Part 8 (1/2)
There came a far-distant, roaring sound. Something silvery and glistening rose swiftly toward the sky. It dwindled to a speck. There were more roarings. Three more silvery, glistening objects flung themselves heavenward, leaving ma.s.sive trails of seemingly solid smoke behind them. Then there were bellowings. Larger s.h.i.+ps rose up. As the din of their rising began to diminish, there were louder, booming uproars and other silvery objects seemed to fling themselves toward the sky.
Then thunder rolled, and huge shapes plunged in their turn toward the heavens. The s.p.a.ce-fleet of Kandar left its native world. It departed in the formation used for s.p.a.ce maneuvering, much like the tactical disposition of a column of marching soldiers in doubtful territory.
There was a ”point” in advance of all the rest, to be the first to detect or be fired on by an enemy. Then flankers reached straight out, and to the right and left, and then an advance-guard, and then the main force with a rear-guard behind it.
The take-off area became invisible under a monstrous, roiling mountain of smoke, from which threads of vapor reached to emptiness. It became impossible to hear oneself talk; it was unlikely that one could have heard a shot, as the heavy s.h.i.+ps took off. But presently there were only lesser clamors and then mere roarings after them, and the last of the rocket-boomings died away. The smoke remained, rolling very slowly aside. Then there were unexpected detonations. As the rocket-fume mist dissolved, the detonations were explained. Every building in the fleet's home area, the sunken fuel-tanks, the giant rolling gantries--every bit of ground equipment for the servicing of the fleet was methodically and carefully being blown to bits. The fleet was not expected back.
The s.h.i.+ps rose above the atmosphere, and rose still higher, and the planet Kandar became a gigantic ball which filled an enormous part of the firmament. Then there were cracklings of communicators, and orders flittered through emptiness in scrambled and re-scrambled broadcasts of gibberish which came out as lucid commands in the control-rooms of the s.h.i.+ps. Then, first, the point, then the advanced flankers, and then the main fleet, line by line and rank by rank--every s.h.i.+p drove on outward under top-speed solar-system drive.
The last of the four chartered s.p.a.ce-liners, come to take refugees away before the Mekinese arrived, saw the disappearance of the s.h.i.+ps in the rear of the fleet's formation. The liner was lowered to the ground by the landing-grid. It reported what it had seen. Those who were ent.i.tled to depart on it crowded aboard. With the fleet gone, panic began.
Morgan had to spend lavishly to get copies of the news reports that the liner had brought along as a matter of course. He took them back to the _Sylva_, where a frowning man with rings on his fingers read them with dark suspicion. Presently, triumphantly, he dictated predictions of dirty tricks from indications in the news.
Morgan returned to what he'd called the family room of the yacht. He relaxed. Gwenlyn tried to read. She did not succeed. She was excessively nervous.
Bors was not. The fleet re-formed itself well out from Kandar. It made for a rendezvous over a pole of the gas-giant planet which was the fourth planet from Kandar's sun. It was almost, but not quite in line with that yellow star toward the base, from which the Mekinese flotilla would come. The fleet went into a polar orbit around that gigantic planet, which was useless to mankind because its atmosphere was partly gaseous ammonia and partly methane.
The cosmos paid no attention. An unstable sol-type star in Cygnus collapsed abruptly and a number of otherwise promising planets became unfit for human exploitation. In Andromeda, a super-nova flared. The light of its explosion would not reach Kandar for very many thousands of years. The largest comet in the galaxy reached perihelion, and practically outshone the sun it circled. n.o.body saw it, because n.o.body lived there. On a dreary, red-sky planet in Mousset, a thing squirmed heavily out of a stagnant sea and blinked stupidly at the remarkable above-water cosmos it had discovered. Suns flamed and spouted flares.
Small dark stars became an infinitesimal fraction of a degree colder.
There was a magnetic storm in the photosphere of a sun which was not supposed to have such things.
The war-fleet of Kandar, in very fine formation, flowed in its polar orbit around the fourth planet out from Kandar's sun. In carefully scrambled and re-scrambled communications, certain s.h.i.+ps were authorized to modify the settings of Mark 13 missiles in this exact fas.h.i.+on, to remove their warheads, and to diverge in pairs from the fleet proper.
They were to familiarize themselves with the results of making the acceleration of such missiles variable during flight. They would use the supplied data-tables to compute firing constants for given ranges and relative speeds. They would, of course, return to formation to permit other s.h.i.+ps the same practice with the new method of missile handling.
