Space Captain

VI

When the spaceport landing-grid let go of the Yarrow, she was a full five planetary diameters out from Manaos.

She'd lifted off at sunrise, spaceport time, and Manaos was a magnificent half-disk as seen from space. It was brilliantly green and blue where the sun shone on it and abysmally black where it was lighted only by the stars. But if one watched for a few minutes through a spaceport he could see the dark half of the disk displayed very faintly by starlight. With sharp eyes one could even see the ghostly specks and spirals of cloud-systems on Manaos' night side. Corresponding cloud-formations on the daylight side were blindingly white.

But Trent was in no mood to regard the wonders of the heavens. He aligned the Yarrow's drive-axis for a certain fourth-magnitude star, the aiming-point for a ship intending a passage from Manaos to Loren. He snapped into the ship's speaker system, "Overdrive coming. Ten seconds. Count down."

He counted down himself, from ten to nine and eight and so on to zero. He pressed the over drive-button and instantly fought dizziness and acute nausea and immediately afterwards that ghastly, spiralling, plummeting sensation as if falling through illimitable emptiness which goes with going into overdrive.

But then, abruptly, he was back in the pilot's chair, and the viewports were black as if sunk in tar, and somehow the normal minor operating sounds within the ship were consoling and welcome and deeply satisfying. Because they meant that the ship was alive and operating, and, therefore, it was going somewhere and, therefore, it would ultimately arrive.

Trent began to calculate in his head. While he'd been on Manaos, waiting for the Yarrow, no less than eleven ships had taken off for space in the bland conviction that because Trent had come out on top in a fight with a pirate, they also could now travel confidently to high profits before the rest of the Pleiads dared try it.

And the same thing had happened elsewhere. Ship owners on a dozen worlds, feverishly anxious for the profits they'd been missing, would convince themselves that the danger from piracy had diminished past the point where it needed to be considered. And most of those ships would make their voyages in safety because there were so many of them and a limited number of pirates could make only so many captures. But that didn't mean less danger. It only meant that the same danger was distributed among more ships.

Trent fumed about it, though it was strictly none of his business. Yet he couldn't help but consider it his business as regarded Marian. The ship she'd sailed on was statistically in less danger than the Hecla had been, but the improvement was in the probability of being captured, not the consequences. The disaster to any ship captured was as' final as before. More, if the pirates were deliberately taking ships to get prisoners.

He couldn't sit quietly in the pilot's chair and envision such things. He got up and jerked a thumb for the man on control room watch to take over.

The man said, "Cap'n."

"What?"

"We got extra hands on board."

Trent stopped.

"Those fellows we carried out to the Hecla, sir. They come to say howdo to us. Pretty well lit, they were. We were over at the Hecla getting small arms when they come. They set down to wait for us. They passed out. They ain't waked up yet."

Trent frowned. He scowled. But after all, it made little or no difference. They might even come in handy.

"When they wake up, I'll put them to work," he said curtly.

There was nothing else to do about stowaways, especially these. Trent was not so concerned about rations or air that he considered them to matter. And they were trained in combat tactics. They made the Yarrow as heavily manned, but not armed, as any pirate ship would be. But this didn't happen to be an idea Trent found comforting. Marian Hale had gone to space for Loren. Just about now she'd be lifting off from Midway—if she'd arrived there—and would next be reported as landing on Loren—if she got there.

He went to the engine room. McHinny nodded portentously at him.

"I got my gadget built up again," he reported proudly, "and it's better than it ever was before! It'll take care of any pirate ship that ever was!"

"You're sure of it?" asked Trent.

"I know my gadget," said McHinny confidently. "Yes, sir! Nobody's going to have to worry about pirates any more!"

Trent said, "It'll be too bad if we have to depend on it and it doesn't work."

"I know what I'm doing!" insisted McHinny. "I know what you're doing, too! You want to make it look like it's no good! You handle it wrong on purpose! But you can't do that any more! Not now!"

