Then he waited for the telltale signs. Eventually they came, chiefly a rocking to and fro of the vessel as the first ripples of the shock wave lapped against the furled silk.
Deeper into the wave he would harness these retroactive ripples, using them to slow the ship down and make it safe for her to enter the atmosphere.
He unfurled one small saiclass="underline" the aft topgallant. For a second or two it flapped, then filled with the retroactive eddy as though trapping a fall of water and bellied toward the deck, which in response tilted sternward.
The red wall which was Mars swung, tilted vertiginously, and vanished beneath the hull as the topgallant turned the ship through a hundred and eighty degrees like a weathercock turning in the wind. She was now falling Marsward bottom first, and for the first time in months the sun shone directly on the deck—a sun shrunk to half size, giving off a wan, clear light.
Zhorga ordered more sails cautiously unfurled. The shock wave snatched at them, buffeting and shaking the galleon with terrifying force. Agonized, he wondered if the tackles could take the treatment. Already the deceleration was bearing him down toward the deck. But soon the whole sail canopy had been unfurled and the galleon was on full brake.
Gasping, crushed by the thunderous deceleration, those on board lay stretched out on deck. The timbers groaned and protested, and the ordeal went on and on and on, seemingly without end.
It was, in fact, impossible to gauge its length, for no one stayed conscious. Zhorga was not sure how many times he blacked out, how many times he dimly recovered his senses to find the ship shaking and shuddering all around him. He only knew that, in the end, he became aware of a series of decided bumps, as if the vessel were bouncing down a flight of steps. This, he decided later, betokened the ship’s passage through the shock wave’s inner isoclines, for suddenly everything became marvelously calm. The deceleration slackened and became merely mild. The sails no longer vibrated or rucked wildly.
The ship was through the shock wave’s leading fracture zone. Here the wave manifested as an easy swell, making it an easy matter to control the ship’s rate of descent. Zhorga, trying to bring life back into his aching limbs, grinned with triumph. Far from being the most dangerous maneuver he had attempted, the deceleration had proved in many respects to be the easiest He had made it!
The ship swooped over Mars, moving southward away from the dead center of the shock wave. Shortly she encountered the beginnings of the normal circum-planetary flow, the sort of ether movement Zhorga understood best. He ordered the crew to dismantle the sail canopy and prepare for aerial flight.
Masts, booms and yards shifted jerkily into position. Zhorga was so intent on the operation that he was not the first to spot the object that came hurtling round the curve of the planet, and which expanded rapidly from a tiny wedge into a long elegant shape. When it was pointed out to him, all he could do was stare.
It was a ship, orbiting in free fall below the violence of the shock wave, all sail taken in. But what a ship! She was, he judged, nearly a quarter mile in length, and at first she seemed so strange, her appearance so unexpected, that he was confused.
Abruptly she put out a sail, an oddly-shaped sheet of silk, and with incredible skill altered course to go flashing by the Wandering Queen at close quarters. Now her immensity was overpowering and her length seemingly endless. Her burnished wood shone in the sun, and her decks seemed jeweled, bedecked with satins and velvets. Colors glowed along her hull, which was decorated with unfamiliar designs. At her stern a stiff pennant bearing a black emblem added to her outlandish appearance.
Her design owed nothing to seagoing or airgoing influences. Her tiered decks would have made aerodynamic nonsense. This was a ship built for space alone. What was more, her masts and booms were so unbelievably long—longer even than the ship herself—that the vast expanses of silk they could presumably carry would have attained speeds too great even for interplanetary travel.
Such enormous speeds were useful in only one area: travel from star to star. This was an interstellar ship.
Zhorga was stunned. He had heard of these interstellar leviathans, of course, but never in his life had he expected to see one. What could be her business on Mars?
In a fragment of time she had dwindled into the distance—but as she did so she seemed to eject a smaller part of herself, which sprouted brilliant blue ether silk and advanced toward the Wandering Queen again, swiftly catching up with the galleon and pacing her a short distance away.
The daughter craft reminded Zhorga of a dragonfly. Its sails resembled a dragonfly’s double wings, being extended on flexible rods which could be warped, curved and twisted by means of control lines. The hull was long and black, except for two transparent domes within which figures could be seen peering across at the Earth ship. Like a dragonfly, too, it could hover and dart, displaying perfect control. Zhorga realized that he faced a sailing technique beyond his wildest dreams.
Zhorga tore his gaze away from the sight. The task of adjusting spars and rigging still had to be completed. Stalking across the deck, he attracted the attention of Clabert, and managed to get the work back under way.
The new activity seemed to displease those aboard the dragonfly. The craft spat out a glimmering flare which stitched a magnesium-bright necklace across the bows of the Wandering Queen, which by now had almost adopted the attitude of aerial flight. In the forward dome, the watching figures gesticulated across at the galleon, pointing upward and astern.
Zhorga easily guessed their meaning. They wanted him to accompany the dragonfly to a rendezvous with the mother ship. But how could he? He did not have that kind of maneuverability. Could they not see he was practically helpless to go against the ether current, Mars’s version of the slipstream?
He signaled Clabert to continue and soon all was in readiness to enter the atmosphere. A second glowing missile crossed the stem of the ship. Zhorga realized glumly that he had no choice but to hope that the captain of the dragonfly would be content to follow the Wandering Queen down, and would forebear from doing her any damage.
But he had reckoned without the impetuosity of certain of his crew, who had received lessons galore from their master on rashness. Unseen by Zhorga, Bruge, Small and Patchman levered one of the bombards out of its storage pit, loaded, primed and fired it, all in the space of a minute.
The ball missed the dragonfly proper, but tore a rent in one of the silken wings. Aghast, Zhorga yelled futilely in his helmet, but the dragonfly’s response came almost immediately. Its third glowing shot hit the Wandering Queen amidships and exploded with a dazzling blare of light.
Zhorga distinctly heard a soft WHUMPH through the brass of his headpiece. Momentarily he was blinded. Then his vision cleared to see that a number of side strakes were smashed, and a section of deck lay propped against the rail, having come adrift from its beams.
On the foredeck, the fighting spirit was unabated. By now both bombards had been manhandled onto their firing platforms. They were fired as fast as they could be reloaded, all balls going wide. In return, the dragonfly sent yet another fire-dart which fell among the rigging and devastated the spars, scattering fragments of wood, rope and silk in all directions.
And then a rapid whisper of air against the sides of the hull signaled the end of the battle. The ship was entering the atmosphere.
Mars’s air was in a sense artificial, being produced by the air fires (though these had burned for centuries and could not be put out). The continuous addition of phlogistonic gases from the burning areas was offset by a boiling off, or evaporation, of air from the top of the atmosphere, which consequently met space abruptly, not gradually as did Earth’s. Almost, the atmosphere had a surface of its own, and the Wandering Queen was now plunging into that surface.