“It is true you could take them if they stood and fought,” Chi agreed, “but this time they will not. I beg you to hold firm. If we can hold their people on the ground for just another few hours, the main task force will be here and we will be impregnable.”
“Two more punches, evenly spaced, twenty-million-kilometer separation!” the scanning computer reported.
Marquette’s eyes narrowed. “Freighters. Scows. The one in the middle is the only worthy fighting ship.” He punched a command button. “Identification?”
“Likely that the freighter to port is Bahakatan, freebooter vessel commanded by Ali Mohammed ben Suda,” the computer reported. “Starboard is Kaotan, commanded by Ikira Sukotae. Commanders are last known registry, may not apply at this date. Fighter is unknown origin, no registry, but was involved in the Battle of Janipur. Communications monitors referred to it as Lightning. All three ships have additional armor and have changed configurations since last encounter. Bahakatan is most vulnerable since inherent design makes it intrinsically slower and less maneuverable, but for that reason it is probably the best armed and shielded.”
Chi nodded. “What do we have?”
“Nine fighters dedicated to command ship fighter screen, two other groups of six each on random surface sweeps, two transports and the supply and factory ship each with one group screen of nine,” Marquette responded.
Alarms suddenly went off. “Minipunch detected! Attack imminent!” warned the speakers, and as Chi watched, the center ship vanished from its position on the master screen while the two fighters went into normal space motion, peeling off and creating large arcs as their probable attack plan was analyzed.
“Don’t like this,” Marquette grumbled. “Sitting ducks, waiting for them to shoot before we know where to shoot back.”
Lightning emerged from its punch within barely a kilometer of the supply and factory ship and let loose a barrage of torpedoes, punching back in within moments.
“Bastard! Nervy bastard! He’s actually punched inside our damned fighter screen!” the commodore exclaimed. The torpedoes, all intelligent and all preprogrammed for weak spots in shielding, curved and dodged close to the transport whose guns blazed trying to pick them off before one of the torpedoes found a way in. In the meantime the fighters were nearly useless; any attempt on the torpedoes would be just as likely to hit the ship they were supposed to protect.
“Transport struck! One—two—no, three hits! Damage serious!” the battle group commander called, although Marquette could see what was happening. Lightning punched out a good fifty million kilometers out from the Chanchuk task force, looped, then came back straight in and punched as, simultaneously, the two freighters punched as well.
With these speeds and distances, punching was nearly instantaneous. An attacker would simply vanish in one spot and appear in another. No human could defend against such an attack, but the battle computers could shift—if Marquette freed them to counter the threat.
Suddenly all three ships were inside the command ship’s perimeter, firing off salvos of a dozen torpedoes and vanishing. Punching in with their full forward shields on and punching out without turning, the massed fire from the command ship itself had no more effect than to perhaps shake up the people on the attacking vessels. The command ship attack was equally futile; the kind of screens employed by the command ship would take far more than these kinds of forays to damage. Still, there was a faint shudder within the bowels of the ship as the torpedoes struck where they could.
“These aren’t random attacks,” Marquette told Chi. “They’re well planned, well scouted, and well flown. Thanks to the initial response, the damage to the factory ship isn’t bad and is under control, but they can do this all day if they have the power, and I’d guess they do. Sooner or later they are going to take some of us out. I’ve got to free the defensive computers to work as a whole! Otherwise we will begin to suffer serious damage!”
“No!” Chi was adamant. “They are trying to pull us away, don’t you see?”
“Colonel, we have twelve fighters covering the Chanchuk grid from pole to pole. Nobody can punch from the surface; it’d take a good ten minutes for anything taking off to reach orbit, let alone beyond. In ten minutes I can have three fighters taking out anything that comes up from anywhere.”
Chi swallowed hard, unable to make a case against that. The navy knew what it and a potential enemy could do, and physical laws were physical laws. “All right. I will defer to you on this. Keep the planetary screen intact but feel free to employ your other forces as you desire.”
“Now you’re talking!” The commodore could have overridden Chi from the start, of course, on the basis of sheer rank and position, but had no desire to do so. Their mission was to prevent an escape; that was Chi’s department.
