Space Captain

II

The emergence of the Yarrow from overdrive would naturally set strident gongs to ringing in both the other ships. The space-communicator speaker in the ceiling of the control room babbled frantically, "Mayday! Mayday! Calling for help! A pirate has blown our overdrive and shelled us! Mayday! Mayday! Hel—"

There was a crashing noise in the speaker. The wail for aid from the merchantman was blotted out and destroyed by a monstrous pure white noise. It came from the smaller ship. Somebody in the control room there had been stung to action by the Yarrow's breakout. He'd seen, at last, the visible detector signal, and as a first emergency reaction he'd turned loose pure noise. It jammed the rest of the distress call and would have made cooperation between the Yarrow and the Hecla impossible, had it been possible in the first place.

The speaker made other noises, originating in the engine room. Trent swore. He flipped off the communicator from the need to have in-ships reports. The mate's voice came, startlingly clear:

"Gadget's ready to charge, sir. The engineer says so. You can charge the gadget."

Ahead where the two strange craft lay, the spaceboats from the smaller one reversed their motion and raced back toward the ship from which they'd come. That vessel continued to transmit a powerful blast of ear-splitting sound, the reception of which Trent had just stopped. The merchantman continued to beg frantically for help.

"Go ahead, sir," repeated the mate from the Yarrow's engine room. "It's all right to charge."

Trent fumbled for the first of the two new controls on the instrument board. The first should draw on the drive circuit for thousands of kilowatts to charge the gadget's power bank of capacitors. It should continue to draw for minutes. Then a tripping of the second new control should mean the discharge of energy in one blast of power that ought to blow the pirate's drive and leave it helpless and limited to normal-space drive.

This could be done only with both ships in overdrive. But Trent was confident that he could force the pirate into that quasi-cosmos and there let the gadget cripple it, forcing it back to normality where it might be dealt with. He had only police-type rockets, to be sure, but there were other means. In any case, at the least and worst he should be able to take off the Hecla's ship's company and carry them to port, and then return with better weapons to finish off the pirate. He should be able to do it before it could rewind its overdrive.

His fingers found the charging switch. Thrown, it should begin to charge up. In minutes it would be ready. The pirate could be gotten into overdrive where it would expect to blow the Yarrow's drive. But its own field generator should flash and arc and perhaps even melt down.

He threw the charging switch.

There was a racking, crashing explosion in the engine room. The smell of vaporized metal and burnt insulation spread through the Yarrow. There were shoutings.

The mate came into the control room. His spacesuit showed signs of having been spattered with exploded bits of wire insulator.

"That gadget," he said with unbelievable stolidity, "it blew out. It didn't work. It blew when you turned it on."

Trent was too much enraged even to swear. He'd tried the gadget the Yarrow's owners swore by and touted. He'd thrown away the advantage of surprise. Now he was only miles away from an undoubtedly armed pirate which was acutely aware of his presence.

It would have been logical for him to tear his hair in total frustration, and such a reaction would have seemed as useful as any other. But he stared at the spaceboats streaking back toward the pirate ship. It would take them so long to get back and so much longer to get into the spaceboat blisters in which they were carried. The pirate could blow the Yarrow's drive if she went into overdrive. The Yarrow couldn't blow the pirate's. Trent could only put up a fight in normal space with the odds on the pirate. The only fact in his favor was that the pirate wouldn't follow him into overdrive until it had its spaceboats back aboard. It was possible for him to maneuver in a fashion peculiarly like a submarine—one of those fabulous weapons of the last wars on Earth—submerging to get out of sight, but only until the pirate's spaceboats were stowed again.

He used that antiquated maneuver. The Yarrow vanished, only to reappear seconds later in normal space once more and very much nearer to the pirate.

The spaceboats were nearly back home, then. The pirate swung, and there was one of those extraordinarily hurried bursts of smoke which appear when an explosive is set off in emptiness. Vapor appeared and fled madly to nothingness. A shell went hurtling madly to nowhere. The pirate had a gun. The Hecla had said it had been shelled. Trent took the Yarrow into overdrive again. The symptoms of nausea and dizziness and crazy spiral fall were multiplied in their unpleasantness by being repeated after so short an interval.

