Three Worlds to Conquer Read online

  “That’s better,” he panted. When he could see the layout, it was familiar. It ought to be. He’d spent hours memorizing the diagrams she smuggled to him, the instructions and specifications. After so much mental rehearsal, the act had a tinge of falsity, as though it, too, was only practice.

  A throbbing awoke, the hull transmitted it to him and he leaned back with a whistle. Sweat coursed past his brows and stung his eyes. Ten minutes for warmup. That was cutting matters pretty fine, but he dared wait no longer than he must.

  There were no ports in this ship, and he didn’t want to risk activating the viewscreens before he was ready to lift. Someone might be sniffing around outside with a detector. “What’re they doing, do you think?” he asked inanely.

  “Running around like beheaded chickens, I’ll bet,” she answered. “They’ll come to order fast. They’ve got tight discipline. But right now I’d love to watch the confusion.”

  He leaned over to assist her into the harness of the chair beside his. “Well,” he said, “so far it went like the proverbial clockwork. I wouldn’t be surprised but that the whole operation will succeed. How are you going to like being a heroine?”

  She forced lightness into her tone. “As much as you’re going to like being a hero. Which is to say, plenty.”

  “Uh, I dunno. No more privacy, no more daring to indulge in little human failings from virtue—God, I’ll bet I wind up addressing a Rotarian-lunch! It’s different for you, of course. You can enjoy the glamor aspect But I’m too old and homely.”

  Her look lingered on him, in the dim shadow-haunted light. “You’re not old, Mark,” she said low.

  “You don’t deny the homeliness, eh?” He tried to chuckle.

  “I’m old enough not to care for boys. I prefer men. And you’re more a man, in every way, than anybody else I ever met.” She drew a quick breath. “Oh, dear,” she said confusedly, “we’re not getting this harness fastened right at all.”

  They fell into silence.

  The engine rumble strengthened. “Time!” said Fraser. He switched on interior lights and viewscreens.

  It was as if suddenly he commanded a tower above the field. Men swarmed about in an antlike orderliness. Those working by the moonships wore bulky radiation armor. A ’dozer had already arrived and started heaping a protective ringwall. “Swayne’s even sharper than I thought,” said Lorraine grudgingly.

  “Damn!” Fraser said. “Our blast’ll incinerate those guys.”

  “Do you care?—Yes, you would. I guess we can spend thirty seconds’ worth of warning time.”

  Fraser flipped the radio to the general communication band and plugged in a jack to his helmet set. “Attention all personnel.” he droned. “Your attention out there! Spaceship Olympia about to lift. Clear the area. Clear the area.”

  A voice screamed back: “What the hell is this?” But Fraser was watching the Vega. He saw a turret swing about, readying to shoot as soon as he went beyond the minimum radius.

  “You’ve got ten more seconds to get away,” he called.

  They ran. Two men came nearer, though, stopped at the very edge of the danger zone and raised their laser guns. They’ve got guts, for sure, Fraser thought, and pulled the main switch.

  The surge of power clattered the teeth in his jaws. He saw the exhaust cloud spreading below him, like snow tongued with fire, out across the field. Even by conduction, the noise invaded his entire being. Steering jets blasted as the jacks withdrew. The ship’s nose swung sickeningly upward. Acceleration struck. The field fell away.

  Ganymede fell away. It was a pocked and pitted crescent below him, and the sun rose over the rim.

  Fraser cut the thrust when he had twice escape velocity and returned his chair to the upright position. Free fall was stillness and dream, with stars crowding the spaceward screen, but he was too busy to notice. “Run me a radar beam back that way, Lory. I want to make sure we aren’t being followed.”

  “We can’t be. Every one of their boats is tied up in orbit around the other moons, or out toward the asteroids. And we can outrun the Vega.”

  “We can’t outrun a missile,” he said bleakly. “I’ve got to bring us down at Blocksberg undetected, remember?”

  Her fingers danced over the console. The screen came aglow. A computer threw figures onto a set of meters and drew two continuously changing curves on a fluorescent dial.

  “A couple of rifle shells,” she deduced. “They aren’t on a collision orb.t with us, though.”

