E c tubb, p.15
E C Tubb, page 15
"Machen!" Varl slammed his hand on the intercom. "Get up here! You too, Erica!"
He was busy when they arrived, taking sights, checking position.
"Plot a course," he said to the navigator. "One which will take us along the line of drift. Stay well clear of all obstructions. I don't want to get anywhere near to those shapes."
"A power source?"
"Yes."
"Hydee? If so -- "
"Rocket." Varl turned to the woman as the other set to work. "Check those figures of yours for any clue as to what Kreutzal thought he might run into. Did he make any repeat journeys to a special point?
Did he favor any particular length of jump? Take any unusual precautions? Any special equipment?"
"You have something in mind?"
"I'm wondering if he found this place before he vanished. If so, he might have left something to help us."
"I'll look." Erica was not too optimistic. "But if he'd found anything of value, we'd know it. My guess is that if it exists it'll be in his ship."
Varl intended to find that ship. As Machen worked on his calculations, Varl rechecked his plan. To blast along the general direction of drift might not be the simple thing it seemed. Would speed alone cause the drifting shapes to react? Would their speed be enough to save them? And would their increased velocity alone be enough to send them from the path Kreutzal might have taken?
He was balancing probabilities, setting risk against potential gain -- should they run now while they had the chance or make one last effort to accomplish their mission?
His hand reached for the intercom.
"Your attention, please! Hear this! We are going to blast down the drift. Man all stations. External gunners to stand by for action. Ten minutes. Mark!"
"No," Varl said in answer to a query from Lydon. "We won't need the PEAP to be activated."
"Maybe he hopes to call Kreutzal back from the dead." Machen handed Varl the course he had plotted. "I'm working in the dark as regards the effectiveness of the rockets in these conditions. But follow these targets and we should stay constant relative to the drift. If the drift is constant. If the targets don't move. If -- " He broke off, shrugging. "What I'm really saying is that you'll have to guide the ship by guess and by God."
"Rather I didn't?"
"Hell, no! If we're going, let's go in glory!"
Such euphoria could vanish to leave a black depression, but for the moment it ruled. Varl checked his instruments, watched the final seconds die on the chronometer, and dropped his hands to the controls.
The _Odile_ became fully alive.
A ship designed for space, mobile, adorned with fire, it thrummed with pulsing vibrations as it moved. Varl watched the shapes as they spun close and passed while others took their places. Gradually he increased the thrust, aiming at the points Machen had designated, frowning as subtle distortions increased.
"The left!" Machen warned. "Watch the left!"
A spiral spun and turned into a frothing mass of jutting spears -- the threat fell behind as another loomed ahead. A bizarre combination of cones and rods and rounded protrusions expanded to form a shimmering web.
Varl hit the warning button and increased the thrust. The web grew larger, closer, to hit and almost hold, then the _Odile_ was through, leaving curling ends and shattered symmetry.
"God!" Machen gusted his relief. "That was close!"
Too close. Had the thing moved to intercept the ship? If so, how? There had been clear space and then, without warning, the shape had appeared.
Varl adjusted the controls as another loomed ahead; a rounded ball thick with enigmatic lumps which had not been there a moment before. The _Odile_ shuddered to the thrust of guiding rockets and the ball fell behind as they passed to one side. The mass was as large as a planetoid, blotched with a riot of color, touched with transient glitters that were repeated from something far ahead.
"Lydon!" Varl snapped into the intercom. "Can you change the polarity of your machine?"
"Change -- I don't understand."
"Reverse its effect. Send out an emission which emulates death, not life." Why couldn't the fool understand? "A negative effect instead of a positive one. Can you do it?"
"I don't know."
"Try! Get at it and try!" Varl broke the connection.
"Do you think it will work?" Machen said.
"It might. It's a chance.
"Reverse the polarity," the navigator mused. "If one attracts, the opposite should repel. Let's hope it does. You're thinking of what threw us into this space?"
Varl nodded.
"Is that why you've drifted for so long?"
"We came to find Kreutzal."