Trent grunted and turned to the engine room door. McHinny said suspiciously, "I know what you think! You got an extra overdrive unit in the hold because you think my gadget might blow your overdrive next time you try to use it! You're all set for it! But you wait! You see what happens!"

Trent went out. McHinny angered him, but it was good to have something to be angry about which wasn't connected with Marian. He was in a state of acute, irritated anxiety about her. He could make no plans for action, of course. There was no proven need for it, and if it should be needed he'd have no idea where to act, or how. He was driving for Loren because he couldn't endure indefinite uncertainty. If the Cytheria came into port on Loren with Marian aboard, he would be sure of her safety. He would also have made a fool of himself, because he had no really valid reason for going to Loren except to ease his mind. But if the Cytheria didn't come into port with her aboard…

It wouldn't be his fault. He'd told her he didn't think it safe for her to put out to space. But it would be his fault because it was his doing that merchantmen throughout the Pleiads were taking to space under the delusion that danger from pirates was now ended. And that had happened because he'd snatched her from deadly danger. Which he couldn't be criticized for. But if he'd simply thrust his pirate prisoners out an airlock the present situation wouldn't exist. So he blamed himself for not doing that.

The Yarrow had been in overdrive for eight ship-days and a little over when the alert signal went through the ship.

"Overdrive detector registers, sir," said the man on control room watch. "Captain, sir! Our overdrive detector's registering!"

Trent made his way quickly to the control room. There was a red light calling attention to the overdrive detector dial. There was another ship in detector-range, and it was in overdrive, too.

Trent took his seat at the control board. He gave crisp orders. All hands ready for spacesuits. Small arms to be passed out. He called McHinny and told him that his gadget might undergo an actual combat test. Then he watched, tensely, but somehow relieved that some sort of action might be substituted for mere frustrated waiting.

Some centuries earlier, a Captain Trent had lured a privateer out of a harbor where she was amply protected by the guns of a fort. He towed an improvised sea-anchor of canvas behind his ship. Because of the drag, his ship appeared both slow and unhandy. So the privateer came out to make a capture. In the forgotten fight that followed on one of Earth's oceans, at the proper critical moment Trent had the towline cut, and simultaneously uncovered guns of heavier weight and longer range than the privateer had suspected. He also revealed that the formerly logy and slow-sailing ship could not only out-fight but outrun the quasi-piratical ship that had attacked it. In consequence, the privateer's flag presently came fluttering down. And that Captain Trent put the privateer's crew into her boats with food and water, and he and his prize sailed away over the horizon while the left-behind privateers cursed him heartily.

But Captain Trent of the Yarrow could not look for such a happy termination of this affair. At the moment, the situation was simply a deflection of a needle from its proper place on an instrument-dial. He hadn't heavier guns than the other ship. He had no guns at all. Further, he hadn't the legs of the other ship. The Yarrow wasn't built for fighting or running away. And her overdrive unit hadn't the power per ton of ship-and-cargo mass the piratical ship would be sure of. In overdrive, the pirate ship could undoubtedly blow the Yarrow's field-generating equipment without any trouble at all.

But this was nevertheless action, after two hundred odd hours of inactivity. Any kind of happening was welcome.

Trent watched the detector-dial. The other ship might sheer off. If so, it was an honest merchantman experiencing the jumping jitters because its detector would be giving a positive reading too. If it didn't sheer off…

It didn't. The strength of the signal picked up increased steadily on the dial. The other ship was moving to close in on the Yarrow. To all appearances, the prospects were for a matter-of-fact approach to fatal nearness, despite such dodgings and twistings as the Yarrow might attempt. The dial-reading grew stronger still. Trent changed course. The reading continued to show a steady, closer approach of the invisible other vessel. It had changed course in pursuit. The dial-needle neared that red band which meant a dangerous proximity of two ships. When the needle touched the edge of the red area, either one of two evenly matched overdrives might blow out. But there was a black mark somewhere in the red. If the needle reached that mark, the Yarrow's drive would blow. It would have to.

Trent spoke curtly into the microphone before him.

