“That mind-level control business,” Trigger said finally. “Maybe it found a way of going out to them.”
She could see by their faces that the idea had occurred, and that they didn’t like it. Well, neither did she.
They pitched a few more ideas around. None of them seemed helpful.
“Unless we just want to hightail it,” the Commissioner said finally, “about the only thing we can do is go back and slug it out with the frigate first. We can’t risk snooping around the station while she’s there and likely to start pounding on our backs any second.”
Mantelish looked startled. “Holati,” he cautioned, “that’s a warship!”
“Mantelish,” the Commissioner said, a trifle coldly, “what you’ve been riding in isn’t a canoe.” He glanced at Lyad. “I suppose you’d feel happier if you weren’t locked up in your cabin during the ruckus?”
Lyad gave him a strained smile. “Commissioner,” she said, “you’re so right!”
“Then keep your seat,” he said. “We’ll start prowling.”
They prowled. It took an hour to recontact the Aurora, presumably because the Aurora was also prowling for them. Suddenly the detectors came alive.
The ship’s guns went off at once. Then subspace went careening crazily past in the screens. Trigger looked at the screens for a few seconds, gulped and started studying the floor.
Whatever the plasmoid had done to the frigate’s crew, they appeared to have lost none of their ability to give battle. It was a very brisk affair. But neither had the onetime Squadron Commander Tate lost much of his talent along those lines. The frigate had many more guns but no better range. And he had the faster ship. Four minutes after the first shots were exchanged, the Aurora blew up.
* * ** * *
The ripped hunk of the Aurora’s hull which the Commissioner presently brought into the lock appeared to have had three approximately quarter-inch holes driven at a slant through it, which subsequently had been plugged again. The plugging material was plasmoid in character.
“There were two holes in another piece,” the Commissioner said, very thoughtfully. “If that’s the average, she was punched in a few thousand spots. Let’s go have a better look.”
He and Mantelish maneuvered the gravity crane carrying the holed slab of steel-alloy into the ship’s workshop. Lyad was locked back into her cabin, and Trigger went on guard in the control room and looked out wistfully at the stars of normal space.
Half an hour later, the two men came up the passage and joined her. They appeared preoccupied.
“It’s an unpleasant picture, Trigger girl,” the Commissioner said. “Those holes look sort of chewed through. Whatever did the chewing was also apparently capable of sealing up the portion behind it as it went along. What it did to the men when it got inside we don’t know. Mantelish feels we might compare it roughly to the effects of ordinary germ invasion. It doesn’t really matter. It fixed them.”
“Mighty large germs!” Trigger said. “Why didn’t their meteor reflectors stop them?”
“If the ship was hove to and these things just drifted in gradually—”
“Oh, I see. That wouldn’t activate the reflectors. Then, if we keep moving ourselves—”
“That,” said the Commissioner, “was what I had in mind.”
29
Trigger couldn’t keep from staring at the subspace station. It was unbelievable.
One could still tell that the human construction gangs had put up a standard type of armored station down there. A very big, very massive one, but normally shaped, nearly spherical. One could tell it only by the fact that at the gun pits the original material still showed through. Everywhere else it had vanished under great black masses of material which the plasmoids had added to the station’s structure.
All over that black, lumpy, lava-like surface the plasmoids crawled, walked, soared and wriggled. There were thousands of them, perhaps hundreds of different types. It looked like a wet, black, rotten stump swarming with life inside and out.
Neither she nor the two men had made much mention of its appearance. All you could say was that it was horrible.
The plasmoids they could see ignored the ship. They also gave no noticeable attention to the eight space flares the Commissioner had set in a rough cube about the station. But for the first two hours after their arrival, the ship’s meteor reflectors remained active. An occasional tap at first, then an almost continuous pecking, finally a twenty-minute drumfire that filled the reflector screens with madly dancing clouds of tiny sparks. Suddenly it ended. Either the king plasmoid had exhausted its supply of that particular weapon or it preferred to conserve what it had left.
“Might test their guns,” the Commissioner muttered. He looked very unhappy, Trigger thought.
He circled off, put on speed, came back and flicked the ship past the station’s flank. He drew bursts from two pits with a promptness which confirmed what already had been almost a certainty—that the gun installations operated automatically. They seemed remarkably feeble weapons for a station of that size. The Devagas apparently had had sense enough not to give the plasmoid every advantage.
The Commissioner plunked a test shot next into one of the black protuberances. A small fiery crater appeared. It darkened quickly again. Out of the biggest opening, down near what would have been the foot of the stump if it had been a stump, something long, red and worm-like wriggled rapidly. It flowed up over the structure’s surface to the damaged point and thrust the tip of its front end into the crater. Black material began to flow from the tip. The plasmoid moved its front end back and forth across the damaged area. Others of the same kind came out and joined it. The crater began to fill out.
They hauled away a little and surfaced. Normal space looked clean, beautiful, homelike, calmly shining. None of them except Lyad had slept for over twenty hours, “What do you think?” the Commissioner asked.
They discussed what they had seen in subdued voices. Nobody had a plan. They agreed that one thing they could be sure of was that the Vishni Fleet people and any other human beings who might have been on the station when it was turned over to the king plasmoid were no longer alive. Unless, of course, something had been done to them much more drastic than had happened to the Aurora’s crew. The ship had passed by the biggest opening, like a low wide black mouth, close enough to make out that it extended far back into the original station’s interior. The station was open and airless as Harvest Moon had been before the humans got there.
“Some of those things down there,” the Commissioner said, “had attachments that would crack any suit wide open. A lot of them are big, and a lot of them are fast. Once we were inside, we’d have no maneuverability to speak of. If the termites didn’t get to us before we got inside. Suits won’t do it here.” He was a gambler, and a gambler doesn’t buck impossible odds.
“What could you do with the guns?” Trigger asked.
“Not too much. They’re not meant to take down a fortress. Scratching around on the surface with them would just mark the thing up. We can widen that opening by quite a bit, and once it’s widened, I can flip in the bomb. But it would be just blind luck if we nailed the one we’re after that way. With a dozen bombs we could break up the station. But we don’t have them.”
They nodded thoughtfully.
“The worst part of that,” he went on, “is that it would be completely obvious. The Council’s right when it worries about fumbles here. Tranest and the Devagas know the thing is in there. If the Federation can’t produce it, both those outfits have the Council over a barrel. Or we could be setting the Hub up for fifty years of fighting among the member worlds, sometime in the next few hours.”
Mantelish and Trigger nodded again. More thoughtfully.
“Nevertheless—” Mantelish began suddenly. He checked himself.
“Well, you’re right,” the Commissioner said. “That stuff down there just can’t be turned loose, that’s all! The thing’s still only experimenting. We don’t know what it’s going to wind up with. So I guess we’ll be trying the guns and the bomb finally, and then see what else we can do . . . Now look, we’ve got—what is it?—nine or ten hours left. The first of the boys are pretty sure to come helling in around then. Or maybe something’s happened we don’t know about, and they’ll be here in thirty minutes. We can’t tell. But I’m in favor of knocking off now and just grabbing a couple of hours’ sleep. Then we’ll get our brains together again. Maybe by then somebody has come up with something like an idea. What do you say?”
“Where,” Mantelish said, “is the ship going to be while we’re sleeping?”