"Sure, but that thing could be waiting, and you want to increase the odds on our chances of survival.
So drift, find a reason for doing it, but give that thing time to forget us. You're shrewd. Damned shrewd
-- I hope you're as lucky."
Varl shared that hope. In this world dimension he needed all the luck he could find.
Ahead the small glitters had grown brighter and the shapes on all sides seemed closer. They thronged in all directions, resembling oddly shaped asteroids; peanuts, doughnuts, warped crystals, puffed grains of rice, puckered sponges, all on a gigantic scale yet seeming to be smaller than before.
Had speed increased the size of the _Odile?_ That illusion would account for the apparent diminution.
Varl fed power into the port jets and saw the shimmering twists of convoluted crystal which had appeared before him swing to one side. Its movement was an illusion; the ship had moved, not the shape.
Another appeared, flowering as he watched into a spined and writhing monstrosity, avoided as again the steering rockets cut space with streamers of flame.
"Fast!" Machen was tense in his seat. "We're going too damned fast!"
When Varl had won the Lacerta Trophy years before, he had gone too fast. But the _Odile_ was not a sleek racer and the hazards were not drifting balloons. He had slashed to victory in the race with the hydee jumping in microseconds, fantastic velocity which had carried him clear. In the alien space he had only the relatively sluggish rockets to set against the menace of the shapes.
And, as Machen had said, he was going too fast.
"Stand by for reverse!" He yelled the warning. "On three! Mark!"
The _Odile_ spun, the venturis spouting flame in their direction of motion, cutting down their velocity with the impact of pulsing hammers. There was a time of jarring punishment, then Varl cut the drive and spun the ship again to stare at the screens and what lay ahead.
"What the hell is that?" Machen cried.
Before them shone a cluster of brilliant particles. Shot with glimmers and restless movement, the objects darted to hang, then to dart again, like a swarm of gnats all blazing in brilliant colors. And among them --
Varl blinked and saw burning afterimages on his retinas.
"Ships!" Machen's voice rose with incredulity. "They're ships!"
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*CHAPTER 24*
THE vessels were old, scarred, stained with time. As the _Odile_ approached, the ships grew larger, jumping into clearer detail as Varl stepped up the magnification of the screens. The _Bismarck_.
The _Aphrodite_. The _Warnemunde_. He noted the names as he took in other details, the coded markings, the designs.
"Old," Machen said. "That type of hull went out before I was born. What the hell are they doing here?"
Paying the price of ignorance or attack, Varl thought. The ships had been thrown into this alien dimension to be caught in the drift, moving on to some final resting place as ships of old lost in a vast ocean had ended in the Sargasso Sea. If the _Odile_ and her crew could forge ahead, catch up with the first vessels to be trapped, they might find Kreutzal's among them.
As he reached for the controls, color blazed from the screens.
The darting objects had come close, no longer gnats but swollen ovoids, as large as the _Odile,_
vaned, pointed, curved with bizarre configurations.
One flickered and vanished to appear directly ahead. Ahead and close!
The _Odile_ slewed as Varl hit the controls, tongues of fire streaming from the guidance jets to
touch the alien shape with incandescent fingers. A vane sagged, a curved protuberance turned into a gust of vapor, then the thing backed to hover wreathed in a shimmer of green.
From it a bolt of lavender lanced at the _Odile._
Varl felt the impact, read the damage from his instruments. He heard, too, the scream torn from a human throat. He slammed his hand on the alarm.
"Battle stations! All guns open fire! Torps! Loose at -- " He broke off, staring, not daring to move.
Beside him, hovering like a glowing silver ball, something had appeared. It moved as he watched, drifting back to elongate into a cylinder, constricting to a thin disc, expanding to a sphere, narrowing to a glittering spindle. It was the thing he had caught a glimpse of in the passage; the thing Rachel had seen before it had touched Ivan Yegorovich to leave him living but dissected on the floor; the thing that had spread Ovidio over the hull as if he had been made of butter.
