They found the manway ladder and began to climb, Fenrir and Sigyn impatiently crowding their heels.
There was nothing on the control room level and they ran down the short corridor that their maps had showed. They turned left, into the corridor that had the control room at its end, and into the concentrated fire of nine waiting Gerns.
Fenrir and Sigyn went into the Gerns, under their fire before they could drop the muzzles of their blasters, with an attack so vicious and unexpected that what would have been a certain and lethal trap for the humans was suddenly a fighting chance.
The corridor became an inferno of blaster beams that cracked and hissed as they met and crossed, throwing little chips of metal from the walls with snapping sounds and going through flesh with sounds like soft tappings. It was over within seconds, the last Gern down and one man still standing beside him, the blond and nerveless Lake.
Thomsen and Barber were dead and Billy West was bracing himself against the wall with a blaster hole through his stomach, trying to say something and sliding to the floor before it was ever spoken.
And Sigyn was down, blood welling and bubbling from a wound in her chest, while Fenrir stood over her with his snarling a raging scream as he swung his head in search of a still-living Gern.
Humbolt and Lake ran on, Fenrir raging beside them, and into the control room.
Six officers, one wearing the uniform of a commander, were gaping in astonishment and bringing up their blasters in the way that seemed so curiously slow to Humbolt.
Fenrir, in his fury, killed two of them as Lake"s blaster and his own killed three more.
The commander was suddenly alone, his blaster half lifted. Fenrir leaped at his throat and Humbolt shouted the quick command: "Disarm!"
It was something the prowlers had been taught in their training and Fenrir"s teeth clicked short of the commander"s throat while his paw sent the blaster spinning across the room.
The commander stared at them with his swarthy face a dark gray and his mouth still gaping.
"How-how did you do it?" he asked in heavily accented Terran. "Only two of you- ".
"Don"t talk until you"re asked a question," Lake said.
"Only two of you . . ." The thought seemed to restore his courage, as sight of the ship had restored Narth"s that night, and his tone became threatening. "There are only two of you and more guards will be here to kill you within a minute. Surrender to me and I"ll let you go free-"
Lake slapped him across the mouth with a backhanded blow that snapped his head back on his shoulders and split his lip.
"Don"t talk," he ordered again. "And never lie to us."
The commander spit out a tooth and held his hand to his bleeding mouth. He did not speak again.
Tip and Freckles were holding tightly to his shoulder and each other, the racing of their hearts like a vibration, and he touched them rea.s.suringly.
"All right now-all safe now," he said. He called Charley Craig. "Charley-did you make it?"
"We made it to the drive room-two of us and one prowler," Charley answered.
"What about you?"
"Norman and I have the control room. Cut their drives, to play safe. I"ll let you know as soon as the entire ship is ours."
He went to the viewscreen and saw that the battle was over. Chiara was letting the searchlight burn again and prowlers were being used to drive back the unicorns from the surrendering Gerns.
"I guess we won," he said to Lake.
But there was no feeling of victory, none of the elation he had thought he would have.
Sigyn was dying alone in the alien corridor outside. Sigyn, who had nursed beside him and fought beside him and laid down her life for him . . .
"I want to look at her," he said to Lake.
Fenrir went with him. She was still alive, waiting for them to come back to her. She lifted her head and touched his hand with her tongue as he examined the wound.
It was not fatal-it need not be fatal. He worked swiftly, gently, to stop the bleeding that had been draining her life away. She would have to lie quietly for weeks but she would recover.
When he was done he pressed her head back to the floor and said, "Lie still, Sigyn girl, until we can come to move you. Wait for us and Fenrir will stay here with you."
She obeyed and he left them, the feeling of victory and elation coming to him in full then.
Lake looked at him questioningly as he entered the control room and he said, "She"ll live."
He turned to the Gern commander. "First, I want to know how the war is going?"
"I-" The commander looked uncertainly at Lake.
"Just tell the truth," Lake said. "Whether you think we"ll like it or not."
