We All Died at Breakaway Station (27 page)

“They’re no more than eleven hours from the planet at their present speed, figuring deceleration.”

“How much time can you add to that?”

“I wish I knew, general. A few hours, maybe. Any word about Mothershed yet?”

“No. Not yet. It’s too early.”

“Yes, I know. Do you know, general, is Mothershed’s report on tapes, or is he planning on giving it live?”

“No, I don’t know. Tapes, I would assume. He should have had time to prepare his full report on the way back.”

“Maybe. If so… Look, general, contact Admiral Ommart. Tell him what the situation is here, if you haven’t already. Tell him that if the report is on tapes, and if they can get those tapes off Mothershed’s ship, he’d better get them back to Adrianopolis as fast as he can.”

“But the ships from Port Abell, they’ve already lifted. They’re out of ordinary communications range now.”

“Then tell him to get another ship on the way. We may not have very much time left.”

“I know, admiral.”

“Then get started on it, man. We can’t waste any more time.”

“I will. Good luck, admiral.”

“Thank you, general. And good luck to you.”

The index finger of Bracer’s right hand tripped the switch that broke the connection. Then he turned to face the new captain of the LSS
Iwo Jima
.

“How do we stand, Dan?”

The League patrol ship
Messala Corvinus
broke out of the atmosphere of Adrianopolis and into the blackness of space. Nuclear fire drove it upward, farther and faster, crushing the officers and crew back into their acceleration cots despite the ship’s gravity control devices. Cold agonizing sweat stood out on the forehead of the ship’s commander, and he wished that he had never received his promotion.

Glenn, Guardian Culhaven was a very frightened man, more frightened than he had ever been in his life. Why, Lord, why did Admiral Ommart think
he
could do this? He hadn’t done badly while on temporary duty on Cynthia, but he had done nothing outstanding either, and then he was reassigned to Adrianopolis, and what had he done there? Oh, admiral, you should have picked someone else, he told himself. Someone with more experience. A better man than I am should be going out there after Admiral Mothershed.

Glenn wished that he had some magical powers that could instantaneously transport him back to the great library in Culhaven where Anjenet sat watching the tri-D that showed his ship moving out of Adrianopolis. How proud she must be of me now, Glenn thought. How little I deserve that pride.

He looked at the officers of the starship’s small bridge, saw the confidence in their faces, the pride they felt at having been given this assignment. And he wished that he could be like them. God, how he wished it.

Then he forced himself to put his fears a little way from him, far enough away at least to try to act like a patrol ship’s commander. His hands went to the command console before him.

“Engineering, this is the commander,” he said into the console, hoping that his voice did not show his fear.

“Engineering here, sir,” came the reply. “Star drive status?”

“Nearly at potential, sir.”

“Stand by,” Glenn said, then turned to his astrogator. “Mass proximity?”

“Dwindling, sir,” replied the astrogator. “Should reach safe level for star drive in three minutes, thirty seconds.”

“Very good,” he said, just a little pleased that his voice was behaving as it should. “Engineering?”

“Still here, sir.”

“Turn star drive controls over to the computer,” Glenn said. “I’ll program.”

“Very good, sir,” the engineering officer replied.

Glenn cut in the audio circuits of the ship’s computer, and wished that a patrol ship had one of those Organic Computers like a big warship did. Those things were really human. You didn’t have to tell them everything to do.

“Computer receiving, sir,” answered a very convincing mechanical voice.

“Prepare for entry into star drive as soon as pseudospeed potential and mass proximity are in agreement.”

“Yes, sir,” answered the electromechanical computer.

“Achieve maximum pseudospeed as quickly as possible,” He hoped that was the right way to phrase it. “Astrogation will give coordinates.”

“Understood, sir,” the computer replied.

Then he told his astrogator to feed the computer the proper data and leaned back in the cot, relaxing as well as he could under the combined force of acceleration and nerves.

