“Gotcha. Now what?”
“Put your left arm into the left arm lock and grasp the combat flight controller. It overrides the ship’s guidance system as well as my own.”
Alex slipped his left arm into a flexible sleeve and let his fingers feel of the indicated instrumentation. Several lights came alive off to his left.
“Looks okay, but I didn’t push anything on.” “The system responds to your touch,” Grig informed him. “When it’s powered up all you have to do is make physical contact to activate everything, and let go of it to relinquish control.”
“Okay.”
“Now slip your right arm into the other arm lock.”
Alex did as he was instructed. More lights sprang to life around him. He was sitting inside an electronic Christmas tree. It was quite pretty, so long as you didn’t think about what it represented.
“Got it.”
A small control panel slid into position beneath his right hand.
“At your fingers now are the ship’s weapons systems.”
Alex moved slightly to inspect the panel and was startled to see that he recognized it.
“Hey, fan lasers, photon bolts, particle beams . . . just like on the game back home.”
“Nothing so primitive,” Grig assured him. “Cen-tauri’s test game would use terminology familiar to you. The weapons you actually control are far more advanced and much more deadly than anything your people have yet developed or even thought about.”
“Oh,” said Alex, impressed.
“However, you may refer to the weapons systems by familiar names if you wish. It doesn’t matter what you call them; only how you employ them. What did you call the first system?”
“Fan lasers.”
Grig managed to sound amused. “Toys. Kid stuff.”
Alex swallowed. “What exactly can this ship do?”
“You’ll find out,” Grig assured him.
“Well, at least the controls are familiar.” He moved his thumb toward a large red button protected by a flip-up bar set off to the far side of the panel. “Except for this …”
“Careful, careful!” Grig shouted. Alex hastily withdrew the exploring thumb. “That is for the …” The alien hesitated. “How’s your knowledge of the theory of high-energy physics?”
“Pretty shallow,” Alex confessed.
“Let’s just call it the blossom, though there’s nothing so delicate about it. A defensive weapon of last resort. Hopefully we won’t have to use it.”
“I’ll go along with that.” Alex studied the button warily. It looked like a big fat red spider now, hunkered down on its legs, just waiting for a chance to jump out and bite him on the back of his hand.
Yet there was a morbid fascination to it. He tried to imagine what it might do. Grig had referred to it, at least for Alex’s benefit, as the “blossom.” He conjured up an image of a burning flower, discarded it as unsatisfactory. It did give him something to concentrate on, however, as Grig took the ship through final checkout. A steady whine was now coming from the stern, audible even though Grig had closed both hatches and sealed them in tight. Like bugs in a bottle.
That image wasn’t very nice either. He turned his thoughts elsewhere. “How come you know so much about this ship when it wasn’t even included with the others?”
“I told you. I helped with some of the final refinements. In fact, I was working here with the design staff when the main hangar went up.”
When the main hangar went up, Alex echoed silently, trying and failing to imagine what that instant of shock and destruction must have been like.
“You mean the whole hangar’s gone? I know it looked bad back there, but I didn’t think it was all gone.” He paused. “What about the other hangars, the other bases?”
“What other bases?” Grig asked him.
Alex’s thoughts were moving fast now, one right on the heels of the other. They collided with some rising, uncomfortable suppositions. “You mean all the gunstars were located in that one hangar?”
“Yes. We were overconfident and underexperienced. Remember, we relied on our long-range defensive shields to protect us from assault for so long.”
“Well then, what about the rest of the Starfighters? The ones I was with when Enduran spoke?”
“They were all in the hangar. That one hangar.” Grig’s tone was flat and unemotional, wholly professional.
“You mean they’re all dead?”
“Death is a primitive concept. We still have little real knowledge of what lies on the other side of the line of existence that we call life. It is like different states of matter. Nothing is destroyed, only changed. You end up facing the universe in a different guise. Myself, I am something of a romantic. They were good souls all, your fellow fighters. If they hadn’t been, they wouldn’t have been Starfighters. I rather like to think of them as battling evil in another dimension.”