"Don't move!" Varl rapped the order as Machen, seeing the intruder, started to rise. "Don't attract it!"
"My, God, Commander! If -- "
"Don't move!"
Play possum, play dead, hope it goes away. Freeze and maybe it won't see you and you'll live to laugh another day; live to laugh and love and walk free instead of sitting, damp with fear, guts churning in knowledge of what the thing could do, dying a thousand deaths in the anticipation of one.
As the pulse of guns shook the _Odile,_ Varl looked at the screens, at the glittering ovoids darting like a mass of fireflies or a swarm of wasps. Together? Were they and the shining thing a part of some monstrous whole? Or were they a form of predator like lice feeding on the afflicted?
"No!" Machen felt sweat break out on his body as the glittering spindle changed and edged toward him. "Dear God, no!"
He rose to throw himself away and to one side, then screamed. Flesh fell from his arm, his side, the length of his thigh, breaking open to expose the cage of his ribs, the lungs, the white sheen of bone, the yellow of fat. His whole body followed the break, opening as if unfolding.
A man was turned into a shrieking, carmine flower.
Varl snarled, one hand leaping at the controls as the other snatched at the laser clipped beneath the wide arm of his chair. As the venturis spouted to life he lifted the weapon, firing, sending flashes of searing, merciful heat into the distorted flesh of the navigator.
"Lydon! The machine! Turn on your machine!"
He continued to fire as he yelled, aiming at the shining spindle, seeing the hull beyond sprout blackened patches, jamming back the trigger and venting the last of the charge in a beam of continued energy to cut and slash and cut again at the spindle, and at the place where the spindle had been.
"Lydon!"
"I'm working on it! Reverse polarity?"
"Yes. Reitsch? Start the field! We're going into hyperspace!" The magic of the hydee would be used to escape the terror of the alien death which had struck at them.
The menace of the burning ovoids massed closer, too close -- Varl fed power into the jets as he veered the ship, using the incandescent blast as a weapon to drive the enemy back, to clear an area. He ignored the blood that gushed from his nose as savage accelerations slammed him hard against his chair.
On the instrument panel telltales flickered, then steadied as the scream of the hydee rose above the general din. The scream told of misaligned coils and inefficient working.
"Reitsch!"
"I'm adjusting -- doing what I can. Maybe if -- "
"Maintain the power!" Varl remembered Asner's warning. "Keep it going! Cascade the field -- if you lose it we're dead!"
More bodies would be added to the others; Machen and whoever it was had screamed. Erica?
Dear God, let it not be her!
"Fire! Keep firing! Loose the torps!"
They were aiming blind, but the shooting kept them busy and held the thing at bay. The hydee
screamed and the _Odile_ shuddered and the roar of venturis became a threnody. The fight gained them time -- time for power to build the field, for energy to flow from the accumulators, the pile, concentrating power on power to cascade, their one hope of safety. The ship jerked and the guns fired and the air grew thick with the stench of fire and blood.
And all at once there was calm.
Varl stared at the screens, seeing the familiar gray nothingness of hyperspace. He killed the rockets; the guns fell silent. He was conscious of a terrible negation as if all life had been drained from his body --
and he was convinced that he was the one man left alive in the entire universe.
"Kurt!" Erica entered the control room and ran toward him, not looking at the mess on the floor. "I feel -- "
"Dead. I know. Dead and lost and alone. It's Lydon's machine. He got it going in time. Reverse polarity." His arms closed around her as she came to him, but, oddly, he still felt alone. "A heterodyning effect. He's damped out all mental emanations."
Lydon had turned the _Odile_ into an apparent coffin, finding the answer to the terror as he had saved them all.
They were still in hyperspace, but the thing that had attacked them was gone. They had repelled it or made themselves so inconspicuous that it no longer reacted to their presence.
"It can be copied," Varl said. "Refined and fitted to all ships. We didn't find Kreutzal, but we did what we set out to do. They'll be no more _Lewannas_."
"Kalif will be glad," Erica said. Then she cried out in alarm. "Kurt!"
