Poul Anderson - The Rebel Worlds

You understand that principle too — never giving the opposition a free ride, never missing a chance to complicate his life? Flandry thought with respect. I’ve known a number of civilians, including officers’ spouses, who didn’t.

“What about interplanetary communications?” he asked. “I assume you do mining and research on the sister worlds. You mentioned having been involved yourself. Do you think those bases were evacuated?”

“N-no. Not the main one on Dido, at least. It’s self-supportin’, kind of, and there’s too big an investment in apparatus, records, relationships with natives.” Pride talking: “I know my old colleagues. They won’t abandon simply ’cause of an invasion.”

“But your people may have suspended interplanetary talk during the emergency?”

“Yes, belike. ’Speci’ly since the Josipists probly won’t find any data on where everything is in our system. And what they can’t find, they can’t wreck.”

“They wouldn’t,” Flandry protested. “Not in mere spite.”

She retorted with an acrid: “How do you know what His Excellency may’ve told their admiral?”

The intercom’s buzz saved him from devising a reply. He flipped the switch. “Bridge to captain,” came Rovian’s thick, hissing tones. “A ship has been identified at extreme range. It appears to have started on a high-thrust intercept course to ours.”

“I’ll be right there.” Flandry stood. “You heard, my Lady?” She nodded. He thought he could see how she strained to hold exterior calm.

“Report to Emergency Station Three,” he said. “Have the yeoman on duty fit you with a spacesuit and outline combat procedure. When we close with that chap, everyone goes into armor and harness. Three will be your post. It’s near the middle of the hull, safest place, not that that’s a very glowing encomium. Tell the yeoman that I’ll want your helmet transceiver on a direct audiovisual link to the bridge and the comshack. Meanwhile, stay in this cabin, out of the way.”

“Do you ’spect danger?” she asked quietly.

“I’d better not expect anything else.” He departed. The bridge viewscreens showed Virgil astonishingly grown. Asieneuve had entered the system with a high relative true velocity, and her subsequent acceleration would have squashed her crew were it not for the counteraction of the interior gee-field. Its radiance stopped down in simulacrum, the sun burned amidst a glory of corona and zodiacal light.

Flandry assumed the command chair. Rovian said: “I suppose the vessel was orbiting, generators at minimum, until it detected us. If we wish to rendezvous with it near Aeneas” — a claw pointed at a ruddy spark off the starboard quarter — “we must commence deceleration.”

“M-m-m, I think not.” Flandry rubbed his chin. “If I were that skipper, I’d be unhappy about a hostile warship close to my home planet, whether or not she’s a little one and says she wants to parley. For all he knows, our messages are off tapes and there’s nobody here but us machines, boss.” He didn’t need to spell out what devastation could be wrought, first by any nuclear missiles that didn’t get intercepted, finally by a suicide plunge of the ship’s multiple tons at perhaps a hundred kilometers a second. “When they’ve got only one important city, a kamikaze is worth fretting about. He could get a wee bit impulsive.”

“What does the captain mean to do, then?”

Flandry activated an astronomical display. The planet-dots, orbit-circles, and vector-arrows merely gave him a rough idea of conditions, but refinements were the navigation department’s job. “Let’s see. The next planet inward, Dido they call it, past quadrature but far enough from conjunction that there’d be no ambiguity about our aiming for it. And a scientific base … cool heads … yes, I think it’d be an earnest of pious intentions if we took station around Dido. Set course for the third planet, Citizen Rovian.”

“Aye, sir.” The directives barked forth, the calculations were made, the engine sang on a deeper note as its power began to throttle down speed.

Flandry prepared a tape announcing his purposes. “If discussion is desired prior to our reaching terminus, please inform. We will keep a receiver tuned on the standard band,” he finished, and ordered continuous broadcast.

Time crept by. “What if we are not allowed to leave this system afterward?” Rovian said once in Eriau.

“Chance we take,” Flandry replied. “Not too big a risk. I judge, considering the hostage we hold. Besides, in spite of our not releasing her to him, I trust friend McCormac will be duly appreciative of our having gotten her away from that swine Snelund … No, I shouldn’t insult the race of swine, should I? His parents were brothers.”

“What do you really expect to accomplish?”

“God knows, and He hasn’t seen fit to declassify the information. Maybe nothing. Maybe opening some small channel, some way of moderating the war if not halting it. Keep the bridge for ten minutes, will you? If I can’t snake off and get a smoke, I’ll implode.”

“Can you not indulge here?”

“The captain on a human ship isn’t supposed to have human failings, they hammered into me when I was a cadet. I’ll have too many explanations to invent for my superiors as is.”

Rovian emitted a noise that possibly corresponded to a chuckle.

The hours trickled past. Virgil swelled in the screens. Rovian reported: “Latest data on the other ship indicate it has decided we are bound for Dido, and plans to get there approximately simultaneously. No communication with it thus far, though it must now be picking up our broadcast.”

“Odd. Anything on the vessel herself?” Flandry asked.

“Judging from its radiations and our radar, it has about the same tonnage and power as us but is not any Naval model.”

“No doubt the Aeneans have pressed everything into service that’ll fly, from broomsticks to washtubs. Well, that’s a relief. They can’t contemplate fighting a regular unit like ours.”

“Unless the companion—” Rovian referred to a second craft, detected a while ago after she swung past the sun.

“You told me that one can’t make Dido till hours after we do, except by going hyper; and I doubt her captain is so hot for Dido that he’ll do that, this deep in a gravitational well. No, she must be another picket, brought in on a just-in-case basis.”

Nevertheless, he called for armor and battle stations when Asieneuve neared the third planet.

It loomed gibbous before him, a vast, roiling ball of snowy cloud. No moon accompanied it. The regional Pilot’s Manual and Ephemeris described a moderately eccentric orbit whose radius vector averaged about one astronomical unit; a mass, diameter, and hence surface gravity very slightly less than Terra’s; a rotation once in eight hours and 47 minutes around an axis tilted at a crazy 38 degrees; an oxynitrogen atmosphere hotter and denser than was good for men, but breathable by them; a d-amino biochemistry, neither poisonous nor nourishing to humankind — That was virtually the whole entry. The worlds were too numerous; not even the molecules of the reel could encode much information on any but the most important.

When he had donned his own space gear, aside from gauntlets and closing the faceplate, Flandry put Kathryn McCormac on circuit. Her visage in the screen, looking out of the helmet, made him think of warrior maidens in archaic books he had read. “Well?” she asked.

“I’d like to get in touch with your research base,” he said, “but how the deuce can I find it under that pea soup?”

“They may not answer your call.”