“‘In another dimension.'” Alex swallowed before asking the inevitable next question. “How many are left? Surely some of them got p ut? How many?”
“Counting yourself?” The ship shook beneath Alex’s backside now, trembling with energy held in check, eager to show its strength. He wondered if the engines were prototypes too, and if so, how thoroughly they’d been tested.
If nothing else they were more thoroughly tested than he was, he thought.
“Yeah, counting myself.”
“One.” Grig touched a switch. A section of mountain vanished ahead of them. Despite the internal compensation system Alex was slammed back into his seat as the gunstar exploded skyward.
The surface of Rylos receded behind them with astonishing rapidity. Alex was nestled so snugly into his seat he couldn’t turn to look out the transparent dome covering the gunner’s position, but it was simple enough to activate the perpetually positioned display screen to provide him with the view astern as well as forward. It was not a flat image. He saw fore and aft hemispheres as the screen neatly cut the globe of the universe in two halves for easy viewing. Fore and aft, of course, were relative terms only, extrapolated from the ship’s longitudinal axis.
There was a voice in his ears, reaching him via concealed speakers. The tiny button in his left ear continued to translate for him.
“Who is this?” the voice demanded to know. “Who is taking up the last gunstar? That ship is still classed experimental and is not qualified for flight. Identify yourself!”
Alex could see Grig turned slightly toward a voice pickup. “This is League Navigator/Monitor Grig. Hi.”
“You’re taking up the last gunstar without . . . !”
“Thanks ever so much. We appreciate your concern.” The angry voice was banished from the ship when Grig nudged a control.
Alex had heard enough. “Now wait a minute, Grig. What the hell do you think you’re doing? What the hell are we doing? There’s no fleet, no other Starfighters. I thought I was coming back to help the others and now you tell me we’re the others. We don’t have a plan or backup or anything. It’s just one ship. One lousy little untested ship. You, me, and . . . that’s it?”
“Precisely.” Grig was unperturbed by Alex’s tone. He adjusted something on his console and the starfield slid eighty degrees before straightening again. The gunstar did not bank and roll like the fighters Alex had seen on TV in World War II movies. There was nothing to bank and roll against.
“Xur thinks you’re still on Earth. He knows that the main base and Command Central, together with all the Starfighters and their ships, have been destroyed. His spies will have so informed him. This will be classic military strategy, a surprise attack when least expected. They think they have us beaten, helpless, unable to resist.”
“They’re right!”
“So,” Grig continued easily, “the last thing they’ll be expecting is a counterattack. It will throw them badly off balance. They’ll start to wonder what else they’ve missed.”
“Yeah, I’m sure they’ll be terrified,” Alex mumbled.
“It will be something of a shock.”
“It’ll be a slaughter, that’s what it’ll be!”
“That’s the spirit!” Grig told him. “I knew you had the makings of a true Starfighter. You have all the base primitive emotions, the blind desire to strike back, the relentless drive to …”
“All the fear,” Alex said, interrupting him. “All the terror. You don’t understand, Grig. I meant it’ll be our slaughter. One ship against the whole armada! It’s worse than crazy!”
To Alex’s consternation, his declaration only seemed to please Grig that much more. “Ah yes, just think of it! One gunstar against the armada. I’ve always wanted to fight a desperate battle against incredible odds. It appeals to my sense of irony.”
Alex groaned.
“Besides, you badly underestimate your own abilities. Centauri knew his business. And you said you found the fire controls familiar.”
“Yeah, sure, but that was just a game.”
“You destroyed everything the test unit could throw against you. You must have, or Centauri would never have brought you into this. Forget reality, Alex. Make a game of it if it helps. Concentrate on your fire control and your display screen. Remember the game? It should’ve had test lights as one phase.”