"We have all the planets but Earth, itself," the commander said. "We"ll have it, soon."
"And the Terrans on Athena?"
"They"re still-working for us there."
"Now," he said, "you will order every Gern in this ship to go to his sleeping quarters.
They will leave their weapons in the corridors outside and they will not resist the men who will come to take charge of the ship."
The commander made an effort toward defiance: "And if I refuse?"
Lake answered, smiling at him with the smile of his that was no more than a quick showing of teeth and with the savage eagerness in his eyes.
"If you refuse I"ll start with your fingers and break every bone to your shoulders. If that isn"t enough I"ll start with your toes and go to your hips. And then I"ll break your back."
The commander hesitated, sweat filming his face as he looked at them. Then he reached out to switch on the all-stations communicator and say into it: "Attention, all personnel: You will return to your quarters at once, leaving your weapons in the corridors. You are ordered to make no resistance when the natives come .
There was a silence when he had finished and Humbolt and Lake looked at each other, bearded and clad in animal skins but standing at last in the control room of a ship that was theirs; in a ship that could take them to Athena, to Earth, to the ends of the galaxy.
The commander watched them, on his face the blankness of unwillingness to believe.
"The airlocks-" he said. "We didn"t close them in time. We never thought you would dare try to take the ship-not savages in animal skins."
"I know," Humbolt answered. "We were counting on you to think that way."
"No one expected any of you to survive here." The commander wiped at his swollen lips, wincing, and an almost child-like petulance came into his tone. "You weren"t supposed to survive."
"I know," he said again. "We"ve made it a point to remember that."
"The gravity, the heat and cold and fever, the animals-why didn"t they kill you?"
"They tried," he said. "But we fought back. And we had a goal-to meet you Gerns again. You left us on a world that had no resources. Only enemies who would kill us- the gravity, the prowlers, the unicorns. So we made them our resources. We adapted to the gravity that was supposed to kill us and became stronger and quicker than Gerns. We made allies of the prowlers and unicorns who were supposed to be our executioners and used them tonight to help us kill Gerns. So now we have your ship."
"Yes . . . you have our ship." Through the unwillingness to believe on the commander"s face and the petulance there came the triumph of vindictive antic.i.p.ation.
"The savages of Ragnarok have a Gern cruiser-but what can they do with it?"
"What can we do with it?" he asked, almost kindly. "We"ve planned for two hundred years what we can do with it. We have the cruiser and sixty days from now we"ll have Athena. That will be only the beginning and you Gerns are going to help us do it."
For six days the ship was a scene of ceaseless activity. Men crowded it, asking questions of the Gern officers and crew and calmly breaking the bones of those who refused to answer or who gave answers that were not true. Prowlers stalked the corridors, their cold yellow eyes watching every move the Gerns made. The little mockers began roaming the ship at will, unable any longer to restrain their curiosity and confident that the men and prowlers would not let the Gerns harm them.
One mocker was killed then; the speckle-faced mocker that could repeat messages verbatim. It wandered into a storage cubicle where a Gern was working alone and gave him the opportunity to safely vent his hatred of everything a.s.sociated with the men of Ragnarok. He broke its back with a steel bar and threw it, screaming, into the disposal chute that led to the matter converter. A prowler heard the scream and an instant later the Gern screamed; a sound that died in its making as the prowler tore his throat out. No more mockers were harmed. One Ragnarok boy was killed. Three fanatical Gern officers stole knives from the galley and held the boy as hostage for their freedom. When their demands were refused they cut his heart out. Lake cornered them a few minutes later and, without touching his blaster, disemboweled them with their own knives. He smiled down upon them as they writhed and moaned on the floor and their moans were heard for a long time by the other Gerns in the ship before they died. No more humans were harmed.
They discovered that operation of the cruiser was relatively simple, basically similar to the operation of Terran ships as described in the text book the original Lake had written. Most of the operations were performed by robot mechanisms and the manual operations, geared to the slower reflexes of the Gerns, were easily mastered.
