Apparently the same thought had occurred to e'Kraft, who said, "Navigation, how far is the Vengeance from target?"
"Ten kilometers. The enemy craft is less than nine meters long."
Less than nine meters long. The smallest insterstellar craft the Dorvik ever made was more than a kilometer wide. The Enemy was superior to anything Lal had imagined. If only there were some way to capture the Enemy craft, to learn its secrets. Possibly even more important, to learn what monster would annihilate a sun.
"Detonate the Vengeance"
And the screen turned gray.
E'Kraft spoke. "The entire mass of the wagon has been converted to energy, Puissance."
Lal stared stupidly: it was so anticlimactic. They had just created more energy in a second than the average G-class star produces in an hour, yet this explosion was observable only as a blank image screen, or the motion of a tiny hand on the dial of a gravitic surge detector. It would take ten hours for the light from that explosion to reach them. Even then it would set houses afire on the blue planet.
How close it had been... another few seconds and the Enemy might have completed its obscene mission, and so doomed the Dorvik race. For the moment at least, all was saved. He turned to e'Kraft and saw relief mirrored in his eyes.
"General, I--"
He was interrupted by the reappearance of the General's aide. "Puissance, we detected a grave disturbance after the detonation."
"After?"
"Yes, Puissance. Somehow the intruder survived the detonation."
"That's impossible!" shrieked lal, even as he accepted the awful truth. Nothing made by men could withstand the vast fireball that the Vengeance has become. What were they fighting?
The game might already be over. Lal's eyes looked across the Imperial gardens, but his mind saw a wave of hell creeping out ever so slowly from an annihilated star. The energy from such a detonation would vaporize planets a hundred parsecs away; and the destruction would creep on, confined to the speed of light but pushing inexorably across the galaxy. His race would know of the explosion, and would retreat before the swelling sphere of oblivion, but little by little the galaxy would be taken away from them, until every planet was lifeless and his race...
"See! The maggots have guessed what we're going to do. That was a nasty jolt they gave us, don't you think, Gyrf?
"The maggots are trying to avoid the big fry, but they can't save themselves." He paused, overcome by anticipations of delight. "We'll watch the fire spread from nest to nest-for ten thousand years we'll watch them burn."
The other creature agreed enthusiastically, its earlier anger almost forgotten. Neither of them noticed a slight wavering in the air behind them. The distortion was in the far infrared and near microwave. The changing refractive indicesd moved through the visibvle, the ultraviolt, the gamma. Sill Gyrd and Arn were too engrossed to notice.
"The converter is set to go when we jump, Arn. What's keeping you?"
"The navigation, of course. This is a galactic jump we're making. Give me a few more seconds."
"Idiot"
The shimmer took form. Gyrd turned from Arn and saw what had materialized behind them.
"Mother!"
But for her physical perfection she looked much like her remote ancestors, who tamed fire in Africa and--scant millennia later--played with fission under a stadium in Chicago. There was fear on her face, the fear of a parent who has discovered anew that untrained children are essentially monsters--and that if those children are godlings, then their evil can be satanic. She stared at her daughter, Gyrd, for a long moment, then said slowly, "Why are you here?"
Arn said, "Because we're lost?"
The woman shook her head. "I defused the converter, Arn, right where Gyrd dropped it. You can make no successful lie, or excuse, for what you've done. A million different races, all with the potential to become what we are, would have been destroyed by what you planned."
Gyrd pulled nervously at one of her pigtails. "But they're just festering in their nests. They don't feel pain the way we can. It would be fun--"
"Fun?" the woman said, and Gyrd screamed.
"Go home now. She frowned in a moment of concentration. "The arithmetic has been done. The machine is ready to jump. I'll be following right behind you."
Both Arn and Gyrd were silent now, dazed. Arn made an adjustment in the controls, and their craft vanished, leaving the woman standing penisively in space.
Lal only caught the last part of the sentence.
"... Gone from the galaxy"
"Damn it! Why didn't you say that in the first place?" snapped Harl.
"Never mind, General," said Lal. He turned back to the aide. "Say that again."
"Puissance, our instruments indicate that the intruder jumped before any attempt to annihilate the sun."
The universe regained.
The silence was finally broken by General e'Kraft. "Have we your permission to resume tactical operations, Puissance?"
Lal looked through him and beyond. For a moment he could feel only the beauty of the luscious gardens and the now safe again stars. But it could happen again. The Enemy could sweep in on any large star in the galaxy and set their bomb. "General, you may retreat, and you may ask the Mush-faces for peace terms." He gnashed his fangs once as he discared his race's dream and accepted a nightmare. "We can spread the news of this day through the galaxy much fast than we can our Empire. And we'll need all the help we can get." But Lal knew with a silent desperation that there would never be enough advanced races to guard all the super stars. "Everything that lives must be banded agaisnt them." He shook a talon at the sky
The woman remained a moment, alone. Her feet seemed planted in the wispy Maelstrom--called the Milky Way by some--and faint air vaoprs encirlced her. She gazed out form the sun and "saw" the Dorvik battlewagson twelve billion kilometers away. Perhaps some good could come of this yet. She hoped so. She wanted very much to belive that they were really good children... all of them.