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Operation Interstellar

<h2>CHAPTER 16</h2> For four solid months, Al Donatti tried to reply by Z-wave and failed. This was because Grayson was busy following the radio beacon between Latham Alpha and the next Galactic Survey station along the network. Because of daily contact and a certain amount of quavering faith, no one dared to retune the Z-wave dials. Paul and Nora followed the beacon in almost to the station. Then, because Paul did not know that he had already established contact across a myriad of relay connections all the way back to Neoterra, he waited in space until he could pick up the beacon beyond the next link. Two light weeks out beyond the radio link, Paul was still conversing with Stacey and Morrow. "Now?" Nora nodded. "You've done it," she said. "We're in." Here was no grand celebration over a quick success. Here was the culmination of gradual acceptance, a sort of growing-in of knowledge, gradual and complete. It was hard to define the line between promise and fulfillment. Only by personally setting a date and using it as the time-mark could the time of proof be set. But this was it. "Paul." "Yes?" "I'm glad—for you." "And you?" Nora nodded happily. "Pretty soon, Paul?" "Any day in the week." Nora pouted. "Paul, I want some clothing. I feel seedy." "You look good to me." Nora laughed. "I'll look better in some new clothes." Paul eyed her carefully, boldly. There had been clothing on Latham Beta III for Nora, lend-lease from a few of the botanical-worker's wives that were reasonably similar in size. The dress that Nora had worn during the escape from Westlake's little college had been the best fitted among the clothing, and Nora wore it now. She knew that even though it was a bit overworked, she looked better in it than in any of the clothing she had borrowed. Nora returned Paul's appraisal of her with a flaunt of her hip. "So?" "So!" he said. Paul turned toward the control panel and made some computations and some settings on the dials. Nora pouted. "Why the cloud-up-and-rain?" he asked. Nora chuckled. "Trigonometry," she said. "First things first," Paul replied. The floor surged upward, causing Nora to lose her balance. Paul caught her neatly. "We're on our way," he said. Nora looked up in his eyes. Silently. There was no point in saying anything. The Z-wave, proved-in months ago on Neoterra, newly-proved to Paul and Nora, was a sort of landmark that did not require any further amplification. That was finished and done. There had been restraint. Now it seemed childish like a youngster who saves the fanciest chocolate for the last and best. This was the last and best and both of them knew it. Her lips were softer, warmer. More eager. In all of their previous lovemaking there had been a strident vigor and an avid clutching for one another, a sort of regret that fulfillment was yet to come, but not yet here. Now this frantic reaching seemed gone. Paul knew the free relaxation of Nora's softness against him, he felt the sweet lassitude soften her. His hands caressed her and Nora moved to relish the caress. "Paul—I love you." "I know—you don't mind if I know?" "I want you to know—" Eleven days later they landed on Latham Alpha IV. Stacey greeted them with, "So now what, children?" "Neosol." Stacey eyed them with envy. "Somewhere along in this mad pattern I recall vaguely that I have a wife named Gloria and a daughter, both of whom think I am deceased. Looking at you two makes me want to howl at the moon—if I could find a moon to howl at on this misbegotten planet. You can head for Neoterra, but does anybody mind if I head for home and fireside? I want to walk in and be a great shock to my wife." "You—" "Shut up," snapped Stacey. "Or I'll tell Nora about you." "Please do anyway." "Stacey, you stay out of this." "Bribe me, chum. I'm not incorruptible." Nora smiled. "Maybe I can offer something—" "Possibly." "Like a sum of money or a—" "Nah!" "Personal gift—" "What kind?" "Such as a good book?" "Nah." "He's hard to please," complained Nora. "I'm not hard to please. Just keep making offers. You'll hit on something." "I'll tell Gloria," suggested Paul. Stacey cleared his throat. "Gloria is a very smart woman," he said. "She would believe you only if she had seventeen confirming witnesses—or the odd look on my face. So—Migawd! What was that?" The ground trembled and the air racketed to the blast of explosion. A flash of white flame filled the sky. Had the blast been atomic the shock-wave would have flattened the Latham Alpha IV station. It was that close. But it was just common high explosive of the chemical type that shattered at them, and cracked a couple of windows in the Relay Station not far away. "Bombs!" shouted Stacey. Paul raced to the control panel and set the drive; he wanted to get a long way from there and he did not care which way. Just away.... <hr class="tb" /> Hoagland's