The Lost Patrol (25 page)

-42-

The hours lengthened into a day as the various ships accelerated. Finally, it appeared that the alien vessels sensed the drone’s approach.

“Look,” Meta said. “That’s a spread of something.” She sat in the pilot seat, Keith taking a long-deserved rest.

Maddox was tired from the endless acceleration. They’d gained a greater velocity than the opposing ships. It would still be a close-run thing, as the others had much less distance to cover. Fortunately, the alien ships had already begun to decelerate. Maddox had one advantage. He would not decelerate this pass. He did not intend to board
Victory
just now, but to destroy the three alien spacecraft. He predicated the possibility on the fact that their primitive drives must mean he had superior technology.

“Did they just expel chaff?” Maddox asked.

Meta tapped her board, studying the screen. “Unknown,” she said. “No. It’s decelerating. I bet they’re bomblets.”

“Proximity grenades,” Maddox muttered. “The aliens plan to throw shrapnel in our drone’s path.”

“The battle computer agrees with your analysis,” Meta said.

Maddox nodded. That seemed like the simplest course. Space battles were rather simple affairs in terms of actions. The techs made the difference.

The captain leaned over his board and began tapping. He studied the stellar situation. The debris and asteroids thickened in places. No doubt, that was where the planets used to be. What had Ludendorff said? The great conflict had occurred four to five hundred years ago.

“We’re going to need help to defeat the alien vessels,” Meta said.

Maddox looked up at her in wonder.

“What did I say?” she asked.

The captain tapped his board, viewing the star system and the location of the active Swarm mines.

“I have an idea,” he said.

“If you mean you plan to use the Swarm mines, I’d say that’s a longshot.”

“Do you have a better idea?”

Meta shook her head. “Still, it’s a deadly risk to us.”

“We’re going to need the professor for this,” Maddox said. “I want to rig the anti-torpedoes. A few of them will cruise near the active mines, and hopefully pull them to the alien ships.”

Meta stood, moved near and took the captain’s head in her hands. She kissed him. “Did I ever tell you that you’re brilliant?”

For an answer, he stood, grabbing her, showering her face with kisses. Afterward, he released her. “I can’t remember if you’ve said that or not.”

“Umm,” she said, smiling at him.

“First the hard part,” Maddox said, “which is talking some sense into the Methuselah Man.” He headed for the hatch.

***

The shuttle was small, made up only of a few compartments, a tiny medical bay, a larger cargo hold and the engine area with its fuel pods.

Maddox floated through a short hall, unlocking the professor’s hatch and entering.

Ludendorff sat at a monitor, absorbed with his study.

Maddox cleared his throat.

“Just a minute,” the professor said. “I don’t want to lose my train of thought.” The Methuselah Man continued to read, examined a stellar map and finally sat back in contemplation.

Maddox allowed him the display. The situation had seriously deteriorated. Two thousand light-years from home—

“Ah, Captain,” the professor said. “You wish to speak to me?”

He told Ludendorff about Shu.

“Interesting,” the professor said. “I can’t decide whether the experience has unhinged her mind or if she has finally decided to make her move. I suspect the latter. Especially as we have reached the destination that she selected.”

Maddox studied the Methuselah Man. Ludendorff was close to one thousand years old. Had he played every trick and had every ploy played upon him enough times that he instantly recognized what an adversary was going to do? Or had the professor become lax over the ages, having lost his zest? Ludendorff was smart, but if the past was a reliable guide, the man could be outsmarted.

“Dana is on our starship,” Maddox said.

Ludendorff nodded.

“She’s your lover.”

“I know what she is, thank you,” the professor said testily.

“Does being a Methuselah Man mean that everyone else is a passing flower to you?” Maddox asked.

“That’s clever, Captain. What else would you like to discuss?”

“Do you want to go home?”

“Oh, I see. You believe I’m so old that I no longer care what happens to me. It is the reverse, if you must know. I love life more than you can imagine. What has kept me alive all these centuries is more than medical advances. It is my enthusiasm for knowledge. Can you conceive of a love so intense that it caused me to study the Swarm for centuries?”

“You don’t love Dana?”

“Captain, I’m speaking about intellectual curiosity. That is much greater than sex. Although, I hasten to add, my lovemaking is legendary and prodigious in its own right. A monk loses something potent when he abstains from lovemaking. It is accurate to say that I am the greatest lover among humanity. Still, I am able to compartmentalize. The young fool of a pilot could learn something from me.”

“No doubt,” Maddox said.

“Trying to humor me is a vain action. Say what you think, as I already know what you’re going to say anyway.”