The defense computers took over task force command. The three vulnerable ships were brought close and tightened up with the command ship, and the new task force fighter screen, now numbering eighteen, divided into two groups, one shielding the ships and the other ready to analyze speed, trajectory, and movements of the enemy and go after them. None of the fighters was manned; all had limited punch capability.
The three enemy ships and the SPF played cat and mouse for almost forty minutes, neither striking any real blow against the other that caused any damage, until the defense computers under Marquette determined what was known as a “release pattern” to the enemy attacks. They came in, attacked alternately, and regrouped at various angles from the task force—but the regrouping positions were now showing a distinct mathematical pattern. The defense computers took a guess at just where they could come out next, and when the next attack came, and the attackers punched through, the fighters punched through at the same time.
Colonel Chi watched the battle on the screens, noting particularly the rolling and gyrations of the enemy vessels as they were engaged by the fighters. Thinking about there being people on those attacking ships, she was very glad she was a ground trooper.
“Stung ’em a bit that time,” Marquette noted with satisfaction.
“Sir! Surface launches!”
Marquette whirled in his chair. “Where? How many?”
“All over. Oh, my—hundreds*. From all over the place!”
A full three-dimensional model of Chanchuk hovered over the command plate in the planetary defense section, and on it could be seen just what the monitor was reporting. Hundreds of angry, red blips, all over the globe…
Suddenly Chi realized the one thing she’d forgotten in all the excitement over the Sacred Lodge, the raid, the creature, all the rest. That damned small motor assembly.
Somehow, somewhere, over a very long period of time, they had been planting those things all over Chanchuk! What use was just a motor and a small logic module? On defensive screens the damned things all looked alike. Somewhere among them was one, two, perhaps three with pirates aboard—and the ring.
“Break off!” Chi shouted. “Concentrate all fighters on those things! Shoot ’em down! All of them! Forget about anything else!”
“I’ll be damned if I’m going to take my screen off this ship!” the commodore responded. “Recall and reform battle group,” he commanded. “When done, commit three fighters from battle group two to each enemy vessel. Have planetary defense battle group break off and split into thirds and join covering fighters. Target anything attempting to reach said vessels. Shadow!” He turned and looked up at Chi. “Can’t possibly get more than a fraction of ’em, but we can shoot anything they try to pick up!”
Chi’s estimation of Marquette went up a notch or two.
The tiny SPF fighters were much too small and fast to use torpedoes against, and as long as they themselves could throw a random missile or two at the enemy to make it keep its distance—which meant keeping out of range of the ship’s guns—they were relatively safe. On the other hand, guns could pick off an object of any size or significance that was on any sort of clear trajectory for pickup by the freighters, who were bearing down so that they would both skim opposite sides of Chanchuk well away from the task force’s position. If either freighter stopped long enough to allow matter transmission from the surface, enough fighters would converge on it that it would never escape.
Lightning continued its attack against the task force, keeping the rest of the fighter screen occupied. Now facing only nine fighters having to cover four ships, the enemy was able to inflict some real damage on the previously weakened supply and factory ship and on the two transports. It ignored the command ship for now— except for an occasional salvo of torpedoes to keep the fighter screen busy—since those shields were just too strong for any one ship.
“Two Val ships and twice the fighters and all three of them would be history,” Marquette noted. “I just can’t figure out what they’re trying to accomplish by this.”
The two freighters continued to close as the fighters screening them remained ahead and began picking off anything in their path before those freighters could get close. There were now effectively two fighter groups, one on each freighter, while a lone group of five or six ships randomly picked off the small dots just attaining orbit.
Marquette pointed at the globe of Chanchuk. “We’ve got a few of those mystery blips heading straight for us. Good. It’ll give our gunnery computers some work!”
Lightning looped at forty-six million kilometers out, turned, and bore back in on them head on, punching as predicted. Suddenly an alarm went off in the command center and they turned to look. The projected exit of Lightning was not within their protective ring but below and beyond it! As they watched, Lightning reappeared perhaps a hundred kilometers below them, extended some sort of scoop, and sucked up a half dozen of the mystery blips.
It was so close in that the defense computers committed the fighters to go after Lightning, loosing a horde of torpedoes at the same time. Even ships’ guns opened up; at that range they had a clear shot at the enemy.