crew had gotten off first. This followed a certain kind of reasoning that shows less troublesome planning to destroy than to protect. His crews had driven their ships as fast and as hard as ships and men could stand the gaff. The flight had dropped down out of supervelocity one by one, a quarter of a light year from Latham Alpha, coming into real space in a volume spherically as large as the outer limits of the Solar System. Here the earlier arrivals had waited for the followers, since no two ships could drive at precisely the same speed across a galactic distance. They had closed down into formation as they came out of superspeed, each arrival taking its place in the space pattern. Finally Hoagland counted noses and found them all in place. Then— "Latham Alpha IV. The Galactic Relay Station!" The ships went into superdrive briefly to return a few hundred thousand miles above the ice cap where the relay station stood, waiting the last few hours of its term of years for the arrival of the last link in the Galactic Network. Hoagland's flight lined down on a long curve, one ship after the other, each pilot aiming for the station. It had been the first bomb, a clean miss, that had alerted Paul Grayson's little group. "Get that ship!" roared Hoagland. The leading ship, having bombed and missed, curled upward after its bombing dive, circled around and got on the tail of Grayson's spacecraft. The second ship made a closer miss, circled the course and laid its nose behind the first. A burst of orange flame licked across the nose of Hoagland's Number One craft and the shell glanced from Grayson's flank, sending a ringing crash through Paul's ship. All three of them looked behind to see ship after ship line up to race after them. Paul reached for the high drive. It was almost warm enough to use— <hr class="tb" /> Huston's flight had taken off a few hours later. There had been a lot of preparation: Data regarding dates, flight velocities, and some calculations as to the completion of the Network. Then a courier ship had been prepared—prepared like no ship had ever been prepared before. Unmanned, but timed to perfection, courier ships crossed space between Sol and Neosol in half the time of passenger flights. They carried tons of official mail; ordinary commercial mail was not permitted here. In Huston's special courier the tons of official mail had been whittled down to one piece, four pages of micro-typewritten tissue paper and the remaining load had been filled up with additional power-pack. The timing had been calculated to perfection and the timing circuits had been carefully checked by the Standards Technicians. Then the drive had been set and the ship had taken off for Terra in a flight calculated to make space-crossing history. Only then did Huston's flight form and leap into space from Neoterra. Driving as hard and as fast as men and machinery would permit, Huston's crew came down out of supervelocity four months later, a couple of light months South Galactic from Latham Beta. Like Hoagland, Huston waited in space until the stragglers came through. Unlike Hoagland, Huston had to wait because he was going to defend, not make a destructive attack. Once the flight had formed, they circled Latham Beta and headed for Alpha in superdrive. They came in to one side of Alpha IV, and circled the planet less than a hundred miles up, coming around the planet in time to watch the first line of Hoagland's ship start the bombing run. "You know the score!" snapped Huston. "That relay station must remain intact until the Network Beam gets here! Protect it!" Huston's flight spread out a bit and streaked across the ice cap, hitting Hoagland's bombing curve in the middle, ship after ship. Orange flames licked the noses of Huston's craft and the shells screamed across the ice cap to flash in and around Hoagland's flight. The careening ships and the flight of screaming shells destroyed the flight perfection of the bombing pilots. The ice cap blazed with dots of flame and pillars of smoke as the bombs landed in a shotgun pattern around, but never quite on, the relay station. Huston's men spotted the hare-and-hounds game forming at the upward swing of the bombing run and the ships roared for counter-attack. Like twin corkscrews, both flights spiralled up after Grayson's fleeing ship. "Grayson!" roared Huston. "Grayson!" "Yeah—?" It was Z-wave now, because all of the ships were close-locked in combat. Not the galactic separation that made original contact necessary. "Grayson, this is Huston. How long before the beacon beam arrives?" "Hours." Huston groaned. "We've got to defend that station for hours or defeat Hoagland completely!" Huston's flight split into two, one of them spiralled down to race in a large circle high around the relay station, the rest of them remaining in the locked spiral of the flight. Grayson snapped the high drive and his ship flashed