The Pirates of Zan

CHAPTER EIGHT

HODDAN did not worry about his captive-followers. Soon he saw the weird spacefleet.

The spaceboat drew up alongside the gigantic hulk of the leader’s ship. The seven Darthians were still numbed by their kidnaping and the situation in which they found themselves. They looked with dull eyes at the mountainous object they approached. It had actually been designed as a fighter-carrier of space, intended to carry smaller craft. It must have been sold for scrap a couple of hundred years since, and patched up for this emigration.

Hoddan waited for the huge door to open. It did. He headed into the opening, noticing as he did so that an object two or three times the size of the spaceboat was already there. It cut down the room for maneuvering, but a thing once done is easier thereafter. Hoddan got the boat inside, and there was a very small scraping and the great door closed before the boat could drift out again.

Hoddan turned to his victim-followers once the spaceboat was still.

“This,” he said in a manner which could only be described as one of smiling ferocity, “this is a pirate ship, belonging to the pirate fleet we passed through on the way here. It’s manned by characters so murderous that their leaders don’t dare land anywhere away from their home star-cluster, or all the galaxy would combine against them, to exterminate them or be exterminated. You’ve joined that fleet. You’re going to get out of this boat and march over to that ship yonder. Then you’re going to be space-pirates under me.”

They quivered, but did not protest.

“I’ll try you for one voyage,” he told them. “There will be plunder. There will be pirate revels. If you serve faithfully and fight well, I’ll return you to Don Loris” stronghold with your loot after the one voyage. If you don’t—” He grinned mirthlessly at them, “if you don’t, out the airlock with you, to float forever between the stars. Understand?”

The last was pure savagery. They cringed. The outside-pressure meter went up to normal. Hoddan turned off the vision screens, so ending any views of the interior of the hold. He opened the port and went out. Sitting in something like continued paralysis in their seats, the seven spear-men of Darth heard his voice in conversation outside the boat. They could catch no words, but Hoddan’s tone was strictly businesslike. He came back.

“All right,” he said shortly. “Thai, march ’em over.”

Thai gulped. He loosened his seat-belt. The enlistment of the seven in the pirate fleet was tacitly acknowledged. They were unarmed save for the conventional large knives at their belts.

“Frrrd, harch!” rasped Thai with a lump in his throat. “Two, three, four. Hup, two, three, four. Hup…”

Seven men marched dismally out of the spaceboat and down to the floor of the huge hold. Eyes front, chests out, throats dry, they marched to the larger but still small vessel that shared this hold compartment. They marched into that ship. Thai barked, “Hmmmmm halt!” and they stopped. They waited.

Hoddan came in very matter-of-factly only moments later. He closed the entrance port, so sealing the ship. He nodded approvingly.

“You can break ranks now,” he said. “There’s food and such stuff around. The ship’s yours. But don’t turn knobs or push buttons.”

He went forward, and a door closed behind him.

He looked at the control board, and could have done with a little information himself. When the ship was built, generations ago, there’d been controls installed which would be quite useless now. When the present working instruments were installed, it had been done so hastily that the wires and relays behind them were not concealed, and it was these that gave him the clues to understand them.

The space-ark’s door opened. Hoddan backed his ship out. Its rockets had surprising power. He reflected that the Lawlor drive wouldn’t have been designed for this present ship, either. There’d probably been a quantity order for so many Lawlor drives, and they’d been installed on whatever needed a modem drive-system, which was every ship in the fleet. But since this was one of the smallest craft in the lot, with its low mass it should be fast.

“Well see,” he said to nobody in particular.

Out in emptiness, but naturally sharing the orbit of the ship from which it had just come, Hoddan tried it out tentatively. He got the feel of ft. Then as a matter of simple, rule-of-thumb astrogation, he got from a low orbit to a five-diameter height where the Lawlor drive would hold by mere touches of rocketpower. It was simply a matter of stretching the orbit to extreme eccentricity as all the ships went round the planet. After the fourth go round he was fully five diameters out at aphelion. He touched the drive button and everybody had that very peculiar disturbance of all their senses which accompanies going into overdrive. The small craft sped through emptiness at a high multiple of the speed of light.

Hoddan’s knowledge of astrogation was strictly practical. He went over his ship. From a look at it outside he’d guessed that it once had been a yacht. Various touches inside verified that idea. There were two staterooms. All the space was for living and supplies. None was for cargo. He nodded. There was a faint mustiness about it. But there’d been a time when it was some rich man’s pride.

