The Centauri Device Part 10

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To prove his point, perhaps, s.p.a.ce ignored him.

Track, meanwhile, had been visited by peculiar, stealthy emotional stirrings.

Oddly enough, he perceived something of what Pater was suggesting, and saw himself suddenly as a denizen of this metamathe-matical or aesthetical s.p.a.ce, like poor Annie Truck, a losing vector-her life a movable a.n.a.logy for hard vacuum, her AdAc habit a dyne field of the head, himself a last-minute fibril of hypothesis extending toward some once-glimpsed mental Galactic edge. He became uncomfortable.

"I don't know anything about that,** he said, squinting along the optical maze of the command-bridge, "but this isn't any kind of flying Fin used to. It looks more like a one-night stand at the s.p.a.cer's Rave.H What else could he say? He was a lout "What do we do now?"

**We wait," said Pater (who wasn't misled, and appeared to be looking at him with a sort of compa.s.sionate irony), "but not for long.'*

In that, he was correct. A willowy young fellow wearing his blond beard tied up with tarred string leaped to his feet and waved a fist over his head. His arcane apparatus had discerned something leaving the dyne fields not a hundredthousand miles from their ambuscade. A few minutes later, it popped up on one of the forward screens, heading at a fair pace straight down the open anarchist throat: six IWG battles.h.i.+ps like black and orange melons englobing an orbit-to-orbit medium haulage vehicle made of spidery girders, small ball bearings, and a big silver caterpillar-this last the hold section, with a capacity of several milUon tons.

Activity on the Green Carnation redoubled: the lights became fierce; bursts of ultrasound attacked the command-bridge like bats; the quarterdeck crew donned one-way visors and multiplied their efforts, jerking spastically from machine to machine in the The Centaur; Device

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stroboscopic glare, calling "It's green-it's brown-I have you on four-'*

Himation came through scratchily on a battle-communication frequency, tidal RF interference grinding behind his voice. "We can knock the drive pods right off it, Pater," he suggested.

"Quick then, Manteau-before they can get it back into the Dyne. On les aura!"

The Green Carnation and Atalanta in Calydon detached themselves from the opposed files of the ambush; they raced toward one another, met head-on in a suicidal flare of retrofire, executed a terrifying Siamese turn through ninety degrees of arc, and hurled themselves side by side at the transporter, white heat blazing at their sterns and a trail of stripped and violated particles streaming out behind them.

IWG woke up, staggered about, broke formation. "They've sent us beginners!"

cried Himation joyously. And as the Green Carnation ran on in through the broken globement, her rearward screens showed the rest of the fleet closing like a golden jaw. Dyne-torpedoes flipped end over end out of their tubes and began a misleading vibration-in and out of Reality they went, like shoals of pike seen through muddy water, and slipped among the battles.h.i.+ps.

Pater himself took control of the flags.h.i.+p. He bore down on the haulage vessel like a madman, the command-bridge glare turning his b.u.t.tonhole carnation black and his teeth the color of steel. "Torpedoes are so unselective, Captain!" he shouted in Truck's ear. "And I love those long reaction guns!" The caterpillar expanded until it filled the screens, huge registration numbers against its silver skin. And bigger yet-until Truck was digging his fingernails into his wet palms, until the Green Carnation howled with proximity alarms, until Pater threw her up into the vertical position and presented his ventral guns hi a sweeping broadside skid- Move for move in impeccable formation, the two

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The Centaur! Device

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cruisers shuddered and shook, their gunners grinning in the red ectoplasmic backwash of the cannon-and, abruptly, the hauler was a dead whale, its drive compartments separating and vaporizing in a wild yellow rose of light, its hold sheared neatly away beneath the wrecker's torch. Before the rose was blown, Atalanta in Calydon and the Green Carnation were up and out, mirror-images tumbling and braking through a loop that brought them back to their wallowing prize.

And before that maneuver was complete, the rest of the fleet was hanging at rest in the vacuum, practicing fire-control on bits of wreckage. IWG hadn't fired a shot: they were split open, they had spilled their flesh all over the show. One of them was still trying to withdraw, caught by some failure of its drive as it faded into the dyne fields-a gray, ghostly rubber ball, perished, gaping with pain, neither here nor there.

Little Tiny Skeffern had suffered the entire circus with his eyes shut and his hands clamped round the neck of his guitar. "Truck, I*m not cut out for this stuff.'* he said. He sat down on the floor, drew up his legs, and jerked a thumb at Pater. "He's off his head, that bloke." He raised a feeble smile.

"Next time I see you coming, remind me of this-even three weeks on Sad al Banis beginning to look bearable.**

The exterior screens caught fire for a moment as some thin-lipped gunner blew an IWG Dynaflow to pieces. Truck stared out at the drifting wreckage.

