Protector

Alice was pregnant.

Little blue lights.

“I, I, I’ll go,” he told them. “I’m not ru

“I’ve located the second wave,” said Bre

“Dammit! I didn’t need to hear that!”

Alice put a hand across his mouth. “I understand, my loyal crew. I think you’re right.”

And the air was full of the smell of burning bridges.

They stood beneath the branches of the single huge tree, watching. Bre

The two-hundred-year-old singleship looked like a short insect with a long stinger, the cargo webs spread like diaphanous wings, the stinger tipped with actinic light. The sound of it was a shrill scream. Bre

Roy felt a twitchy urgency, a sense that if he didn’t do something now, right now, he was committed for life. But the moment was long past. He only watched.

The sun looked odd now. Bre

She was gone.

“She won’t have any trouble,” said Bre

“Sure,” said Roy. He saw that the grass was dying and the leaves on the tree were turning yellow. Bre

Bre

Bre

It was all happening very fast now. The airlock led into a cramped control room, with two crash chairs and a three hundred and sixty degree wraparound vision screen over a control board like that of any spacecraft. Bre

“Shouldn’t I know something—”

“No. You can inspect the vehicle to your heart’s content after we’re under way. Hell, you’ll have a year at it.”

“Why so hurried?”

Bre

They floated within the hole in Kobold’s donut.

Bre

Kobold receded violently. “I’m giving us a ru

“Good.”

Kobold slowed, stopped, then came up like a wargod’s fist. Roy yelped. He couldn’t help it. They were through the hole in an instant, and black space ahead.

Roy turned his chair for a rear view, but Kobold was already gone. Sol was a star among stars.

“Let’s magnify that,” said Bre

Bre

Kobold began to crumple in on itself, as if an invisible hand were wadding it up. Rock churned and began to glow yellow-hot. Roy felt queasy in his soul and in his belly. It was as if someone had bombed Disneyland.

He said, “What did you do?”

“Shut down the gravity generators. I couldn’t leave it out here for the Pak to find. The longer it takes them to find artifacts around Sol, the better off we are.” Kobold was all yellow-hot and melted, and tiny. “In a few minutes it’ll all be plated across that eight foot ball of neutronium. When it cools it’ll be practically unfindable.”

Now Kobold was a blinding white point.

“What happens next?”

“For a year and two months and six days, nothing. Want to inspect the ship?”

“Nothing?”

“By which I mean that we won’t be doing any accelerating for that long. Look.” Bre

“We’re here, at Sol. We’re on our way to here. That point is just between Alpha Centaurus and Van Maanen’s Star. When we fire up the Pak ship we’ll be heading directly into the Pak fleet. They won’t be able to get our velocity toward them without knowing our exhaust velocity, and they won’t know our transverse component at all. They’ll have to assume I’m coming from Van Maanen’s Star to Alpha Centaurus. I don’t want to lead them back to Sol.”

“That makes sense,” Roy admitted reluctantly.

“Let’s take that tour,” said Bre

The Flying Dutchman, Bre

“But you did all our steering at takeoff.”

“Sure, but I could spin us a light-sail if I had to. I don’t want to. It would make us more visible.”

The Flying Dutchman was a matrix of rock, mostly hollow. Three great hollows held the components of a Pak-style Bussard ramjet ship. Bre

There was a hydroponics garden. “This is off limits,” said Bre

There was an exercise room. Bre

There was a machine shop.

There was a telescope: big, but conventional. “I don’t want to use gravity generators from now on. I want us to look like a rock. Later we’ll look like a Pak ship.”

Roy thought that was u

“Maybe.”

And there was Protector.

For the first several weeks of the voyage they did little besides train Roy Truesdale to use that ship. He was drilled in the differences between Phssthpok’s ship and Bre

So Bre

The control pod was much bigger than Roy had expected. “Phssthpok didn’t have this much room, did he?”

“Nope. Phssthpok had to carry food and air and recycling equipment for something like a thousand years. I don’t. We’ll still be crowded… but we’ll be entertained. Phssthpok didn’t have our computer technology either, or didn’t use it.”