He went back to the control-room to make an estimate. From the pilot’s seat one could see a speck of brightness directly ahead. Infinitesimal dots of brightness appeared swiftly brighter and then darted outward. As they darted they disappeared because their motion became too swift to follow. There were, of course, methods of measuring this phenomenon so that one could get an accurate measure of one’s speed in overdrive. Hoddan had no instrument for the purpose. But he had the feel of things. This was a very fast ship indeed, at full Lawlor thrust.

Presently he went out to the central cabin. His followers had found provisions. There were novelties — hydroponic fruit, for instance — and they’d gloomily stuffed themselves. They were almost resigned, now. Memory of the loot he’d led them to at Ghek’s castle inclined them to be hopeful. But they looked uneasy when he stopped where they were gathered.

“Well?” he said sharply. Thai swallowed.

“We have been companions, Bron Hoddan,” he said unhappily. “We fought together in great battles, two against fifty, and we plundered the slain.”

“True enough,” agreed Hoddan. If Thai wanted to edit his memories of the fighting at the spaceport, that was all right with him. “Now we’re headed for something much better.”

“But what?” asked Thai miserably. “Here we are high above our native world—”

“Oh, no!” said Hoddan. “You couldn’t even pick out its sun, from where we are now!” Thai gulped.

“I do not understand what you want with us,” he protested. “We are not experienced in space! We are simple men…”

“You’re pirates now,” Hoddan told him with a sort of genial bloodthirstiness. “You’ll do what I tell you until we fight. Then you’ll fight well or die. That’s all you need to know!”

He left them. When men are to be led it is rarely wise to discuss policy or tactics with them. Most men work best when they know only what is expected of them. Then they can’t get confused and they do not get ideas of how to do things better.

Hoddan inspected the yacht more carefully. There were still traces of decorative features which had nothing to do with spaceworthiness. But the mere antiquity of the ship made Hoddan hunt more carefully. He found a small compartment packed solidly with supplies. A supply cabinet did not belong where it was. He hauled out stuff to make sure. It was — it had been — a machine shop in miniature. In the early days, before space-phones were long-range devices, a yacht or a ship that went beyond orbital distance was strictly on its own. If there were a breakdown it was strictly of private concern. It had to be repaired by its own, or else. So all early spacecraft carried amazingly complete equipment for repairs. Only liners had been equipped that way in recent generations, and it is almost unheard of for their tool shops to be used.

But there was the remnant of a shop on the yacht that Hoddan was using for his errand to Walden. He’d told the emigrant leaders that he went to ask for charity. He’d just assured his followers that their journey was for piracy. Now…

He began to empty the cubbyhole of all the items that had been packed into it for storage. It had been very ingenious, this miniature repair shop. The lathe was built in with strength-members of the walls as part of its structure. The drill press was recessed. The welding apparatus had its coils and condensers under the floor. The briefest of examinations showed the condensers to be in bad shape, and the coils might be hopeless. But there was good material used in the old days. Hoddan began to have quite unreasonable hopes.

He went back to the control-room to meditate.

He’d had a reasonably sound plan of action for the pirating of a spaceliner, even though he had no weapons mounted on the ship nor anything more deadly than stun-pistols for his reluctant crew. But he considered it likely that he could make the same sort of landing with this yacht that he’d already done with the spaceboat. Which should be enough.

If he waited off Walden until a liner went down to the planet’s great spaceport, he could try it. He would go into a close orbit around Walden which would bring him, very low, over the landing-grid within an hour or so of the liner’s landing. He’d turn the yacht end for end and apply full rocketpower for deceleration. The yacht would drop like a stone into the landing-grid. Everything would happen too quickly for the grid crew to think of clapping a forcefield on it, or for them to manage it if they tried. He’d be aground before they realized it.

The rest was simply fast action. Hoddan and seven Darthians, stun-pistols humming, would tumble out of the yacht and dash for the control-room of the grid. Hoddan would smash the controls. Then they’d rush the landed liner, seize it, shoot down anybody who tried to oppose them, and seal up the ship.

And then they’d take off on the liner’s rockets, which were carried for emergency landing only, but could be used for a single take-off. After one such use they’d be exhausted. And with the grid’s controls smashed, nobody could even try to stop them.

It wasn’t a bad idea. He had a good deal of confidence in it. It was the reason for his Darthian crew. Nobody’d expect such a thing to be tried, so it almost certainly could be done. But it did have the drawback that the yacht would have to be left behind, a dead loss, when the liner was seized.

Hoddan thought it over soberly. Long before he reached Walden, of course, he could have his own crew so terrified that they’d fight like fiends for fear of what he might do to them if they didn’t. But if he could keep the spaceyacht also…

He nodded gravely. He liked the new possibility. If it didn’t work, there was the first plan in reserve. In any case he’d get a modern spaceliner and suitable cargo to present to emigrants of Colin.