"Engine room," he snapped. "I'm going to charge your gadget. Right?"

McHinny's voice, shrill and unreasonably pettish, snapped back, "Go ahead! Dammit, she's ready!"

Trent had his finger on the charge-button which should draw some thousands of kilowatts into the pirate-frustrator capacitors, to be stored up and stored up until it could be released in a surge of multi-megawatt violence lasting for the forty-thousandth of a second. Nothing could withstand it.

Nothing! Any drive phased into it would blow with insensate violence.

He'd actually begun to put pressure on the charge-switch when he stopped. If the gadget worked, the other ship would be disabled. Its drive coil might be irreparably ruined, so its crew couldn't rewind it to serviceability. And it was not probable, but it was possible that the other ship might not be a pirate. It might be an honest trading ship with an inattentive hand on control room watch. Carelessness could happen. '

He shifted his hand. He said into the all-ship microphones, "We'll break out of overdrive first. Get set. Three, two, one, zero!"

He flipped the breakout switch. There was dizziness and momentary nausea and the feeling of a horrible spinning fall. Then stars flashed into being out the viewports and on the vision-screens. The Yarrow made a curious bobbing motion, quaintly like a curtsey of greeting to the universe to which it had returned. There were stars by multiples of millions.

And there was a flaming yellow double sun to starboard, near enough for each of its monster components to have visible disks a third of a degree across. If a double sun could have a planetary system, the Yarrow would have broken out inside it. There was brilliant, glaring, intolerable light which was blistering until the viewports' automatic filters reduced it.

Trent said evenly, "I think we've got company. If that other ship goes on without stopping, its skipper ought to break the man in the control room for inattention to duty. If it doesn't go by…"

The mate said stolidly, "You cut off the drive and the detector too, Cap'n."

Trent nodded.

"Either our overdrive or theirs had to blow some time soon. I cut ours to make it seem to blow. But if I kept the detector on, they'd know it didn't. I'm hoping…"

He reached over and cut the Lawlor drive too. In or out of overdrive, the Lawlor drive propelled the Yarrow on her course. Where this encounter took place, of course, a Lawlor drive alone was just about as useful as a pair of oars.

"We're acting like a derelict, a crippled ship, anyhow. We'll see what the other ship does. Meanwhile I'll charge the gadget."

This time he did press the charge-button, to draw on the Yarrow's power-bank for thousands of kilowatts for minutes in succession, to be discharged at will in a practically instantaneous surge of pure electric energy.

There was a crash and a roaring which was a bellow. The smell of vaporized metal and distilled insulation ran through the ship. The crash was so loud that for seconds afterwards Trent heard nothing. The first sound his recovering ears did hear was McHinny's voice, shrilling profanity at the top of his lungs. Then he heard the air-apparatus running at emergency speed to clear away the stench.

He jerked his head at the mate. The mate vanished. Trent sat tensely at the control board, waiting. With increased return of hearing he noticed rustling, crackling noises which would be microwave radiation from the nearby double sun.

The mate's voice came over the loud-speaker. "Captain, sir, the gadget's blown again. It just ain't any good!"

Trent could hardly have become more tense, but it did seem that his muscles did tauten further. Yet the Yarrow was in no worse situation than it had been when it rescued the crew—and Marian—from the Hecla.

The cracklings and rustling sounds from the double sun were broken into. There was a specifically artificial sound from the space around the Yarrow. It was high-pitched to begin with, and it rose swiftly in pitch until it passed the shrillness of the highest of whistles. It was, of course, a single radar pulse, imitating in the Pleiads the sound-ranging cry of furry flying creatures called bats, on Earth.

"All hands," said Trent evenly. "Get into spacesuits and load all weapons. We've just been hit by a radar pulse. There'd be no reason for anybody but pirates to follow us out of over-drive and try to locate us by radar."

There were stirrings here and there. The mate came back and said, "Your spacesuit, Captain."

Trent got up from the control board and slipped into his space armor. There came another radar pulse. It was louder.