  “Whew! That’s a relief. Not that we couldn’t evade them, at this distance, but I was worried that Traffic Control might have managed to slap a radar beam on us. Now our angular diameter is too small for them to have any real chance of doing so. I’ll swing us around behind Jupe. By the time we orbit back here, everything should have settled down and we can make a quick sneak landing.”

  Without navigation tables or equipment to give him information more precise than memory and trained vision supplied, he could only calculate approximate vectors. They would serve, though, for his rough purposes. He set the panel and applied one-tenth gee acceleration. More than that, and the exhaust would be detectable at too long a range. He’d speed up when they’d put a hundred kilomiles or so between themselves and Ganymede.

  The receiver blinked a red signal. “Oh, oh,” Lorraine said, “Callers. Think they’ve locked onto us?”

  “No. They’re broadcasting. I may as well reply. They aren’t set up to triangulate on us.” Fraser plugged his radio connection back in. “Attention, spaceship Olympiad “Swayne’s voice,” Lorraine whispered. He saw fear touch her face.

  That roused anger in him. “Olympia speaking,” he snapped. “What the devil do you want?”

  “I might ask the same,” Swayne answered dryly, “as well as who’s aboard. This is the commandant of the military administration.”

  “Nu?” Fraser decided not to admit his or Lorraine’s identities: partly out of contrariness, partly to avoid reprisals on his family. Of course, they’d soon guess hers—“Return at once, in the name of the law.”

  “If that’s all you’ve got to say, over and out.”

  “Wait. I know what you’re after. It’s obvious. You think you can make Earth. You can’t. That ship isn’t supplied. You can’t have carried along enough to make any difference. A spaceship’s water recycler needs a certain minimum quantity to function. You haven’t even any air.”

  “I’m breathing.”

  “You know as well as I do that the cycler in a spacesuit is different from the powered system in a ship . . . which also requires a certain pressure to work. Your chemicals will be used up in a matter of days.”

  “If you’re trying to scare me, you’re wasting air yourself. Let me scare you instead. When the Navy arrives, you’ll be held to account for everything that’s happened in the Jovian System. Think that over and conduct yourself accordingly.”

  “Shut up,” Swayne said. “Do you believe I’m such an idiot as you? You must have arranged to get supplies somewhere. I doubt very much if it’s at one of the other moons. How could there be secret communication between them? But in case that is your aim, then, for your information, each has a boat on orbital radar picket, and each boat will get radio orders to fire at sight of you.”

  Uh-huh. That’s why you can’t keep watch on all Ganymede.

  “I think you must plan to come back to some part of this moon,” Swayne said. “I’ve thought for some time, in any event, that we need a close-in patrol as an added precaution. So . . . a number of moonships are promptly going to take up stations. They aren’t well equipped for such work—they will be when we get their radars rebuilt—but meanwhile they can keep every square foot of the surface under visual observation. If you land anywhere on Ganymede, you’ll be seen. The Vega will scramble and blast you. She can do that on a few seconds’ notice if she’s kept on continuous full alert, warmed up. And that’s what she will be until I’m certain you’ve been taken care of.”

>   “Oh, no, no, no,” Lorraine gasped. The color bleached from her skin. It was as if a boot had struck

  Fraser in the groin. But somehow he snarled, “Why should we come back to your firing squad?”

  “I admire your spirit,” Swayne said, “and it was decent of you to warn the men. You have my oath as an officer that if you return peacefully, at once, you will simply be held in brig and receive a fair trial when the lawful government has been restored.”

  His voice was fading as the distance lengthened. The stars crackled their scorn through every word. But the ring and cold in that tone remained clear:

  “If you do not come back, if you get away. I shall maintain the Vega on alert for the week or so which is the maximum time you could possibly survive. However, that will tie up too much manpower; the armament project will be halted. I don’t want that. Nor do I want to take the risk, even if it is small, that you have a cache somewhere, on some orbiting rock, that I don’t know about. Therefore, if you do not reverse acceleration at once, I shall fire a missile.”

  Fraser stared at Lorraine. She shook her head, eyes blind with tears.