There were certain electronic circuits which were akin. The Lawlor drive unit formed a forcefield, a stress in space, into which a nearby ship necessarily moved. The faster-than-light angle came from the fact that it worked like a donkey trotting after a carrot held in front of him by a stick. The ship moving into the stressed area moved the stress. The forcefields of a landing-grid were similar. A turning principle was involved, but basically a landing-grid clamped an area of stress around a spaceship, and the ship couldn’t move out of it. When the landing-grid moved the stressed area up or down — why — that was it.

All this was known to everybody. But a third trick had been evolved on Zan. It was based on the fact that ball lightning could be generated by a circuit fundamentally akin to the other two. Ball lightning was an area of space so stressed that its energy content could leak out only very slowly, unless it made contact with a conductor, when all bets were off. It blew. And the Zan pirates used ball lightning to force the surrender of their victims.

Hoddan began to draw diagrams. The Lawlor drive unit had been installed long after the yacht was built. It would be modern, with no nonsense about it. With such-and-such of its electronic components cut out, and such-and-such other ones cut in, it would become a perfectly practical ball-lightning generator, capable of placing bolts wherever one wanted them. This was standard Zan practice. Hoddan’s grandfather had used it for years. It had the advantage that •it could be used inside a gravity field, where a Lawlor drive could not. It had the other advantage that commercial spacecraft could not mount such gadgets for defense, because the insurance companies objected to meddling with Lawlor drive installations.

Hoddan set to work with the remnants of a tool shop on the ancient yacht and some antique coils and condensers and such. He became filled with zest. He almost forgot that he was the skipper of an elderly craft which should have been junked before he was born.

But even he grew hungry, and he realized that nobody offered him food. He went indignantly into the yacht’s central saloon and found his seven crew members snoring stertorously, sprawled in stray places here and there.

He woke them with great sternness. He set them furiously to work on housekeeping — including making meals.

He went back to work. Suddenly he stopped and meditated afresh, and ceased his actual labor to draw a diagram which he regarded with great affection. He returned to his adaptation of the Lawlor drive to the production of ball lightning.

Once finished, he examined the stars. The nearby suns were totally strange in their arrangement. But the Coalsack area was a spacemark good for half a sector of the galaxy. There was a condensation in the Nearer Rim for a second bearing. And a certain calcium cloud with a star-cluster behind it which was as good as a highway sign for locating oneself.

He lined up the yacht again and went into overdrive once more. Two days later he came out, again surveyed the cosmos, again went into overdrive, again came out, once more made a hop in faster-than-light travel, and finally he was in the solar system of which Walden was the ornament and pride.

He used the telescope and contemplated Walden on its screen. The spaceyacht moved briskly toward it. His seven Darthian crewmen, aware of coming action, dolefully sharpened their two-foot knives. They did not know what else to do, but they were far from happy.

Hoddan shared their depression. Such gloomy anticipations before stirring events are proof that a man is not a fool. Hoddan’s grandfather had been known to observe that when a man can imagine all kinds of troubles and risks and disasters ahead of him, he is usually right. Hoddan shared that view. But it would not do to back out now.

He examined Walden painstakingly while the yacht sped toward it. He saw an ocean come out of the twilight zone of dawn. By the charts, the capitol city and the spaceport should be on that ocean’s western shore. After a suitable and very long interval, the site of the capitol city came around the edge of the planet.

From a bare hundred thousand miles, Hoddan stepped up magnification to its limit and looked again. Then Walden more than filled the telescope’s field. He could see only a very small fraction of the planet’s surface. He had to hunt before he found the capitol city again. Then it was very clear. He saw the curving lines of its highways and the criss-cross pattern of its streets. Buildings as such, however, did not show. But he made out the spaceport and the shadow of the landing-grid, and in the very center of that grid there was something silvery which cast a shadow of its own. A ship. A liner.

Then the silvery thing moved visibly across other objects, and its shadow ceased to be. It was thrust surely and ever more swiftly skyward by the grid. The liner was rising to outer space.

There was a tap on the control-room door. Thai.

“Anything happening?” he asked uneasily.

“I just sighted the ship we’re going to take,” said Hoddan.

Thai looked unhappy. He withdrew. Hoddan plotted out the extremely roundabout course he must take to end up with the liner and the yacht traveling in the same direction and the .same speed, so capture would be possible. It could not be attempted in clear space. Five diameters out, the liner could whisk into overdrive and be gone forever. On the other hand, within five diameters the yacht couldn’t use its drive, either. And yet again, the liner and the yacht had to be moving away from the planet at the time of capture, with enough velocity to attain clear space on their momentum, or there’d be no point in the attack. If the yacht did not float on out past the five-diameter limit, it could be gathered in by the landing-grid and brought to ground for such measures which might seem appropriate.

