Hour of the Horde

13

Three days until Decision Point.

Two days.

One. Miles got up from his seat before the control console and the vision screen. He walked back through the ship, past the rest of the twenty-two. They sat, silently working with their weapons. Miles went alone out onto the platform.

He looked off into the direction in which the Horde was coming.

But here, to the naked eye, there was nothing to see. The silver ships were still buried in intergalactic darkness, light-years distant and invisible still.

Here there was nothing but the shape of the Fighting Rowboat, silent under the distant light of the artificial sun overlooking the Battle Line, and the storage shed, motionless on the glinting metal deck of the platform. Miles looked to his right.

Dimly, off there in airlessness, was a little reflection—a faint gleam from the small ship next to the Fighting Rowboat. He turned around.

Behind him stretched the long line of misty whiteness that was the spiral of the galaxy he was here to defend, now shrunk to a spindle shape, so distant that the shape of the Earth he had come from was more than dwindled into invisibility—it had become a part of a whole.

He turned back to look out again into the darkness where the powerful eye of the vision screen had told him that the Horde was rushing down on him at translight speeds. Just hours and minutes away now—and still invisible to the unaided vision.

He chilled at the massiveness of the scene compared to his own smallness as he stood here between the glowing line of the uncounted stars of his galaxy and the uncounted ships of the invisible Horde—part of one single Battle Line of which his ship was the last and least.

Here, as he stood on the platform by the silent ship, it seemed to him suddenly that none of it was real—Horde, galaxy, or Battle Line. Either that or he had been caught in a dispute between things huge and invisible and placed out here to be crushed by the clash of their meeting…

He turned and went slowly back across the platform, up the ladder, and back into the ship. He went back up the corridor to the control room, where Luhon and Eff still sat in their seats before their controls, gazing at the screen, and he took the empty commander’s seat between them.

He looked at the screen.

It had been extended now, curved forward through forty-five degrees at each end to encompass the full picture of the Horde as it was now seen from the viewpoint of their ship in the Battle Line. Now, in the directionless blackness of intergalactic space, it no longer seemed to be coming at them horizontally.

It had expanded to fill the expanded screen horizontally and stretch into the screen additions with the hornlike tips of its forward-curving ends, but it had expanded as well in its middle section to fill the center screen from top to bottom. Now it seemed to be not so much ahead of them as above them, hanging over them, rushing down on them like some great voracious amoeba, pulsing with life in the successive shifts of its successive lines of ships, its horntip arms already stretching forward to enclose them and cut off retreat.

“Those armtips must be level with us now, don’t you think?” said Luhon, echoing Miles’ own unspoken thought. All of the twenty-three aboard the ship had seemed to think with one mind lately. Luhon punched controls on the console before him, requesting a calculation.

After a moment the result flickered on the small console screen. He touched the wipe-out button.

“Yes,” he said. “Theoretically, they’ve got ships behind us now.”

“How long to Decision Point?” asked Miles.

“Five hours, some minutes,” said Eff.

Time went by. Now it was just four and a half hours to Decision Point…

Four hours to Decision Point…

Three…

Two…

One hour. Thirty minutes…

“What’s the matter with them?” snarled Eff. For once his cheerful, bearlike face was all animal fury. “What are they waiting for? What’s going to happen that’s new in the next few minutes—”

“Attention!” The communications speaker above them broke suddenly into life with the flat, passionless voice of a Center Alien. “Attention! Your weapons are now unlocked, ready to be used. You will leave the Battle Line immediately, head back into the galaxy, and attempt to find a hiding place around or on some world of a system that does not possess organic life. I will repeat that. Your ship’s weapon controls and weapons are now unlocked. You are to leave the Battle Line immediately, return to the galaxy, and hide yourselves on some lifeless solar system.”

The voice ceased as suddenly as it had begun. So quietly had it spoken, so abruptly had it stopped speaking, that it was a few seconds before Miles and the others were able to react. Then a wave of common emotion—felt along that network of emotional sensitivity that enclosed them all—swept throughout the ship like a silent moan of disbelief and new fury.

“They’re sending us away,” whispered Luhon. His eyes were glittering. “They can’t do that to us.”

“That’s right,” said Miles in a voice he hardly recognized as his own. “They can’t!”

He was already busy, jabbing at the call button of the communicator in front of him.