For a long time after that there was something close to silence in the Yarrow. True, the air apparatus whirred and cut off. The temperature control made a new kind of noise. Now it was cutting down the heat-intake from the nearby double sun instead of holding the temperature of the Yarrow so many degrees Kelvin above the chill of empty space. And there were indefinite small sounds which came from the mere presence of living men inside the Yarrow.

There was a third radar pulse. The first had been like a squeaking. This was like a scream.

Then a vision-screen, turned away from the nearby suns, showed the blinkings of minute specks of varicolored lights which were stars. A voice came from the outside communicator, "Privateer Bear of Loren calling. What ship's that?"

Trent had, of course, anticipated the question. But he wanted to ask one of his own. Marian was off-planet somewhere in one of an unjustified number of suddenly foolhardy ships. All of them couldn't hope to escape capture by pirates. But the pirates couldn't hope to capture all of them, either. So the question Trent needed an answer to was, had the Cytheria been taken by this particular ship? If not, absolute recklessness was justified. The Yarrow, ramming, would not injure or endanger Marian in the process. On the other hand, if the Cytheria had been captured and Marian was one of other captives on this ship, then the maddest of recklessness was a necessity. Trent's, most desperate obligation would be to smash the pirate at any cost because Marian was on board.

The ceiling loudspeaker bellowed, "What ship's that? Answer or take what you get for it!"

Trent growled, "This is the Cytheria, bound for Loren. And if you're the Bear you'll go about your business! You've blown our overdrive!"

Sweat stood out on his face as he waited to hear. If this pirate ship had taken the Cytheria, they'd know the Yarrow wasn't the Cytheria. And they'd reveal it.

But the voice from outside the ship, from the pirate, was only almost mocking. "It was the only way we could hail you. You tried to run away. What's your cargo?"

Trent ran off a cargo list at random. It didn't matter. He didn't think of the huge crate loaded aboard the Yarrow on Manaos. He didn't think of it. The vision-screen showed a small glittering which now rapidly took on the shape of a ship. The voice from the ceiling speaker said genially, "We can use some of that. We'll come aboard."

Trent's eyes burned, now. Marian wasn't aboard this ship. Therefore anything that could be done to deceive, to damage, or to destroy this pirate could be done from a simple, honest hatred of everything it stood for. And Marian wasn't involved. However, there seemed nothing to be done.

Trent protested as if angrily. The other ship took form as a polished fish-like shape. He argued feverishly, as if he believed he dealt with the privateer Bear of Loren, owned by the planetary president who happened to be Marian's father. Actually, it was conceivable that it was the Bear. Or the one that had attacked the Hecla was the Bear. But he didn't care. Marian was in danger, and therefore he didn't care whether it was a quasi-level privateer or an unquestionable freebooter. He meant to try to destroy it, legally or illegally, properly or otherwise.

Meanwhile he protested. His argument was that the Yarrow—which he called the Cytheria—was bound for Loren and the cargo she carried was to be delivered to that planet anyhow. As a privateer, insisted Trent, the Bear was bound to respect vessels bound for its home spaceport. It had done enough damage! It has blown out his overdrive. It…

"We'll give you receipts for what we take," said the voice from the ceiling loudspeaker. It was almost openly mocking, now. "You'll get what's coming to you. All you have to do is go on to Loren and ask for it."

Trent clicked off the communicator and swung about in the pilot's chair.

"On the way out to put us on board the Hecla when she was abandoned," he said coldly to the mate, "I had you pack the bow with bales of stuff in case a gun opened on you from ahead. None of that's been shifted, has it?"

"No sir," said the mate stolidly. "All of it's still there. You've got him sure our overdrive's blown, sir."

"And if we went into it," said Trent acidly, "he could really blow it just by following us!" He pushed the all-speaker button. "All hands! We've been stopped by something that says its the Bear, of Loren. It says we're to be boarded. All hands get ready to get out of sight and come out again on call."