into superdrive and away. Hoagland's flight gave up the chase and looped up and over and down towards the station again. Huston's half-flight cut the corner of the curve and passed through Hoagland's ships, the space-rifles barking. It was a maneuver similar to "Crossing the Tee" in naval warfare. One shell drilled in through the fore port of Hoagland's ninth ship and the velocity of the ship carried the racketing bit of metal back through the guts of the ship where it glanced viciously from wall to wall. Lights went dark and then the ship lost drive as the round hit some of the vital wiring. Inert, the ship continued on its course freely, curving down towards Alpha IV to land with a blossom of flame as the driving-chambers blew their atomic load. Space flashed bright as one of Huston's craft rammed its enemy. A flare of molten metal splashed wide and bits of solid, jagged hull sprinkled space with deadly missiles that caused the following ships to veer wide. A third ship exploded violently as one of Huston's shells drilled the drive chamber. One of Huston's ships ran into one of the jags of hull and went inert. The pilot fought it while the crew struggled with the ruined wiring. Arcs and flares filled the ship as the air dropped in pressure within the ship, then the electrical arcs went out as vacuum came. Struggling against no-gravity, the crew floated in the ship, hurling tools to direct themselves, tossing cables across the hull-spaces. A dim light came on as the ship dropped toward the ice cap, then the drive returned part way. The pilot fought the ship down to a racketing, sliding crash that hurled up a fountain of chipped ice and strewed the furrow with fragments of ship. Those of the crew who survived the crash leaped from the ship through jagged holes in the hull and raced for the relay station. All of them remembered one main tenet of warfare: Eventually, no matter how outrageous or how efficient grow the mechanized weapons of warfare, it is the man with the bared knife that subdues his enemy on the contested ground! Revolvers shattered the locked door of the station and the men took shelter inside. They might be sitting ducks for a bombing run. If their pilots could stop Hoagland's bombing runs, Hoagland's men would eventually have to land and make for the station on foot. Then they would be ready! The downward circle of Hoagland's flight circled the entire planet, crossed below the antipodal ice-cap and came roaring across the planet just above the stratosphere. Huston was waiting for them and the two flights plowed into one another head on. Now both flights were facing each other and the space-rifles vomited their rain of solid shells. Had this been a battle between trained and well-armed space forces, it would have been sheer carnage. But the space rifles were not radar-trained nor electronically fired. These were ships of commerce locked in combat as deadly as man against man, but lacking the finer techniques of modern mass-killing. Ship after ship trained on one another and raced towards one another on dead course. The space rifle spitted as fast as the perspiring gun-layers could serve the breech. It was Blam! Blam! Blam! with the pilot holding the course dead true, nose toward nose across the ice cap, each pilot trying to make the other pilot swing aside first, daring and trying to keep his own nerves from screaming while he looked death right in the eye and spat. Untrained by experience and lack of enemy-courtesy, there was no commonly-accepted rule regarding the final tilt from the collision course. Some went left, some went right, some went up. Some dodged down and hit the planet with a racketing crash and a shower of ice—amid the vomit of flame as the drive chamber let go. Some veered into one another's course and the stratosphere flashed high and wide with flame and terror. Others missed cleanly, circling left and right; others coursed up and over, with one pilot tightening the curve to the plate-buckling strain-point to circle the course and end up with his nose and the space rifle looking down the drive chamber of the enemy. One of Hoagland's pilots circled up, loosing a bomb as it rose. Huston's pilot ran into the bomb and the sky roared white and hot. Then both flights were through one another and circling high above the ice cap for another run. They met ten thousand miles in space, wide spread and raced at one another in a mad dog-fight. On the ground below, survivors leaped from cracked ships and raced to safety. Pitifully few survived. Aligned man against man and group against group—for they were spread out across a twenty-mile area—they fought with revolvers and stalked one another across the hummocks of ice and laid in wait in defiles and passes, converging on the station. Holes poked in the ultra-hard glass dome near the edge of the station wall sprouted revolver barrels. The relay station became a block