A Jungle of Stars (1976) (15 page)

time. But normal time progressed with the battle; and the more normal time that passed, the more numerous the defenders became. They came from all over the galaxy, at null-speeds, as fast as the messenger ships could get there, phase in, broadcast the alarm,and phase out for the next destination. An attack on Haven brought them all.

The pilot, in his own battle Sector, had done well, sustaining no injury while taking seven of the enemy. His squadron's luck had been equally good: of the fifty that started, thirty-seven were still operational.

The fighters had been drawn out or destroyed in the enemy squadron he had been facing, and new reinforcements had brought him back up to strength.

The flagship, still covered with fighters, was nonetheless exposed here and there, phasing in and out of stasis to confuse the attacking shots without losing contact for long with its defenders. One moment it was there, the next not.

The pilot's flagship deployed some of the newcomers along the entire D-line front while keeping the original ships at sub-light. Enemy protective fighter screen actions became multilevel as well, thinning them out.

The defenders bad made a breach almost in the center of the attack line, and The Bromgrev had called in a lot of reserves to plug it. This left only the rapidly thinning screen ahead with no reinforcements. They had to nail the flagship of the enemy squadron before the center plug was achieved and the right flank could be relieved. A breakthrough here would mean a total fragmentation of forces -- and a link with Haven forces on the other side of the offensive line.

The pilot decided to go in.

"Dive! Dive!" he warned the gunners, who mentally switched phase as the ship did, going to D-1, then back up through the center of the line at A-1, almost on top of the enemy flagship.

There was a rumble and a tremor as one of the enemy beams struck a glancing blow on his ship, but, for a split second, the gaps in the fighter screen exposed the enemy flagship. The gunners struck and the flagship winked out. Almost as soon as it happened, the rest of the squadron rallied and moved in on the disorganized enemy fighters, mopping them up.

The pilot saw one ship of the defeated force phase into D, and received permission to chase. It was headed in-system.

The pilot located it at D-1 and started to close, but could not get in close enough for a good shot. Suddenly the object of the pursuit went to null, stopping dead almost literally in both time and space and causing the pilot to overshoot.

Cursing himself for his carelessness, he halted and backtracked, but the fugitive slipped through the defense zone at D-2, then came back up on the pilot's tail, firing steadily.

He rolled, and managed to come up just under the enemy ship. The gunners fired and seemed to strike the enemy, but did not destroy it. It vanished into A.

The, pilot brought his own ship up to A and finally spotted the ship, wobbling crazily but still headed in-system. He noted the trajectory but did not give chase. The enemy ship, disabled, sputtering, on its last legs, would be captured in Earth's gravity well and pulled down before he could phase to get to it. Let the ground men take it.

Moving back to the battle, the pilot could see the field emptying. The Bromgrev had lost too many ships in too short a time to penetrate and hold; the defenders were mopping up, but it was over. Back in contact with Flag, the pilot was told to break and return. The ship was no longer needed.

He broke and headed back for Base in the asteroids. As he completed the course setting, he could feel his power ebbing, his strength diminishing. The starfield was closing in on him.

"No! No!" he protested. "I can't go back! I can't. . ." The man on the couch awoke. For a few minutes he just lay there; then, slowly, his head throbbing with pain, he disconnected the helmet and straps. He heard audible groans over the ship's intercoms. The gunners, too, were coming out of it.

Shaking his head to clear it, he raised the couch to a sitting position and fed the coordinates for the remainder of the flight back to Base.

It was always this way: that feeling of freedom, of strength, of power, when be was the ship -- and the sense of puniness, of being an insect bound to the flesh, and one of billions, when he came out of it.

Flag had sounded Recall, and it reached the one very tiny area of the ship's computers that he couldn't reach: the automatic equipment that pulled them out of their union with their machinery even though they did not want it.

They never wanted it.

He felt a pain in his left shoulder and, rubbing it, saw that the shock of the glancing blow had caused him to be cut by the straps. Another aggravation of the flesh.