  “Stop playing hero,” Swayne urged. “Your death won’t gain anything for your cause. Come back, and you may yet have a chance to be of service.”

  He spoke almost at the limit of audibility now, a ghost’s whisper. “All right,” Fraser croaked. “You win. Roger and out.”

  He snapped off the transmitter.

  Lorraine’s gauntleted fists beat the arms of her chair. “I’d rather be dead,” she wept.

  “You may get your wish,” he said harshly. “I agreed just to gain us some time. The longer the wait before he shoots that missile, the more distance it’ll have to cover, and the larger the volume of space in which it’ll have to hunt around for us.”

  “You mean—” she stiffened—“we might evade it altogether?”

  “N-no, I’m afraid not. We haven’t got that much of a head start” He reached for the main switch, but withdrew his hand. “Uh-uh. We’d better stay at low thrust. If they detected a jetblast with a red shift, they’d fire immediately, and the missile’s detectors would latch onto us for keeps. As is—Lory, this is a long chance to take, and even if it succeeds, I don’t know how to reach Blocksberg. Tell me if I have a right to.” He sighed. “People depend on me. And then there’s you, you’ve got your life ahead of you.”

  “How much would that be worth, after they put me through ‘re-education’ ? But Eve and your kids—”

  “Hell! Well try k! Our own radar will tell us when the missile’s found us and started homing in. Then we’ll open our engine up. Full acceleration. This boat’s got more thrust than we can maybe stand, not having any booster drugs along, but well try.”

  She had stopped crying. The tears still glistened on her face, but she watched him unwaveringly and her tone held only puzzlement: “I don’t get it I thought you intended to play hide-and-seek, hoping the missile wouldn’t spot us before it ran out of fuel. But if you don’t think that’s possible, how can you ever believe we can outrace it?”

  “We can’t, over the long haul. But if the race is short enough, perhaps—” unconsciously, his hand closed over hers and squeezed—“perhaps we can get to safety ahead of it”

  “Where?”

  He pointed to the starboard front viewscreen. Jupiter filled its darkness.

  XVII

  As they came up the gorge that cut through the north side of the Wilderwall, they heard the first drums. Theor stopped in his tracks. The army behind rattled slowly to a halt. Like a single animal it strained to hear; but by then the beats had ceased.

  For a space Theor stood in a silence broken only by the whine of wind above the cliffs. They hemmed him in on either side, blackly outlined against a strip of sky almost as dark with clouds and evening. Trees grew sparsely on top. Their limbs writhed in the cold sliding of the air. Down here on the bottom of the ravine, shadows were thick and the host was a vague mass, faintly glowing by its infrared radiation, the chillier weapons and armor revealed in silhouette. The detritus that carpeted the way was sharp under his feet.

  “Did you hear that?” he asked. “Yes,” Walfilo said. “Watchers’ signals.”

  The drums muttered again, somewhere on the heights to the left.

  “This is an ill place to be caught,” said Walfilo. “They could hurl stones at us from above.”

  Theor debated whether to advance or retreat. The entrance of the gorge was closer than the pass ahead. By going back, he would soon reach ground where his soldiers could deploy. But then they might sit to days awaiting attack, while Leenant and Pors starved in Nyarr. “We’ll advance,” he said.

  “I would not ordinarily counsel that,” Walfilo muttered, “but our mission is so forlorn anyway—” He clapped his hands together. An adjutant hurried up. “Dispatch a patrol to find out whatever it can about that messenger. Have the rest dose ranks and continue.”

  The army’s own drums banged forth the order. Echoes rolled emptily from wall to wall. Ice alloy clanked, stones clattered, feet shuffled in their thousands and the Nyarrans moved on.

  The murk deepened as night fell, but there was no slopping. One couldn’t lose his way here! The scouts returned with the expected report: no trace of a spy. He had all the mountains to hide in when they approached. However, more encouragingly, there was no indication of a barbarian war-band either.

  Or was that anything to cheer about? Theor felt his mouth tighten as grimly as Walfilo’s.

