Harry Harrison - The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You

It was. At minimum output the nose cannon on the patrol boat drilled neatly into the iron, sending out clouds of monatomic gas. When the hole looked deep enough I sealed my suit and went out to examine it for myself, drifting down the length of the silvery drill hole.

“Looks good,” I said when I emerged. “Bolivar, do you think you can ease her in, nose first, without breaking off too many pieces of that ship?”

“A piece of cake, Dad!”

He was as good as his word, and I stood to one side as the patrol boat slid silently by and vanished from sight. Now we could plant instrumentation on the surface, connect it through to the ship, cut another hunk of asteroid to plug the hole when we went in, arrange braces for the boat…

I was facing the Gnasher as I floated there, and she was clearly visible as she stood by two kilometers away at the edge of the spatial debris field. Her ports glowed cheerfully in the interstellar darkness and I looked forward to getting back and getting my feet up after a good day’s work.

Then the black form appeared, blotting out the stars. It was big and fast, very fast, and the mouthlike glowing opening appeared even as it rushed forward. Opening and engulfing the Gnasher and closing again—then vanishing. All in an instant while I could only stay mute in paralyzed silence.

Then it was gone. The ship, Angelina, James.

Gone.

I have had my bad moments but this one, without a doubt, was just about bottom. I was frozen there, fists clenched, staring in horror at the spot where the ship had been but an instant before. Up until this time the sticky moments in my life had, for the most part, involved me and me alone. This solitary danger clears the mind wonderfully, and promotes the gushing of the adrenals when instant action is needed for survival. But now I wasn’t threatened or in danger, or possibly dead—but Angelina and James were. And there was nothing I could do.

I must have made some sound while thinking this, undoubtedly a nasty one, because Bolivar’s voice rang in my ears.

“Dad? What’s going on? Is something wrong?”

The tension broke and I dived for the ship, explaining what had happened as I shot into the airlock. He was white-faced but in control of himself when I appeared in the control compartment.

“What do we do?” he asked in a much subdued voice.

“I don’t know yet. Go after them of course—but where do we go? We need a plan…”

A high-pitched warble sounded from the communication equipment and I bulged my eyes in that direction.

“What is it?” Bolivar asked.

“A general psi-alarm. I’ve read about it in the training manuals but I never heard of it being used before.” I punched a course into the controls. “As you undoubtedly know, radio waves travel at the speed of light, so that a message transmitted from a station one hundred light years away would take a hundred years to reach us. Not the speediest form of communication. So most messages are carried in ships from point to point. This is also the only form of communication that is exempt from Einsteinian laws. Psi, which appears to be instantaneous. So the psimen can talk to one another, brain to brain, without a time lag. All of the good ones work for the League and most of these for Special Corps. There are electronic devices that can detect psi communication, but only at full strength and on a simple on-off basis. Every League ship is equipped with a detector like this, though they have never been used except in tests. To make them switch on every psiman alive broadcasts the same thought at the same time. The single word— trouble . When this psi-alarm is received every ship spacewarps to the nearest broadcast station to find out what is wrong. We’re on our way.”

“Mom and James…”

“Finding them will take some thought—and some help. And, call it a nagging hunch, but I have a feeling that this alarm is not unrelated to this present business we are involved in.”

Unhappily, I was right. We broke out near a repeater beacon and the recorded signal instantly blasted out of our radio.

“… return to base. All ships report for orders. Seventeen League planets have been attacked by alien forces in the past hour. Space war has opened on a number of fronts. Report for orders. All ships return to base. All ships… ”

I had the course set even before the message had begun to repeat itself. To Corps Main Base. There was no place else to go. Resistance to the invaders would be organized by Inskipp and all of the available information would be there. I will not tell you how we felt as the days rolled by; Bolivar and I found the time bearable only by repeating that if outright destruction were planned the fire power we had seen could have easily demolished the admirals’ satellite and our ship. They wanted the people in them alive. They had to. We did not dare think why they wanted them. Just that they were prisoners someplace and that we would get there and free them.

I flew the ship by reflex as we broke out of spacewarp near the base. Slamming in at maximum G’s, reversing at the last possible moment, again at maximum reverse thrust, killing the controls as the magnetic grapples took hold, reaching the port while it was still opening. With Bolivar at my side all of the way. We went through the corridors at the same pace and into Inskipp’s office to find him sound asleep and snoring on his desk.

“Speak,” I commanded, and he opened a pair of the reddest eyes I have ever seen. Then groaned. “I should have known. The first time I have tried to sleep in four days and you appear. Do you know what…”

“I know that one of those space-whales swallowed my cruiser along with Angelina and James and we have been bucketing back here in a patrol boat for some time.”

He was on his feet swaying. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know, we’ve been busy.” He staggered to a cabinet and gurgled dark liquid out of a crystal bottle into a glass, which he drained. I sniffed the bottle and gurgled myself the same amount.

“Explain,” I ordered. “What’s been going on?”

“Alien invasion—and let me tell you that they are good. Those space-whales are heavily armored battleships and we have never been able to dent one. We have nothing that can touch them in space. So all we can do is retreat. They’ve made no planetary landings yet that we know of, just bombardment from space, because our land based units are strong enough to keep them off. We don’t know how long this will last.”

“Then we are losing the war?“

“One hundred percent.“

“How optimistic. You wouldn’t care to tell me who we are fighting?”

“Yes. Them, these !”

He flicked on the screen and stabbed the buttons and, in gorgeous color and three-dimensional reality a loathsome form hung before us. Tentacled, slimily green, clawed and greasy, with far too many eyes sticking out in odd directions, as well as a number of other appendages best left undescribed.

“Uggh,” Bolivar said, speaking for all of us.

“Well, if you don’t like that,” Inskipp growled, “how about this – or this.” The slide show of slugs clicked by, creature after creature, each one more loathsome—was it possible?—than the one before. Hideous sqwitchy things, united only in their repugnancy.

“Enough,” I finally shouted. “A reducing diet of nausea. I won’t eat for a week after this. Which one of them is the enemy?”

“All of them. Let Prof Coypu explain.”

The recording of the professor appeared on the screen, and was quite an improvement over the creepy-crawlies despite his gnashing teeth and lecture room manner.

“We have examined the captured specimens, dissecting the dead ones and brain-vacuuming the live ones for information. What we have discovered is rather disconcerting. There are a number of life forms involved, from different planetary systems. From what they say, and we have no reason to doubt them, they are involved on a holy crusade. Their single aim is to destroy mankind, wipe all representatives of our species from the galaxy.”