“Belike this will all prove unnecessary,” Brechdan said. “The destroyer estimated she would overtake Flandry in three days. She will need little longer to report back. At such time we can feel easy, and so can his Majesty’s government. But for certainty’s sake, we had best get straight to work. Please accompany me to the adjacent office.” He rose. For a second he locked eyes with Abrams. “Commander,” he said, “your young man makes me proud to be a sentient creature. What might our united races not accomplish? Hunt well.”
Abrams could not speak. His throat was too thick with unshed tears. He bowed and left. At the door, Merseian guards fell in, one on either side of him.
Stars crowded the viewscreens, unmercifully brilliant against infinite night. The spaceboat thrummed with her haste.
Flandry and Persis returned from their labor. She had been giving him tools, meals, anything she could that seemed to fit his request, “Just keep feeding me and fanning me.” In a shapeless coverall, hair caught under a scarf, a smear of grease on her nose, she was somehow more desirable than ever before. Or was that simply because death coursed near?
The Merseian destroyer had called the demand to stop long ago, an age ago, when she pulled within range of a hyper-vibration ’cast. Flandry refused. “Then prepare your minds for the God,” said her captain, and cut off. Moment by moment, hour by hour, he had crept in on the boat, until instruments shouted his presence.
Persis caught Flandry’s hand. Her own touch was cold. “I don’t understand,” she said in a thin voice. “You told me he can track us by our wake. But space is so big. Why can’t we go sublight and let him hunt for us?”
“He’s too close,” Flandry said. “He was already too close when we first knew he was on our trail. If we cut the secondaries, he’d have a pretty good idea of our location, and need only cast about a small volume of space till he picked up the neutrino emission of our powerplant.”
“Couldn’t we turn that off too?”
“We’d die inside a day. Everything depends on it. Odds-on bet whether we suffocated or froze. If we had suspended-animation equipment—But we don’t. This is no warcraft, not even an exploratory vessel. It’s just the biggest lifeboat-cum-gig Queen Maggy could tote.”
They moved toward the control room. “What’s going to happen?” she asked.
“In theory, you mean?” He was grateful for a chance to talk. The alternative would have been that silence which pressed in on the hull. “Well, look. We travel faster than light by making a great many quantum jumps per second, which don’t cross the intervening space. You might say we’re not in the real universe most of the time, though we are so often that we can’t notice any difference. Our friend has to phase in. That is, he has to adjust his jumps to the same frequency and the same phase angle as ours. This makes each ship a completely solid object to the other, as if they were moving sub-light, under ordinary gravitic drive at a true velocity.”
“But you said something about the field.”
“Oh, that. Well, what makes us quantum-jump is a pulsating force-field generated by the secondary engine. The field encloses us and reaches out through a certain radius. How big a radius, and how much mass it can affect, depends on the generator’s power. A big ship can lay alongside a smaller one and envelop her and literally drag her at a resultant pseudo-speed. Which is how you carry out most capture and boarding operations. But a destroyer isn’t that large in relation to us. She does have to come so close that our fields overlap. Otherwise her beams and artillery can’t touch us.”
“Why don’t we change phase?”
“Standard procedure in an engagement. I’m sure our friends expect us to try it. But one party can change as fast as another, and runs a continuous computation to predict the pattern of the opposition’s maneuvers. Sooner or later, the two will be back in phase long enough for a weapon to hit. We’re not set up to do it nearly as well as he is. No, our solitary chance is the thing we’ve been working on.”
She pressed against him. He felt how she trembled. “Nicky, I’m afraid.”
“Think I’m not?” Both pairs of lips were dry when they touched. “Come on, let’s to our posts. We’ll know in a few minutes. If we go out—Persis, I couldn’t ask for a better traveling companion.” As they sat down, Flandry added, because he dared not stay serious: “Though we wouldn’t be together long. You’re ticketed for heaven, my destination’s doubtless the other way.”
She gripped his hand again. “Mine too. You won’t escape me th-th-that easily.”
Alarms blared. A shadow crossed the stars. It thickened as phasing improved. Now it was a torpedo outline, still transparent; now the gun turrets and missile launchers showed clear; now all but the brightest stars were occulted. Flandry laid an eye to the crosshairs of his improvised fire-control scope. His finger rested on a button. Wires ran aft from it.
The Merseian destroyer became wholly real to him. Starlight glimmered off metal. He knew how thin that metal was. Force screens warded off solid matter, and nothing protected against nuclear energies: nothing but speed to get out of their way, which demanded low mass. Nevertheless he felt as if a dinosaur stalked him.
The destroyer edged nearer, swelling in the screens. She moved leisurely, knowing her prey was weaponless, alert only for evasive tactics. Flandry’s right hand went to the drive controls. So … so … he was zeroed a trifle forward of the section where he knew her engines must be.
A gauge flickered. Hyperfields were making their first tenuous contact. In a second it would be sufficiently firm for a missile or a firebolt to cross from one hull to another. Persis, reading the board as he had taught her, yelled, “Go!” Flandry snapped on a braking vector. Lacking the instruments and computers of a man-of-war, he had estimated for himself what the thrust should be. He pressed the button.
In the screen, the destroyer shot forward in relation to him. From an open hatch in his boat plunged the auxiliary’s auxiliary, a craft meant for atmosphere but propellable anywhere on gravity beams. Fields joined almost at the instant it transitted them. At high relative velocity, both pseudo and kinetic, it smote.
Flandry did not see what happened. He had shifted phase immediately, and concentrated on getting the hell out of the neighborhood. If everything worked as hoped, his airboat ripped through the Merseian plates, ruinously at kilometers per second. Fragments howled in air, flesh, engine connections. The destroyer was not destroyed. Repair would be possible, after so feeble a blow. But before the ship was operational again, he would be outside detection range. If he zigzagged, he would scarcely be findable.
He hurtled among the stars. A clock counted one minute, two, three, five. He began to stop fighting for breath. Persis gave way to tears. After ten minutes he felt free to run on automatic, lean over and hold her.
“We did it,” he whispered. “Satan in Sirius! One miserable gig took a navy vessel.”
Then he must leap from his seat, caper and crow till the boat rang. “We won! Ta-ran-tu-la! We won! Break out the champagne! This thing must have champagne among the rations! God is too good for anything else!” He hauled Persis up and danced her over the deck. “Come on, you! We won! Swing your lady! I gloat, I gloat, I gloat!”
Eventually he calmed down. By that time Persis had command of herself. She disengaged from him so she could warn: “We’ve a long way to Starkad, darling, and danger at the end of the trip.”
“Ah,” said Ensign Dominic Flandry, “but you forget, this is the beginning of the trip.”
A smile crept over her mouth. “Precisely what do you mean, sir?”