“Answer me!” he snapped into the voice grille of the console before him. “Answer me! I’m calling for an answer!”

But there was no answer. Miles continued to call and jab at the button until at last his hand dropped in defeat.

“They won’t answer,” he muttered. For a moment he sat without moving; then at a sudden thought, his hand leaped out again to punch for a picture of the Battle Line, stretching away to their right.

It took shape on the screen in front of him. He pulled back the focus until he was able to see several dozen of the ships stretching off to the right. As he watched, one of the ships disappeared—it had gone into shift.

A moment later, the ship only two stations up from the Fighting Rowboat also blinked out and disappeared.

Miles felt coldness flood through him on a wave of icy shock.

“They can’t be,” he muttered to himself. “They can’t—”

“Can’t what?” snapped Luhon.

But Miles’ fingers had jumped once more to the communications section of the console in front of him.

“This is the last ship in line!” Miles was snapping into the microphone grille. “This is the last ship in line, calling the ship sixth up from our position. Are you preparing to leave the Battle Line? Answer me! Are you preparing to leave the Battle Line? If so, why? Why? Answer me—”

“We hear you,” interrupted the overhead speaker suddenly in the common language of those aboard the Fighting Rowboat but in harsh, unfamiliar accents. “Yes, we are leaving. We are retreating with the rest. Why do you ask?”

“Retreating?” echoed Miles. “Retreating—you mean just we little ships are retreating? Or more than just us?”

“Haven’t you been informed?” roared the harsh voice above him. “The Center’s computational devices have said that all should save themselves. The devices have calculated and found an answer that predicts defeat if we try to stop the Horde. All are leaving. All—”

The voice was cut off suddenly, as Miles jabbed at both voice and sight communication controls. Abruptly, in the screen before them formed a schema of the whole Battle Line. It showed the line from end to end and the ships in all their sizes and varieties, but as if only a few yards were separating them. As Miles, Luhon, and Eff watched, ships were winking out of existence in that line. Even the huge globular dreadnoughts of the Center Aliens were disappearing.

It was true. After everything—after all their work and the work of the Center Aliens and others to set up this Battle Line—now just because of some cold answer given by a lifeless mechanism, the greatest strength the galaxy could gather was not going to face the Horde after all. They all were going to turn tail and run, save themselves, and let the Horde in to feed on the helpless worlds they had been sent out here to protect.

“My people,” breathed Luhon.

His head flashed out with that fantastic speed of reflex he possessed, and without warning, on the screen before them all was the picture of the Horde again, like some evil, glittering silver amoeba, hanging over them all, reaching out as if to swallow not only the former Battle Line but the whole galaxy behind it in one vast and evil embrace.

Before Miles, in that moment, there also rose up a picture of his people and his world—the world as he had seen it during those last days when he had moved like a ghost from spot to spot about its surface and among its many people. He saw it, and at the same time in his mind’s eye he saw the picture of the world that the two Center Aliens had shown him—a world that a million years before had been cleaned to the point of barrenness by the Horde.

In his mind’s eye now he saw Earth like that. One endless, horizon-wide strength of naked earth and soil, with nothing left. Everything gone—all gone. The cities, the people within them, their history, their music, their paintings, Marie Bourtel…

“I won’t!”

It was more than a verbal shout, it was a roar within the very fibers of his being. A roar of no-saying to all that the Horde represented and to all that retreat without any attempt to stop the invaders would mean. It was an answer to the idea that he, Miles, could go and hide himself while the Horde swept off, possibly to do to Earth what it had done to that other, unknown world a million years ago. There was nothing intellectual or sensible about that great roar of negation that picked him up body, mind, and soul, like a whirlwind. It was as deep and basic within him as the ancient, unconquerable savagery that use to reach out and destroy the intent of his paintings.

And it was echoed around him through the emotional matrix enclosing the twenty-two other savage beings who shared this ship with him. Like him, they were reacting without the need for thought, and there was now not even a need for consultation.

Miles’ hands slapped down on the console in front of him. To his right, Luhon’s flashing gray fingers were already blurring over his controls, and Eff was busy at his left.

Like a single living creature, with one mind alone, the Fighting Rowboat lifted from her cradle and flashed into shift—single-handedly and alone into attack against the uncountable numbers of the Silver Horde.