Poul Anderson - Ensign Flandry

Moments later he regained consciousness. He was falling, falling forever, and blind … no, he thought through the ringing in his head, the lights were out, the gravs were out, he floated free admidst the moan of escaping air. Blood from his nose formed globules which, weightless, threatened to strangle him. He sucked to draw them down his throat. “Dragoika!” he rasped. “Dragoika!”

Her helmet beam sprang forth. She was a shadow behind it, but the voice came clear and taut: “Domma-neek, are you hale? What happened? Here, here is my hand.”

“We took a direct hit.” He shook himself, limb by limb, felt pain boil in his body but marveled that nothing appeared seriously injured. Well, space armor was designed to take shocks. “Nothing in here is working, so I don’t know what the ship’s condition is. Let’s try to find out. Yes, hang onto me. Push against things, not too hard. It’s like swimming. Do you feel sick?”

“No. I feel as in a dream, nothing else.” She got the basic technique of null-gee motion fast.

They entered the corridor. Undiffused, their lamplight made dull puddles amidst a crowding murk. Ribs thrust out past twisted, buckled plates. Half of a spacesuited man drifted in a blood-cloud which Flandry must wipe off his helmet. No radio spoke. The silence was of a tomb.

The nuclear warhead that got through could not have been very large. But where it struck, ruin was total. Elsewhere, though, forcefields, bulkheads, baffles, breakaway lines had given what protection they could. Thus Flandry and Dragoika survived. Did anyone else? He called and called, but got no answer.

A hole filled with stars yawned before him. He told her to stay put and flitted forth on impellers. Saxo, merely the brightest of the diamond points around him, transitted the specter arch of the Milky Way. It cast enough light for him to see. The fragment of ship from which he had emerged spun slowly—luck, that, or Coriolis force would have sickened him and perhaps her. An energy cannon turret looked intact. Further off tumbled larger pieces, ugly against cold serene heaven.

He tried his radio again, now when he was outside screening metal. With her secondary engines gone, the remnants of Sabik had reverted to normal state. “Ensign Flandry from Section Four. Come in, anyone. Come in!”

A voice trickled through. Cosmic interference seethed behind it. “Commander Ranjit Singh in Section Two. I am assuming command unless a superior officer turns out to be alive. Report your condition.”

Flandry did. “Shall we join you, sir?” he finished.

“No. Check that gun. Report whether it’s in working order. If so, man it.”

“But sir, we’re disabled. The cruiser’s gone on to fight elsewhere. Nobody’ll bother with us.”

“That remains to be seen, Ensign. If the battle pattern should release a bogie, he may decide he’ll make sure of us. Go to your gun.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Dead bodies floated in the turret. They were not mutilated; but two or three thousand roentgens must have sleeted through all shielding. Flandry and Dragoika hauled them out and cast them adrift. As they dwindled among the stars, she sang to them the Song of Mourning. I wouldn’t mind such a send-off, he thought.

The gun was useable. Flandry rehearsed Dragoika in emergency manual control. They’d alternate at the hydraulic aiming system and the handwheel which recharged the batteries that drove it. She was as strong as he.

Thereafter they waited. “I never thought to die in a place like this,” she said. “But my end will be in battle, and with the finest of comrades. How we shall yarn, in the Land of Trees Beyond !”

“We might survive yet,” he said. Starlight flashed off the teeth in his bruised and blood-smeared face.

“Don’t fool yourself. Unworthy of you.”

“Unworthy my left one! I plain don’t intend to quit till I’m dead.”

“I see. Maybe that is what has made you vaz-Terran great.”

The Merseian came.

She was a destroyer. Umbriel, locked in combat with the badly hurt enemy cruiser, had inflicted grave harm on her, too. Murdoch’s Land was shattered, Antarctica out of action until repairs could be made, but they had accounted for two of her fellows. New Brazil dueled yet with the third. This fourth one suffered from a damaged hyperdrive alternator. Until her sweating engineers could repair it, which would take an hour or so, her superlight speed was a crawl; any vessel in better shape could wipe her from the universe. Her captain resolved he would go back to where the remnants of Sabik orbited and spend the interim cleaning them out. For the general order was that none but Merseians might enter this region and live.

She flashed into reality. Her missiles were spent, but guns licked with fire-tongues and shells. The main part of the battleship’s dismembered hulk took their impact, glowed, broke, and returned the attack.

“Yow-w-w!” Dragoika’s yell was pure exultation. She spun the handwheel demoniacally fast. Flandry pushed himself into the saddle. His cannon swung about. The bit of hull counter-rotated. He adjusted, got the destroyer’s after section in his cross-hairs, and pulled trigger.

Capacitors discharged. Their energy content was limited; that was why the gun must be laid by hand, to conserve every last erg for revenge. Flame spat across kilometers. Steel sublimed. A wound opened. Air gushed forth, white with condensing water vapor.

The destroyer applied backward thrust. Flandry followed, holding his beam to the same spot, driving inward and inward. From four other pieces of Sabik, death vomited.

“Man,” Flandry chanted, “but you’ve got a Tigery by the tail!”

Remorselessly, spin took him out of sight. He waited, fuming. When he could again aim, the destroyer was further away, and she had turned one battleship section into gas. But the rest fought on. He joined his beam to theirs. She was retreating under gravities. Why didn’t she go hyper and get the hell out of here? Maybe she couldn’t. He himself had been shooting to disable her quantum-field generator. Maybe he’d succeeded.

“Kursoviki!” Dragoika shrieked at the wheel. “Archers all! Janjevar va-Radovik for aye!”

A gun swiveled toward them. He could see it, tiny at its distance, thin and deadly. He shifted aim. His fire melted the muzzle shut.

The destroyer scuttled away. And then, suddenly, there was New Brazil. Flandry darted from his seat, caught Dragoika to him, held her faceplate against his breast and closed his own eyes. When they looked again, the Merseian was white-hot meteorites. They hugged each other in their armor.

Umbriel, Antarctica, and New Brazil: torn, battered, lame, filled with the horribly wounded, haunted by their dead, but victorious, victorious—neared the planet. The scoutships had long since finished their work and departed Empire-ward. Yet Ranjit Singh would give his men a look at the prize they had won.

On the cruiser’s bridge, Flandry and Dragoika stood with him. The planet filled the forward viewscreen. It was hardly larger than Luna. Like Terra’s moon, it was bereft of air, water, life; such had bled away to space over billions of years. Mountains bared fangs at the stars, above ashen plains. Barren, empty, blind as a skull, the rogue rushed on to its destiny.

“One planet,” the acting captain breathed. “One wretched sunless planet.”

“It’s enough, sir,” Flandry said. Exhaustion pulsed through him in huge soft waves. To sleep … to sleep, perchance to dream … “On a collision course with Saxo. It’ll strike inside of five years. That much mass, simply falling from infinity, carries the energy of three years’ stellar radiation. Which will have to be discharged somehow, in a matter of seconds. And Saxo is an F5, shortlived, due to start expanding in less than a begayear. The instabilities must already be building up. The impact—Saxo will go nova. Explode.”