They could spend the forty-day voyage to Athena in further learning and practice so on the sixth day they prepared to depart. The unicorns had been given the freedom they had fought so well for and reconnaissance vehicles were loaned from the cruiser to take their place. Later there would be machinery and supplies of all kinds brought in by freighter ships from Athena.
Time was precious and there was a long, long job ahead of them. They blasted up from Ragnarok on the morning of the seventh day and went into the black sea of hypers.p.a.ce.
By then the Gern commander was no longer of any value to them. His unwillingness to believe that savages had wrested his ship from him had increased until his compartment became his control room to him and he spent the hours laughing and giggling before an imaginary viewscreen whereon the cruiser"s blasters were destroying, over and over, the Ragnarok town and all the humans in it.
But Narth, who had wanted to have them tortured to death for daring to resist capture, became very cooperative. In the control room his cooperation was especially eager. On the twentieth day of the voyage they let him have what he had been trying to gain by subterfuge: access to the transmitter when no men were within hearing distance. After that his manner abruptly changed. Each day his hatred for them and his secret antic.i.p.ation became more evident.
The thirty-fifth day came, with Athena five days ahead of them-the day of the execution they had let him arrange for them.
Stars filled the transdimensional viewscreen, the sun of Athena in the center. Humbolt watched the s.p.a.ce to the lower left and the flicker came again; a tiny red dot that was gone again within a microsecond, so quickly that Narth in the seat beside him did not see it.
It was the quick peek of another ship; a ship that was running invisible with its detector screens up but which had had to drop them for an instant to look out at the cruiser. Not even the Gerns had ever been able to devise a polarized detector screen.
He changed the course and speed of the cruiser, creating an increase in gravity which seemed very slight to him but which caused Narth to slew heavily in his seat. Narth straightened and he said to him: "Within a few minutes we"ll engage the ship you sent for."
Narth"s jaw dropped, then came back up. "So you spied on me?" "One of our Ragnarok allies did-the little animal that was sitting near the transmitter. They"re our means of communication. We learned that you had arranged for a ship, en route to Athena, to intercept us and capture us."
"So you know?" Narth asked. He smiled, an unpleasant twisting of his mouth. "Do you think that knowing will help you any?"
"We expect it to," he answered.
"It"s a battleship," Narth said. "It"s three times the size of this cruiser, the newest and most powerful battleship in the Gern fleet. How does that sound to you?"
"It sounds good," he said. "We"ll make it our flagship."
"Your flagship-your "flagship"!" The last trace of pretense left Narth and he let his full and rankling hatred come through. "You got this cruiser by trickery and learned how to operate it after a fashion because of an animal-like reflex abnormality. For forty-two days you accidental mutants have given orders to your superiors and thought you were our equals. Now, your fool"s paradise is going to end."
The red dot came again, closer, and he once more altered the ship"s course. He had turned on the course a.n.a.lyzer and it clicked as the battleship"s position was correlated with that of its previous appearance. A short yellow line appeared on the screen to forecast its course for the immediate future.
"And then?" he asked curiously, turning back to Narth.
"And then we"ll take all of you left alive back to your village. The scenes of what we do to you and your village will be televised to all Gern-held worlds. It will be a valuable reminder for any who have forgotten the penalty for resisting Gerns."
The red dot came again. He punched the BATTLE STATIONS b.u.t.ton and the board responded with a row of READY lights.
"All the other Gerns are by now in their acceleration couches," he said. "Strap yourself in for high-acceleration maneuvers-we"ll make contact with the battleship within two minutes."
Narth did so, taking his time as though it was something of little importance. "There will be no maneuvers. They"ll blast the stern and destroy your drive immediately upon attack."
He fastened the last strap and smiled, taunting a.s.surance in the twisted unpleasantness of it. "The appearance of this battleship has very much disrupted your plans to strut like conquering heroes among the slaves on Athena, hasn"t it?"
"Not exactly," Humbolt replied. "Our plans are a little broader in scope than that.