"We've got it now, Tiny. If Pater keeps his word, we can take the thing somewhere quiet and chuck it out of an airlock. Sigma-End's a nice place: we could go there and get smashed for a year-go back to being losers,'*

Tiny watched his fingers stalking up and down the fretboard. "We don't have to go there to do that,*' he observed astutely.

Pater relinquished the flags.h.i.+p to his pilot, who grinned ruefully, made an aerobatical gesture with one hand, and murmured, "Nice time, Pater."

Pater bowed and laughed. "Dock it now," he suggested, "and be careful with the artwork." The command-bridge relaxed, its peculiar voices diminished. The severed hold section of the hauler crept back into view, toppling end over end on a heading for M41 in Orion, a target it was unlikely to reach in the near future.

"Prepare to board, Manteau," said Pater over the s.h.i.+p-to-s.h.i.+p.

There was a long pause, full of the croaking whisper of the stars. Someone adjusted the gain of the receiver, shrueeed.

"Manteau?"

Himation came on. "Pater,** he reported thoughtfully, "we aren't boarding anything just at this precise moment. Have a look out there. The b.l.o.o.d.y Fleet's arrived.**

"Oh Jesus,*' whispered Tiny Skeffern, and closed his eyes again.

IWG came out of the dyne fields in three waves, fifty at a time, each spherical dreadnought half a mile in diameter and mounting enough fire power to pulverize Jupiter. Their fire ports were already open, sowing torpedoes like showers of steel needles. Syringa and the Melancholia that Transcends All Wit vaporized in the first second of the engagement, trapped among the slagged embers of the ambushed convoy. The New English Art Club ran helplessly through the resulting plasma-front and came out limned with a fire of her own; looping and twisting, plowed into the last of the escort s.h.i.+ps (which was still trying to vanish) and joined it half in and half out of dyne, ectoplasmic and doomed- Aboard the flags.h.i.+p, Swinburne Sinclair-Pater rubbed his jaw and saw that it was impossible to disengage. The command-bridge howled and wept, the crew 90 The Centaur! Device leaped and gyrated among their alien machinery like salmon in white water- "I'm going to ram, b.u.g.g.e.r it," reported the Liverpool Medici, driving sideways across Pater's bows at a group of three Fleet vessels, and was never heard from again. Down in her belly, gunners threw up disgustingly and cheered the moment of impact- "Get out of the way and let the ferret see the rabbit!" screamed White Jonquil to the Gold Scab. She took a hit on the bridge and, her turrets spouting erratically, cartwheeled twenty thousand miles in a halo of tangled struts and hull-plates. "Now look what you've done!'*

"-and there's a core-melt on Number Five," whispered a faint, injured voice.

"Can anybody help-" He died away without identifying himself, merged with the sea of interference- It was murder.

They winked out one by one, the Forsaken Garden, Les Flews dii Mal, the Whistler, and the Fastidious. Running on to the guns, Imaginary Portraits embedded herself in her a.s.sailant; they spun together disconsolately, drifting toward far Centauri. Trilby and the Strange Great Sins collided, embraced, tore through IWG like an impromptu scythe.

A distant bubbling moan, as the s.h.i.+p with the core-melt came back on, pleading. Himation*s voice cut across him as Atalanta in Calydon cut across the top of Pater's screen, trying to outrun a covine of s.h.i.+mmering torpedoes.

"We've been suckered, Pater. The jig's up. I count fifteen of us left, and I'm getting damage reports from my own crew."

"-if someone could just get a party aboard. We've lost steerage-"In half an hour, it was all up with them. Fifteen had dwindled to five after an attempt to break out of the IWG enelobement-then to two. Tiny Skeffern shook his head and stared glumly at Truck as Pater and

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JBmation skulked through the tragic debris, powered down and on communications silence to avoid detection. Corpses with frosty eyes knocked gently on the bull of the Green Carnation, and anarchist s.h.i.+ps like filleted golden carp floated across her screens; while out beyond the eddy of wreckage IWG depended-a colony of fat spiders-from invisible threads.

Parties of pressure-suited commandos began combing the outer derelicts for survivors. The pilot with the core-melt let them on board, then gave up trying to keep it in check-he was gone in a twinkling, the last flicker of the candle. Off the port bow of the flags.h.i.+p hung a great black and orange moon, peeled to the honeycomb decks and still spilling power conduit into the void like mile-long cilia; to starboard, Atalanta in Calydon prowled, her hull blackened and scarred, more wolf than fawn.

The command-bridge was silent, full of white, listless faces, its illumination desperate and spectral. When he closed his eyes, Truck could still see frozen afterimages of the battle, the thin bodies of anarchists wrapped in white light, aspects of devotion. Beside him, Tiny Skeffern s.h.i.+fted uncomfortably.

