End Run
Christopher Stasheff and William R. Forstchen
For Lt. General “Jimmie” Doolittle, who did the end run first. Thank you, Godspeed, and safe journey.
PART I
MILK RUN by Christopher Stasheff
“Viking at two o’clock!” As an afterthought, the duty officer hit the “battle stations” alarm. The klaxon quacked feebly throughout the ship—well, most of it, anyhow. At least, they heard it in the wardroom.
“Oh, yes sir, right away, sir!” Flip leaped up jogging, knees punching high in parody as he headed for his gun turret.
Jolie watched him go as she ground out her cigarette under a smoking lamp that no longer quite cleared the atmosphere. She heaved a sigh. “Flip he’s called, and flip he is. Come on, Harry—get cannonized.”
“I’ll leave that for the Kilrathi, if you don’t mind.” Harry rose from the seat across from her. “I just shoot ’em, I don’t catch ’em.” I hope, he added silently, the old familiar fear chilling his core. “Have fun in the tail gun.” He took one last drag, then rolled the coal carefully off his cigarette, blew out the last of the smoke, and tucked it away for future reference. He leaped into a run, jogging toward his gun turret.
On the bridge, Captain Harcourt asked, “What’s it look like, Billy?”
“Private enterprise, Captain,” the lookout answered.
Harcourt grunted. They had all had more than enough experience with the lightly armed, privately owned raiders who kept appearing out of uncharted jump points to raid the Confederation colonies along the edge of the war zone. At least, they thought their jump points were uncharted—but after two years on picket duty, the crew of the Venture-class Corvette Johnny Greene knew where all three of them were, so well that everyone on the crew could recite the coordinates in their sleep—and frequently did.
They didn’t get very excited about the Vikings any more.
To an outsider, the crew might have appeared to be anything from informal to slapdash, but they worked together smoothly and efficiently, affecting a boredom that they almost always really felt—except when one of the privately-owned raiders showed up for a quick try at easy meat. Then the appearance of boredom masked the old, familiar fear of violent death. There was always the chance that one of the Vikings might be a match for the Johnny Greene, always the chance that a jump point might disgorge something bigger.
“All battle stations green, Captain,” Lieutenant Janice Grounder reported.
Billy killed the klaxon, what there was of it.
“Right, Number One. Set course for intercept.”
“Already on it, Captain. Skoal,” answered Morlock Barnes, the astrogator.
Harcourt settled back in his acceleration chair, satisfied, surveying the bridge—pools of light in a chamber of gloom, each pool with a person huddled over a console. The atmosphere was quiet, feeling something like a neighborhood library—if a library had the underlying tension of a life-or-death fight. It was a nice, cozy place for four people.
Unfortunately, they had five in it.
Harcourt looked for something out of order. He had a lot to choose from; the room was a monument of ingenuity, with every screen illuminated by a clip-light, the backlighting having burned out months before. In front of Grounder, who doubled as helm, were two gyroscopes with extended axes, very obviously cobbled out of bits and pieces of metal. Mounted at right angles in universal gimbals, they were substitutes for the attitude gauges, which had burned out even sooner than the screen lights. The helm itself still responded well, but only because Coriander, the damage control officer, had gone EVA and replaced the thrust tube that had been shot off by a Viking six months before. She had used the casing of a dud missile that, fortunately, they had been able to reclaim from the wreckage of the raider at which it had been aimed.
It was ironic that because the missile hadn’t fired, the ship had still been intact to be captured after Flip and Harry had shot off its thrust tubes. The Kilrathi had tried to escape in rescue pods, and were now comfortably interned on the surface of the planet they had tried to raid. Of course, they were doing hard labor, helping to strengthen the planet’s defenses, but that was one of the fortunes of war. The flip side was that their ship had furnished a surprising number of spare parts that had helped keep the Johnny Greene moving. For example, other Venture-class Corvettes did not have tail guns.
The dud missile had also furnished a computer lock-on, which Coriander had jury-rigged to aim Harry’s laser cannon, his own aiming computer having melted down during a particularly heavy engagement. Flip aimed his laser cannon with the lock-on from the Kilrathi missile that their own dud had sheared in half on its way through the Viking’s side.
They no longer noticed the stink in the air, the aroma of bodies that were washed too seldom—the water purifier was still functioning, sometimes—and the air regeneration system had interesting green growths here and there, plus filters that were nearly clogged.
The occasional Kilrathi raider did, at least, relieve the boredom. Never mind the fact that every single one of them could be killed—not very probably, because the Kilrathi were very much more lightly armed than the Johnny Greene. They were desperate fighters, though, and there was no way of telling when one of them might get it right.
Never mind that, indeed—and Harcourt tried not to. They had all grown so used to the routine that the others were pretty good at ignoring the danger, too—or, at least, pretending.
“Retract scoops,” Harcourt ordered. “Full thrust.”
“Full thrust,” the intercom confirmed. CPO Lorraine Hasker was in the midsection of the ship with her own console, monitoring the health of the engines that were her babies—even if two of them were cuckoos in her nest.
The ship accelerated—surprisingly, much faster than it was supposed to be able to. Coriander had made a few modifications of her own. If they kept it up for any length of time, the engines would burn out—providing they didn’t shake the ship apart first; the two original engines weren’t quite in tune any more, and the Kilrathi add-ons weren’t exactly balanced. But they wouldn’t need to keep up that speed for long.
The Kilrathi apparently hadn’t been expecting either the Johnny Greene or its speed; they changed course, paralleling the Confederation ship’s vector, and shot away, accelerating at maximum thrust.
“He’s running,” Billy reported.
“Don’t they always.” It wasn’t quite boring, Harcourt considered—at least it was action. But they always followed the same pattern. “You’d think the blighters would tell each other what happened when they tried any given maneuver. They could at least spread the word that it doesn’t work.”
“How?” said Grounder. “None of them ever make it back.”
“Well, that’s true,” Harcourt allowed. “But there must be thousands of them doing this all along the front. Some of them must get back.”
“Maybe the other ones don’t try to run,” Grounder suggested helpfully, “like that first one we fought. Remember? They charged us.”
“Yes, and their engines have been coming in handy ever since.” Harcourt looked over at CPO Coriander. “Nice job, Chief. Don’t know how you ever managed to tie them in with our control system.”
“I didn’t,” Coriander answered, “quite.”
“Good enough for me,” Grounder said. “They roar when I push the stick.”