Zach Hughes: Closed System

Pat was paralyzed until the buzz of an alarmjerked his head around, and then he was on therun, the redheaded woman following him moreslowly. Four police vehicles were approaching atdifferent angles to surround the ship. There was,as yet, no light of dawn. The ashfall had dimin­ished almost to nothing. The night-vision camerasshowed clearly that the police vehicles had uncov­ered their weapons. Pat's hand slapped switches, buttons. Shield up, weapons ready. The lead vehi­cle mounted a respectable laser cannon with along, graceful barrel. Up close, it could punch ahole in Skimmer's shield and hull.

"Should we be worried about this?" he askedthe girl.

She was taut, her mouth open, eyes narrowed."I'm not sure."

"Did the Man know you planned to leave?" Hereyes instantly shifted away from his.

"Quickly," he said, his voice urgent. "I'm goingto have to rely on your knowledge and judgment. Idon't want to do anything drastic unlessit'snecessary."

She seemed doubtful. "He was in the outback.Not due back until tomorrow."

The lead vehicle had come to a halt, cannonpointed toward Skimmer's weakest point, the mainentry hatch. The same tall, efficient security manwho had visited him only a short time before wasstanding behind the laser cannon. Pat activatedthe outside pickups.

"You have just ten seconds to open, Captain,and then we'll blast you open."

He couldn't wait for more information from thegirl. "Wake up, old man," he told the computer.The blink was already programmed, but it wascustomary for a ship to lift from the surface onflux. It was possible to blink away from a planet'ssurface, but decidedly unsafe for anything nearenough to the ship to be affected by the field of theblink generator.

The policeman was counting,"...six, five . . ."

"Let's go, baby," Pat said, hitting the buttonwhich activated the drive circuits.

"...three, two . . ."

There was a brief, uneasy slide into nothingness.On the screen Pat saw three of the police vehicles tumbling in free space. They'd been too near the ship. They'd been enclosed in Skimmer's powerfulfield, and now men were dying of explosive de­compression in the vacuum of space. A body, burst­ing as he watched, separated itself from a vehicleand spun slowly, eerie things happening to frailflesh and blood. It was the security officer.

"Oh, my God," Corinne Tower whispered as analarm screamed, sending Pat into motion. Two Taratwo light cruisers were closing rapidly. His screen was up. He jerked the fire-control helmetonto his head, wondering how the hell the cruisershad known to be there. True, a blinking ship sends a signal ahead of itself into space, pointing to the emergence site, but the cruisers would have had to be ready to blink instantly, would have had to bewatching him in order to detect that preblink signal.

Gun ports began to flare on the closing warships. Lasers. Two sleek and deadly ship-to-shipmissiles swam out as if in slow motion from thelead cruiser and then accelerated with slashes of light. Range seven miles. Seconds. No time toprogram a blink. The lead missile was growing rap­idly on the screen as the ship buzzed and screamedwarnings.

"Alert, alert," the computer chanted, losing, forthe moment, its reluctance for audio commun­ication.

"I hear you," Pat said, forgetting the presence ofthe tense, silent girl.

He had only one advantage. He couldn't hope to match shields and armaments with two new cruis­ers, but he had power to spare, power built into theold space tug, power to latch on to and haul the biggest space liner ever built, the generator built oversize, huge enough to store power for multipleblinks without draining the charge. He had usedonly a small portion of the charge in blinking up from the surface of Taratwo.

No time to select known coordinates. No time totrust a cranky, aging computer to obey a vocal order to select a registered blink beacon at ran­dom and put it in B for boogie. The old boy mightdecide to take a full survey of all blink beaconswithin range.

He acted on his only choice.