The time lapse before its return to normal space was very short. It was only seconds, but the spaceboats were alongside the pirate and the mussel-shell-shaped covers of the lifeboat blisters were already opening to receive them. But the Yarrow was only hundreds of yards away, now, and Trent flung it into full-speed-ahead emergency drive.

The Yarrow rushed upon the pirate ship like something infuriated and deadly. It was the most improbable of all possible maneuvers. There were stars on every hand, and above and below to boot. There was no solidity for distances no human being had yet been able to comprehend. With all of space in which to maneuver or attempt to flee, with an enemy come from beyond the nearer stars, Trent was attempting the absolutely earliest and most primitive of naval combat tactics. Ramming. And it was partly successful.

The pirate ship let off a panicky shell at the Yarrow. It missed. Before the gun could be fired again the Yarrow was upon it. Steel hull plates crumpled and tore. The bigger ship plunged into the lesser one, with all its interior ringing from the screech of rent metal.

And the pirate vanished. It had gone into overdrive at the last and ultimate instant, while its bow plates were actually crumpling. The Yarrow plunged through the emptiness the pirate left behind. It turned and plunged again, and again, and yet again, like something huge and enraged trying to trample or to crush a small and agile foe.

There were only two ships left in normal space, here. One of course was the Yarrow. The other was the helpless merchantman Hecla. For the moment Trent ignored the other ship. He kept the Yarrow twisting and circling through the emptiness where the pirate had been. He kept the Yarrow's own drive detector in operation, attempting to locate his enemy. He'd only damaged it in normal space, but if he followed it into overdrive—as things had worked out—it could cripple the Yarrow and then stand off and bombard it until no trace of life remained aboard. Had the men in the pirate's control room been alert, the pirate would have had adequate warning of the Yarrow's coming.

But here and now the pirate ship stayed in overdrive and within detection-range for a considerable time. It might be evaluating the damage the Yarrow's keel had done to it. But Trent listened icily, and heard the whine of its drive grow fainter and fainter until it died away. Then it must be either in normal space—but a very great distance off—or in overdrive and almost unimaginably distant.

It was an hour and more before Trent turned the Yarrow to the disabled Hecla. He'd turned off the spacephone speaker so he could listen to aboard-ship reports. Now he flipped it on again and a shaking, agitated voice came to him instantly.

"Please answer! Our hull is punctured by shells and we've had to put on our spacesuits because our air is going fast. A shell in the engine room knocked out our Lawlor drive and our overdrive coil is blown! Our situation is desperate! Please answer!"

Trent thumbed the transmitter button.

"Yarrow calling Hecla," he said in a dry voice. "Under the circumstances, all I can do is take you aboard and get you to ground somewhere in safety. I can't linger around here. The pirate is damaged but apparently not destroyed. It went into overdrive when we hit it, and it's gotten away. Whether it can come back or not I don't know. Do you want to try to make repairs, gambling that it won't return?"

The voice from the Hecla was almost unintelligible in its frantic denial of any such idea and its haste to accept Trent's offer. Trent made brisk arrangements for the transfer of humans from the disabled ship. He shifted the Yarrow close alongside to make the transfer easier. He summoned the mate.

"You'll stay here," he commanded, "and you'll watch that detector! The pirate's men on watch were looking at the spaceboats so they didn't notice we were on the way. But you'll look at this and nothing else! And you'll report by spacephone if that needle even thinks of quivering!"

He made his way to the blister he'd emptied to receive the Hecla's boat and that helpless space craft's complement. In minutes he was aboard the Hecla. The air pressure was low. Very low. He went briskly over the wreck with the Hecla's skipper, who would follow tradition and be the last man to abandon ship, but who was plainly not happy about delay.

"All right," said Trent, when he'd seen what damage the pirate's shelling had done. "Just one thing more. I want to look at the engine room again."

