“None of the warring factions possesses the Valliardi Transfer. Your ship is the only spacecraft with that capability. Valliardi died under
interrogation—he was old. He couldn’t have told them anything more than theory, anyway.” There was a pause, a long swig of something. “You’re our only hope, Virgil, our only hope. Delia Trine—you remember her—she told me that she didn’t want to live through the war.”
No! Don’t wrap yourself up and fly away!
“She’s with about five hundred other people who built a hide-out on Mercury.”
Dead, now. Dead and old and cold and gone. She waited out a war and—
“It’s a cryonic preservation unit, totally automated and run on solar power.”
What?
“She told me to tell you,” Brennen said, “that she’ll wait for you there.”
“Delia?” His teeth clacked against the breathpiece.
“I hope to be able to encrypt another update to you. Good luck, Virgil.”
Wizard’s voice goes beck to blank space where it came from and I sit. A soft roar begins to envelope me.
“I await your instructions,” the computer said.
“No other updates?”’
“None.”
Virgil flexed his fingers under the pressure suit. A stinging itch encircled his left wrist, then subsided quickly. “What year is it now?”
“A transmitting clock on the satellite indicates May Sixteenth, Twenty-One Sixty-Three. Four hundred twenty-six Zulu. I have recalibrated our clock to reflect this.”
“Do you have any preliminary scans of the solar system?”
“That will take several hours.”
“Straight.” Delia, Delia. Why must I always wait? You’ve waited longer, though. Long and frozen. And the years you waited before freezing down. Why wait for me? What has Master Snoop got in mind for you to do to me? Or has the Death Angel merely been waiting to claim her toughest catch? And what has changed since the last message, forty-seven years ago? What made Wizard risk madness to escape Earth? Too much. The roar... the roar!
Under the assault of changing events, Virgil’s battered mind shut down.
The body drifted limply about the confines of the command chair, driven by random muscle twitches and restrained by the single safety harness.
“Wake up,” the computer said, three hours later.
Virgil tried to roll over. “Didn’t anyone program you not to interrupt dreams?”
“What is your name?”
“Call me Ishmael.”
The computer made no sound for a moment. “That name is not entered in my files.”
Damned right. He kept his eyes closed.
“I am programmed to shut down in the event of a security breach by unknown persons.”
“Virgil, damn it. Virgil Grissom Kinney.”
“Sequence Kinney. Virgil, you had thirteen days of sleep when you were being operated on. That ought to have been sufficient.”
“Where were we?”
“Epsilon Indi.”
“Where are we?”
“Sol.”
Virgil shifted in the chair and smiled. “Then I’ve gone over eleven years without sleep, objectively speaking.”
The computer was not amused. “I’ve finished the preliminary scans.”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“The only neutrino flux I can read is from the sun itself. There are some low-level infra-red sources throughout the system, but concentrations are evident near Earth orbit, in the asteroid belt, and here, near the orbit of Pluto.”
Virgil opened his eyes and sat up. “Where’s Mercury?”
“The other side of the sun.”
“Calculate a transfer there.”
“I would advise transferring first to a position from which we can observe directly our destination. I calculate a possibility that the space surrounding the planet may be seeded with flak.”
“To keep us from transferring in?”
“To destroy us if we do.”
“That’s stupid. You couldn’t fill enough of space to guarantee that.” He began to loosen the headpiece of his pressure suit.
“A density of units of one gram per six million cubic meters would be sufficient to cripple this ship. They could fill space to an altitude of twenty thousand klicks and would require less than four hundred million kilograms of mass.”
Virgil unsealed the headpiece and pulled it back, removing the breathpiece. “They’d go through all that expense not even knowing if I was coming back? That’s ridiculous. It’s uneconomic.”
“True. If we were the only Valliardi ship.”
Could they be scared of the Mad Wizard? “What makes you suspect otherwise?”
“Anything could have happened in the past half century. I think we should be cautious.” Suddenly, the computer changed its speech pattern to one of extreme urgency. “Alert! Put your helmet back on and go to battle stations.”
“Why?”
“We are not the only Valliardi ship. Six of them just appeared eight seconds ago.” Sirens wailed. Virgil fumbled with the head-piece, his left wrist aching. “No offensive action on their part yet. I have lasers trained on each. We’re surrounded. One each fore, aft, port, starboard, topside and below. I await orders.”
Virgil tried to speak with the breathpiece half in his mouth. Words and saliva tumbled over one another. “Don’t fire unless attacked first. They may have Brennen’s laser shielding, if they’ve got the transfer.” His left hand lifted a protector cap from three red switches. “If we can’t get out, I’ll cut the electrostatic fields on the anti-matter pods and erase this portion of space.”
“I don’t like that idea.” The lights under the switches winked out.
“Hey! You can’t do that!”
“I just did. I am sending a hailing message.”
Ben, you fool, you’re ruining my plan. “Stand by to transfer to any random point between Jupiter and Saturn on my command.” His right hand covered the transfer button.
A man’s face appeared on the HUD. He wore a breathing device but no space suit. His head was bald, or shaven; dozen of wires and electrodes covered his scalp. He stared directly at Kinney without blinking. His voice sounded old and rasping and it wavered, as though he could not control his speech well.
“This is Wing Commander Sterkoy of Akros Gamma Protection. We have half-gram Valli pellets set to transfer into six vital points in your ship. Surrender now. We have identified your ship as Circus Galacticus, which left the solar system Twelve June, Twenty-One Oh-Seven.”
“How fast can you transfer out of here?” Virgil asked in a low voice.
“One nanosecond from decision to execution. After that, the transfer is instantaneous.”
“Program this—at some random moment in the next minute, transfer out without any warning. You have a destination plotted?”
“Yes.”
Virgil looked out the viewport at the ship off the bow. Spaceship design had not changed much in half a century. It looked like a cone that had been laid on its side and stomped. Its exterior displayed the ravages of many transfers—pits and scratches and even a few small craters covered the plating. The ship was only half again larger than the average executive shuttle.
Hardly seems a threat, but if they transfer six half-gram pellets into Circus, they could cripple it. They might even have one aimed in here.
“Please begin shutting down power. We shall board in full armor.”
“Start shutting down, Ben. Nonessential equipment first.”
“Complying.”
Even Ben does not know when we’ll transfer. He’s leaving it up to a random number generator. Will they be able to track us somehow? Why did Trapper look so... so intently at me when I wasn’t transmitting my own image back to him? Why—