He swung the Yarrow to face the approaching and enlarging other ship of space. He yearned fiercely to destroy it, but at that moment the Yarrow's own prospects looked dim. For one thing, the first freebooter he'd encountered had a gun, a cannon firing solid shot. In a sense it was an antiquity. It was probably of a design from the twentieth century, when guns reached their highest development before being replaced by rocket-missiles. Its shells could penetrate both skins of the Hecla but had little power to do damage beyond that. One of the other pirate's shells had bounced around in the Hecla's engine room without doing any particular harm. But those shells could let all the air out of a ship.

Perhaps this second pirate ship also had a gun. Against that twentieth-century weapon—outmoded as it was—Trent had prepared a nineteenth-century defense. There'd been a civil war in a nation called the United States, back on Earth, and in that war much action took place on the continental rivers. For this specialized fighting, river-steamers were converted into fighting ships by piled-up bales of a crude textile fabric then much in use. The river steamers became "cotton-clad" gunboats as contrasted with iron-clad ones and did good service. Trent had packed the bow of the Yarrow with similar materials. They should limit the penetration of solid shot fired from straight ahead.

The other ship was plainly visible now. It swiftly increased in size. There was no sign of injuries to or repairs of its bow portion, so it couldn't be the ship that had stopped the Hecla. It was larger, too. There were, then, at least two space craft operating out of some unknown base. There might be a number more.

The other ship swept to a position a mile to starboard. It checked there and lay still. The mussel-shell-shaped boat-blister covers opened, revealing spaceboats Trent snapped into the all-ship speakers, "Men with rocket-launchers to the airports. Rope yourselves safe, and be ready to open the outer doors and start shooting."

He grimaced. He'd bought small arms on Dorade, but they'd been designed for police use. They'd be totally useless against a ship, of course. But they might do damage to a spaceboat.

He switched the communicator on again. The voice rasped, "I'm telling you—open your cargo-doors! Open your airlocks! There's a boarding-party coming."

"Acknowledge," said Trent.

He covered the communicator microphone with his hand and gave short, savage commands. He opened an after cargo door. It stayed open. A second door started to open and apparently stuck. It went back to closed position; It partly opened and closed again. This could be seen from the pirate ship. It should be taken as attempted obedience. An airlock door opened. Another. The locks showed no spacesuited figures in them.

The pirate's spaceboats, three of them, moved away from their storage blisters. They came steadily toward the Yarrow. The two ships were infinitesimal specks in immensity. The spaceboats were smaller than specks. The blazing double sun alone was huge. It seemed nearby. All the rest of the galaxy appeared to consist only of uncountable dots of light of every imaginable color and degree of brightness, unthinkably remote. To someone with a taste for comparisons, this action was taking place in such isolation, such loneliness, such enormous nothingness that the isolation of a ship in overdrive seemed companionable by contrast.

The spaceboats were halfway to the Yarrow. Trent barked into the all-speaker microphone, "Close face-plates! Take ordered action!"

And he acted as he spoke. The Yarrow spun like a top to face the pirate ship and plunged toward it at maximum acceleration in Lawlor drive. But the motion seemed horribly deliberate. Lifetimes seemed to pass at intervals that were only heartbeats. The Yarrow rushed upon the pirate—but not quite exactly. She would ride down and destroy the nearest spaceboat first. The pirate did have a gun. It flashed, and there was that hundredth-of-a-second flaring out of smoke before the utter emptiness of space snatched it away to nothingness.

A shell hit the Yarrow. Its impact could be heard or felt all over the ship. Spacesuited men appeared suddenly in the open airlocks. Rockets—only police-rockets, but still rockets—streaked away from the open lockdoors. Four… eight… a dozen. One hit a spaceboat. There was a soundless flash. A shaped-charge satchel bomb went off inside the spaceboat. It had been meant for the destruction of the Yarrow should her crew resist the entrance of their murderers. But one spaceboat had ceased to exist. The Yarrow's bow swung to bring a second spaceboat to close range for the rocket-launchers on the port side. The smoke-jetting rockets plunged. One of them exploded just the bare instant before another arrived at the very same spot. It was pure chance, but the spaceboat's back was broken, and other rockets hit, too. It was not possible to estimate the total damage from the Yarrow.

