The breath sighed suddenly from Miles’ lungs. An empty feeling came to dwell suddenly in the area of his stomach. It had never occurred to him that they would not all be starting out as equals. How was he to keep Luhon as his second-in-command when the gray-skinned alien was not only his physical superior but his superior in experience of controlling the vessel, as well?
“No, friend Miles,” said Luhon. Miles turned to see the brilliant eyes regarding him and realized that Luhon had read his emotional reaction with the same perceptiveness with which Miles and evidently everyone else aboard the ship had been equipped by the Center Aliens. Luhon’s sensing of Miles’ emotional reaction, plus a shrewd guess, could be tantamount to Luhon’s reading Miles’ mind. “Remember, you’re the one who believes that we can get good enough to be allowed to fight the Silver Horde in our own persons. I still don’t believe it, and if the power of this ship is really psychic rather than physical, that power is going to depend on someone who can believe.”
Miles nodded. He sat down in the central control seat. Luhon took the seat to his right, and Eff slid into the seat at his left, as if at the order of some unspoken command.
“Suppose we lock in together as a single pattern, just the three of us to start,” said Luhon calmly. “And I’ll take the two of you on a computerized version of one of my imaginary battles.”
His fingers flew over the controls of the console before him, and Miles found his own fingers flying as well. The consoles were identical—he already knew that from that information the Center Aliens had earlier planted in his mind. Each of them could control this ship independently, but there was a triangular reinforcement of purpose and strength if one individual and one console led and the other two followed and reinforced. Now, with Luhon leading but with the master controls still in off position so that the vessel did not actually fly or fight, Miles followed Luhon into the gray-skinned alien’s imaginary battle against the Silver Horde. The ship, Miles realized as his fingers flashed over the controls, could be flown. But the weapons were dead—and not only because the crew of the Fighting Rowboat had ignored them all this time. Some master control of the Center Aliens held the weapons locked and useless.
But the psychic patterns, the emotional reflexes of Miles and his two companions, were joined together now into a single reacting unit. Their thoughts were not joined, but they reached in unison and with an automatic understanding of one another. They were welded into a single purpose and action. It was a strange feeling to Miles, for within Eff’s share of that pattern Miles could now sense the direct, open, and vital quality of the bearlike alien, and in Luhon, at his right, he could sense the deep, dark-running feelings beneath the gentle exterior of soft voice and swift, silent movement. Just so, Miles now understood, the other two would be sensing him to a greater degree than they ever had previously.
Meanwhile, computer-created before them all, there had appeared on the vision screen before them the shape of a silver crescent in the light of the artificial sun over the battle line. A silver crescent, horns forward, pointing toward them. It was, Miles’ Center Alien-implanted knowledge told him, a reconstructed image of what the Silver Horde had looked like attacking this galaxy a million years before.
Their fingers moved automatically on the consoles in response to their wishes. The instruments recorded the Fighting Rowboat as lifting from her position—even while in reality she still stayed where she was. In mock action, she was recorded as drifting outward to join the vanguard of other ships from the Battle Line advancing against the invaders.
Now the screen showed that advance. At the far left end of the advancing line was the tiny shape of the Fighting Rowboat. Even the ship next to her—the smallest of the great round ships of the Center Aliens—was many hundred times her size and mass.
Together, the galaxy’s ships joined in formation, and faster now—and then faster—they plunged together toward the oncoming silver crescent of the attacking Horde.
The silver crescent shape was pulsing and swelling rapidly on the screen. Now it began to be visible in depth, if not in thickness, like a great flat scimitar swung at them in the same plane as their own battle line’s formation. A few moments more, and its front edge began to fuzz, to reveal itself—as the two opposing armadas approached each other in shifts that must be many times the speed of light—as an incredible multitude of individual vessels.
Luhon stepped up the magnification on the screen. The view of the approaching front line of scout vessels of the Silver Horde jumped at them. They were small ships—even smaller than the Fighting Rowboat herself, which would have made three of them—but there were literally millions of them in this first line of invaders alone. A feeling of berserk joy leaped from the imagination of Luhon and communicated itself to Miles and Eff. In his imagination the little Fighting Rowboat suddenly thrust with extra energy ahead of her huge partners until she alone was drawing away toward the enemy in advance of all the rest of the front line of galaxy ships.
On and on she plunged, faster and faster, now so far in advance of her former linemates that the big ships would not be able to support her during the moment in which she would first make contact with the oncoming scout ships of the Horde.
Their imaginations locked together with the imagination of Luhon, neither Miles nor Eff cared, as Luhon himself did not care. The white fury of battle lust that had flamed within each of them during their fights among themselves aboard the ship was now unified in the locked psychic pattern and was lashing them on against the Horde. To die was nothing. But to cut and slash and kill among the silver vessels—that was everything, no matter what the personal cost.
Now they were almost upon the scout ships. Now they were suddenly among them, striking right and left with their weapons—paralyzing the psychic opposition of the smaller invader vessels long enough to slash open the silver ships with the physical edge of their combined weapons. Like a wolf among a pack of weasels—in the imagination of Luhon—they raged right and left, up and down the oncoming wave of Horde scout ships, snapping, shaking, slashing, and killing.
But now the larger ships of the invaders, their second wave, were almost upon the Fighting Rowboat. It would take a miracle to manage their escape. But the imagination of Luhon had programmed the miracle into the exercise. In the nick of time, the Fighting Rowboat flung free and raced away—just as the heavy vessels of the Center Aliens came up to engage with the second wave of the Horde.
But the little vessel was not finished. Safe behind her own dreadnoughts, she turned again and hung around the outskirts of the conflict, snapping up those smaller vessels of the enemy that reeled hurt from the battle. She was still among the fury of it all when the Horde’s crescent began to break up, began to drift away and reform, moving in a different plane and line away from the galaxy. Mixed with the huge dreadnoughts of the Center Aliens, the Fighting Rowboat joined in harrying and driving away the defeated ships of the Silver Horde.
Suddenly Luhon’s programmed battle ended. Suddenly the pattern of the three minds broke apart. Miles sat back exhausted in his seat and, looking about, saw Luhon and Eff slumped on either side of him.
For a long moment, even as he sagged exhausted in his seat before the console, the feeling of the imagined victory continued to glow inside Miles. But slowly that glow dwindled, flickered, and went out.