Hoddan worked out the angles and the speeds. He had to dive past Walden, swing around its farther side, and come back like a boomerang so his and the liner’s speed and line of motion would match up into a collision course. Then rockets…

He put the yacht on the line required. He threw on full power. Actually, he headed partly away from his intended victim. The little yacht plunged forward. Nothing seemed to happen. Time passed. Hoddan had nothing to do but worry. He worried.

Thai tapped on the door again.

“About time to get ready to fight?” he asked dolefully.

“Not yet,” said Hoddan. “I’m running away from our victim, now.”

Another half-hour. The course changed. The yacht was around behind Walden. The whole planet lay between it and its intended prey. The course of the small ship curved, now. It would pass almost close enough to clip the topmost tips of Walden’s atmosphere. There was nothing for Hoddan to do but think morbid thoughts. He thought them.

The Lawlor drive began to burble. He cut it off. He sat gloomily in the control-room, occasionally glancing at the nearing expanse of rushing mottled surface presented by the now-nearby planet. Its attraction bent the path of the yacht. It was now a parabolic curve.

Presently the surface diminished a little. The yacht was increasing its distance from it. Hoddan used the telescope. He searched the space ahead with full-width field. He found the liner. It rose steadily. The grid still thrust it upward with an even, continuous acceleration. It had to be not less than forty thousand miles out before it could take to overdrive. But at that distance it would have an outward velocity which would take it on out indefinitely. At ten thousand miles, certainly, the grid-fields would let go.

They did. Hoddan could tell because the liner wobbled slightly. It was free. It was no longer held solidly. From now on it floated up on momentum.

Hoddan nibbled at his fingernails. There was nothing to be done for forty minutes more. Presently there was nothing to be done for thirty. For twenty. Ten. Five. Three. Two-

The liner was barely twenty miles away when Hoddan fired his rockets. They made a colossal cloud of vapor in emptiness. The yacht stirred faintly, shifted deftly, lost just a suitable amount of velocity — which now was nearly straight up from the planet — and moved with precision and directness toward the liner. Hoddan stirred his controls and swung the whole small ship. He flipped a switch that cut out certain elements of the Lawlor unit and cut in those others which made the modified drive unit into a ball-lightning projector.

A flaming speck of pure incandescence sped from the yacht through emptiness. It would miss… No! Hoddan swerved it. It struck the liner’s hull. It would momentarily paralyze every bit of electric equipment in the ship. It would definitely not go unnoticed.

“Calling liner,” said Hoddan painfully into a microphone. “Calling liner! We are pirates, attacking your ship. You have ten seconds to get into your lifeboats or we will hull you!”

He settled back, again nibbling at his fingernails. He was acutely disturbed. At the end of ten seconds the distance between the two ships was perceptibly less.

He flung a second ball-lightning bolt across the diminished space. He sent it whirling round and round the liner in a tight spiral. He ended by having it touch the liner’s bow. Liquid light ran over the entire hull.

“Your ten seconds are up,” he said worriedly. “If you don’t get out—”

But then he relaxed. A boat-blister on the liner opened. The boat did not release itself. It could not possibly take on its complement of passengers and crew in so short a time. The opening of the blister was a sign of surrender.

The two first ball-lightning bolts were miniatures. Hoddan now projected a full-sized ball. It glittered viciously in emptiness. It sped toward the liner and hung off its side, menacingly. The yacht from Darth moved steadily closer. Five miles. Two.

“All out,” said Hoddan regretfully. “We can’t wait any longer!”

A boat darted away from the liner. A second. A third and fourth and fifth. The last boat lingered desperately. The yacht was less than a mile away when it broke free and plunged frantically toward the planet it had left a little while before. The other boats were already streaking down-ward, trails of rocket fumes expanding behind them. The crew of the landing-grid would pick them up for safe and gentle landing.

Hoddan sighed in relief. He played delicately upon the yacht’s rocket controls. He carefully maneuvered the very last of the novelties he had built into the originally simple Lawlor drive unit. The two ships came together with a distant clanking sound. It seemed horribly loud.

Thai jerked open the door, ashen white.

“W-we hit something! Wh-when do we fight?”

“I forgot. The fighting’s over,” Hoddan said ruefully. “But bring your stun-pistols. Nobody’d stay behind, but somebody might have gotten left.”

He rose, to take over the captured ship.