enough to shatter it.
Behn-Kihl-Nahm did not believe in omens, but he handled the crystal
carefully as he removed it from the dais and made certain that no One
else saw.
Ambush
"Captain! The intruder's soliton wave has vanished!"
Captain Voba Dokrett struck Gorath's navigator a mighty blow across the
back. "Emergency stop! Take us back to realspace! Smartly now--it's
your first daughter's life if the enemy isn't under our guns when we
exit."
Dokrett spun away from the navigator's station and hunted down the
gunnery master with his eyes.
"Instruct the blaster batteries to target the intruder fore and aft for
weapons, then hole her amidships."
"Sir, shouldn't we disable the intruder first?"
"Bloodprice's ion batteries were ineffective. Dogot went by the book
and died. Give the order."
"Yes, sir," said the gunnery master. "All fire stations, attend.
Numbers one and three forward,-acquire tracking and target bow
section.
Numbers four and six forward, target aft section. Numbers two and
five, rig for hull cutting and stand by."
The gunnery master was barely finished barking the orders when the
crossover alarm began to sound and Gorath began to shudder and hum.
"A prize share to every officer if we take the intruder intact!"
Dokrett cried. "For the glory of Prakith
and in service to our beloved governor, Foga Brill, I commit this
vessel to the fight before us!"
All around Gorath's bridge, display screens came alive as the cruiser
plunged back into the sea of electromagnetic energies that was the
sublight universe.
"Captain, there is no sign of Tobay," called the sensor master. "If
they did not observe the target's soliton change, they will have jumped
on ours and overshot the entry."
"How sad for her crew, to lose their prize shares at the ninth hour,"
Dokrett said. "Range to target!"
"Eight thousand meters."
Grinning broadly, Dokrett clapped his hands on the navigator's
shoulders. "Ha! It seems you are a good father after all," he
exclaimed.
"Should we wait for Tobay, Captain?"
"No!" he barked. "Fire!"
The gunnery master leaned toward his station.
"Numbers one and three forward, fire! Numbers four and six forward,
fire!"
Almost at once and nearly as one, four of the cruiser's eight primary
batteries sent fierce pulses of energy lancing toward the great vessel
ahead.
There was no fire, nor any explosions, but Dokrett's telescopic scanner
showed plumes of debris scattering from black-edged-slashes across both
ends of the intruder's hull. "Enough!" Dokret cried. "To the heart
of her, now!"
Moments after the gunnery master relayed the orders, the four active
batteries fell silent, and the two batteries standing by opened fire
The ferocious haft of blaster bolts from their muzzles battered a
single spot amidships on the giant vessel until another black-edged
hole opened there. Then the focus of the blaster bolts spread into a
circle, chewing at the edges of the opening until it was twenty meters
across.
"Cease fire!" Dokrett shouted. "That should be enough to keep them
busy. Gunnery master, enable all batteries for counterfire.
Navigation master, bring us up alongside. Boarding parties, to your
breaching pods!
The prize is nearly ours."
There was no response from the target as Gorath closed on it, moving to
within a hundred meters of the opening amidships. At that distance,
times the diameter of the Prakith light cruiser--filled every
viewscreen and gunner's port.
"Captain!" called the sensor master. "Something odd--at this
distance, with a ship that size the reading from the magnetic anomaly
detector should be nearly off the scale. But by the reading I'm
getting, I would have said nothing larger than a pinnace was out
there."
Dokrett nodded. "Look at the way she burned," he said. "Look at the
way she's built. That's not durasteel or matrix armor. Whatever it
is, we've never seen its kind before. What do you show for power
generation?"
The sensor master waved his hands, frowning in puzzlement. "Field
strength is negligible."
"Very well," said Dokrett, much pleased by the answer.
"Open the ports. Away all pods."
In the moment between the opening of the ports and the launching of the
first breaching pod, something shot out from the intruder and slammed
into the hull of Gorath with such force that it knocked Dokrett to his
knees. Alarms began to sound all over the bridge as the impact of a
second projectile again made the cruiser shake from bow to stern.
"Fire! Fire!" Dokrett screamed as he dragged himself to his feet. A
few scattered batteries were already engaged, though their efforts
seemed undirected. "Gunnery master! Destroy those launchers!"
