Imperial Stars 1-The Stars at War (31 page)

In the picture, the ship's ramp was lowering. "You can imagine the Terrans' anxiety," B'kila said dryly. "They'd been radioing the Roxolani since the fleet came out of the hyperdrive in the solar system." Chang nodded. Naturally, they had gotten no reply.

Out came the Roxolani, a platoon of stout, furry humanoids in high-crowned helmets and steel corselets. They moved with the precision of veteran troups, shaking themselves into a skirmish line. At a shouted command from an officer wearing scarlet ribbons on his arm and fancy plumes, they raised their weapons to their shoulders and fired into the Terrans.

Chang heard the ancient screams. Undoubtedly the man holding the video set ducked for his life, for the picture jerked and twisted, but the scout pilot saw the clouds of black-powder smoke float into the sky.

The Terran soldiers around the star-ship returned fire automatically, opening up with small arms, rocket and grenade launchers, and recoilless shells from the armored fighting vehicle that had somehow squeezed into position close by.

When the video straightened, the starship was holed and all but two of the aliens down. The survivors gaped at their fallen comrades. Neither had made the slightest move to reload his musket. Reading nonhumans' body language was always tricky, but Chang knew stunned horror when he saw it.

" 'The Road Not Taken,' " B'kila murmured. "Back then, on Terra, they
knew
FTL travel was impossible forever. It was a rude shock when they found that a couple of simple experiments could have given them the key to contragrav and the hyperdrive three, four, even five centuries earlier."

"How
did
they miss them?" Chang asked.

"No idea—in hindsight they're obvious enough. What's that race that flew bronze ships because they couldn't smelt iron? And every species we know that reached what the old Terrans would have called a seventeenth-century technological level did what was needed—except us.

"But trying to explain contragrav and the hyperdrive skews an unsophisticated, developing physics out of shape. With attention focused on them, too, work on other things, like electricity and atomics, never gets started. And those have much broader applications—the others are only really good for moving things from here to there in a hurry."

With a chuckle, Chang said, "We must have seemed like angry gods when we finally got the hyperdrive and burst off Terra. Radar, radio, computers, fission and fusion—no wonder we spent the next two hundred years conquering."

"No wonder at all," B'kila agreed soberly. "But the Confederacy grew too fast and got too big to administer, even with all the technology we had. And unity didn't last forever. None of our neighbors could hurt us, but we did a fine job on ourselves. Someone back then wrote that it was only sporting for humans to fight humans; no one else gave any competition."

"And so, the Collapse," Chang said.

"And here we are, on Loki and a few other worlds, picking over the pieces, a scrap from here, fragment from there, and one day we'll have the puzzle together again—or maybe a new shape, better than the one before . . . if we get the time. But those four missing ships frighten me."

That was a word Chang had never heard her use before. "I still don't see how they disappeared. There's no one out there."

"No one we know of," B'kila corrected. "But I keep thinking that a road traveled once might be traveled twice." As he took her meaning, Chang felt the little hairs at the nape of his neck trying to stand up. She finished low and fierce. "Find out what happened.
And come back.
"

"Any other little favors you'd like?"
Praise of Folly
's computer had demanded when Chang described the mission. "Shall we write the suicide note, too? I won't go, I tell you—I'd end up in the scrapper there just as much as you."

"Shall I shift into override mode?" Chang snapped, in no mood for backtalk.

"No, don't," the computer said with poor grace. "It always leaves me slow and stupid for a couple of days afterwards."

Surly was a better word, the scout pilot thought, but held his peace. The take off was as smooth as takeoffs under contragrav always were, the shift into hyperdrive as brutal as the others
Praise of Folly
had been making lately. Chang staggered into the head and threw up. When he came out, he asked plaintively. "Isn't there any way to smooth that out?"

"Of course," the computer said. "Get me the parts and—"

Chang grunted. Loki's own yards turned out decent craft, but some techniques of precision manufacture had yet to be rediscovered. If one of the old Confederacy ships went wrong, repairs weren't likely to do much good.