The note of the hydee had faltered, becoming a grating whine which rose to fall, then suddenly broke. In the screens the grayness vanished to be replaced with the cold glory of distant stars.
"Reitsch?"
"It's gone, Commander. The entire unit's a mass of slag."
They had broken out into normal space, but without the hydee they could be stranded light-years from any habitable world. With rocket power alone they would starve.
A moment of fear dissolved as Varl checked the screens and the eye-searing brilliance of a nearby sun.
"We can make it." Varl felt the euphoria of release from strain. "We'll use the rockets to signal.
They'll be seen and a ship will come out to rescue us. Erica, we've made it!" He swept her up in his arms.
"We're safe, girl! Safe!"
She responded to his embrace, her lips warm against his own, then he felt her stiffen in his arms, and saw what had quenched her joy.
In the screens something loomed huge and menacing, a great ovoid blazing with a riot of color, vaned, pointed, curved in bizarre configurations -- something they had seen before in an alien dimension.
"A ship!" Varl knew it had to be that. "It must have followed us!" The alarm blared as he hit the button. "Battle stations! Prepare for attack!"
The attack came as the echoes died, and in his turret Stan Carter screamed as the flesh roasted on his bones in a blaze of lavender fire. The scream was repeated by another. Then a third.
"Fire!" Varl fed power to the jets, and the _Odile_ shuddered, sluing beneath opposed thrusts to form scythes of incandescent fury. "All guns keep firing!"
Green iridescence flared from the vessel as beams and shells struck home, then the bright shimmer died, leaving a lambent hue. A protective screen, Varl guessed, lowered to project the lavender fire. "The torps! Owen -- the torps!"
A torpedo lanced from its housing to meet lavender and dissolve in brilliance. Another missed; the _Odile_ felt the impact of violent forces and echoed to dying screams.
"Owen?"
"Dead." The voice was unrecognizable. "He's dead."
"Stacey! Reitsch? Mboto!" Varl did not wait for answers. "All guns cease fire! Cease firing!" He turned to Erica. "Take over control," he snapped. "Kill the ship and let it spin under momentum. Get ready to loose the torpedoes when I give the word."
"Kurt! What -- "
Before she could ask her question, he was gone, racing to the lock, suiting up, triggering the cycle as the inner door closed. A moment later he looked at naked space, the stars, the alien ship that threatened his command.
It hung in a web of green as if watching its helpless prey, then it fell below the curve of the hull as the _Odile_ slowly turned on its long axis. As the alien ship dropped out of sight, Varl threw himself from the lock, magnetic boots scraping on the plating, one hand snapping fast the end of his line. Straightening, he made his way forward to the humped bulk of a seared, blackened external gun. The gunner was dead --
behind the faceplate grinned a naked skull. Releasing the body, Varl took its place. The damaged weapon still functioned when he checked it.
The alien ship again came into view. It had not moved, its apparent motion due to the _Odile's_
own, and Varl watched, gauging just when the alien would be in line with the bow.
"Erica?" he said over the com line.
"All ready, Kurt."
"Good. I'm in position. Aim directly ahead and loose the torps when I give the word. Understood?"
There was no answer, as he had expected. The stars wheeled above and around him and he waited, tension mounting, praying the alien would not move. Then, as the alien ship passed overhead toward the bow, he swung up the muzzle and waited.
As the edge of the blazing ovoid touched the curve of the bow he jammed back the release.
He held the gun steady as laser fire hit and blossomed into green sparkles. The attack was over before the alien could move. Then the protective field died to return his fire with lavender fury. "Now, girl! Now!" he snapped.
The first torpedo missed. The second hit to expand in a gush of blue-white fire. The third completed the destruction.
A sun blossomed where the alien vessel had been.
Varl felt the impact of blasting radiation; he was torn from the gun and thrown to the full extent of his line, body jerking with involuntary spasms. Below him the _Odile_ crawled with green and lavender fire, with a shimmering golden brightness which died with the rest to leave only a sere and darkened hull.