"If… if the pirate comes back—"

"It will be too bad," agreed Trent. "But just the same—"

He went into the Hecla's engine room. The disabling of the Hecla had been very efficiently done. With the overdrive blown, the cargo boat was capable only of moving in unassisted Lawlor drive. It could make desperate darts and dashes here and there to postpone its inevitable doom. But that would be inconvenient for the pirate. It carried a gun for such occasions. It used it, and the Hecla could no longer have resisted.

At this moment the Hecla's skipper was agitatedly pointing out that the pirate might come back.

Trent did not answer. He was busy in the engine room, reading dials, checking the fuse box. Having established a delay sequence he went with the Hecla's now-quivering skipper to the airlock. The Yarrow's bulk loomed up not forty feet away, but beneath and between the ships an unthinkable abyss lay. Stars shone up from between their feet. One could fall for millions of years and never cease to plummet through nothingness.

A Yarrow spaceman hauled them across and to the Yarrow's open airlock at the ends of the space-rope lines. Instants later Trent was in the control room, his helmet off but otherwise attired for space. He stared out of the viewports. He began to frown, and then to scowl. The Hecla's skipper came unsteadily to the control room door.

"I… I suggest," he said shakenly, "that we… get away from here as soon as possible."

"This is my ship," said Trent curtly. "I give the orders. Ah!"

He hadn't turned from the viewport. He'd been watching the Hecla, drained of air and without any living thing aboard, left as a derelict between the stars. But now the abandoned ship suddenly drew away from the Yarrow. She swung in space. She began to drive. She went away into the infinite distances between the suns of the galaxy. She dwindled to the tiniest of specks in the starlight. She disappeared altogether.

The Hecla's skipper's mouth dropped open.

"What—"

"I don't like pirates," said Trent. "I'm afraid we didn't damage that one too badly, because it managed to stay in overdrive. But I didn't want it to come back and loot the Hecla. So I sent your ship driving off. Pure spite on my part."

"But what are we waiting for?" asked the skipper anxiously.

"Nothing now," Trent told him. "I've an errand in the engine room, but that can wait."

He examined the drive detector with almost microscopic care. It reported nothing. He set the Yarrow on course. He threw the drive switch. The Yarrow swept away from there.

Trent entered the engine room. It still smelled of vaporized metal and burnt insulator. McHinny paced up and down, swearing steadily and with undiminished indignation. He had invented the device which Trent had unsuccessfully used to blast the pirate ship. Now his gadget, which should have prevented all danger from the pirate ship, was a scorched, swollen, discolored wreck. A thread of smouldering insulation still sent a twig of gray smoke into the air above it.

"It didn't work," said Trent flatly. "What happened?"

McHinny was instantly and fiercely on the defensive. Hell hath no fury like an inventor defending his claim to genius.

"You didn't work it right!" he cried bitterly. "You ruined everything! You turned it on when there were two ships in range! Two! You overloaded it!"

Trent said nothing. This was defense, not fact. The Hecla's drive had been burnt out by the pirate. It couldn't constitute half of an overload of overdrive tension.

"And the mate hurried me!" snapped McHinny furiously. "He kept saying I had to hurry and get it back together! I was improving it, and he rushed me to get it together again!"

Trent frowned. "Can you repair it?" he asked detachedly. "If it can be made to work we'll try it again."

"I'll have to rebuild it!" fumed the engineer. "And I won't stand for anybody telling me what to do! I invented it! I know all about it! I won't do anything unless I have a free hand!"

Trent raised his eyebrows. "All right," he said, "but we were lucky. Next time you remember that you're right in the same ship with the rest of us!"

He turned and started for the control room, contemplating his next move. The plans of the Yarrow's Captain Trent bore a strong family resemblance to the plan his ancestor had carried out in the days of sail. He believed that pirates did not like to fight. They preferred to murder. He suspected that they would be astonished if attacked, because they were accustomed only to attacking. And he believed that violent action when they didn't expect it might yield interesting results.

