“Good. Report any activity by intruder immediately, Corporal.” Blaine switched off as the warning horns sounded again. Fifty kilos lifted from his chest as the ship’s acceleration cased. Tricky thing, this, he thought. Got to balance between getting too close to Cal and cooking the crew, and just killing everybody from the gee stress.
At his station forward, one of the helmsmen leaned against the padding of his couch. His partner leaned against him to touch helmets. For an instant they cut their mikes while Quartermaster’s Mate First Class Orontez spoke to his partner. “My brother wanted me to help him with his wet-ranch on Aphrodite and I thought it was too goddamn dangerous. So I joined the flipping Navy.”
“Commander Sinclair, have we enough energy for a report to Fleet?”
“Aye, Skipper, the engines hold verra well indeed. Yon object is nae so massive as we thought, and we’ve hydrogen to spare.”
“Good.” Blaine called the communications room to send out his report. Intruder aboard. Cylinder, ratio of axes four to one. Uniform metallic in appearance but close inspection impossible until acceleration eases off. Suggest Lermontov attempt to recover the sail, which would decelerate rapidly with no pod ahead of it. Estimated time of arrival, New Scotland… suggest MacArthur put into orbit around uninhabited moon of New Scotland. No evidence of life or activity aboard alien, but…
It was a very large “but,” Rod thought. Just what was that thing? Had it fired on him deliberately? Was it under command, or what kind of robot could pilot it across light years of normal space? What would it, whoever or whatever was commanding it, think of being stuffed into the hangar deck of a battle cruiser, cut loose from its shrouds.
Hell of an undignified end to thirty-five light years of travel.
And there was nothing he could do to find out. Nothing at all. MacArthur’s situation wasn’t so critical, Renner had her well under control; but neither Blaine nor Cargill could leave his station, and he wasn’t about to send junior officers to investigate that thing.
“Is it over?” Sally’s voice was plaintive. “Is everything all right?”
“Yes.” Rod shuddered involuntarily as he thought of what might have happened. “Yes, it’s aboard and we’ve seen nothing about it other than its size. It won’t answer signals.” Now why did he feel a little twinge of satisfaction because she’d just have to wait like the rest of them?
MacArthur plunged on, whipping around Cal so close that there was a measurable drag from the corona; but Renner’s astrogation was perfect and the Field held nicely.
They waited.
At two gravities Rod could leave the bridge. He stood with an effort, transferred to a scooter, and started aft. The elevators let him “down” as he moved through the ship, and he stopped at each deck to note the alert crewmen still at their posts despite being at general quarters too long. MacArthur had to be the best ship in the Navy… and he’d keep her that way!
When he reached Kelley’s position at the air lock to hangar deck, there was still nothing new.
“You can see there’s hatches or something there, sir,”
Kelley said. He pointed with a flash. As the light flicked up the alien craft Rod saw the ruins of his boats crushed against the steel decks.
“And it’s done nothing?”
“Not one thing, Captain. It come in, whapped against the decks—like to threw me into a bulkhead; that thing didn’t come in fast but she come down hard. Then, nothing. My files, me, the middies who keep swarming around here, none of us seen a thing, Cap’n,”
“Just as well,” Rod muttered. He took out his own light and played it on the enormous cylinder. The upper half vanished into the uniform black of the Field.
His light swept across a row of conical knobs; each a meter in diameter and three times that in length. He searched, but there was nothing there—no tag ends of the shrouds which ought to be hanging from them, no visible opening in the knob through which the shroud could have been reeled. Nothing.
“Keep watching it, Kelley. I want continuous surveillance.” Captain Rod Blaine went back to the bridge with no more information than he’d had before and sat staring at his screens. Unconsciously his hand moved to rub the bridge of his nose.
Just what in God’s name had he caught?
8. The Alien
Blaine stood rigidly at attention before the massive desk. Fleet Admiral Howland Cranston, Commander-in-Chief of His Majesty’s forces beyond the Coal Sack, glared across a rose-teak desk whose exquisite carvings would have fascinated Rod if he’d been at liberty to examine them. The Admiral fingered a thick sheaf of papers.
“Know what these are, Captain?”
“No, sir.”
“Requests that you be dismissed from the Service. Half the faculty at Imperial University. Couple of padres from the Church and one Bishop. Secretary of the Humanity League. Every bleeding heart this side of the Coal Sack wants your scalp.”
“Yes, sir.” There didn’t seem to be anything else to say. Rod stood at stiff attention, waiting for it to be over. What would his father think? Would anyone understand?
Cranston glared again. There was no expression in his eyes at all. His undress uniform was shapeless. Miniatures of a dozen decorations told the story of a commander who’d ruthlessly driven himself and his subordinates beyond any hope of survival.
“The man who fired on the first alien contact the human race ever made,” Cranston said coldly. “Crippled their probe. You know we only found one passenger, and he’s dead? Life-system failure, maybe,” Cranston fingered the sheaf of papers and viciously thrust them away. “Damned civilians, they always end up influencing the Navy. They leave me no choice.
“All right. Captain Blaine, as Fleet Admiral of this Sector I hereby confirm your promotion to captain and assign you to command of His Majesty’s battle cruiser MacArthur. Now sit down.” As Rod dazedly looked for a chair, Cranston grunted. “That’ll show the bastards. Try to tell me how to run my command, will they? Blaine, you’re the luckiest officer in the Service. A board would have confirmed your promotion anyway, but without this you’d never have kept that ship.”
“Yes. Sir.” It was true enough, but that couldn’t keep the note of pride out of Rod’s voice. And MacArthur was his— “Sir? Have they found out anything about the probe? Since we left the probe in orbit I’ve been busy in the Yards getting MacArthur refitted.”
“We’ve opened it, Captain. I’m not sure I believe what we found, but we’ve got inside the thing. We found this.” He produced an enlarged photograph.
The creature was stretched out on a laboratory table. The scale beside it showed that it was small, 1.24 meters from top of head to what Rod at first thought were shoes, then decided were its feet. There were no toes, although a ridge of what might have been horn covered the forward edges.
The rest was a scrambled nightmare. There were two slender right arms ending in delicate hands, four fingers and two opposed thumbs on each. On the left side was a single massive arm, virtually a club of flesh, easily bigger than both right arms combined. Its hand was three thick fingers closed like a vise.
Cripple? Mutation? The creature was symmetrical below where its waist would have been; from the waist up it was—different.
The torso was lumpy. The musculature was more complex than that of men. Rod could not discern the basic bone structure beneath.