Despite
Praise of Folly
's tape library, travel under hyperdrive was dull. The computer played chess at a setting that let Chang win about half the time, until one day he escaped from a trap it thought he shouldn't have seen. Then it trounced him six times running, adding insult to injury by moving the instant he took his finger off a piece. After that it seemed satisfied, and went back to a level mere mortals could match.

From time to time other ships showed on the detector. Most of them never sensed
Praise of Folly
; Confederacy instrumentation handily outranged non-human or post-Collapse gear. Once, though, two vessels made a chase of it. "Damned pirates," Chang growled, and outran them.

He approached his planned emergence-point obliquely, not wanting any observers to track his course back to Loki. The jolt on leaving hyperdrive was not as bad as the one entering it—quite.

"Now what?" the computer said.

The viewscreen showed a totally unfamiliar configuration of stars. Even the Orion Nebula was not as Chang knew it, for he was seeing the side opposite the one it presented to human space. He shrugged. "Make for the nearest main-sequence G or K," he said, and gagged as
Praise of Folly
returned to hyperdrive.

The first yellow-orange sun proved without habitable planets. So did the second and third. A lean region, Chang thought. He was on his way to the fourth when the detector picked up the alien squadron.

Excitement and alarm coursed through him. From the brilliance of the blips on the screen, those were sizable ships. They were making good speed, too, far better than most of the nonhuman craft he knew. He held his course and waited to be noticed.

In short order he was; the strangers had sensitive detectors. Three vessels peeled off from the main group toward him. He took no evasive action; he was looking for contact. "Fool that I am," he said to no one in particular.

The lead ship's drive field touched his; they were both thrown back into normal space. Gulping, Chang wondered whether the aliens were subject to nausea.

The two ships emerged on divergent vectors several thousand kilometers apart. That would have been enough to make it impossible for most of the aliens the scout pilot knew to find him in the vastness of space, but the stranger swiftly altered course and came after him.

"I'm picking up radar," the computer reported.

"Wonderful," Chang said morosely. As usual, B'kila had been right.

The other two ships must have slaved their engines to their detector screens, for they returned to normal space at the same instant as their comrade and
Praise of Folly.
Chang's radar soon found them. They closed rapidly.

"Radio traffic," the computer said. The whistles and growls that came out of the speaker sprang from no human throat.

"Let's give them something to think about." Chang recorded his name and the name of his ship. "Squirt that out on their frequency."

There were several seconds of absolute silence, then a burst of alien noise that sounded much more excited than the previous signals. Chang wondered if the non-humans had learned English or Low Mandarin from any of the earlier pilots. If so, they were not letting on. The incomprehensible babble continued.

Then alarms hooted and the computer was shouting, "Missile away!" A moment later it reported, "Contragrav job, fairly good velocity, but a clean miss—trajectory far ahead of us."

"Just the one launch?" the scout pilot asked tensely.

"So far."
Praise of Folly
was a confirmed pessimist.

"Might be a shot across our—" A new star bloomed in the forward screen, a supernova burst that went from white through yellow and orange to red and slowly guttered out.

"Fission explosion," the computer said matter-of-factly. "Thirty kilotonne range."

Chang held his head in his hands. Not just electronics, then: the aliens had a grasp of nuclear physics, too. He could not imagine anything worse.

"It lit up these,"
Praise of Folly
said. Another screen came on, its images grainy with high magnification. The scout pilot did not recognize the craft displayed, but he knew warships when he saw them. They bristled with launchers and also sported two turrets each: quick-fire guns for close-in work, he guessed.

He weighted his options. Even winning a standup fight would not give him enough information to make B'kila happy. Meekly stopping, though, stuck in his craw. "They may as well be as worried as I am," he decided. "Give the lead ship a peewee at about the same distance they put theirs—but throttle down the missile so theirs seems to out-perform it." He did not intend to show all his cards.

Atomic fire blossomed again, unmistakably brilliant. The gabble of alien noise rose to a roar. Then abrupt silence fell; it must have occurred to one of the nonhumans that Chang might somehow know their language. Cat and mouse, he thought, with neither side sure which was which.