In spite of what Jeanny Thompson, and others,might have thought, Pat Howe was not like some old-fashioned mercenaries, imbued with a secret death wish, seeking danger for the thrill of riskingit, courting the final solution, death, as ordinarymen court women. Pat valued his freedom, and hevalued his life. He did what he had to do to pre­serve that life with two homing missiles inchesaway from his thrusters, heading in, and two light cruisers tickling Skimmer's shield with laser can­non. Either of the cruisers could best him in aclose-in fight, and there was no question in hismind that their intent was to blast him out ofspace.

The computer was cranky. The missiles shouldhave been taken out by AMMs before they wereallowed to get in so close. At the last moment the old man sent out the hunter-killer AMMs, and the resultant explosions were far too close to the hull,but there was no new blare of noise from thealarms to indicate hull rupture, only a wild ridefor a moment, and then Pat's fingers stabbed once,twice, three times and there was that sliding feel­ing of blinking and he was still alive and breath­ing after doing the most dangerous thing a spacemancould do, take a wild blink.

Taking a random blink was recklessly dangerousbecause astronomical bodies ranging in size downto the tiniest asteroids were deadly hazards. Twobodies cannot exist at the same point in space andtime. A ship, passing through that nowhere whichis a blink, would merge, down to the molecularlevel, with any object already occupying a point inspace and time on the chosen route, the resultbeing instant death for any life form.

Pat had gambled and he'd won. He had set coor­dinates in no conscious order. It gave him, how­ever, only a few seconds respite, for the Taratwocruisers were equipped with the latest in follow-and-detect equipment, and there they were, withinten miles of the Skimmer, and they loosed a cloudof missiles, leaped into motion to close the range.Pat had to stay ahead of them. It was obvious nowthat they were equipped with the new multiblinkgenerators. There were so many missiles comingthat he didn't have enough AMMs to stop them.His fingers jabbed figures off the top of his headinto the computer.

The children of Old Earth had brought into spacewith them the legend of a deadly, ancient gameplayed

with an antique projectile weapon with six chambers for explosive-driven bullets. Pat's gamewas like that ancient one. He had pulled thetrigger once and the firing pin had fallen on anempty chamber. He pulled the trigger a secondtime, held his breath through the blink slide, lived,and the two cruisers were right behind him.

He fired his own missiles, hating to do it. Thedamned things were the latest Zedeian technologyand they cost a mint, but it would give him sec­onds while the cruisers put out their own AMMs towipe out his total missile armament. Surely, con­sidering the value of space aboard a ship of theline, the cruisers wouldn't be able to follow stillanother multiblink without recharging. But he'dwon a deadly gamble twice. He didn't dare try it a third time. With the few seconds he'd bought with his six missiles, he told the computer to pick thenearest blink beacon and go.

"Arrrr," he growled, the sound becoming amoan as the old man began to make a total surveyof all blink beacons within ten parsecs. An alarmscreamed, telling him that the shield had taken a direct laser hit. The screen gave off an odd aromaof strain and heat. He'd had that scent in his nose only once before, when he was playing dodge-'emwith that pirate ship out near the Hogg Moons.His instruments told him that the power of theshield was already down, expended in absorbingthe close, direct blaze of the cannon.

So, with a silent prayer, he pulled the triggerand came out close to a blazing sun, a very nearthing, and now more alarms clanged, telling himof too much heat, too much radiation in the solarwind from the star which filled his viewscreens.He considered kicking in the flux drive, but thatwould take too long. By the time he gained safedistance from the star the entire hull would beradioactive. He punched in a very, very short blink,a relatively safe blink, just to the limit of his opti­cal scanners, and he disappeared just as the twocruisers emerged. This time he had empty spacearound him, after his fourth random blink, the lastone less risky than the first three. He put theSkimmeron flux to get him away from the point ofemergence. The fact that the two Taratwo cruisers hadn't followed immediately indicated that they'dhave to charge their generators before blinkingagain, and by that time the flux drive would haveput him beyond the range of their sensors. Hecould take his time finding a blink beacon and make one more leap before he had to rechargeSkimmer'sgenerator. He wasn't about to try for afifth empty chamber in the gun.