Protector

Bre

They played games, using analog programs set up in the computer. Bre

They held long discussions on philosophy and politics and the paths mankind was taking. They read a great deal. Bre

Over many months Roy began exercising more and sleeping less. He was strong now; he no longer felt like a cripple. His muscles were harder than they had ever been in his life.

And the Pak ships came steadily closer.

Through the clear twing they were invisible, black in a black sky. They were still too distant, and not all of their output was visible light. But they showed under magnification: the sparkling of hysteresis in the wide wings of the ram field, and in the center the small steady light of the drive.

Ten months after Roy had emerged from the stasis box, the light of the leading pair went out. Minutes later it came on again, but it was dim and flickering.

“They’ve gone into deceleration mode,” said Bre

In an hour the enemy’s drive was producing a steady glow, the red of blue-shifted beryllium emission.

“I’ll have to start my turn too,” said Bre

“You want to fight them?”

“That first pair, anyway. And if I turn now it’ll give us a better window.”

“Window?”

“For that right-angle turn.”

“Listen, you can eitber explain that right-angle turn business or stop bringing it up.”

Bre

“What are you pla

“My compliments. That’s a good guess. I’ve found a nonrotating neutron star… almost nonrotating. I wouldn’t dare dive into the radiating gas shell around a pulsar, but this beast seems to have a long rotation period and no gas envelope at all. And it’s nonluminous. It must be an old one. The scouts’ll have trouble finding it, and I can chart a hyperbola through the gravity field that’ll take us straight to Home.”

Casual as Bre

They watched it grow. Its drive flame made wiggly lines on Bre

“Yah.”

“I wonder if hes close enough to try the gravity widget.”

Roy watched, but did not understand, as Bre

“Got him,” Bre

“Is that what your widget does? Collapse somebody else’s gravity generator into a hypermass?”

“That’s what it’s supposed to do. But let’s just see.” He used the spectroscope. “Right. Helium lines only. Hind ship gone, lead ship coming on at about one gee. He’ll be passing me sooner than he expected. He’s got two choices now. Run or ram. I think he’ll try to ram — so to speak.”

“He’ll try to throw his ram field across us. That’d kill us, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes. Him too. Well—” Bre

Two days later the lead ship was gone. Bre

The next pass was different.

It was six months before the remaining Pak came close; but one day they were naked-eye visible, two wan yellow dots in the blackness astern. Their speed had dropped to not much above Protector’s own.

From an initial separation of eight light-months the scout pairs had converged over the years, until they were nearly side by side, thirty light-hours behind Protector.

“Time to try the gravity widget again,” said Bre

While Bre

And he was wrong. The flare came from below, lighting the interior of the lifesystem sphere. Bre

For a moment afterward, then, Bre

“What happened?”

“They did it. They built a gravity widget like mine. My own widget collapsed into a hypermass, and the hypermass started eating its way up the cable. If I hadn’t blown the cable in time it would have absorbed the weapons pod. The energy release would have killed us.” Bre

“What are they likely to throw at us in the meantime?”

“Lasers for sure. They need heavy lasers anyway, to communicate with the main fleets. I’m going to opaque the twing.” He did. Now they were locked inside a gray shell, the scouts showing only in the telescope screen. “Other than that… we’re all in a bad way for throwing bombs. We’re all decelerating. My missiles would be like going uphill; they couldn’t reach them at this distance. They can reach me, but their bombs are going in the wrong direction. They’ll go right through the ram field from behind.”

“Good.”

“Sure. Unless they’re accurate enough to hit the ship itself. Well, we’ll see.”

The lasers came in two beams of searing green light, and Protector was blind aft. Part of Protector’s skin boiled away frighteningly. The underskin was mirror-surfaced.

“That won’t hurt us until they get a lot closer,” said Bre

A cluster of small masses approached them. Bre

A day out from the neutron star, one of the green war beams went out. “They finally saw it,” said Bre

“They’re awfully close,” said Roy. They were, in a relative sense: they were four light-hours behind Protector, closer than Sol is to Pluto. “And you can’t dodge much, can you? It’d foul our course past the star.”