Bors read the letter from Talents, Incorporated. It gave an exact time for the breakout of the Mekinese fleet. The rest consisted mostly of specific warnings from the Talents, Incorporated Department for Predicting Dirty Tricks. It listed certain things to be looked for among the s.h.i.+ps of the fleet. The information was like the news of an enemy s.h.i.+p aground on Kandar; it was self-evidently plausible once one thought of it. Mekin was ruled and its military practices governed by men with the instincts of conspirators, using other men with the psychopathological impulses which make for spies. They thought of devices neither statesmen nor fighting men would have invented. But a paranoid Talent could think of them, and know that they were true.
As a result of the warnings, the flags.h.i.+p was found to have been somehow equipped, by Mekin, with a tiny, special microwave transmitter which used a frequency not usual on Kandar. It was, in effect, a radio beacon on which enemy missiles could home. Also, the lead s.h.i.+p of a cruiser-squadron had been mysteriously geared to reveal its exact position, course and speed while in s.p.a.ce. There were other concealed devices. Some would make the controls of predetermined s.h.i.+ps useless when beams of specific frequency and form were trained upon them.
Once the basic idea was discovered, it was possible to make sure that all such enemy-supplied equipment was out of operation. The fleet was still in no promising situation, with a ten-to-one disadvantage. But it could not have put up even the beginning of a fight, had these spy-installed devices remained undiscovered.
Bors said carefully, by scrambled and re-scrambled communicator, ”Majesty, I'm beginning to be less than despairing. If they expect our s.h.i.+ps either to have been destroyed aground, or to be made helpless the instant combat begins, we may give them a shock. We hoped to smash them s.h.i.+p for s.h.i.+p. Finding out their tricks in advance may give us that! And if our missiles work as they've promised, we may get two for one!”
King Humphrey's voice was dogged. ”_I will settle for anything but surrender! From an honorable enemy I would take severe terms rather than see my s.p.a.cemen die. But I would do n.o.body any good by yielding to Mekin!_”
Bors clicked off. He looked at a clock. The prediction from Talents, Incorporated was that the Mekinese fleet would break out of overdrive at 11.19 hours astronomical time.
He went over his s.h.i.+p. His crew was by no means depressed. There had been a terrific lift in spirits when dummy-warheaded missiles made theoretic hits, though fifteen interceptors tried to stop them. The crewmen now tended elaborately to explain the process. A part of the trick was the curved path along which the re-set missiles flashed. Such courses alone could never be computed by an unwarned enemy under battle conditions. But the all-important thing was that the missiles changed their acceleration as they drove. That couldn't be solved and the solution put into practice during one fleet-action. Once the enemy had experienced it, they could later duplicate it without doubt, but it would still be impossible to counter.
So Bors's men were cheerful to the point of gaiety. They would fight magnificently because they were thinking of what they would do to the enemy instead of what the enemy might do to them. If enemy crews had been a.s.sured that the fleet was half defeated before the fight began, to find the fleet not crippled by spy-set devices would be startling. To find them fighting like fiends would be alarming. And if--Bors grimly repeated to himself, _if_--the modified missiles worked as well in battle as in target practice....
He turned in and, despite his tensions, fell asleep immediately and slept soundly. When he awoke he felt curiously relaxed. It took him a moment to realize he had dreamed about Gwenlyn. He couldn't remember what he had dreamed, but he knew it was comfortable and good. He wouldn't let himself dwell on it, however. There was work to be done.
It was singularly like morning on a planet. The s.h.i.+p was spotless, immaculate. There was the fresh smell of growing things in the air. To save tanked oxygen the air-room used vegetation to absorb CO{2} and excess moisture from the breathing of the crew. There was room to spare everywhere, because unlike aircraft and surface s.h.i.+ps, the size of a s.p.a.ce-s.h.i.+p made no difference in its speed. There was no resistance due to size. Only the ma.s.s counted. So there was s.p.a.ciousness and freshness and something close to elation on Bors's s.h.i.+p on the day it was to fight for the high satisfaction of getting killed.
Bors saw to it that his men breakfasted heartily.
”We've got a party ahead,” he told the watch at mess. ”Eat plenty but give the other watch a chance to fill up, too.”
Somebody said cheerfully, ”The condemned men ate a hearty breakfast, sir?”
Bors grinned.