My first time out-system, he thought, and on an assignment like this. And again he wondered why Admiral Ommart had chosen him. Not that his record was bad. It was pretty good, in fact, but it had been mostly due to luck, and maybe his luck wouldn’t hold out this time. Anybody’s luck will run out sooner or later. But, no, he told himself, it wasn’t his record. Ommart had picked him because he was a Culhaven, the Guardian Culhaven, in fact. His father could have taken on an assignment like this without batting an eye, rescued Admiral Mothershed and fought off a dozen Jillies without receiving a scratch. But Glenn was not his father, though maybe Fleet Admiral Paolo Ommart didn’t know that.

Damn my father! Glenn thought angrily. Damn the Culhavens! Why did
I
have to be born into
this
family?

Then he felt the shuddering flicker of entry into star drive as the
Messala Corvinus
made its first microjump into and then out of a universe that didn’t really exist, and crossed one hundred and seven kilometers in doing it. Then the next flicker, and the next, and the next, until the flickers came so fast that he hardly noticed them.

“Cut nuclear drive,” he heard his voice saying and was pleased that some part of him still functioned like a warship commander.

Then he looked at the tanks which had now synchronized with the flickering of the starship and showed a view of space, compensating for the ship’s increasing pseudospeed.

Those stars, all those stars, he thought. God, give me courage.

Absolom Bracer stood on the bridge of the
Iwo Jima
and waited while the ship prepared itself for battle, and looked at the tanks that showed the depths of space, and thought about one particular star.

Somewhere, twenty-seven light-years “that way,” lay a blue and cloud-whitened world. The third planet of a rather average star, a star a little brighter than the run of the mill G-type perhaps. But still it was a very special star, and it was a very special world that orbited it at some one hundred and fifty million kilometers. It was the homeworld. Earth.

In the northern portion of the western hemisphere lay the continent of North America, and about midway up that continent, along the eastern side of that mass of land, were the ranges of mountains called the Appalachians, running from the Carolinas into what had once been known as Pennsylvania, and north. Absolom Bracer remembered those ancient, weather-worn mountains well. A century before he had been born there.

Fifteen or twenty standard years had gone by since he had last visited them, and his plans had been to return there at least once more. He would go back, he had dreamed, when he returned to Earth when he had been made into a whole man again.

One day he would leave the great hospitals, walking away on two legs of flesh, swinging real arms at his sides, looking through eyes of organic fluid and transparent tissue that turned with the pull of tiny muscles, and no one would tell by looking at him that he had once been killed by the Jillies. He would take an aircar and leave behind the clean, antiseptic hospital wards and all the memories of why he had been there, and skim across the greenness of Earth, across the mountain tops, along the ancient Indian trails where a few patches of carefully preserved forest still grew, down into the valley cut by the Kanawha River as it made its way westward toward the Ohio, a laughing river echoing the ancient days it had not yet forgotten. He would go down into the valley where the city of Charleston had once stood, centuries before, where the wild rhododendron now grew in the cold crater that wind and rain had nearly obliterated, where men came to hunt and fish and just be alone with only themselves and the ancient Earth in the preserves of the Kanawha.

There he would land his borrowed aircar and step out into a world that was much as it had been when the first white men from the east had come across the mountains to hunt and trap and do battle with the dark-skinned natives of the land. He would walk away from the aircar into the green forest and find some shaded clearing where he could lie down on the thick-piled leaves and look up into the sky of Earth and forget that there were enemies beyond the sky, enemies that Man did not understand, with whom he could not communicate, and was forced to fight, and to kill, enemies who killed men and would kill
mankind
if they were allowed to do it. And then he would forget it all, the enemies, that he had died out there in the cold, alien, unwelcoming darkness beyond the sky.

Yet, Absolom Bracer told himself slowly, that would never be. It
was
a dream. And now that dream was ended. He could not go back. That world was forever lost to him, except for the old, old memories of a boy in those mountains, a boy who had never dreamed that he would die in the stars and rise again like Lazarus, and then die again before he ever came home. The memories would have to do. Perhaps others did not have as much.

Then he called for status reports of the
Iwo Jima
and of the
Pharsalus
and the
Rudoph Cragstone,
and he looked at the scopes and screens and tanks, and the images of the approaching enemy warships, and he knew that the time for waiting had nearly passed.

