Nigel Findley: Into the Void

Teldin looked back. Horvath's eyes, too, were locked on the Unquenchable. "What's happening?" the human asked the gnome.

"Don't know," Horvath replied shortly, then snapped, "Saliman. Get us up to speed. Oars-" he gestured his confusion "-follow that dreadnought!"

The longboat surged and began to accelerate, but Teldin knew it would never catch the Unquenchable if the larger vessel maintained its present speed. Teldin shifted his position on the thwart, and his foot struck something that rolled on the planking with a metallic sound. He reached down into the scuppers and extracted a brass tube almost as long as his forearm. Although it was rare on Krynn, Teldin recognized the object immediately: a sailor's glass. He raised it to his eye and pointed the tube at the receding ship.

The dreadnought seemed to leap closer. Through the glass he could easily see the commotion on deck. Gnomes were running everywhere, swarming into the rigging.

"Ship ho!" The voice was Miggins's, booming from the midships thwart. The gnome was pointing generally forward and upward. "High on the port bow," he called, "ahead of the 'quenchable!"

There was a cold prickling on Teldin's brow, and the flat, coppery taste of fear was in his mouth. He strained to make out the ship, bringing the glass around in the direction in which the gnome was pointing, but could see nothing against the blackness of space. You don't need to, his fear told him, you know what it looks like: a black spider, coming to kill you.

"Can you make it out?" Horvath asked.

"Is it neogi?" It took Teldin a moment to realize it was his own voice that had asked that.

In answer, the younger gnome reached forward and snatched the glass from Teldin's hands. "No, not neogi," Mig-gins replied after a dozen heartbeats, "not a deathspider. Wasp. No, three wasps."

Relief washed over Teldin like a wave. For the first time, he realized that his forearms were knotted from the death grip he had on the gunwale. With a conscious effort, he opened his hands and flexed them to restore the circulation in his fingers.

Once again he looked up into space in the direction that Mig-gins had indicated. He could see the ships-still too distant for him to pick out details, but recognizable as shapes totally different from the neogi spiderships he'd imagined. He sighed and smiled at Horvath.

"Any colors?" Horvath asked.

"None," Miggins answered, then immediately corrected himself. "Hoisting a flag now. Black field…" The young gnome's voice took on a harsher edge. "… red device. It's the neogi skull."

Teldin felt the sudden tension amid the rest of the crew. "What's happening?" he demanded. "You said they're not neogi."

"No, they're not neogi," Horvath confirmed flatly. "The neogi skull flag is universal. They're pirates."

Teldin stated at the three ships closing rapidly with the dreadnought and spreading out into a line-abreast formation. In the harsh sunlight he could make out their angular, somehow brutal configuration. They seemed so small in contrast to the bulk of the dreadnought.

"Three wasps are serious trouble," Horvath said as if in answer to Teldin's thoughts. "They've got the maneuverability, and the Unquenchable isn't in any shape for a fight, not now."

"But it's sailing right to them!" Teldin yelled.

"Sure she is." It was Dana who snapped back the answer. "In a stern chase, at that range, we'd lose. They'd rake us, and we couldn't return fire until they chose to approach."

"Maybe they haven't the stomach for a foe that wants to close," Miggins added.

"What do we do?" asked Teldin.

"Nothing," Horvath told him. "They can't retrieve a boat in a battle. We stay back." The gnome grinned, but to Teldin it looked forced. "It won't be long. We've got enough air to hold out until this is over. Even now, the Unquenchable can give a good accounting of herself. Right?"

"Right," Miggins answered heartily, a little too heartily, Teldin thought.

"I wish I were aboard," Dana mumbled.

Teldin had never seen a space battle from this perspective, and being in one wasn't the same thing at all. At first it seemed like a stately dance. From his vantage, the four ships seemed to be moving virtually at a crawl, maneuvering to get the advantage on their foe. The approaching wasps initially held to their line-abreast formation while the Unquenchable brought its bow to bear on the center pirate vessel. The dreadnought's stern was now pointing directly at the longboat. The line of wasps began to lengthen noticeably as the ships loosened up their formation.

It looked like the illustrations of naval skirmishes that Teldin had seen in his grandfather's books, but then everything changed and he realized for the first time exactly how complex a space battle could be. Suddenly, the two flanking wasps tipped their noses down and dived sharply. The line became a triangle, and suddenly another dimension had been added to the tactical picture.

"Classic tactics," Horvath muttered.

"What?"

Horvath shot an exasperated look at Teldin… then relented. "You can't know," he said tiredly. "Look you. It's the classic move for three ships engaging one. Form a triangle. If the enemy commits to attacking one ship, the other two maneuver to parallel the enemy, or 'cross its T' and rake it from astern. Whichever ship the Unquenchable goes after, the others have clean shots at her. And if the attackers have superior maneuverability and speed-which they do-all the Unquenchable can do is go after one ship. Unless…"

"Unless?"

The gnome grinned wolfishly. "Unless Wysdor remembers those dusty books we read a century or so back."

"But what can they do, anyway? They don't have any weapons left," Teldin exclaimed.

"They didn't" Horvath corrected him. "But we do have some members of the Weapons Guild aboard, and I doubt that even my brother could keep them from making some modifications over the last few hours. Now watch."

The dreadnought held its course, as though to drive straight through the center of the expanding triangle of wasp ships. Then the gnomish vessel's complex rigging shifted, and the bow started to come up until the stubby bowsprit was pointing directly at the wasp forming the triangle's apex. Teldin could almost feel the strain in the massive ship as it settled on its new course.

"I thought you said they shouldn't commit to one ship," Teldin said accusingly.

"Just watch," Horvath told him, "and learn something."

The dreadnought kept its bow pointing directly at the apex wasp. For the first time, Teldin started to sense the immense speed of closure as the ships hurtled head-on at each other. He reached back and took the glass from where it lay, forgotten, on Miggins's lap, and focused it on the pirate vessel.

The angular ship seemed to jump closer as Teldin focused through the clumsy device. It really did look like a wasp. The body was wide where the two sets of wings were mounted, but then tapered to a sharp point at the tail. The head-maybe the bridge, or maybe a fire platform-was cantilevered forward and down, giving the whole vessel a slightly hunchbacked, and decidedly evil, appearance. Six legs sprouted from the lower hull near the wing roots-probably landing gear of some kind, or maybe part of the ship's rigging, Teldin presumed. The whole ship, apart from its pale and slightly iridescent wings, was painted night black, making it difficult to focus on against the backdrop of space.

As he watched, two of the four wings shifted their angle and the vessel began to maneuver. Teldin tracked the glass over to the dreadnought, but the two vessels were too far apart to fit in the device's narrow field of view. He lowered the tube from his eye, understanding why Miggins had given up on the device: the naked eye was the only way to get a sense of the overall battle.