Poul Anderson - Margin of Profit

“Ha, like a fish we play him! Good St. Peter the Fisherman, help us not let him get away!”

It was a bleak and savage battle, nine and a half trillion empty kilometers from anyone’s home, with no one to watch but the stars. Rentharik was a good pilot, and a desperate one. He had less power and less mass than the Mercury, but he knew how to use them, lunging, bucking, wheeling about in an attempt to ram. Live flesh could only take so much, thought Van Rijn while the thunders clattered around him. The question was, who would have to give up first?

Something snapped, loud and tortured, and he felt a rush of stinging electrified air. Petrovich cried it for him: “Burst plate—Section Four. I’ll throw a patch on, but someone’s got to weld it back or we’ll break in two.”

Van Rijn signaled curtly to Torres. “Can you play our fish? I think he is getting tired. Where are the bedamned spacesuits?”

He reeled from his chair and across the pitching deck. The Gantok was making full-powered leaps, trying to stress the Mercury into ruin. By varying their own velocity and beam-force, the humans could nullify most of the effect, but it took skill and nerve. God, but it took nerve! Van Rijn felt his clothes drenched on his body.

He found the lockers and climbed awkwardly into his specially built suit. Hadn’t worn armor in a long time—forgotten how it stank. Where was that beblistered torch, anyhow? When he got out on the hull, surrounded by the blaze of all the universe, fear was cold within him.

One of those shocks that rolled and yawed the ship underfoot could break the gravitic hold of his boots. Pitched out beyond the hyperdrive field and reverting to normal state, he would be forever lost in a microsecond as the craft flashed by at translight speeds. It would be a long fall through eternity.

Electric fire crawled over the hull. He saw the flash of the Gantok’s guns—she was firing wildly, on the one-in—a-billion chance that some shell would happen to be in phase with the Mercury . Good—let her use up her ammunition. Even so, it was a heart-bumping eerie thing when a nuclear missile passed through Van Rijn’s own body. No, by damn, through the space where they coexisted with different frequencies—must be precise—now here is that fit-for-damnation hull plate. Clamp on the jack, bend it back toward shape. Ah, heave ho, even with hydraulics it takes a strong man to do this, maybe some muscle remains under all that goose grease. Slap down your glace filter, weld the plate, handle a flame and remember the brave old days when you went hell-roaring halfway across this arm of the galaxy. Whoops, that lunge nearly tossed him off into God’s great icebox!

He finished his job, reflected that there would have to be still heavier bracing on the next ship of this model, and crept back to the air lock, trying to ignore the ache which was his body. As he entered, the rolling and plunging and racketing stopped. For a moment he thought he had been stricken deaf.

Then Torres’ face swam into the intercom, wet and haggard, and said hoarsely: “They’ve quit. I don’t think they expect their own boat can take any more of this—”

Van Rijn straightened his bruised back and whooped. “Excellent! Wonderful! But pull us up alongside quick, you lardhead, before—”

There was the twisting sensation of reversion to normal state, and the hyperdrive noise spun into silence. Van Rijn lost his footing as the Mercury sprang forward and banged against the enemy.

It had been an obvious tactic for Rentharik to use: Switching off his interstellar drive, in the hope that the Terran ship would remain hyper and flash so far away he could never be found again. The answer was equally simple—a detector coupled to an automatic cutoff, so that the Mercury would instantly do likewise. And now the League ship was immediately alongside the Gantok, snuggled beneath the very guns the frigate could no longer bring to bear and held by a tractor force she could not break.

Van Rijn struggled back to his feet and removed his helmet. The intercom blushed at his language.

“Captain!” Petrovich yelped the realization. “ They’re going to board us! ”

“Name of Judas!” van Rijn’s breastplate clashed on the deck. “Must I do all your thinking for you? What use is our pressor if not to swat off unwelcome guests?” He threw back his head and bellowed with laughter. “Let them try, let them try! Our drive field envelops theirs, so it does not matter whether they use their engines or not—and we are stronger, nie? We can drag them with us even if they fight it. All my life I have been a deep-sea fisherman. And now, full speed ahead to Antares with this little minnow that thought it was a shark!”

A hypervid call to Antares as soon as they were in range brought a League carrier out to meet them. Van Rijn turned the Gantok over to her and let Torres pilot the battered Mercury in. Himself, he wanted only to sleep.

Not that the Borthudians had tried any further stunts, after their boarding party was so cold-bloodedly shoved into deep space. Rentharik was sensible enough to know when he was beaten, and had passively let his ship be hauled away. But the strain of waiting for any possible resistance had been considerable.

Torres had wanted to communicate with the prisoned crew, but Van Rijn would not allow it. “No, no, my boy, we demoralize them more by refusing the light of our eyes. I want the good Captain Rentharik’s fingernails chewed down to the elbow when I see him.”

That was, in the governor’s mansion, in Redsun City. Van Rijn had appropriated it for his own use, complete with wine cellar and concubines. Between banquets he had found time to check on local prices and raise the tag on pepper a millicredit per gram. The colonists would grumble, but they could afford it; if it weren’t for him, their meals would be drab affairs, so didn’t he deserve an honest profit?

After three days of this, he decided it was time to see Rentharik. He lounged on the governor’s throne, pipe in one hand.

Rentharik advanced across the parquet floor, gaunt and bitter under the guns of two League gentlemen. He halted before the throne.

“Ah, so there you are!” Van Rijn beamed and waved the bottle. “I trust you have had the pleasant stay? Redsun City jails are much recommended, I am told.”

“My government will take measures,” spat the Borthudian. “You will not escape the consequences of this piracy.”

“Your maggoty little kinglet will do nothing of the sort,” declared Van Rijn. “If the civilized planets did not dare fight when he was playing buccaneer, he will not when it is the other way around. He will accept the facts and learn to love them.”

“What do you plan to do with us?”

“Well, now, it may be we can collect a little ransom for you, perhaps, eh? If not, the local iron mines are always short of labor. But out of the great goodness of my heart, I let you choose one man who may go home freely and report what has happened. After that we negotiate.”

Rentharik narrowed his lids. “See here, I know how your filthy trading system works. You won’t do anything that doesn’t pay you. And to equip a vessel like yours—one able to capture a warship—costs more than the vessel could ever hope to earn.”

“Quite so. It costs just about three times as much.”

“So…we’ll ruin the Antares route for you! Don’t think we’ll give up our patrols in our own sovereign territory. We can outlast you, if you want a struggle of attrition.”

“Ah!” Van Rijn waggled his pipestem. “That is what you cannot do, my friend. You can reduce our profit considerably, but you cannot eliminate it; therefore, we can continue the route indefinitely under present conditions. You see, each voyage nets a thirty per cent profit.”