“But that’s impossible!” wailed the AskoFs chief engineer. “A gravity attractor beam of that magnitude…. Admiral, it can’t be done! The power requirements would burn out any generator in a microsecond!”
“It’s being done,” said Golyev harshly. “Maybe they figured out a new way to feed energy into a space distorter. Now, where are those figures on intensity? And my slide rule…. Yeh. The whole fleet will soon be in a field so powerful that—Well, we won’t let it happen. Stand by to hit that generator with everything we’ve got.”
“But sir … we must have—I don’t know how many ships—close enough to it now to be within total destruction radius.”
“Tough on them. Stand by. Gunnery Control, fire when ready.”
And then, whispered, even though that particular line was private and none else in the ship would hear: “Elva! Are you all right down there? Elva!”
Her hands had eased their trembling enough for her to light a cigaret. She didn’t speak. Let him worry. It might reduce his efficiency.
Her screen did not happen to face the vortex source, and thus did not show its destruction by the nuclear barrage. Not that that could have been registered. The instant explosion of sun-center ferocity transcended any sense, human or electronic. Down on Vaynamo surface, in broad daylight, they must have turned dazzled eyes from that brilliance. Anyone within a thousand kilometers of those warheads died, no matter how much steel and force field he had interposed. Two score Chertkoian ships were suddenly manned by corpses. Those further in were fused to lumps. Still further in, they ceased to exist, save as gas at millions of degrees temperature. The vessels already crashed on the giant station were turned into unstable isotopes, their very atoms dying.
But the station itself vanished. And Vaynamo had had the capacity to build only one such monster. The Chertkoian ships were free again.
“Admiral to all captains!” cried Golyev’s lion voice. “Admiral to all captains. Let the reports wait. Clear the lines. I want every man in the fleet to hear me. Stand by for message.
“Now hear this! This is Supreme Commander Bors Golyev. We just took a rough blow, boys. The enemy had an unsuspected weapon, and cost us a lot of casualties. But we’ve destroyed the thing. I repeat, we blew it out of the cosmos. And I say, well done! I say also, we still have a hundred times the strength of the enemy, and he’s shot his bolt. We’re going on in! We’re going to—”
“Alert! Condition red! Enemy boats returning. Enemy boats returning. Radial velocity circa 50 KPS, but acceleration circa 100 G.”
“What?”
Elva herself saw the Vaynamoan shooting stars come back into sight.
Golyev tried hard to shout down the panic of his officers. Would they stop running around like old women? The enemy had developed something else, some method of accelerating at unheard-of rates under gravitational thrust. But not by witchcraft! It could be an internal-stress compensator developed to ultimate efficiency, plus an adaptation of whatever principle was used in the attractor vortex. Or it could be a breakthrough, a totally new principle, maybe something intermediate between the agoratron and the ordinary interplanetary drive…. “Never mind what, you morons! They’re only flocks of splinters! Kill them!”
But the armada was roiling about in blind confusion. The detectors had given mere seconds of warning, which were lost in understanding that the warning was correct and in frantically seeking to rally men already shaken. Then the splinter fleet was in among the Chertkoians. It braked its furious relative velocity with a near-instantaneous quickness for which the Chertkoian gunners and gun computers had never been prepared. However, the Vaynamoan gunners were ready. And even a boat can carry torpedoes which will annihilate a battleship.
In a thousand fiery bursts, the armada died.
Not all of it. Unarmed craft were spared, if they would surrender. Vaynamoan boarding parties freed such of their countrymen as they found. The Askol, under Golyev’s personal command, stood off its attackers and moved doggedly outward, toward regions where it could use the agoratron to escape. The captain of a prize revealed that over a hundred Vaynamoans were aboard the flagship. So the attempt to blow it up was abandoned. Instead, a large number of boats shot dummy missiles, which kept the defense full occupied. Meanwhile, a companion force lay alongside, cut its way through the armor, and sent men in.
The Chertkoian crew resisted. But they were grossly outnumbered and outgunned. Most died, under bullets and grenades, gas and flamethrowers. Certain holdouts, who fortified a compartment, were welded in from the outside and left to starve or capitulate, whichever they chose. Even so, the Askol was so big that the boarding party took several hours to gain full possession.
The door opened. Elva stood up.
At first the half-dozen men who entered seemed foreign. In a minute—she was too tired and dazed to think clearly— she understood why. They were all in blue jackets and trousers, a uniform. She had never before seen two Vaynamoans dressed exactly alike. But of course they would be. she thought in a vague fashion. We had to build a navy, didn’t we?
And they remained her own people. Fair skin, straight hair, high cheekbones, tilted light eyes which gleamed all the brighter through the soot of battle. And, yes, they still walked like Vaynamoans, the swinging freeman’s gait and the head held high, such as she had not seen for… for how long? So their clothes didn’t matter, nor even the guns in their hands.
Slowly, through the ringing in her ears, she realized that the combat noise had stopped.
A young man in the lead took a step in her direction. “My lady—” he began.
“Is that her for certain?” asked someone else, less gently. “Not a collaborator?”
A new man pushed his way through the squad. He was grizzled, pale from lack of sun, wearing a sleazy prisoner’s coverall. But a smile touched his lips, and his bow to Elva was deep.
“This is indeed my lady of Tervola,” he said. To her: “When these men released me, up in Section Fourteen, I told them we’d probably find you here. I am so glad.”
She needed a while to recognize him. “Oh. Yes.” Her head felt heavy. It was all she could do to nod. “Captain Ivalo. I hope you’re all right.”
“I am, thanks to you, my lady. Someday we’ll know how many hundreds of us are alive and sane—and here!— because of you.”
The squad leader made another step forward, sheathed his machine pistol and lifted both hands toward her. He was a well-knit, good-looking man, blond of hair, a little older than she: in his mid-thirties, perhaps. He tried to speak, but no words came out, and then Ivalo drew him back.
“In a moment,” said the ex-captive. “Let’s first take care of the unpleasant business.”
The leader hesitated, then, with a grimace, agreed. Two men shoved Bors Golyev. The admiral dripped blood from a dozen wounds and stumbled in his weariness. But when he saw Elva, he seemed to regain himself. “You weren’t hurt,” he breathed. “I was so afraid …”
Ivalo said like steeclass="underline" “I’ve explained the facts of this case to the squad officer here, as well as his immediate superior. I’m sure you’ll join us in our wish not to be inhumane, my lady. And yet a criminal trial in the regular courts would publicize matters best forgotten and could give this man only a limited punishment. So we, here and now, under the conditions of war and in view of your high services—”