“That remains to be seen, Ensign. If the battle pattern should release a bogie, he may decide he’ll make sure of us. Go to your gun.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Dead bodies floated in the turret. They were not mutilated; but two or three thousand roentgens must have sleeted through all shielding. Flandry and Dragoika hauled them out and cast them adrift. As they dwindled among the stars, she sang to them the Song of Mourning. I wouldn’t mind such a send-off, he thought.
The gun was useable. Flandry rehearsed Dragoika in emergency manual control. They’d alternate at the hydraulic aiming system and the handwheel which recharged the batteries that drove it. She was as strong as he.
Thereafter they waited. “I never thought to die in a place like this,” she said. “But my end will be in battle, and with the finest of comrades. How we shall yarn, in the Land of Trees Beyond!”
“We might survive yet,” he said. Starlight flashed off the teeth in his bruised and blood-smeared face.
“Don’t fool yourself. Unworthy of you.”
“Unworthy my left one! I plain don’t intend to quit till I’m dead.”
“I see. Maybe that is what has made you vaz-Terran great.”
The Merseian came.
She was a destroyer. Umbriel, locked in combat with the badly hurt enemy cruiser, had inflicted grave harm on her, too. Murdoch’s Land was shattered, Antarctica out of action until repairs could be made, but they had accounted for two of her fellows. New Brazil dueled yet with the third. This fourth one suffered from a damaged hyperdrive alternator. Until her sweating engineers could repair it, which would take an hour or so, her superlight speed was a crawl; any vessel in better shape could wipe her from the universe. Her captain resolved he would go back to where the remnants of Sabik orbited and spend the interim cleaning them out. For the general order was that none but Merseians might enter this region and live.
She flashed into reality. Her missiles were spent, but guns licked with fire-tongues and shells. The main part of the battleship’s dismembered hulk took their impact, glowed, broke, and returned the attack.
“Yow-w-w!” Dragoika’s yell was pure exultation. She spun the handwheel demoniacally fast. Flandry pushed himself into the saddle. His cannon swung about. The bit of hull counter-rotated. He adjusted, got the destroyer’s after section in his cross-hairs, and pulled trigger.
Capacitors discharged. Their energy content was limited; that was why the gun must be laid by hand, to conserve every last erg for revenge. Flame spat across kilometers. Steel sublimed. A wound opened. Air gushed forth, white with condensing water vapor.
The destroyer applied backward thrust. Flandry followed, holding his beam to the same spot, driving inward and inward. From four other pieces of Sabik, death vomited.
“Man,” Flandry chanted, “but you’ve got a Tigery by the tail!”
Remorselessly, spin took him out of sight. He waited, fuming. When he could again aim, the destroyer was further away, and she had turned one battleship section into gas. But the rest fought on. He joined his beam to theirs. She was retreating under gravities. Why didn’t she go hyper and get the hell out of here? Maybe she couldn’t. He himself had been shooting to disable her quantum-field generator. Maybe he’d succeeded.
“Kursoviki!” Dragoika shrieked at the wheel. “Archers all! Janjevar va-Radovik for aye!”
A gun swiveled toward them. He could see it, tiny at its distance, thin and deadly. He shifted aim. His fire melted the muzzle shut.
The destroyer scuttled away. And then, suddenly, there was New Brazil. Flandry darted from his seat, caught Dragoika to him, held her faceplate against his breast and closed his own eyes. When they looked again, the Merseian was white-hot meteorites. They hugged each other in their armor.
Umbriel, Antarctica, and New Brazil: torn, battered, lame, filled with the horribly wounded, haunted by their dead, but victorious, victorious—neared the planet. The scoutships had long since finished their work and departed Empire-ward. Yet Ranjit Singh would give his men a look at the prize they had won.
On the cruiser’s bridge, Flandry and Dragoika stood with him. The planet filled the forward viewscreen. It was hardly larger than Luna. Like Terra’s moon, it was bereft of air, water, life; such had bled away to space over billions of years. Mountains bared fangs at the stars, above ashen plains. Barren, empty, blind as a skull, the rogue rushed on to its destiny.