house protected by Huston's survivors. The first crash had been a blessing instead of a defeat, for Huston's men defended the station against Hoagland's surviving crews. Huston's survivors made their way to the station, leaving their dead and the dead of their enemy on the ice behind them, and bit by bit the numbers embattled in the relay station grew. For any one of Hoagland's men, once within the station, could stop this battle merely by firing a single revolver shot through one of the vitals of the radio beacon receiver. Or hitting it with any hard instrument. Or just by flipping the "ON-OFF" toggle switch that controlled the entire station. Both flights, diminished now, hit one another in a mad pass high above the planet. Space filled with bits of jagged metal and the silent shells that would someday end up as satellites to some distant sun—to possibly confuse some space miner that found a piece of nickel-steel completely machined and fitted with copper expansion-bands in an orbit around an unpopulated stellar system. Numbers being equal, Huston's men had one small advantage. They wanted to hit Hoagland's crew. Hoagland's gang had two objectives. They wanted to destroy the station, and so part of their efforts was directed towards the station itself while only the rest was directed at Huston's flight. The flights passed through one another leaving space strewn with ruin; and circled down on opposite sides of a great circle to cross the ice cap face to face again only a few miles above the relay station perched precisely on the polar axis. The wind whistled and the odd-smelling atmosphere took on another odor as the battle raged briefly above the relay station. The ice was dotted again with divots of flaming hell thrown high by missed bombs and water ran from the hot craters in starred rivulets to freeze later in a curiously beautiful pattern. Again diminished, the flights whirled, stalking and sparring like swordsmen, cautious, angry, hating. And while the embattled fleets of spacecraft circled one another, Paul Grayson was far in space, coming out of superdrive, confident that he had outrun or at least disappeared from instant contact with the enemy. Alpha IV was far, far behind. Latham's Triplets were only stars in a neat equilateral triangle below. Very bright stars, but none the less true stars showing no disc to the naked eye. "Now what?" asked Stacey. "That was damned close, Little Friend." "Do we go back?" asked Nora. "I'd rather not," said Stacey. "I prefer to die in bed at the age of one hundred and seventeen after a long, pleasant, active, and interesting life." "Huston is down there, too, you know," said Paul thoughtfully. "So what?" "He apparently came with quite a gang." Stacey grunted. "Let's wait until we're sure that the unpleasantness has subsided. Someone will be yelling 'Veni Vidi Vici' and I want to be sure that the guy yelling 'Vici' is on my side." Grayson shook his head thoughtfully. "Huston got here," he said. "So?" "Hoagland and his gang must have—" Grayson's voice trailed away as Paul went into another reverie of thought. "Paul, this is what is commonly referred to as patently obvious." Paul snapped out of it again. "Y'know," he said slowly, "Neither Hoagland nor Huston would be a-roaring down here with fire in their eyes if they did not know we'd succeeded." Nora blinked. "They must have overheard us," she said. Paul spread his hands. "Why not? The link was solid between Latham's Triplets and Neoterra. We might have interfered with their Z-wave." "That's fine reasoning. But now take the next step and where are we?" "Huston wanted to know how long before the beam came in," said Paul. "Then he groaned and said that they'd have to defend the station for hours." "After which," said Stacey, "we left somewhat precipitously, if not graciously. I don't blame us, but of course, we are sort of biased by our own feelings." "But why?" asked Nora. "I've been away from the Galactic Survey for a long time," said Paul thoughtfully. "It's more than possible that Latham's Triplets is the station that completes the link. There is always some question as to where the final beam would cross because we were not sure what the precise stellar separation was. In fact," he said with a smile, "this determination of stellar distances was the reason for originating the Galactic Survey. Now, if Latham Alpha turned out to be the final link, coming a bit early, and Haedaecker's Theory was wrong, the link between Sol and Neosol could be complete by Z-wave once the radio contact checked in. Huston might have some plan—" again Paul trailed off as he began to think about the subject deeply. "And," prompted Nora. "The final link should be heading towards Alpha IV quite close by now," said Paul. "We'll tap it before it lands." <hr class="chap" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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