At his first glance the history buff screamed, “Get us away from that!”
Persoff had the planer at thirty gees before Tokugawa could inhale for the explanation. It was too late. This spike was a railgun longer than the Yorktown, and it threw one rock.
Drill called for everyone to be in suits for maneuvers, and the planer had moved the ship somewhat, but six men died when the rock hit, and most of one end of the ship was sheared off. It was the end the ram was attached to.
Persoff wrecked the railgun with a plasma shot and set about the serious business of getting them onto that island. There was no way they could stay in space to repair the ship. Half of the bio converter had gone with the ram.
He took his time setting the ship down, which was the best part about gravity planers: you could land a ship that was open to space. The bad news about the landing site was also the good news: almost all the island was covered by trees, in perfect rows, which meant that there were definitely people who thought like humans here. Kzinti liked loose forests with large clearings, Jotoki liked groves with pools in the middle, and the sonar-using Kdatlyno kept trees widely separated when they allowed them around at all.
Up close, the trees were mostly pines, which implied humans again; someone else might have taken over a world with a human ship orbiting it, but no race that wasn’t from Earth could stand the smell.
The Yorktown’s planer cut out just as they settled, and everyone and everything aboard gave a little bounce as the lower local gravity took over. Persoff froze, then said, “Emery, what was that?”
“I don’t know, Captain, but half my board just went black,” she replied. “The cutoff point…looks to be just about where that shot hit us.”
“Sweet reason. We just made it. Tokugawa, what was that ship? — Tokugawa?”
“He hit his head when he fell, sir,” said his assistant, Fiester.
“Tanj. How is he?”
“I got him to sick bay right away. He was doing well when I left.”
“Good grief, how fast were you moving? We just got down.”
“No, sir, not just now; he fainted when they shot at us.”
“Fainted?”
“Passed out? Went all pale and blotchy-”
“I’m familiar with the procedure. Sick bay, this is the captain, connect me with Tokugawa.”
“He’s not well, sir,” said Meier.
“Now, Doctor,” he told her.
“Doctors,” Kershner muttered.
“Sorry I funked, sir,” Tokugawa said.
“I gather you had reason? What is that ship, anyway?”
“It’s the Galaxias, sir. Built by Sinclair Enterprises in 2164. It was supposed to be the first manned ramship.”
“I never heard of it.”
“No, sir, it was headed in this general direction and disappeared in a big flash of light. It just dropped out of the news, and references to it disappeared.”
“That’s weird.”
“Not really. The UN didn’t want any bad publicity for the colony ships, and the ARM had draconian powers over the media even then. It was an experimental design, too. Had a whopping big Sinclair accelerator as part of its drive.”
“I would think they’d have noticed pretty quickly that it doesn’t really reduce inertia,” Persoff remarked.
“Not from outside the field,” Tokugawa agreed. “The thing is, they mounted the generator on a spike that extended way in front of the ship, and used the field as a nonmagnetic ramscoop. Everything went in just fine, but when it tried to get out the aft side of the field, it slowed way down and gathered at the middle. That was what got fed into the fusion drive. Worked great in the tests, and they kept solid objects out of the path with an early version of the medium ionizer all later ramships use, a big blue laser aimed forward from inside the field. Came out as X rays, vaporized everything. I guess the kzinti noticed the laser, attacked, and got fried like the ones we met. I was afraid that was the end pointed at us. Instead we got the exhaust accelerator.”
“Why was it so big?”
“Generation ship, sir. They were planning to go outside the plane of the galaxy and terraform planets, setting down colonies every century or so. The starting crew was three hundred, and they meant to expand to six thousand on each leg, retaining the best gene patterns in the crew for the next trip. They had embryo banks, seeds, bacteria, the works, mostly in stasis. They must have used the accelerator on the planet,” he added.
Persoff frowned. “Explain?”
“They couldn’t have had much choice about where to stop. The planet here would have been the right distance from the primary, but with no collision and no moon it would have been more like Venus or the lowlands of Plateau. If they separated the landing vessels and stocked them as lifeboats, they could have expanded the accelerator around the planet, so it radiated heat five hundred times as fast as it absorbed it. Let me see-Doctor, this computer link doesn’t work.”
“You’re injured,” came her voice.
“My hand is fine. See?” There was an exclamation and the sound of a smack. “Ow. Thanks. Now, yes, nine or ten years would be enough time for the carbonates to form, then they’d have the field timed to shut off, and seed algae and so forth.”
“You sound like you were there.”
“Oh, it’s an old idea. John Smith, an exile on Mars, came up with it before the First War as a way of terraforming Venus. He wanted to leave part of the atmosphere out to let the nitrogen boil off, then add water, and helium to keep the water from breaking down, like Jinx has.”
In spite of the urgency of the situation, Persoff had to ask, “Where was he going to get that much water?”
“Callisto.”
“The Jovian moon? The ships would roast in Jupiter’s radiation belts.”
“No ships. He wanted to hit Venus with Callisto. Ion thrusters. For some reason he couldn’t get the UN interested in moving a planet almost as big as Mars past Earth’s orbit.”
Kershner made a noise Persoff would normally have considered medically alarming, and put his face on his control board. Persoff was trying not to grin himself. “I would think not.”
“No. Anyway, Smith should be happy to hear it works, if we can get the news to him.”
“He’s still alive?”
“Was when we left. He’s one of those people who does really well in low gee. Has some weird medical condition that prevents osteoporosis, actually has to have excess calcium cleaned out of his cells on a regular basis. I’ve heard it suggested that’s inherited from our Pak ancestors.”
Persoff was not about to get into that can of worms. “Thanks. So the survivors planted these trees. Good.”
“Trees? Good lord, that’s a lot of trees.-Sir, we didn’t damage any, did we?” Tokugawa sounded badly worried.
“No. You think they’re sacred or something?”
“The Galaxias complement were handpicked, so I doubt they’d have fallen that far back, but I’m sure they’re deeply revered.”
“Well, it’s not as if we have to cut them all down or something,” Persoff said. “Get some rest. I have to check on my ship.” He signed off and said, “Damage and system reports.”
“What do you mean, we have to cut them all down?”
McCabe, the strongest man aboard, and conceivably the strongest anywhere who wasn’t from Jinx, hunched in on himself as if expecting to be hit. “The only way we can get off this planet is a launch catapult, sir. The planer is fried, and a lot of the hull is unsound. What we have to do is cobble together something that’ll get a work crew up to that hulk in orbit and strip the accelerator field generator for parts. That should allow us to fix the planer up there. The thing is, we don’t have the resources to construct an aerodynamic vehicle in less than years. We have to go straight to space all at once. No room to launch on fusion drive, because the ram’s shot, so we’d have to use the singleships for thrust, and they’re so hot the backwash would slaughter everything for miles. And they can fuse protons, so we sure can’t launch from the water. So we have to slap something together and fling it up there and leave the main fusion plant on the ground.”