In short, his views were not those of the average trading-ship captain entering reluctantly into pirate-infested star groups. He'd had lively hopes of profitable action. He still might very well manage to find or contrive activity of a congenial kind. What he considered non-success in the Hecla matter only moved him to modify his intentions, not to abandon them.

There was a girl in the control room when he reentered it. The Hecla's skipper spoke with something approaching reverence.

"Captain, Miss Hale wants to thank you. Her father is the planetary president of Loren."

Trent nodded politely. The girl said in a still unsteady voice, "I do want to thank you, Captain. If it hadn't been for you—"

"Only too pleased," said Trent as politely as before. "I'm glad we happened along."

"I… I can only offer words," said the girl, "but when we get to Loren, my father will at least—"

"I'm sorry, but I'm not going to Loren," said Trent. "The Yarrow's bound for Sira. You'll go aground there."

The Hecla's skipper said urgently, "But Captain Trent, this is Miss Hale! Her father's the planetary president. She was bound home. Surely you can swing ship off-course long enough to put her aground on her home world!"

Trent shook his head regretfully. A few hours earlier, he'd more or less intended to head for Loren himself. But events just past required a change of plan. The encounter with a pirate ship which had captured but not yet looted a merchantman hadn't ended the way he'd have wished. His plans had to be changed. They now called for an immediate call on Sira.

"I'm truly sorry," he said, "but I have to go to Sira. For one thing, it's three days nearer than Loren, and those three days are important to me."

"You don't realize—"

The girl put her hand on the skipper's arm. "No. If Captain Trent is bound for Sira, to Sira we go. I can surely get home from there! Of course we must get word to my father about the pirate pretending to be the Bear. But Captain Trent has surely done enough in saving us from… what would have happened if he hadn't appeared, and especially if he hadn't acted as he did."

Trent cocked his head inquiringly to one side. "The Bear?"

"Our privateer," explained the girl. "We're on a terrible predicament on Loren. We have to have antibiotics, first, and what other off-planet supplies we can. But we have to have antibiotics! Our soil bacteria are death to Earth-type crops. Without antibiotics we'll starve! So we licensed a privateer. You see, with a pirate in action hereabouts and interstellar trade cut to ribbons, trading ships don't come to us. But there are some things we have to have. So our privateer stops ships and requisitions goods, and we pay for them with what we can, later. It's an emergency."

Trent said courteously, "Hmmmmm."

"This morning," she added, "when the pirate showed on our detectors, we put on full drive to avoid it like any other ship. But it overhauled us and closed in. We tried to dodge and twist away, but it finally got close and blew our overdrive and we were helpless. We broke out of overdrive when the blow-up came, and there was the pirate. And it said, 'Commissioned privateer Bear, of Loren, calling. What ship's that?' "

The Hecla's skipper took over the tale, fiercely. "I said, 'The devil you say! This is the Hecla, and Miss Hale's aboard! You're going to find yourselves in trouble!'

The girl interpolated, "It did look exactly like the Bear!"

Trent held up his hand. "Just a moment! You were hailed by the pirate, pretending to be the Bear, which I understand is a privateer."

The girl nodded. "Yes. That's right."

"And you were not upset? Oh, I see now. The Hecla is registered as owned on Loren. You were stopped by a ship claiming to be a privateer from Loren. Naturally, you didn't expect to be looted by a privateer from your home world. Is that the way of it?"

The girl nodded again. She was horribly tense. She'd known complete despair only a little while ago. She wore, now, a very fine air of composure. But her hands were clenched tightly. She seemed not to be aware of it. She was trying hard to keep her lips from quivering. Trent approved of her.

"And you," he turned to the Hecla's skipper, "were so sure you'd nothing to fear that you told this pirate that he was going to get into trouble. You thought it was the Bear, and it had stopped you."

"And blown our drive," said the skipper. "Of course I thought he'd get into trouble! Miss Hale was aboard!"

"And—"

"The man at the pirate's communicator laughed. He laughed! And then we knew what had happened, and we tried to run away, and they followed and headed us off again and again. Finally they began to fire on us. Then a shell went into our engine room so we couldn't even try to run away any more."

