Rob Chilson - Refuge

What Aranimas said was not intelligible, but energy lanced from the big ship at the rock. The rock vaporized, its outline flashing away in puffs of incandescent vapor as the guns bore. Those same mighty weapons had vaporized cubic meters of ices and snow at near absolute zero on the ice asteroid where Aranimas had first found Derec.

Underneath the flimsy camouflage was a little Star Seeker like their own.

Ariel’s vision dimmed as she cut in the rockets’ full power. In a moment, she cut them off. Her head bobbed against the headrest, and the ship was again diving toward Aranimas. He rolled and blasted to avoid them, and something monstrous slapped their flank, making the ship ring.

“Puncture!” Derec gasped, but she had no time. She had to hold him till Wolruf got there-

Aranimas rolled his big ship again, and again blasted to avoid her, throwing off his gunners’ aim. Good job, he doesn’t have computerized./ire control, Ariel thought.

She was confronted with a split-second tactical problem. In moments they’d be past the alien ship, too soon to roll nose-on toward it. Aranimas had seen their intent and was going the other way. So she rotated further in the direction the nose was pointed, to bring their tail toward the enemy.

At the critical moment she blasted, and fire splashed over Aranimas’s ship. It must have rung like a bell. There was a great outrush of air and assorted particles. Ariel was grateful she couldn’t see well enough to tell if the particles were kicking.

In a flashing moment they were past, and the reflected flame glare died, and Aranimas was moving again, fire spurting from points on the ungainly hulls. Another kind of fire flashed, their own ship gonged when hit, jolted again, as Ariel’s head rattled against the headrest and alarms yelled; Derec was saying something as she spun the ship as rapidly as shaking hands would let her. Mistake! she thought. Should never have blasted away from him; now they were far enough away for the gunners to sight them.

Clenching her teeth, Ariel rolled the ship again, trying to ignore the hits, hoping one wouldn’t disable them-or kill them. A single stray bolt would

“We’re still in their near zone,” said Derec, breathlessly. “Glancing hits only -”

True. she thought, smiling mirthlessly -they were still alive!

And then they had completed their roll, much farther from Aranimas than she liked, and she blasted back. No more hits; the uneven outline of the alien ship grew and grew in their vision screens, and she breathed more evenly.

Then she had a moment of wonder: she felt better because she was not going to be killed by Aranimas’s gunners in the next few moments. But she was trying to commit suicide by ramming his ship!

Aranimas began to slide aside and she automatically corrected, centering on the dark bulk. What should she do?

“Wolruf is closing fast, but I don’t know if she’s still maneuverable,” said Derec tensely. “She got hit hard.”

“Give her a call?”

Then Aranimas’s ship loomed monstrous and the alien had arranged a surprise: a gun on the hull swung to bear on them. What prodigies of effort had gotten it ready in the short time the battle had taken, they would never know. It was a full-sized gun, though its first bolt was weak, an aiming shot.

Aranimas’s gunners were not the timid Narwe. They were starfish-shaped creatures about whom Ariel knew little; they avoided the light and breathed a slightly different atmosphere than the rest of the crew. She felt no compunction about them, and spun the ship aside. Aranimas saw that and moved to prevent her from pointing her rockets at the new gun.

A second bolt flashed at them, but the gunners lacked Aranimas’s own savage efficiency.

“Another puncture, and our antenna’s out,” said Derec calmly.

His calmness calmed her, and she made one more attempt to ram. In turning away from her jet, Aranimas had run before their nose. She cracked on full power and they were hurled back into their seats. Her vision dimmed. She thought it was the power fading.

Too slow; the huge, bloated body of the enemy slid sideways even as it grew monstrous before them. Then the vision screen erupted in one pale flare, pale because the safety circuit wouldn’t transmit the whole visual part of the flash: the sensor had taken the next hit from the gun.

“There went our bow!” Derec cried.

Ariel gulped, half expecting to see space before her, but they hadn’t lost that much of the bow. With the vision out, she could only crouch, panting, at her board, the rocket off, hoping for

“The Key-trigger it-” she cried, turning to him, knowing in a flashing moment that it was too late-they’d hit-

The ship jolted, and the impact was quite different from the gun hits. They were thrown forward against their straps, the ship shuddered, metal squealed, something broke-all in an instant-then they were free, the ship floating quietly.

Air hissed out, alarms still burring and shrilling. All communications out, no exterior view. Ariel touched her controls and the attitude jets responded; she could turn and burn again. But they were blind.

“Suits!” said Derec. “ And see if the auto-circuit can give us more eyes.”

Suits first, she thought. When the air goes out of a small ship, it can go fast. Should have had them on all along, if they’d had time.

They scrambled into their suits in a free-fall comedy that was deadly serious. Every moment Ariel expected the lancing fire of a hit, but the ship continued serenely on its way.

They didn’t bother to try communications, knowing that the gun’s bolt, or the impact, must have destroyed the forward antennas. Vision, however, could be brought in from any quarter of the ship. Only the bow eyes were out. After a bit of fumbling, they found an undamaged sensor that bore toward their late battle.

“What…what is it?” Ariel asked, awed.

“I was about to ask you,” Derec said. “You know more about Aranimas’s ship, you were on it longer-”

“That was before my amnesia,” she said.

“Oh.”

“I think-one of the hulls, broken free?”

They had only a partial view of it-it was below the sensor’s view. Only a spinning, irregular curve of dark metal, with an occasional highlight gleaming, here and there a projection-derricks, turrets, landing ports, sensors-and interior beams?

“It can’t be the whole ship,” Derec said finally. “But what happened to it?”

Ariel took a deep breath, found the air inside her suit rank with her sweat. “I’ll turn around!” she said, chagrined. “I didn’t realize how tense I was.”

She wasn’t thinking. I’ll never be a combat pilot, she thought shakily. Wasted minutes looking into a view I could’ve adjusted-Or do pilots get used to this kind of thing?

But the human race had no combat pilots. No telling how well they could perform. Grimly, she thought, if there are many of Aranimas’s kind in space, we may have to learn.

“Aranimas-he disintegrated!” Derec said.

The big composite ship was now a dozen big pieces in a cloud of hundreds of smaller ones. They looked at each other. Derec’s face was as blank as she felt her own to be.

“Did we do that?” she asked.

“I don’t see how-Wolruf!”

After a moment she nodded. “You must be right. But where did she get the guns?”

Derec just shook his head.

If anybody was alive over there, they weren’t disposed to do any more shooting. The wreckage was retreating slowly. Ariel came to herself with a start.

“We’ve got to get back over there-”

“Frost, yes!”

But how?”

It wasn’t easy, but they worked it out. The view they had gave them bearings. They chose a spot that would enable them to miss any of the junk, and rotated the ship until its blind nose pointed along that bearing. Ariel then placed her hands on the board, looked into darkness, and thought, now we find out how good a pilot you are, girl.