"We're trying. But the angle--we can't bring the mains to bear from
here--" Movement on the starboard viewer caught Dokrett's eye, and he
glimpsed the third projectile as it leaped across the gap between the
two ships--it seemed to be ball-shaped, trailing a thick cable
extending back to the intruder. Gorath groaned under the impact.
"What's happening?" Dokrett demanded. "I want to see what's
happening."
"I have something," the sensor master shouted.
One pod had cleared its stowage bay, and the relay from its: viewers
showed that all three projectiles had buried themselves in the
cruiser's hull. Gorath was now anchored to the vagabond by three
slender, undulating tethers at bow, stern, and amidships.
"Navigation!" Dokrett called, wheeling around.
"Break us free! Thrusters full! Stand by, main engines!"
At that moment, two more projectiles erupted from two different points
along the hull of the intruder. These were slender and spiked, and
they drove themselves deep into Gorath's hull.
There was fear in Dokrett's eyes as he started across the deck toward
the navigation master. "Full ahead, now!" he screamed.
But before the captain had covered half the distance to his beleaguered
underling, every bridge station exploded in a shower of sparks. Every
metal structure of the ship suddenly became part of the path for an
enormously powerful electrical current coursing through the tethers
from the alien vessel. The current leaped across isolation blocks and
vaporized insulators, vaulted across the open air and skipped over the
face of the bulkheads, coursed up the legs of crew members and grounded
through their faces and hands. In little more than a second, most of
the cruiser's systems were slag.
Just as quickly, most of the crew was dead, and those not yet dead were
dying--of massive burns, paralyzed hearts, and scrambled neural
systems. On the bridge, the gunnery master and his chair were fused
into a single carbonized sculpture. Captain Dokrett was immolated by a
&nbs
p; lightning spike that used him as a shortcut from a fire-control vent
head above his head to the decking under his feet.
By the time the attacking current ceased, small fires were burning in a
hundred places throughout the ship, providing the only relief to the
darkness that had abruptly fallen inside Gorath's spaces. But when
those fires had consumed the available oxygen, the smoke-filled ship
became as black, still, and silent as a mausoleum.
The extent of the destruction was not as obvious from the outside. The
commander of Pod 5 and his squad of assault troops saw flickering
the crushed hull plates at the impact points, noted the gun turrets
going cold, spotted the darkening of the outer hull from spot fires
within, marked the unbroken static on the command channels. Still, the
ship seemed largely intact.
Then the tethers joining the ships suddenly patted close to the
intruder's hull, and the pod commander faced a quick and irreversible
choice between following his last orders and returning to the
cruiser.
Loyalty weighed more heavily on him than obedience. As the enormous
vessel began to move off, he turned the pod toward Gorath. There was
one voice raised in protest, but the commander silenced the dissenter
with a sharp look.
"The enemy vessel is badly wounded," he said with a savage
satisfaction. "See how slowly it moves. Tobay is nearby. We will
help our brothers on Gorath, and then together we will hunt that demon
down and destroy it."
When the vagabond returned to realspace after the Prakith encounter,
the rumbling entry growl seemed to Lando to have edged closer to a
howl. He signaled to the others for silence and then listened
attentively to the sounds the vessel was making.
"'Is there a problem?" Threepio asked at last.
"I don't know," Lando said. "Get me the database on bioengineered
structures and I'll look it up. I don't know if this ship's even
susceptible to the kind of fatigue that kills metal ships. Maybe
that's why the Qella built her this way--so she could go on forever,
indestructible and self-repairing."
"That seems like a reasonable inference," Threepio
said.
"Except the mechanisms that do the repairs are just as susceptible to
failure, so you need mechanisms that repair the repair mechanisms, and
so on. Is everything working as designed? I have no idea."
"Perhaps it was damaged in the attack," said Lobot. "That could
account for the altered spectrum of the entry growl."
"How would I know?" exclaimed Lando. "I don't even know something as
elementary as what makes her go, what energy source we're tapping when
we touch a trigger point. It takes fusion generators to drive a
hyperspace engine for a capital vessel---everyone knows that, right?
But the radmeter says there are no fusion generators aboard." Lando
shook his head. "I'm half ready to throw my hands up and just say it's
magic."
"We should learn something in the next few moments," Lobot said. "The
last time the vessel jumped to escape capture, it changed course and
jumped out less than fifteen minutes later. If the ship is under the
direction of rule-based logic, as I believe it is, it should do so
again."