"Truck, why aren't we just sneaking off into the dyne?" He was used to the hinterland alleys, the boot, the hasty retreat.

The quarterdeck crew chuckled morosely at this, looking to Pater. He turned from the forward screens, from some reverie of destruction and lost opportunity. "We have become wreckage," he mused, as if discovering something behind the words. "There's a risk in operating any equipment at all now," he explained. "H we were to power up, they'd have us triangulated before we could compute a course." His face was haggard. "We can't do it, Mr. Skeffern. Even the screens are a risk."

He appeared to lose interest. After a while he went on, "While we remain wreckage we are safe. It seems as though they have retained the Device, Captain. sorry about that."

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The Centauri Device Truck shrugged.

"I don't suppose I'd have known what to do with it anyway."

"You miss the point."

"There's something going on out there," said Tiny. In the distance, IWG was maneuvering indecisively, individual s.h.i.+ps pulling out of the rubbish heap on pulses of green flame-while others seemed to be hastily retrieving their commando units. Wings and squadrons formed, grew, inclined toward Centauri.

This obscure performance lasted for some minutes. Wreckage drifted and toppled, raising and lowering the curtain on it. Pater opened a channel on Fleet frequency, but no one on the bridge could separate the urgent babble from its concomitant of interference.

A tolanta in Calydon broke silence suddenly. "Pater!" shouted Himation.

"Something's up-I can see-Christ!" And he began to laugh. "Pater, it's the Arabs! It's the Arabs! They've had it done all over them-" His s.h.i.+p woke up, quivered, took fire at its stern. It drove away through the graveyard, trailing mirth. "I'm going to try and get a better-"

Ma.s.sive jamming overwhelmed his signal.

"Power up!" snapped Pater. Oscillating pulses of blue and violet light washed then- faces, decaying echoes clattered around the bridge. "That fool!" A Fleet dreadnought careened past under full thrust, firing madly at something behind it the way a man stares unbelievingly over his shoulder at a pursuer in the dark. It erupted into curious boils and ran into the wreck of the Forsaken Garden.

The flags.h.i.+p groaned with mysterious voices (and Truck, wrenched out of his head by mounting alien energies, hallucinated briefly a Roman sundial isolatedby a single watery ray of light in a sunken garden, smelling mint, glycol, horsehair) as Pater hurled her up and out. They shot into clear s.p.a.ce- To discover imprudent Himation running under the The Centauri Device

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guns of both IWG and UASR (Navy), with his ammu-? nition spent and big dorsal holes.

Perhaps a hundred Arabs had arrived, cylindrical s.h.i.+ps resembling mammoth nuts and bolts (they were, in fact, complete with threads, down which the command and power sections could be screwed at will) and carrying red and yellow insignia. Their ambush had telegraphed itself-unlike IWG's-and broken into small unformated skirmishes across fifty million cubic miles or so of s.p.a.ce.

"Dyne out!" pleaded Pater. "Dyne out, Monteau!" The Green Carnation lurched.

Choking smoke began to pour into the bridge. Pater got her broadside on to his Arab and pounded it to junk. A cloud of dyne-torpedoes, released like breath from a terminal bubonic-the forward antimissile. batteries coughed once or twice. Something ripped them off, and the sweating gunners with them. "We're losing pressure!" reported one of the quarterdeck crew. The s.h.i.+p lurched again, bellowing and creaking. Pater braced himself and bored in after Himation, drawing fire, yelling "Dyne out!"

"I'm trying to," said Himation coolly. "Don't think I'm not, Pater old chap."

Truck and Tiny groveled on the deck. An enormous hand slapped the s.h.i.+p about.

"I can't hold her, ManteauF cried Pater despairingly. "Rendezvous at Howell!

Dyne out!" The Green Carnation was withering away. Sardonic jungle-noises squawked and twittered from her circuitry as it melted to slag, inflicting terrible burns on the dazed crew. Pater slapped a bank of rocker switches grafted on to the alien controls. She slid into dyne, but it spat her out again, twice. Her spine cracked and flexed. As they went under for the third time, Truck clutching Tiny Skeffern's shoulders and praying with horrified self-disgust that Himation

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would get it and not them, IWG broke into their communication channels- "IT'S WAR NOW, LADDIE! CAN YOU HEAR ME, TRUCK? HOW D*YOU LIKE THAT? **I WANT.

TO SEE YOU AFTER I'VE FINISHED WITH.

THESE SNOTTY JACKALS. YOU HEAR ME, PATER? HE*S MINE, AND YOU'RE FINISHED.

"TRUCK? IT'S WAR-".