Trent could picture it very clearly. The Hecla, plump and matronly and informed of coming doom, would have tried desperately to postpone the inevitable by crazy, panicky flight. The pirate followed. Perhaps for amusement it would have headed off the clumsy merchantman until that diversion palled. On the whole, it would have been very much like a man chasing a chicken or a pig when the time for it to die arrived. It would be horrible! In any case the pirate had put shells into the Hecla to drain her of air, and one shell hit the engine room and stopped the Lawlor drive, and then sent boats to take over. The pirates might have been admitted by airlock to commit their murders. Some people will cooperate most docilely with their intending killers, merely to get a few minutes more of life. Otherwise the pirates would have blasted a hole in their helpless victim's hull and entered through that.

Trent could picture it very clearly, from information about similar events elsewhere.

"And then we arrived," he observed.

"Nothing can ever repay you," said Marian warmly. "I… I've never really believed that anything dreadful could really happen to me. But it could, and it almost did. And you rescued me. So I… want to thank you."

"You've done it very nicely," said Trent, "but we haven't reached Sira yet. We might still run into trouble. Let me say that you're very welcome and let it go at that. Meanwhile, why don't you take over my cabin and rest up and get relaxed? You've had a pretty unpleasant experience.

She smiled at him and went out. The Hecla's skipper followed her. Trent turned back to the instrument board. He looked at the detector dial with special care.

The Yarrow's mate said dourly, "Captain, sir, no matter how it turned out, that was a bad fix for us to be in!"

"Yes," agreed Trent drily. "One should never take the owners' word about gadgets. I didn't like the affair, either. But if the fact means anything to you, we're heroes."

"It don't mean anything to me," said the mate bluntly.

"Then next time," said Trent, "we won't be heroic. Next time we run into pirates, we'll just let them cut our throats without any fuss."

But after the encounter, the effect of assured isolation produced a sort of coziness. The ship felt safe. Beautifully safe. Its air apparatus functioned perfectly. Its temperature control was set so that different parts of the occupied parts of the ship were at different degrees of heat or trivial chill, which made it feel somehow more natural. There were differences in smell. There were even growing plants in a suitable compartment. And the crewmen stood their watches placidly, and those off-watch loafed and gossiped.

But there was, at this moment, a spot illimitably removed from the Yarrow where a ship cut its overdrive and broke out back to normal space. Starlight shone on it. Its bow plates were dented and buckled. The forward third of its hull was airless, and no man could go there save through emergency airlocks between compartments, and they would die immediately if without a spacesuit. This was, of course, the ship that had called itself the Bear when summoning the Hecla to surrender.

The pirate's ship's company was not only raging but desperate. There were fewer crewmen than before it hailed the Hecla. When air left the forward third of its hull, there'd been men there without spacesuits on. In theory they'd had thirteen seconds in which to get into space-armor. None of them had made it. Nobody has ever made it. The surviving part of the crew wanted horribly to take revenge for the Yarrow's act of self-defense.

But at the moment, the crew of the pirate ship labored with oxyhydrogen torches to repair the damage done by the Yarrow's ramming attack. Extensive if temporary repairs were necessary for anything like normal operation of the ship that had named itself the Bear. But even after repair this ship couldn't go to a spaceport and there pass itself off as an innocent merchantman. Repairs couldn't be made in space that wouldn't need to be explained on ground. And it was very likely that the whole matter of the Hecla's crippling would be known all through the Pleiads and elsewhere as fast as the news could travel.

In short, if before this event the pirate had ever passed in any spaceport as an honest craft about its lawful occasions, it couldn't do so any longer.

There was just one possibility. The Hecla had been disabled and hulled. Very probably, if the meddling Yarrow had the nerve to stand by to take off its crew, it was abandoned. But if the pirate ship could recover the Hecla—

The Yarrow drove for Sira. And Trent made tentative plans, tentatively allowing for what he thought the pirate might possibly do. If any of his guesses should turn out to be right, the pirates would most ferociously resent it.