  They reached Windgate Pass near midnight. The cliffs dropped away behind them and a rough but open slope lay ahead, downward to their own country. Theor could see a remote gleam, the luminous Brantor winding south toward Nyarr and the ocean. Even after he had gotten camp established and conferred with Walfilo, he slept little.

  Sometime before dawn, the drumming roused him. He started out of uneasy dreams, momentarily looking for lightning and rain. But no, it was another signal, off in the night—and not a short-range one this time. Those thunder-pulses could only come from one of the biggest military drums, such as needed four Jovians to carry it but in this atmosphere could be heard for ten miles or more.

  Others had been wakened too. He heard cries in the dark, overridden by the rolling, crashing blows off the heights. Then Walfilo’s command bit through the racket. His own drummers repeated it: Silence, silence, silence. The strokes above ended almost simultaneously, and a thrumming hush arose.

  Abruptly Theor realized what his general had in mind. He turned his head south, held every muscle moveless, and listened. It came soon, dwarfed almost to nothing by that immense night, but every note clear. Boom-bom-brr-bom! Boom-bom-brr-bom! Ra-ta-ta-bom-boom, ra-ta-ta-boom, brr-ta, brr-ta, bom-bom, bom-bom—

  Walfilo issued another series of orders. Feet thudded and weapons clinked. Theor followed the noise, arriving just as a good-sized patrol galloped off. Close at hand, Walfilo’s skin radiated brighter than normal, so that Theor could make out the wrinkles which scored the face. “I sent them off in the hope of catching those spies,” the older male said.

  “I realize as much. But may they not be ambushed?”

  “No, the enemy scouts must be very few. A larger party would be heard by us whenever they approached near enough to observe anything useful.”

  “They must be Ulunt-Khaziri,” Theor said dully.

  Walfilo spat. “What else? Chalkhiz knows more local geography than even I feared he would. Almost at once after the last battle, he must have established pickets to watch every route by which we might return, and lines of communication from them to his headquarters. There is no more chance of surprising him. Every move we make will be known.”

  Theor slumped. “What should we do?”

  “We could withdraw.”

  “No.”

  “We could establish ourselves here, then. It’s a highly defensible position.”

  “What use would that be?” Theor asked. “He would simply take Nyarr, and afterwa
rd deal with us at his leisure.”

  “True. I see only one course, then—to proceed openly. Not stop to make rafts, just march as fast as we can, feeding ourselves at the ranches along the way. But first we should make some rough fortifications here, so that we have a strong point to retreat to if we are beaten in the field.”

  “You mean when we are beaten, do you not?” Theor agreed unwillingly. The delay would give time to die enemy, but he knew too well the weakness of his forces.

  Dawn broke in fiery clouds and nacreous mist on the plain. The army fell to work, dragging stones into place for a series of walls across the pass, heaping other boulders up to roll down on attackers. Theor lost himself in toil. But from time to time he heard the drums talking in the distance. It was small consolation that the patrol had captured the one on this ridge. The operators of it had gotten clean away.

  The planet spun through another night before Walfilo conceded that preparations were as adequate as possible. The next morning the army came down the Wilderwall. It took them the whole day to reach the foothills. They camped by the Brantor.

  Toward sunrise Theor heard drums again, nearer than could be accounted for by his own advance.

  They started off at an early hour. Their food supplies were nearly exhausted, hunters could bring in only a niggard ration, and the flat pasturelands were still a couple of days off. The Nyarrans plodded thin and mute along the riverbank, over the rolling, sparsely wooded landscape. The current ran louder than their footfalls, white-streaked on its way to the sea.

  We will be in better shape when we can commandeer from the ranches, Theor assured himself.

  Late in the day, a forgar landed. The rider sprang off and raced to the head of the army. “Reeve—General—I’ve seen the enemy! His entire host, I think.”

  “What?” Walfilo bellowed. “So soon? Impossible!”

  “They’re in ships. The Brantor is covered with their ships.” As if it had heard, a drum started up, miles away but strong and arrogant.

  “Pulled by their beasts?” Theor gripped his ax helve till his knuckles creaked. “Yes, they could come that fast, even upstream. But are you certain of their numbers?”