He glanced over at the two chronographs on either side of the control console, one labeled SUBJECTIVE and the other OBJECTIVE.

The subjective control read 04:51

Almost five hours of battle. It had been a rough one.

The objective one read 00:13.

In normal time, the whole thing bad been fought in thirteen minutes.

"Hey! Var!" hailed the voice of the right gunner.

"Yeah, Gro? What's the problem?"

"Who won?"

2

THE SHIP CAME in low over the horizon, like some ghostly, misshapen balloon floating wobbily down as the helium slowly escaped, and it glowed a sickly blue much stronger than moonlight.

Everyone in town who was out that night saw it. A meteor, most said, and families rushed out into backyards to get a better view.

Jennifer Barrow heard the commotion outside her apartment and made her way over to the French windows and out onto the balcony. The warm, humid air enveloped her like a moist rug, and the mosquitoes took the exit as a signal to attack. She heard her neighbor muttering exclamations under his breath.

"What's going on, John?" she called over to him.

"A meteor, Jenny. Biggest damned thing I've ever seen! It's bigger and brighter than the moon! Wow! Look at that!"

"Describe it to me, John," she asked. "What's it like?"

For the first time, through his excitement, John remembered that Jennifer was totally blind. He coughed apologetically. "It's really kinda huge, Jenny -- larger than this apartment, I guess. Sorta glowing, kinda floating down. It's gonna hit pretty soon. Funny, though . . ."

"What is?" she asked, trying to picture the unprecedented.

"It's coming in so damned slow! Every other meteor I've ever seen has come in like fire."

She remained on the balcony, feeling the excitement and hearing the comments and sensing the awe, but she could not escape the dark thoughts. In a few minutes it'll be all over, she told herself. And I'll go back in again and be alone.

In the dark.

But she was wrong. For her, it was the beginning.

For Alice Mary McBride, age nineteen, it was the end.

She threaded her way up the mountain in her little yellow sports car at over 60 miles per hour, hypnotized by the speed and the sound the car made on the curves. She was high and she knew it. She felt as if the car were going about an inch an hour, and she kicked the accelerator down even harder, urging the little car forward, faster, faster ...

There. The big curve. How fast can I take it? As she made the curve, wheels squealing, she came in sight of the object, coming straight in toward her. For a moment she thought that the pot had been even better stuff than she'd believed, but she suddenly realized that the thing was real and getting larger every second. As she had been hypnotized by the driving before, now the object held her attention. She could think of nothing else, the marijuana high creating a onetrack mind of fixed but limited purpose. The road aimed her.straight at the thing, now reflected in Lake Moses a thousand feet below.

There was a curve ahead.

It was never determined whether the object hit Lake Moses -- throwing up a huge wave that splattered area hundreds of feet from the water's edge --

before, after, or at the same time as Alice Mary McBride.

The old man, standing on the front porch of his home about eight hundred feet farther up the mountain, watching the weird object like everyone else in the town far below, saw the car go through the railing, spin, and plunge into the lake below. There were two bubbling areas in the lake after they both hit: one about in the middle of the lake, the other, much smaller and briefer, toward the mountain side.

"Oh my God! Mary! Mary!" he screamed, and started running down the mountain road although his truck was handy.

Cutting through the switchbacks on old vertical trails, it still took him almost twenty minutes to reach the lake below, tired, huffing and puffing.

He didn't stop, the adrenaline forcing him onward. He jumped into the water and started swimming to where the car had gone under. The lake was deep in the center, but only eight or ten feet near the mountainside.

It wouldn't have mattered.

Joseph McBride was going after his daughter.

It had taken only three hours to reach Mycroft, Virginia, from Washington, and Paul Carleton Savage didn't feel very tired. Although it was almost 4 A.M. when he pulled in, he could see the red lights of the State Police cars up on the mountainside near the break in the barrier and others down at the lake's edge. Pausing for one of the three traffic lights in the little town, he reached into the glove compartment and brought out three wallets. Glancing into them,he found the one he wanted and put it in his right breast pocket before the light changed.

