There were two ways of meeting a missile attack: with anti-missiles or deflector fields. Either method was a matter of precise focusing and tended to leave the defender wide open for a few microseconds after application. The Streall ship, however, clearly had very quick responses. Rodrone’s battle display plate showed the first wave meet total destruction, then most of the second wave immediately afterwards by a fresh defense volley. Even so, a few flashed onwards to blossom satisfyingly among the assemblages of turrets and casings.
Momentarily the Streall ship disengaged itself into three parts, assessing damage and considering procedure. All big Streall ships seemed to be capable of fractioning themselves indefinitely, as if held together by willpower.
Against such a ship, an opening masking volley had been the biggest gun in Rodrone’s armory. Its comparative ineffectiveness made escape even more imperative. He issued crisp orders to Braxon, the man in the pilot’s seat. Despite the fact that the interior of the ship was normally proof against inertial changes, they all felt a sudden surge as the Stond slipped into overdrive.
Moodily Rodrone slipped from the weapons desk, prowling around the control room with a worried scowl on his face. He tried to remind himself that their lives need not seriously be in danger. If overhauled and trapped by the Streall, it would be easy to get away scot-free once they got what they were after. The Streall were not vindictive in a personal sense. But it was as if a fever had gripped him. The thing in the crate, whatever it was, had acquired an exaggerated, ludicrous value in his eyes.
In the first few seconds the Streall almost lost them. Interstellar travel is of necessity faster than light; and while the Streall ship could pace them easily, escape maneuvers depended on the fact that if the velocity difference between two ships was itself in excess of c, they found it hard to locate each other. Each time they knew the Streall had a fix on them, they changed direction, slipping once again into a murky half-invisibility until the pursuers, somehow, guessed their quadrant and once again moved into the same velocity bracket.
“They’re getting closer.” It was Clave speaking. As usual he tried to sound unconcerned, but there was a tension in his dry voice.
“Hurry it up, dammit!” Rodrone growled at the pair who were meantime busy on the other side of the control room. They were scanning star maps of the district, at the same time trying to build up a local picture by taking space-strain readings. Such a project would normally take hours to do properly; Rodrone, unreasonably, was expecting them to come up with results within minutes by using their intuitive instincts. The possibility that there were no results to come up with he refused to admit to himself.
Savagely he kicked the crate that was the focus of all the trouble, trying to catharsize his frustration.
“Stellar comet!” one of the map readers announced. They had found what they were looking for.
“Is it big enough?”
“Maybe. Anyway there isn’t another near enough.”
They typed on keys, conveying coordinates to the pilot board. Almost immediately the ship changed direction again.
“Here we go,” Braxon said tightly. “Keep your fingers crossed!”
Dead silence suddenly permeated the whole ship. Most of them had never experienced this tactic before, and those who had did not wish to do so again. Stellar comets, swift, ceaseless travelers that swung in blazing parabolas around one slow-moving star after another, occurred by the million all over the galaxy, even in the outer parts of the lens. But the comets that were commonly found in the outlying regions were midgets; here in the Hub they were simply enormous, streaming islands of gas and rubble extending for light-years.
Although incredibly tenuous, the interior of such a comet was dense by the standards of interstellar space. To plunge into one at super-light speeds was little short of suicidal. There was no possibility of avoiding collisions with the scattered chunks of rock, and the gas that made up the bulk of the comet could build up an intolerable friction at high velocity despite being constituted of only a few atoms per cubic foot.
But actually they were safer at super-light velocities than they would have been at just below the speed of light. Some collisions would be inevitable; but it was a feature of travel faster than light that solid bodies could pass straight through one another without disturbance, provided their velocity relative to one another was well in excess of the speed of light and that the transit time was short. If contact lasted for longer than a scant few microseconds, then the result was that of a normal collision at very high speeds. The danger to the Stond was that they might encounter two or more rock clusters in rapid succession, aggregating a lethal time period.
Rodrone was muttering a figure to himself. “Sixty-seven… sixty-seven…” This was the probability percentage that the worst would happen. The figure was known to him because he had worked it out long ago for obvious reasons. Twice before he had entered a comet similar to this one in order to evade pursuit. With each repeat performance, he knew, his personal probability of disaster rose. But he still clung to the previous figure, like an incantation. Fleeting pictures of Egyptian gods flitted through his mind, as if he were praying to them.
A comet provided an escape route for two reasons. The danger to the pursuer was equally as great as to the pursued, and the former was rarely seized with the same nerve born of desperation. Secondly, detection became extremely difficult. The quarry stood a good chance of leaving the comet in a random direction without being spotted. If, that is, he had not perished first.
Vision screens turned milky as they penetrated the comet. Vague lumps coalesced momentarily out of the murk, fading just as quickly. Every man’s stomach knotted in reaction to the awareness of jagged rock passing through metal and air and flesh, too fast for the electromagnetic fields surrounding their respective atoms to interact.
Only the rear vision screen showed a sharp image. The Streall ship unhesitatingly followed them into the danger area, splitting itself into five sections as it did so. Then the picture abruptly vanished. Braxon was making random course changes to send the Stond bouncing about the interior of the comet like a flitting ghost.
“Release the mass torpedoes,” Rodrone ordered. If their luck held, the Streall would be unlikely to find them now. This was the second part of the strategy. Eight torpedoes, able by means of their specially adjusted drover engines to increase their inertial mass. Long-range detector techniques would find them indistinguishable from a large vessel like the Strond.
As soon as the torpedoes had been launched to follow their own random patterns through the murky inside of the comet, they thankfully turned the nose of the Stond to the nearest point of exit from this perilous mass of gas, dust and rock. But shortly before they broke into free space, someone pointed to one of the long-range screens with a gasp.
The remains of what had until recently been one section of the Streall ship was drifting unpowered. It was a mangled, junked pile. One half had vanished completely in some cataclysmic explosion. The other exuded a stream of bodies, objects, fragments, gases and liquids.
Five times sixty-seven, Rodrone thought. That made three hundred and thirty-five per cent. Dead certainty.
IV
After he had set course for Brüde, Rodrone took a crowbar and levered open the crate to unpack his find.
Inside the splintered boards he encountered first fluffy white packing material, which he scattered impatiently about the control room until he came to a smooth, glossy surface. Then, like a man who has caught his first glimpse of gold, he broke open the remaining boards and strewed aside the packing material until the supposed Streall artifact stood revealed.