“Excellent,” Maddox said. “That will save time. You can talk and afterward determine my words. I need merely stand here and observe.”

“You’re too prideful, Captain. Most of the time that lashes you to incredible action. You strive to succeed. But it leaves you brittle.”

Maddox waited.

“Very well,” Ludendorff said. “You want to defeat the three alien vessels. I’m not sure that is attainable with just the shuttle, particularly because they are so dense. That is a puzzling mystery, to be sure.”

Maddox still said nothing.

“Oh, I see. You’ve finally made the obvious deduction. We must use the Swarm mines. I was wondering how long it would take you to see that.”

“Hmm,” Maddox said, impressed in spite of himself. Maybe the Methuselah Man did know body language signals better than anyone else did.

“Have you thought about using the anti-missiles as goading devices against the mines?” Ludendorff asked.

Maddox nodded.

The professor rose. “Diplomacy is a dead-end this time. The aliens should have already tried to contact us. That they haven’t is discouraging. It causes me to wonder if this species is as xenophobic as the Swarm. Perhaps that’s why the battle concluded with the star system’s destruction.”

Ludendorff rubbed his hands. “This will be a test of my intellect. Are you ready, my boy?”

Maddox indicated the hatch.

“Then let us see if we can save our starship,” Ludendorff said.

-43-

The shuttle buzzed through the debris of the lost star system, racing to catch up with the three alien vessels. The prize remained inert, the ancient Adok starship that was over six thousand years old.

The shuttle’s drone tried to maneuver around the bomblets. Two accelerated hard enough to reach its path. They exploded, expanding a zone of shrapnel. Eventually, the drone zoomed through the area intact. The bomblets had failed.

In the tiny control cabin, four humans hunched over their various monitors. Keith cheered. Meta slumped in her seat. Ludendorff grinned in a knowing way. Maddox seemed emotionless, but behind his eyes, his mind seethed with the various possibilities.

“I doubt that will work a second time,” Maddox said.

“It won’t,” Ludendorff said. “But it was enjoyable to see the drone win through.”

The shuttle raced to catch up with the slowing aliens. Normally, the drone would have reached the alien vessels long ago, but at Ludendorff’s suggestion, Maddox had seriously lowered the drone’s rate of advance. Now, time passed as the tactical situation tightened.

Once more, the alien vessels belched bomblets. The bomblets spread out behind the teardrop-shaped ships, accelerating toward the fast approaching drone.

“Ready?” Maddox asked.

“Aye-aye, sir,” Keith said.

“Begin,” the captain said.

Keith began to target individual bomblets, firing the shuttle’s laser over twenty thousand kilometers. The small laser lacked killing power at that range, but it heated the first bomblet, causing it to explode prematurely.

In quick order, Keith detonated four more with the laser.

Rockets slid from each alien ship. They burned bright chemical-fueled exhausts.

“This is interesting,” Ludendorff said. “The rockets have chemical fuels. The aliens are even more primitive than I first thought. That makes their insane density even more perplexing.”

“Keep destroying bomblets,” Maddox told Keith.

The pilot obeyed as he created a path through the spreading defensive bomblets. The shuttle’s drone slid through the “ring”, racing for the nearest alien vessel.

The chemical-fueled rockets did not zoom at the drone. They roared for the shuttle, closing fast because the distance between each of them had dwindled to almost nothing in stellar terms.

“Use your laser to target the rocket engines,” Maddox said.

With a few swift taps, Keith retargeted the laser. One after another, he burned out the rocket engines. Afterward, he adjusted the shuttle’s flight path to avoid the drifting rockets.

“They’re launching more of them,” Meta said.

“Rational,” Ludendorff said, “although the wiser course would be to try to contact us. Why don’t they do that?”

The shuttle’s drone raced at the nearest alien vessel. The distance closed fast now. Ten thousand kilometers, eight, six—

More bomblets ejected from the alien ships. Three more big rockets roared toward the drone’s flight path.

“They’re going to destroy it this time,” Ludendorff said.

Maddox had already calculated distances. He tapped his board. A signal left the shuttle, speeding at radio-wave velocity. The signal caused tiny rods to sprout from the drone’s nosecone. A second later, a nuclear detonation forced gamma and X-rays up the rods that zoomed toward the nearest alien vessel.

Bomblets exploded. The rockets did too. Those no longer mattered now.

The gamma and X-rays struck the alien vessel. The rays burned away the outer armored layers but failed to chew away any more than that. The hot radiation continued deeper, though. Did that kill the living creatures inside the incredibly dense ship? According to the shuttle’s sensors, some of the rays burned out ship systems, beginning a chain-reaction of explosions. Finally, the atomic core went critical—and that destroyed the alien ship as if it were a grenade.