Hybeck looked down at the energy pistol in his hand, noted the charge which read at full power, and then checked the two spare charges he had. Then he picked up the other pistol, held it in his hand for a few moments, then gave it to Naha.

“Hy,” she said, “oh, God, Hy, isn’t there anything we can do?”

“I’ve run out of ideas, baby,” he said, looking back at the scout ship’s display screens that showed the rapidly approaching spacecraft, still too far away for really adequate identification, though Hybeck did not need identification. There was no question in his mind about whose ship that was‌—‌the Jillies had found them at last. Maybe that had been inevitable all along.

“We’d better get into our spacesuits,” he said after a while. “When we don’t fire back at them, they’ll probably send a boarding party. I figure we can get a few of them when they try to come in through the air lock.”

Naha nodded, one hand holding the wig that covered her shaven head. “Now look, baby,” he said slowly, “you know what to do, don’t you?”

“Hy, I don’t think I can do it,” Naha replied, tears in her eyes.

“Well, then, just think about what they’ll do to us if you don’t.”

“No‌—‌God, Hy, I can’t believe it.”

“I’ve seen it, baby. I know what they do to living prisoners.” Naha stepped back, turned to hide her face from him.

“Look, all you’ve got to do is push this button.” He showed her the tiny detonating device. “It’s not much of a bomb, but in this small an area‌—‌well, it’ll raise a lot of hell. They won’t take us alive.”

“I know, Hy. I know.”

He looked back at the screens and tanks and scopes and wished to every deity he could think of that he had the power for at least one final energy blast, but he didn’t. That had been used up a long, long time ago, long before this craft was sighted by the ship’s half-operating detectors and scanners, long before he realized that he was totally lost and unable to find his way back into the Paladine.

“We don’t have much more time, baby,” he said.

“Hy, I love you,” Naha said, finally turning back to face him, her injuries healed or hidden by brown plastiskin.

“I‌—‌Naha, if we had made it back, I mean, I would have asked you to take out a contract.”

“Do you mean that, Hy?”

“I mean it.”

Naha tried to smile through her tears.

“Do one thing for me before you put your spacesuit on, baby. Will you?”

“What is it. Hy?”

“Take your clothes off.”

Naha looked at him with a puzzled expression on her face.

“I want to see you just one last time. I know we don’t have time for anything else, but I just want to look at the sexiest thing I ever saw in my life. I want to look at you.”

Naha tried to smile again. “Okay, Hy, I will.”

She loosened the clasps of her blouse, pulled it off in one easy motion, and then dropped her slacks to the scout ship’s deck, and stood there naked before him for a moment. As he stepped forward to take her into his arms he knew that he could not resist her and his own desires, he knew that he would have to have her for one last time, even if that meant allowing the Jillies to enter the ship; he knew that… A sudden buzz burst from the scout ship’s control panel.

“What’s that?” Naha gasped.

“Communications,” he answered. “They’re trying to contact us.”

“The Jillies?”

“I‌—‌I guess so.”

“Isn’t that unusual?”

“Yeah,” Hybeck answered, stepped away from her and hurried to the control panel, dropped into the pilot’s acceleration seat and cut in the communications systems. Almost immediately a voice came from the loudspeaker.

“… request that you identify yourselves at once. Repeat, we request that you identify yourselves at once or we shall be forced to fire on you.”

“Th-that’s a human voice,” Naha gasped.

Hybeck was unable to say a word, but somehow his hands manipulated the tri-D controls and the communications tank came to life. A human face looked out of it. “Who are you?” Hybeck said into the microphone.

“This is the League Patrol Ship
Pizarro,”
said the voice of the man whose image showed in the tank. “You
must
identify yourself.”

“Ah,” Hybeck stammered, “ah, this is scout ship J-7 of the LSS
San Juan.”

“What?”
asked the incredulous patrol ship commander.

“Lieutenant Commander Hybeck of the LSS
San Juan,”
Hybeck said, collecting himself as best he could, “on detached duty. Who’d you say you were, sir?”