That elderly merchant ship continued to hurl itself toward the pirate. The pirate's gun flashed again. It was a hit. And again, a hit. And again. Every shell hit home. Every one went into her bows and vanished in the bales of textiles and crates of other cargo packed to serve as improvised armor plate.

In the control room the instrument board showed three bow compartments losing air. But the Yarrow gained speed every second. The pirate's gun flashed and flashed, and every powder-flash was followed by the crashing impact of a projectile. But the Yarrow could take this kind of gunfire for a while, anyhow the pirate couldn't take ramming. It went into overdrive while the charging Yarrow was still two hundred yards away. Trent drove his ship fiercely through the emptiness where the pirate ship had been. He swung around and headed vengefully for the third of the spaceboats the pirate had put into space. The Yarrow passed it at a hundred yards' distance and rockets flashed and streaked toward it, past it, and into it, but it seemed mostly into it. What was left did not look like a spaceboat any longer, and the Yarrow seemingly had all of space to itself.

The mate seemed pleased. He said relievedly, "I'll take some hands and plug those shell-holes, Captain?"

"Not much use," said Trent, coldly. "If we go into overdrive our coil will blow, unless the pirate goes slinking away. But as long as he's got his gun and shells he won't do that. We killed off a good lot of his men in those boats, though!"

The mate looked pained. "What'll we do then, Captain?"

"We'll have to try," said Trent sardonically, "to think of something."

But it didn't look promising. The pirate had a gun. The Yarrow hadn't. The pirate had an intact overdrive coil, permitting it to appear and disappear, to depart and return, and which would automatically blow out the Yarrow's corresponding unit if Trent tried to make use of it. The pirate had lost a good half of its crew in the lifeboats. Perhaps two-thirds. It definitely would not go away and leave the Yarrow to its own devices. The only unusual thing the Yarrow had displayed was resolution and a furious willingness to fight. That amounted to a tactical surprise.

But the pirate was now recovered from it. It reappeared. With a raging deliberation, it lay off some two miles from the Yarrow and began to pound it with solid shot. When the Yarrow charged, the pirate went into overdrive again. The Yarrow could have followed, of course, but at the cost of blowing its coil before it had completed the conversion from normal space. It could only remain in the glaring, terrible unshielded sunshine of the double sun. When the pirate appeared, the Yarrow dashed at it. But the Yarrow had no weapon but itself that could do its enemy damage, and its defense was only partial, and even that, only when it was driving head-on for its antagonist. Sooner or later its bow-armor of cargo bales must fail it.

The sequence of a desperate charge while the pirate pounded it with its cannon, and the disappearance of the freebooter into overdrive, then its reappearance elsewhere to throw more solid shot became almost routine. Trent turned the Yarrow over to the mate and went to check damage. It is always interesting and sometimes useful to put oneself mentally in an enemy's position. He began to imagine vaguely what he'd be able to do with spaceboats if he used them otherwise than as the pirate had.

He began to count up possibilities. Spaceboats would be very poor targets for a gun firing solid shot. But they'd have to get to actual contact to be able to explode a shaped charge usefully. And if the pirate went into overdrive at such a moment it would take the boat with it. And the spaceboat might come back to normal space lightyears from any ship or planet or… anything. It would never be heard of or seen in all the centuries and millennia still to come.

Trent would have risked it, for himself. But the Yarrow and the men aboard it—

The engine room was still air filled. Trent went around to the tiny emergency lock intended to allow of passage to another of the ship's compartments even if one or more of them lost air.

He came out of the airlock in the cargo hold next astern. He saw the huge crate the freight-broker had practically dumped aboard while the mate was in a state of total confusion.

He looked at it. And if his many-times-great-grandfather, that Captain Trent of the Napoleonic period, or any one of his numerously-great-grandfathers could have seen the situation and followed Trent's reasoning, why, Captain Trent's ancestors would have been pleased.