Protector

“I’m not a cripple,” Roy grunted.

Bre

“Can you? How are they doing?”

“I’ll show you.” Bre

“Yah.” Three green dots, visibly elongated, visibly moving. Presently a brilliant white light — Sol — drifted on from stage left.

“I got some paralax on them while they were making the turn. Low acceleration, but a fast turn, about the same turning radius as ours. I think the individual ships must have turned separately. Now they’re back in tandem, coming at us at five and a half gee.”

“You guessed that almost on the nose.”

“Remember, I spent several days with Phssthpok as my mentor. I figured a healthy Pak could take three gee forever, and six gee for five years, which would kill him. They knew their limits and designed for ’em.”

Three green stars drifted toward Sol. Presently, one by one, they went out and came on again. Now their color was dimmer, yellower. Roy tried to sit up against his own weight, but Bre

Roy watched for another minute, but nothing happened, except that the green stars brightened slightly.

“This is where we stand now. Those images are about a light-year away. The ships themselves would be two light-months closer, assuming they’ve been chasing us at constant acceleration. In a few months we’ll know whether any of them turned back. Otherwise the lead pair would reach us in about fourteen months ship’s time, except that at some point they’ll go into deceleration mode and see if they can hurt us with the backblast, which means it’ll take a little longer.”

“Fourteen months.”

“Ship’s time. We’re doing relativistic speeds. We’ll cover a lot more distance than that.”

Roy shook his head. “It comes to me that you woke me just a bit early.”

“Not really. I can’t think of anything they could do to me over this distance, but I’m not certain they haven’t thought of something. I want you awake and fully recovered if something happens to me. And I want these bombs back in the weapons pod.”

“It sounds unlikely. What could they do to you that wouldn’t kill me too?”

“All right, I had another reason for waking you. I could have rigged you a stasis box right after we left Kobold. Why didn’t I?”

Roy felt tired. Gravity pulling blood from his brain? “I had to be trained. Trained to fight this ship.”

“And are you in condition to fight? Like a pile of wet noodles you are! When things start happening I want you able to move.”

He did feel like a pile of wet noodles. Hell. “All right. Shall we — ?”

“No chance. For today you just lie there. Tomorrow we’ll walk you around a bit. Pretend you’ve been sick.” Bre

Roy had forgotten that this was Phssthpok’s own control module, with a hull that could be made transparent at will. It startled him when the wall went invisible. Then he looked.

They were moving that fast. The stars behind were red-shifted to black. Ahead, above, they were violet-white. And from the zenith they swept back like a rainbow: violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, in expanding rings. The effect was total; all of Protector’s interior partitions had turned transparent too.

“No man has ever seen this before you,” said Bre

“It’s off to the side.”

“We’re not headed for it directly. I told you, I’m pla

“Can we beat the scouts there?”

“Barely ahead of the second ship, I think. We’ll have to fight the first one.”

Roy slept ten hours a day. Twice a day he took long walks, from the control room around the exercise room and back, an extra lap each day. Bre

It felt like he’d been sick. He didn’t like it.

One day they threw the ram field constriction wide open, and — in free fall, protected from the oncoming gamma rays by the scintillating dome of the i

With Bre

33,000 BC: Phssthpok departs Pak.

32,800 BC: First emigration wave departs Pak.

32,500 BC: Second emigration wave.

X: Pak scouts.

2125 AD: Phssthpok arrives Sol. Bre

2340 AD: Kidnap of Truesdale.

2341 AD, October: Discovery of Pak fleet.

2341 AD, November: Departure of Flying Dutchman. Destruction of Kobold.

2342 AD, May: Discovery of Pak scouts.

2342 AD, July: Truesdale in stasis. Departure of Protector.

At this point relativity would begin to screw up the dating. Roy decided to go by ship’s time, given that he would have to live through it.

2344 AD, April: Pak ships sighted altering course.

2344 AD, July: Truesdale out of stasis.

HYPOTHETICAL

2345 AD, September: Meet first Pak ships.

2346 AD, March: Right angle turn (?) Lose Pak scouts.

2350 AD: Arrive Home. Adjust calendars.

Roy studied Home. Over many decades there had been considerable message laser traffic between Earth and Home. There were travelogues and biographies and novels and studies of the native life. Bre

The novels had an odd flavor, a nest of unspoken assumptions that he couldn’t quite pin down, until he asked Bre

Bre

“Yah, when you put it like that… and they’ve got more room, too. They don’t need crematoriums.”

“Good point. There’s endless useless land, useless until it’s fertilized somehow. The bigger the graveyard grows, the more it shows the human conquest of Home. Especially when trees and grass start growing where nothing ever grew before.”

Roy thought the idea over, and decided he liked it. How could you lose? Until the Pak arrived.

“These Homers don’t seem particularly warlike,” he said. “We’re going to have to get them on a war footing before the Pak scouts find Home. Somehow.”

But Bre