A second bolt flashed at them, but the gunners lacked Aranimas’s own savage efficiency.
“Another puncture, and our antenna’s out,” said Derec calmly.
His calmness calmed her, and she made one more attempt to ram. In turning away from her jet, Aranimas had run before their nose. She cracked on full power and they were hurled back into their seats. Her vision dimmed. She thought it was the power fading.
Too slow; the huge, bloated body of the enemy slid sideways even as it grew monstrous before them. Then the vision screen erupted in one pale flare, pale because the safety circuit wouldn’t transmit the whole visual part of the flash: the sensor had taken the next hit from the gun.
“There went our bow!” Derec cried.
Ariel gulped, half expecting to see space before her, but they hadn’t lost that much of the bow. With the vision out, she could only crouch, panting, at her board, the rocket off, hoping for
“The Key-trigger it-” she cried, turning to him, knowing in a flashing moment that it was too late-they’d hit-
The ship jolted, and the impact was quite different from the gun hits. They were thrown forward against their straps, the ship shuddered, metal squealed, something broke-all in an instant-then they were free, the ship floating quietly.
Air hissed out, alarms still burring and shrilling. All communications out, no exterior view. Ariel touched her controls and the attitude jets responded; she could turn and burn again. But they were blind.
“Suits!” said Derec. “ And see if the auto-circuit can give us more eyes.”
Suits first,she thought. When the air goes out of a small ship, it can go fast. Should have had them on all along, if they’d had time.
They scrambled into their suits in a free-fall comedy that was deadly serious. Every moment Ariel expected the lancing fire of a hit, but the ship continued serenely on its way.
They didn’t bother to try communications, knowing that the gun’s bolt, or the impact, must have destroyed the forward antennas. Vision, however, could be brought in from any quarter of the ship. Only the bow eyes were out. After a bit of fumbling, they found an undamaged sensor that bore toward their late battle.
“What…what is it?” Ariel asked, awed.
“I was about to ask you,” Derec said. “You know more about Aranimas’s ship, you were on it longer-”
“That was before my amnesia,” she said.
“Oh.”
“I think-one of the hulls, broken free?”
They had only a partial view of it-it was below the sensor’s view. Only a spinning, irregular curve of dark metal, with an occasional highlight gleaming, here and there a projection-derricks, turrets, landing ports, sensors-and interior beams?
“It can’t be the whole ship,” Derec said finally. “But what happened to it?”
Ariel took a deep breath, found the air inside her suit rank with her sweat. “I’ll turn around!” she said, chagrined. “I didn’t realize how tense I was.”
She wasn’t thinking. I’ll never be a combat pilot, she thought shakily. Wasted minutes looking into a view I could’ve adjusted-Or do pilots get used to this kind of thing?
But the human race had no combat pilots. No telling how well they could perform. Grimly, she thought, if there are many of Aranimas’s kind in space, we may have to learn.
“Aranimas-he disintegrated!” Derec said.
The big composite ship was now a dozen big pieces in a cloud of hundreds of smaller ones. They looked at each other. Derec’s face was as blank as she felt her own to be.
“Did we do that?” she asked.
“I don’t see how-Wolruf!”
After a moment she nodded. “You must be right. But where did she get the guns?”
Derec just shook his head.
If anybody was alive over there, they weren’t disposed to do any more shooting. The wreckage was retreating slowly. Ariel came to herself with a start.
“We’ve got to get back over there-”
“Frost, yes!”
But how?”
It wasn’t easy, but they worked it out. The view they had gave them bearings. They chose a spot that would enable them to miss any of the junk, and rotated the ship until its blind nose pointed along that bearing. Ariel then placed her hands on the board, looked into darkness, and thought, now we find out how good a pilot you are, girl.
In a moment she was back on Aurora, about to do her first solo takeoff. She had had that very thought, or something very close to it, and even more nervousness than now. Now, though, she was in shock. The memories went on and on, the takeoff, the acceleration seeming more fierce than ever now that she had to remain conscious, the relief as the jets shut down, and then the indescribable free, floating sensation of one’s first solo orbit.
“Ariel?”
Her instructor-
“Ariel?”
With a shake, she brought herself out of it. “Sorry. Memory fugue.” As her hands moved over the board-taking care to push the buttons on the real board instead of the remembered one-the memories went on, flashed back, picked up details; A whole chunk of her past restored to her by a chance thought, a chance repetition of forgotten circumstance.
She burned for ten seconds and rolled the ship to study the junk. There should be detectors back there that would tell them how fast they were moving relative to the junk, but they weren’t working. The junk still seemed to be receding. Ariel rolled and blasted for another twenty seconds, again looked.
“That should do it.”
They had only to wait, floating toward the wrecked ship aft-end first, ready to burn to brake down.
“How did she do it?”
Chapter 16. Wolruf Again
“It’s hopeless;’ said Derec.
Mandelbrot was trying to patch their hull.
“It’s got to work,” Ariel said, biting her lip behind her helmet…Otherwise, Wolruf -”
The other Star Seeker had been hit harder than their own and was scarcely maneuverable. Mandelbrot, using rockets welded onto his body and a line gun, had brought them close together, with Ariel doing most of the maneuvering. There was very little air in either ship-and there was no spacesuit for the caninoid alien.
“We’ve been stressed too severely. The best we can do is temporary patching.” Derec tried to rub his head, and his hand encountered his helmet for the fifteenth time. Frustrated, he let it drop.
“If it holds long enough to Jump out of here-” she said.
Derec shook his head. “Four Jumps to Robot City-five for safety,” he said…That’s days of work checking courses and calculating. I wouldn’t want my life to depend on that kind of patching. And we’ll be maneuvering. That’ll strain the patches even more.”
“Something’s got to be done! Maybe Aranimas’s ship-”
Jumping at straws, and she knew it. “Even Wolruf doesn’t really know how to fly it-assuming any of us had the arm reach for that control board. No computer aid, Ariel!”
She nodded soberly…I know. It’s not possible; it’s these ships or nothing. “
“Maybe there’s air or food over there. We could use both.”
They looked at each other somberly. It was not a pleasant position.
On a wrecked ship, barely maneuverable, with most of its instrumentation out, leaking like a proverbial sieve, on a trajectory that would take it somewhere near Procyon in a few million years, short on air, water, and food, with a friend on another, worse ship, sealed into a single room.
“Join the Space Service and see the stars,” Derec said, forcing a grin.
Ariel grinned back, just as wanly.
The alien ship was all around them, and some of the pieces definitely had once been living. Derec, feeling none too good to start, avoided looking at them, though they were at such a distance that details were lost. His imagination supplied them. Many were Narwe, but there was a goodly number of the starfish-shaped dwellers-in-darkness he had glimpsed in his brief time aboard the ship.