Gordon Dickson - Hour of the Horde

Their efficiency and potency with the weapons climbed sharply. By the time the Horde was less than a week from decision point—that moment in which retreat would be no longer possible for the ships of the Battle Lines—Miles’ rating charts showed the Fighting Rowboat to have more than doubled her effectiveness since the time the Center Alien had come to observe them.

“But they’ll still never agree to let us fight,” said Eff, standing beside Miles as he checked the last point of advance on the chart. “We’re still only animals to them. Useful because they can drink our blood before the battle to make themselves strong for it. But aside from that, we’re just so many cattle to be left behind when the real action comes!”

“Still, anything can happen,” answered Luhon softly from Miles’ other side. “Maybe the Horde will decide whether we fight them or not. Maybe the decision won’t be up to the Center Aliens once the real fighting starts.”

Miles said nothing. But he understood the other two, just as he understood the new, welded singleness of decision of all aboard the Fighting Rowboat. The other twenty-two had come to the point he himself had reached a long time ago. They had stopped trying to reconcile the powerful, undeniable feelings burning within them with the cold and distant attitude of the Center Aliens. Now they simply disregarded the fact that the Center Aliens had refused them the right to fight when the battle was joined. They ignored that refusal and continued to prepare themselves as though their part in that battle were inevitable.

Meanwhile, the Horde came on.

Three days until Decision Point.

Two days.

One. Miles got up from his seat before the control console and the vision screen. He walked back through the ship, past the rest of the twenty-two. They sat, silently working with their weapons. Miles went alone out onto the platform.

He looked off into the direction in which the Horde was coming.

But here, to the naked eye, there was nothing to see. The silver ships were still buried in intergalactic darkness, light-years distant and invisible still.

Here there was nothing but the shape of the Fighting Rowboat, silent under the distant light of the artificial sun overlooking the Battle Line, and the storage shed, motionless on the glinting metal deck of the platform. Miles looked to his right.

Dimly, off there in airlessness, was a little reflection—a faint gleam from the small ship next to the Fighting Rowboat. He turned around.

Behind him stretched the long line of misty whiteness that was the spiral of the galaxy he was here to defend, now shrunk to a spindle shape, so distant that the shape of the Earth he had come from was more than dwindled into invisibility—it had become a part of a whole.

He turned back to look out again into the darkness where the powerful eye of the vision screen had told him that the Horde was rushing down on him at translight speeds. Just hours and minutes away now—and still invisible to the unaided vision.

He chilled at the massiveness of the scene compared to his own smallness as he stood here between the glowing line of the uncounted stars of his galaxy and the uncounted ships of the invisible Horde—part of one single Battle Line of which his ship was the last and least.

Here, as he stood on the platform by the silent ship, it seemed to him suddenly that none of it was real—Horde, galaxy, or Battle Line. Either that or he had been caught in a dispute between things huge and invisible and placed out here to be crushed by the clash of their meeting…

He turned and went slowly back across the platform, up the ladder, and back into the ship. He went back up the corridor to the control room, where Luhon and Eff still sat in their seats before their controls, gazing at the screen, and he took the empty commander’s seat between them.

He looked at the screen.

It had been extended now, curved forward through forty-five degrees at each end to encompass the full picture of the Horde as it was now seen from the viewpoint of their ship in the Battle Line. Now, in the directionless blackness of intergalactic space, it no longer seemed to be coming at them horizontally.

It had expanded to fill the expanded screen horizontally and stretch into the screen additions with the hornlike tips of its forward-curving ends, but it had expanded as well in its middle section to fill the center screen from top to bottom. Now it seemed to be not so much ahead of them as above them, hanging over them, rushing down on them like some great voracious amoeba, pulsing with life in the successive shifts of its successive lines of ships, its horntip arms already stretching forward to enclose them and cut off retreat.

“Those armtips must be level with us now, don’t you think?” said Luhon, echoing Miles’ own unspoken thought. All of the twenty-three aboard the ship had seemed to think with one mind lately. Luhon punched controls on the console before him, requesting a calculation.

After a moment the result flickered on the small console screen. He touched the wipe-out button.

“Yes,” he said. “Theoretically, they’ve got ships behind us now.”

“How long to Decision Point?” asked Miles.

“Five hours, some minutes,” said Eff.

Time went by. Now it was just four and a half hours to Decision Point…

Four hours to Decision Point…

Three…

Two…

One hour. Thirty minutes…

“What’s the matter with them?” snarled Eff. For once his cheerful, bearlike face was all animal fury. “What are they waiting for? What’s going to happen that’s new in the next few minutes—”

“Attention!” The communications speaker above them broke suddenly into life with the flat, passionless voice of a Center Alien. “Attention! Your weapons are now unlocked, ready to be used. You will leave the Battle Line immediately, head back into the galaxy, and attempt to find a hiding place around or on some world of a system that does not possess organic life. I will repeat that. Your ship’s weapon controls and weapons are now unlocked. You are to leave the Battle Line immediately, return to the galaxy, and hide yourselves on some lifeless solar system.”

The voice ceased as suddenly as it had begun. So quietly had it spoken, so abruptly had it stopped speaking, that it was a few seconds before Miles and the others were able to react. Then a wave of common emotion—felt along that network of emotional sensitivity that enclosed them all—swept throughout the ship like a silent moan of disbelief and new fury.

“They’re sending us away,” whispered Luhon. His eyes were glittering. “They can’t do that to us.”

“That’s right,” said Miles in a voice he hardly recognized as his own. “They can’t!”

He was already busy, jabbing at the call button of the communicator in front of him.

“Answer me!” he snapped into the voice grille of the console before him. “Answer me! I’m calling for an answer!”

But there was no answer. Miles continued to call and jab at the button until at last his hand dropped in defeat.

“They won’t answer,” he muttered. For a moment he sat without moving; then at a sudden thought, his hand leaped out again to punch for a picture of the Battle Line, stretching away to their right.

It took shape on the screen in front of him. He pulled back the focus until he was able to see several dozen of the ships stretching off to the right. As he watched, one of the ships disappeared—it had gone into shift.

A moment later, the ship only two stations up from the Fighting Rowboat also blinked out and disappeared.

Miles felt coldness flood through him on a wave of icy shock.