had been ordering the destruction of a single inhabited planet, someone--something--absolutely evil had fused a bomb to murder a galaxy.
It was, where an instant before nothing had been.
At one kill-radius from the primary, harsh white sunlight reflected blindingly off the little ovoid, all but blotting out the intricate gamma colored designs that covered its surface.
Two creatures sat within the apparition. Considering the variety possible in this universe, they looked much like the Dorvik. A closer examination by someone trained and clever might have revealed a trimness and efficiency in the intruder's structure that was missing form the Dorvik-that is missing from any natural race. For the intruder's race had supervised its own evolution for more than 1000,000 years. The result might not be remarkable in appearance, but the brains housed in those bodies were far quicker, far more subtle than anything unaided natural selection could produce. And though their grosser emotions were perhaps intelligible, any conversation presented here verges on falsehood in its incompleteness.
One of the creatures--identifiable by the two bristly spikes that grew tangentially from its head--turned to the other and said, in effect, "I still want S Doradus."
"Gyrd, this star is almost as big. And quite a bit easier to reach, too." The creature paused, adjusted the controls somehow. "Figuring the jump back is going to take all my concentration, so you'll have to cancel the relative velocity on the converter when we drop it."
The first replied. "No one tells me what do to, Arn."
An air of hostility just short of physical violence filled the tiny cabin. Then Gyrd submitted with a nod.
"That's better." Arn relaxed. "Just imagine all the maggots that will fry in the fire we're going to set."
Lal broke the awful silence. "How far away is this object?"
"Twelve billion kilometers, Puissance. We won't be able to detect it by electromagnetic means for another ten hours."
"How long would it take to compute a jump to its location?"
The aide did some fast figuring. "If we use everything, including our tactical computers, about ten minutes."
"Very well, put everything you have on the problem. We'll jump one of our battlewagons."
"Yes, Puissance--"
"But, Puissance, what about the Mush-faces? If we don't use the tactical computers for minimal defense, they'll tear our fleet apart."
Lal scarcely hesitated. "We'll have to take those losses. If we can't stop that... thing... near the sun, we'll all be dead anyway and the Dorvik empire will be destroyed in less than ten centuries." He noticed that the aide was still waiting nervously. Lal turned to the man's image and shrilled, "Move!" The aide bowed spastically and the image vanished.
The prince struggled to bring his voice back into control. "General, evacuate one of your battlewagons. We'll annihilate its entire mass right next to the Enemy." His emphasis capitalized the word; the Mush-faces were merely an enemy.
"Yes, Puissance."
"Ten minutes."
Harl nodded, began giving orders on his private comm. In the presence of a member of the Imperial Family he was reduced to the status of a messenger boy.
Lal had given his orders, and now had to endure a small eternity as they were executed. Somewhere he knew mountainous computers were ticking away at the calculations involved in even the shortest jump. Somewhere else, ten thousand men were trying to abandon their battle wagon before the deadline he had set. And somewhere, twelve billion kilometers away, was an object that had to be destroyed else the galaxy would die.
A brilliant red star appeared just above the garden's pseudo-horizon. The dot expanded, becoming fainter as it grew, the mad red eye of a monster. Almost simultaneously, three closely spaced red "starts" shone just two degrees away from the first. Lal recognized the characteristic glow of fusion bombs. The Mush-faces must have discovered that the Darvik defense patterns were no longer adaptive. Without tactical computers, the Dorvik were squatting milvaks before the attack. Those bombs couldn't have been closer than 100,000 kilometers, but the enemy was moving in.
"Enemy rocket bomb at fifty thousand kilometers and closing," said a disembodied voice.
Lal strained for some glimpse of the enemy. he noticed the silvery crescent of another Dorvik battlewagon some two hundred kilometers away, but that was all.
Both men sat in the flagwagon's Imperial gardens and counted their last seconds.
A white glare lit the gardens. Lal looked up, startled. The battlewagon he had noticed before had fired its rockets and now moved slowly across the sky. The brilliance of its jets brought temporary daylight to the gardens.
"It won't work," Harl whispered.
But somehow it did. The feeble-minded rocketbomb accepted the other battle wagon as its target of opportunity, and the garden's curving crystal walls turned opaque as the wagon's screens powered up. When the walls cleared, the other wagon was gone: ten thousand men and the gross annual product of an enitre continent had been vaporized in less than a millisecond.
General e'Kraft's fangs clattered together with suppressed emotion. To lose men in war was expected, but to sit defenselessly and let an enemy destroy you with inferior weapons was nightmare. Abruptly he looked up, as if listening to some private voice. "Puissance, the crew of the Vengeance have removed to the Sword of Alkra."
Several more red dots appeared near the zenith, but Lal ignored them. The fleet would have to hold together jsut a little longer...
The aide reappeared. "Computations complete, Puissance. Just tell us which bat--"
"The Vengeance. As soon as the jump is made and your are sure the Enemy is nearby, annihilate the entire mass of the wagon."
Lal's urgency was conveyed to the other man, who vanished without even bowing.
Harl said something on his private circuit, and a flat image appeared before them. "That's from a camera aboard the Vengeance. It's transmitting by gravitic means, so we'll be able to see everything up to the detonation."
The picture showed the Maelstrom with the Mush-faces' planet off to one side. Abruptly the blue planet vanished. Startled, Lal glanced up and saw that the planet was sitll in his sky. He realized ashamedly that the Vengeance had made its jump. Since the wagon's orientation in space was still the same, the stars had not moved.
Then the camera hunted-and found. At the center of the screen Lal saw a tiny white dot that drifted slowly across the field of stars. That couldn't be the Enemy. It couldn't be closer than ten thousand kilometers. The detonation of the Vengeance would have been quite effective at that range, but the jump should have been more accurate.