The vessel blew outward along with more radiation.

One plate smashed against the next alien ship in the worst possible place—the exhaust port. The plate slammed up into the atomic pile. The pile did not go critical, but radiation saturated the armored engine bulkheads, no doubt killing many of the aliens and making the others too sick to operate their vessel. The vessel began to act erratically, taking a new heading.

“Those are crude, primitive ships,” Ludendorff said. “It’s a wonder they could fight the Swarm at all. It would indicate vast numbers on the aliens’ part. Otherwise, the Swarm would have destroyed the alien fleets and colonized the planets.”

“Unless the aliens blew up their own planets so the Swarm couldn’t get them,” Meta said.

Ludendorff pointed at her. “That, my dear, is an excellent point. Yes. We must consider every possibility. We really don’t know enough about these aliens. It’s a pity we’re going to have to annihilate the last ship.”

“We haven’t done it yet,” Maddox said.

Ludendorff glanced at him. “Are you superstitious, Captain? Do you not want me to jinx us with such words?”

“Actions before words,” Maddox said.

“Where’s the fun in that?” Ludendorff asked. “Bah! I love boasting. It annoys stick-in-the-mud types. Yourself included, naturally.”

Maddox realized the professor was as tense as the rest of them. This must be his way of relieving the pressure. The second kill had been pure luck, and, truthfully, maybe the first had been too. But if they hadn’t tried, they would have already lost.

“Are they in position?” Maddox asked Keith.

The pilot studied his board for some time. “It’s iffy, sir. We don’t know how the old mines work.”

“Intelligent beings will realize the logical choice given enough guesses,” Ludendorff said in a lecturing way. “The Swarm devices seem like mobile mines. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume the objects will act like mobile mines.”

“Possibly,” Maddox said. “I have also heard that experimenters once gave a chimpanzee twelve ways to escape confinement. The ape chose the thirteenth method, which, of course, surprised the scientists.”

“That’s different,” Ludendorff said. “The experimenters simply lacked sufficient imagination to have mapped out all the possibilities.”

“They were finite beings,” Maddox said. “Are you not also finite?”

Ludendorff gave the captain an unreadable glance before everyone went back to studying his or her monitor.

Sixteen minutes later, one of the shuttle’s anti-torpedo devices flashed past an old Swarm mine.

“It’s following the anti-torpedo,” Keith shouted. “Look at that. The mine is accelerating like crazy.”

“The alien ship is taking evasive action,” Meta said.

Maddox hardly breathed. According to what he’d seen so far, the shuttle’s laser would not be able to do much against the alien vessel. The old mine was their last hope.

Three minutes passed.

“Blow it,” Maddox said.

Keith tapped his board. Seconds later, the anti-torpedo detonated. Everyone watched his or her board.

“Bingo,” Keith said. “The mine is veering toward the alien vessel.”

Maddox relaxed fractionally. He studied vectors and velocities. The Swarm mine, which was as big as the alien vessel, moved decisively at the last alien ship.

“Any time now,” Keith said.

The big mine closed in. The alien ship launched lifeboats.

“That’s not going to help them,” Keith said.

The mine reached a five thousand kilometer range. Alien rockets raced at it. The mine reached a four thousand kilometer range from the ship and exploded with a mighty nuclear blast.

The fireball, blast and radiation reached the alien vessel. The hull armor proved ineffectual against the destructive power. The alien ship was too dense to splinter and section away like a normal vessel. Huge cracks appeared, while interior explosions caused the cracks to lengthen and widen.

None of the lifeboats had a chance. They blew apart like tiny flames in a gale.

“We’re next,” Keith said.

Maddox had already made the calculations. The shuttle moved too fast. It wouldn’t outrun the blast entirely, but it would outrun the most destructive part of it. The shuttle’s armor should prove enough protection for what eventually reached them.

“It’s time to begin decelerating,” Maddox said.

Ludendorff stretched, cracking his knuckles. “I knew we would succeed. Still—”

“Oh, oh,” Meta said, having continued to study her monitor.

Maddox raised an eyebrow.

“The Swarm mine must have activated something,” Meta said. “The other mines are engaging their engines and now appear to be targeting us.”

Tense once again, Maddox tapped his board, studying the situation.

“We’re going to overshoot
Victory
by a considerable amount,” Meta said. “Your plan was to decelerate beyond the system and come back in to
Victory
. Now the mines will greet us before we can get to the starship.”

Ludendorff was frowning. Keith had turned pale.

“What are we going to do?” Meta asked Maddox.

“I’m thinking,” the captain whispered.