The three alien ships approached one another, though not so close that a single blast could take out more than one. Boats flitted back and forth: a meeting, no doubt. Glad he was a loner, Chang went to sleep. In case of serious attack, the computer would have to defend
Praise of Folly
anyway.

The computer woke him a couple of hours later to report that one of the aliens had gone into hyperdrive. "Which one?" he asked. The smallest of the three appeared onscreen for a moment.

A boat left one of the remaining aliens and moved slowly toward
Praise of Folly
. Unlike its parent craft, it blazed with lights: the equivalent of a flag of truce? Chang could not afford to be trusting. "If it comes inside 2000 kilometers, fire another warning shot," he said. "Chemical explosion this time, not nuclear."

But the boat stopped at more than twice that distance. It retreated to its own ship, leaving behind a small metal canister made conspicuous by a floodlight and radar beacon. "Playing it very cozy, aren't they?" Chang said.

"Probably booby-trapped."

"Probably," he agreed. "Shall we find out? Send the probe over for a look."

The little robot sped toward the canister. The scout pilot wondered what the nonhumans would make of it. It would tell them something of the technology he had, but he hoped to learn more about theirs.

The light on the canister was incandescent, not a plasma tube; the battery pack that powered it was larger than the Terran equivalent. The canister itself looked suspiciously like a wastebasket. A foil cover had been taped across the top; the paper tape was already beginning to come loose as its adhesive dried in vacuum.

At Chang's direction, the probe peeled back the foil. Nothing untoward happened. The camera pickup showed that inside the canister there were only two rectangular sheets of thick, parchment-like paper, one perfect, the other with a ragged edge, as if it had been torn from a book.

The book page had a line of incomprehensible script, but a black-and-white print took up most of the surface: an irregular pattern of lines and spaces. The scout pilot was used to seeing them in color, but he recognized it at once. "Spectrogram!" He had an inspiration. "Match it against the sun their fleet was heading for."

After a few seconds, the computer said, "It checks." Chang fancied that he heard a note of puzzled respect in the electronic voice. He hid a smile. The computer was smarter than he was, but it did not make intuitive leaps.

The other sheet proved that the aliens were used to contacting other races. A series of skillful cartoons instructed Chang to go into hyperdrive between the two nonhuman ships and let them pace him to the star. They also warned that he would be attacked if he dropped into normal space on his own; he was to let one of the aliens bring him back by cutting across his drive field.

"Sensible enough precautions," he said. "They'll have scrambled every warship in that system to look out for me as I emerge, too. I would, in their shoes."

For
Praise of Folly
, the jump into hyperdrive was smooth. Chang's escorts hovered close, just far enough away to let their fields operate. To his regret, they kept up when he increased speed. Though the rest of their skills seemed a bit behind those of the Terrans, their hyperdrive systems were first-rate.

Shortly before he expected to return to normal space, the scout pilot gritted his teeth and injected himself with several cc's of memory-RNA. For the next ten days to two weeks he would have nearly total recall—and a raging headache.

Like Terrans, the aliens preferred to emerge well away from a system's ecliptic plane, to minimize the risk of encountering sky junk. Chang listened torpidly as radio traffic crackled back and forth between his escort and the ships that, as he had guessed, were standing by awaiting his arrival.

Several formed up in a globe around him. Another message canister showed him that he was to stay in the center of the formation as they approached the system's second planet. "If it weren't for the honor of the thing, I'd rather walk," he grumbled; reading Frost had gotten him interested in other ancient authors.

The lead ship in the escorting array slowed until it was only a couple of kilometers ahead of
Praise of Folly
and began flashing its lights on and off. After a minute or so, the scout pilot understood. "Folly, if you will."

"So it is," the computer said, but went after the alien in spite of his slip of the tongue.

Spaceports on civilized worlds have a depressing sameness; it is next to impossible to make vast expanses of concrete interesting. The perimeter buildings, though, caught Chang's eye when
Praise of Folly
dipped below the last cloud back; they had the massive look of fortifications.