There were several hits but clearly not enough. Lightning lurched and then began accelerating to where it would miss the planet and attain sufficient speed for a punch. The fighters were on its tail, but they could not prevent the punch or stop the enemy ship. Lightning was damaged but by no means helpless, and it had a pretty good chance of complete escape.
“All fighters break off, break off!” Marquette ordered. “Target the escaping vessel. Repeat, target the escaping vessel.”
Almost immediately Kaotan and Bahakatan were alone. Only when they were certain that there was no more fighter cover did they alter course and close in together. Kaotan opened its pickup bays and activated its transport beams as Bahakatan covered.
As Chung had predicted, the pickup was made with comparative ease and safety.
4. Reflections Toward An Ending
THE VAL EXTENDED A COM POD AND ATTACHED TO the transmitting console. The interstellar transmission system included complex miniature punches and required much power, which was why it wasn’t used very often. It also still was slow enough that the conversation between the two machines, which might have been done in seconds, instead would take hours. Machines, however, were patient—when they had to be.
The Val received the sign-on from Master System itself, and quickly transmitted the entire record, including all the test and probe data on the suspects and the complete readout of Colonel Chi.
“If such a being were possible,” the Val added, “it would explain much.”
“Such a being is theoretically possible,” came the reply from deep within the greatest computer ever known. “It would take a computer with vast potential, much biosurgery almost cell by cell and incredible skill with the principles of cellular transmutation, and years of trial-and-error research, but such a creature could theoretically be designed. There was no need for such a project on my part.”
“But could anyone we know do such a thing? Who would have the computer with the skills capable of doing so? And could any human ever dream up such a creature?”
“Humans designed me, with far more primitive tools, and I am infinitely more complex than that. As to the computer—it is obvious. The one on Melchior that was stripped of all data was nonetheless of sufficient size, speed, and capacity for it, if it were a primary task of research and at least half of it were constantly devoted to the problem. That means Clayben. He is the only one who could have done it. An agent who could go through security systems anywhere undetected, find out anything… Yes. It is obvious now. You are certain that there is absolutely no alien element of any kind within any of the suspects, including the children?”
“None that can be measured by any means currently at our disposal.”
“Very well, then. Order them held in continued isolation and wait.”
The wait lasted two days.
“I cannot create such a being without much experimentation, and that takes time,” Master System said at last. “However, proceeding from what we know about such a hypothetical creature, I have determined a basic set of methods that had to be employed in its design. If it is close to what was finally accomplished on Melchior, it is specifically designed so that no form of measurement we can employ will unmask it. However, we do not have to create one. I am certain that there could not be more than one such creature. Otherwise the game would be up long before now. They have, however, placed us in an immediate quandary. Remaking and remolding an entire planetary culture takes time and resources I do not wish to spare at this time, although Chanchuk is now a primary candidate for such treatment at the earliest opportunity. To kill the Holy Lama, her consorts, and their children is the obvious plan to eliminating this creature, but it would totally disrupt and turn against us an entire planetary culture. It would tie down too many resources for too long, and we are always faced with the possibility, even probability, that no such creature exists, making the move meaningless as well.”
“It is true that we are in only tenuous control on Chanchuk at the moment. The local Center and temple authorities have refused to aid us and in many cases have shown a willingness to die rather than cooperate. They have managed to get the word out to the other Centers in spite of our control and from there to the masses in the region. There have been massive demonstrations. The bulk of the population is pacifist, but some are not. Troops have been harassed, some killed. They demand the restoration of the Holy Lama and the Sacred Lodge. It is not anything that we cannot handle, but it is not a good situation. Still, is there another choice?” The Val seemed uncomfortable with its current position.
“I believe there is. They already have the ring. They now face us with creating an entire world of allies and tying up tremendous resources handling such a thing as well. This is a double victory I will not permit. Better to wrest a major victory out of a defeat. They do not have all the rings yet. Without this creature they are highly unlikely to be able to get inside information sufficient to steal another without tripping up. Nor are they likely to have access to a computer capable of creating another even if they somehow have all the programs. But suppose in the process of returning them to Wa Chi Center we also transmuted them?”