"Of course, we were goosing her with a cutting blaster at the time,"
Lando said wryly. "Wait--quiet."
Straining at first to do so, both men could pick out a buzzing whine
that seemed to come from a point several compartments away. As the
ship began to shudder rhythmically around them, the sound swiftly grew
louder, drowning out the normal background noises of the vessel and
acquiring a destructive-sounding rasp.
"What is that?" Lobot asked, the worry in his tone a reflection of the
worry on Lando's face. "It sounds like--" "It sounds like we're under
fire again," Lando said grimly.
"Could it be Colonel Pakkpekatt's armada?"
"Not a chance in a billion," Lando said. "Someone must have followed
us out from Prakith. Lobot, seal up your suit, fast."
"What about your missing glove?"
"Someone has to operate the portals," Lando said.
"That means bare skin. If we lose pressure, I'll make another
sample-bag mitten. But I need you functional in case I don't have time
or it won't hold. Hurry!"
By the time Lobot had snapped his helmet in place, the chamber's even
glow was flickering. As Lando retrieved an unused sample bag from the
depleted equipment sled, the chamber illumination failed entirely.
So had Threepio's courage. He had been clinging to the equipment sled
while Artoo scanned and cataloged the displays from the center of the
chamber, and now his frantic kicking had started the sled tumbling in
slow motion. "Artoo! Artoo, come here this instant. Oh, this is
ghastly--my circuits and gears can't bear any more.
Master Lando, you simply must do something. Surely now you will signal
Lady Luck."
"Forget it," Lando said, jetting toward the chamber's forward portal,
through which they'd entered a short time before. "What I'm going to
do is find out what that noise is all about."
But when he pressed his hand against the portal's trigger, nothing
happened. He repeated the motion, then turned toward Lobot. "Did you
see a one-way sign?"
Tight-lipped, Lobot shook his head.
It was the same at the other end of the chamber.
"We're locked in," Lando announced.
"What does that mean?" Threepio fretted. "You can use your blaster,
can't you?"
"Not without knowing if there's atmosphere on the other side, I can't,"
said Lando.
"This is the limit," Threepio declared. "Master Lando, I insist that
you bring your yacht here immediately-" Before the droid could complete
his demand, before Lando could voice the rejection that was forming on
his tongue, the chamber was filled with a near-deafening wail that was
the malignant cousin of the sound they
had heard earlier. But the source was much closer this time--no more
than one or two bulkheads away.
"Hear the sizzle?" Lando shouted, drifting back from the portal.
"That's the sound a blaster bolt makes when it hits a body, burning the
fat and making the water boil--but a million times worse than I ever
heard before. Someone's slicing this ship to pieces."
By then, Lando had drawn close enough to the tumbling sled for Threepio
to release his grip on it and lunge clumsily toward Lando's nearest
leg.
"What the--Threepio, what are you doing?"
Lando demanded, twisting around to see what had struck him.
Then a new sound made Lando forget about Threepio It was the muted roar
of an explosive decom-pression--a big rupture, and close by, close
enough to make the chamber walls around them ripple visibly in the
beams from Artoo's floodlamps.
"Sweet cold starlight--" Lando breathed, slowly shaking his head.
"She's in trouble now. We're all in trouble."
"There is no reason to
be fearful," Threepio said brightly. "We are
safe now."
"Shut up, Threepio. You don't know what you're talking about."
"Please don't worry, Master Lando. No one needs to worry. I have
taken care of everything," Threepio declared proudly.
"What?" Looking down, Lando saw Threepio drifting away into the
darkness with Lady Luck's beckon call clutched tightly in the hand of
his working arm. Lando grabbed at the pouch where the transmitter had
been, as though unable. to believe what the droid had done.
"Do you know what you've done?" Lando said, his tone low and
menacing.
"Why, of course. I have signaled Lady Luck to come and rescue us."
"No," Lando said, barely restraining his fury.
"You've condemned us. There's something out there big enough and
powerful enough to take on the vagabond and survive. How long do you
think Lady Luck will last after she shows up? You've called a crewless
ship into a combat zone. She's got no way to defend herself. How did
you expect her to get past whatever's out there tearing pieces out of
the hull?"