He headed out to the base of the lake. A roadblock stopped him about a hundred yards from the place where the State Police cars and ambulance were situated.

"Sorry, sir," said a trooper in the hard hill dialect of western Virginia. "Nobody allowed past this point."

Savage smiled and reached for the wallet and gave it to the trooper without comment.

Under the emblem of the Department of Defense was his picture and vital statistics; around the seal it said, "Defense Intelligence Agency." The trooper was impressed.

"Okay, sir, you can go through. Nothin' much happenin', anyway."

"I can start right here," Savage told him. "What happened? All we got was a report that a meteor, or UFO of some kind, crashed in the lake."

"That's about it, sir," responded the trooper. "Everybody says it appeared bright, glowin', pretty big, kinda floated in from the east, there."

He pointed. "Local girl got panicked drivin' up there, and went in with the thing. The lake's the local reservoir -- natural, but pretty deep in the middle. We got a coupla guys up from the Department of Highways with some divin' gear they use to check out drainage and the like in the lake, and they're tryin' to get the girl out now. The car was a softtop. You know, one of them little foreign sports cars, convertible. She landed upside down, so it may take some time to get the body out."

Savage nodded. "Okay. Thanks, officer," he said, and slowly moved the car up to the small crowd of police and rescue people ahead.

One officious-looking middle-aged individual spotted him and came over to where he had just gotten ont of the car. Savage mentally bet himself that it was the mayor.

"Hello, sir," Savage hailed, and pulled the ID again. "Savage, DoD. Any progress?"

"Tom Horgan, Mayor of Mycroft," the mayor said and offered a pudgy hand which Savage shook.

Horgan barely glanced at the ID; like most people he never questioned anyone who spoke with obvious conviction and authority. First rule of being a private detective: be a convincing liar.

"I'm out to check on your mysterious new resident," Savage explained.

"DoD takes a dim view of uninvited guests dropping in like that."

The mayor chuckled, then became suddenly grave.

"You heard about our tragedy," be said more than asked.

Savage nodded. "Yeah, too bad. Who was she?"

"Girl named Alice McBride -- only, only her old man called her that.

Everybody else called her Kip, name she picked sometime and liked. A wild one: booze, drugs, and all that. But, still, a good looker -- and nineteen..."

"Um, yeah," Savage murmured dryly. He craned neck and viewed the spot from which she had plunged. "You'd never ever know there was a road up there from here," he commented. "What the hell was she doing driving up there around midnight? Lovers' Lane? She was alone, wasn't she?"

"Naw, nothin' like that. She lived up there with her pop -- you can't see the house quite from this angle. Ex Army man. His wife died giving birth to the girl, and he retired from the Army and moved here. Bought the old place and fixed it up pretty good. Drives the fuel oil truck here in winter; right now, he's the ice cream man."

One of the divers surfaced and swam in toward shore. The second's head appeared shortly after, about forty feet out; then he, too, started in.

Everyone rushed over to where the two were emerging from the water. The first diver was shaking his head from side to side.

"No way," he told them. "The goddam thing's upside down in about fourteen feet. We'll need a block and tackle rigged on a couple of rowboats to get it over. The doors are jammed shut."

"We'll get her out," the second diver assured them, "but it'll be tomorrow afternoon before we can get the stuff we need up here and ready.

Won't make no difference, though -- 'cept I'd like to get that car out of there before the oil and shit fouls up the whole reservoir."

"What about the other thing that went in?" Savage called out. "See anything of it?"

"Naw," the first diver answered. "It's too far out, and water's too dark. Maybe I'll see it when everything's completely settled in there and we got some light."

"Okay, men, nothing to do until tomorrow!" the mayor called out. "The troopers'll keep watch on things. Why don't we all get some sleep? It's gonna be a long day tomorrow."

Murmurs of assent could be heard, and men started for their cars and trucks. The two divers unloaded their tanks and masks in the back of a yellow state truck and prepared to ge~as well.

Savage walked back to his car, started it, and drove back toward town.