There are two new cruisers on Athena, ready to leave the shops ten days from now. We"ll turn control of Athena over to the humans there, of course, then we"ll take the three cruisers and the battleship back by way of Ragnarok. There we"ll pick up all the Ragnarok men who are neither too old nor too young and go on to Earth. They will be given training en route in the handling of ships. We expect to find no difficulty in breaking through the Gern lines around Earth and then, with the addition of the Earth ships, we can easily capture all the Gern ships in the solar system."
" "Easily"!" Narth made a contemptuous sneer of the word. "Were you actually so stupid as to think that you biological freaks could equal Gern officers who have made a career of s.p.a.ce warfare?"
"We"ll far exceed them," he said. "A s.p.a.ce battle is one of trying to keep your blaster beams long enough on one area of the enemy ship to break through its blaster shields at that point. And at the same time try to move and dodge fast enough to keep the enemy from doing the same thing to you. The ships are capable of accelerations up to fifty gravities or more but the acceleration limitator is the safeguard that prevents the ship from going into such a high degree of acceleration or into such a sudden change of direction that it would kill the crew.
"We from Ragnarok are accustomed to a one point five gravity and can withstand much higher degrees of acceleration than Gerns or any other race from a one-gravity world. To enable us to take advantage of that fact we have had the acceleration limitator on this cruiser disconnected."
"Disconnected?" Narth"s contemptuous regard vanished in frantic consternation. "You fool-you don"t know what that means-you"ll move the acceleration lever too far and kill us all!"
The red dot flickered on the viewscreen, trembled, and was suddenly a gigantic battleship in full view. He touched the acceleration control and Narth"s next words were cut off as his diaphragm sagged. He swung the cruiser in a curve and Narth was slammed sideways, the straps cutting into him and the flesh of his face pulled lopsided by the gravity. His eyes, bulging, went blank with unconsciousness.
The powerful blasters of the battleship blossomed like a row of pale blue flowers, concentrating on the stern of the cruiser. A warning siren screeched as they started breaking through the cruiser"s shields. He dropped the detector screen that would shield the cruiser from sight, but not from the blaster beams, and tightened the curve until the gravity dragged heavily at his own body.
The warning siren stopped as the blaster beams of the battleship went harmlessly into s.p.a.ce, continuing to follow the probability course plotted from the cruiser"s last visible position and course by the battleship"s robot target tracers.
He lifted the detector screen, to find the battleship almost exactly where the cruiser"s course a.n.a.lyzers had predicted it would be. The blasters of the battleship were blazing their full concentration of firepower into an area behind and to one side of the cruiser.
They blinked out at the sight of the cruiser in its new position and blazed again a moment later, boring into the stern. He dropped the detector screen and swung the cruiser in another curve, spiraling in the opposite direction. As before, the screech of the alarm siren died as the battleship"s blasters followed the course given them by course a.n.a.lyzers and target tracers that were built to presume that all enemy ships were acceleration- limitator equipped.
The cruiser could have destroyed the battleship at any time-but they wanted to capture their flagship unharmed. The maneuvering continued, the cruiser drawing closer to the battleship. The battleship, in desperation, began using the same hide-and-jump tactics the cruiser used but it was of little avail-the battleship moved at known acceleration limits and the cruiser"s course a.n.a.lyzers predicted each new position with sufficient accuracy.
The cruiser made its final dash in a tightening spiral, its detector screen flickering on and off. It struck the battleship at a matched speed, with a thump and ringing of metal as the magnetic grapples fastened the cruiser like a leech to the battleship"s side.
In that position neither the forward nor stern blasters of the battleship could touch it.
There remained only to convince the commander of the battleship that further resistance was futile.
This he did with a simple ultimatum to the commander: "This cruiser is firmly attached to your ship, its acceleration limitator disconnected.
Its drives are of sufficient power to thrust both ships forward at a much higher degree of acceleration that persons from one-gravity worlds can endure. You will surrender at once or we shall be forced to put these two ships into a curve of such short radius and at an acceleration so great that all of you will be killed."