"That's better." Arn relaxed. "Just imagine all the maggots that will fry in the fire we're going to set."
Lal broke the awful silence. "How far away is this object?"
"Twelve billion kilometers, Puissance. We won't be able to detect it by electromagnetic means for another ten hours."
"How long would it take to compute a jump to its location?"
The aide did some fast figuring. "If we use everything, including our tactical computers, about ten minutes."
"Very well, put everything you have on the problem. We'll jump one of our battlewagons."
"Yes, Puissance--"
"But, Puissance, what about the Mush-faces? If we don't use the tactical computers for minimal defense, they'll tear our fleet apart."
Lal scarcely hesitated. "We'll have to take those losses. If we can't stop that... thing... near the sun, we'll all be dead anyway and the Dorvik empire will be destroyed in less than ten centuries." He noticed that the aide was still waiting nervously. Lal turned to the man's image and shrilled, "Move!" The aide bowed spastically and the image vanished.
The prince struggled to bring his voice back into control. "General, evacuate one of your battlewagons. We'll annihilate its entire mass right next to the Enemy." His emphasis capitalized the word; the Mush-faces were merely an enemy.
"Yes, Puissance."
"Ten minutes."
Harl nodded, began giving orders on his private comm. In the presence of a member of the Imperial Family he was reduced to the status of a messenger boy.
Lal had given his orders, and now had to endure a small eternity as they were executed. Somewhere he knew mountainous computers were ticking away at the calculations involved in even the shortest jump. Somewhere else, ten thousand men were trying to abandon their battle wagon before the deadline he had set. And somewhere, twelve billion kilometers away, was an object that had to be destroyed else the galaxy would die.
A brilliant red star appeared just above the garden's pseudo-horizon. The dot expanded, becoming fainter as it grew, the mad red eye of a monster. Almost simultaneously, three closely spaced red "starts" shone just two degrees away from the first. Lal recognized the characteristic glow of fusion bombs. The Mush-faces must have discovered that the Darvik defense patterns were no longer adaptive. Without tactical computers, the Dorvik were squatting milvaks before the attack. Those bombs couldn't have been closer than 100,000 kilometers, but the enemy was moving in.
"Enemy rocket bomb at fifty thousand kilometers and closing," said a disembodied voice.
Lal strained for some glimpse of the enemy. he noticed the silvery crescent of another Dorvik battlewagon some two hundred kilometers away, but that was all.
Both men sat in the flagwagon's Imperial gardens and counted their last seconds.
A white glare lit the gardens. Lal looked up, startled. The battlewagon he had noticed before had fired its rockets and now moved slowly across the sky. The brilliance of its jets brought temporary daylight to the gardens.
"It won't work," Harl whispered.
But somehow it did. The feeble-minded rocketbomb accepted the other battle wagon as its target of opportunity, and the garden's curving crystal walls turned opaque as the wagon's screens powered up. When the walls cleared, the other wagon was gone: ten thousand men and the gross annual product of an enitre continent had been vaporized in less than a millisecond.
General e'Kraft's fangs clattered together with suppressed emotion. To lose men in war was expected, but to sit defenselessly and let an enemy destroy you with inferior weapons was nightmare. Abruptly he looked up, as if listening to some private voice. "Puissance, the crew of the Vengeance have removed to the Sword of Alkra."
Several more red dots appeared near the zenith, but Lal ignored them. The fleet would have to hold together jsut a little longer...
The aide reappeared. "Computations complete, Puissance. Just tell us which bat--"
"The Vengeance. As soon as the jump is made and your are sure the Enemy is nearby, annihilate the entire mass of the wagon."
Lal's urgency was conveyed to the other man, who vanished without even bowing.
Harl said something on his private circuit, and a flat image appeared before them. "That's from a camera aboard the Vengeance. It's transmitting by gravitic means, so we'll be able to see everything up to the detonation."
The picture showed the Maelstrom with the Mush-faces' planet off to one side. Abruptly the blue planet vanished. Startled, Lal glanced up and saw that the planet was sitll in his sky. He realized ashamedly that the Vengeance had made its jump. Since the wagon's orientation in space was still the same, the stars had not moved.
Then the camera hunted-and found. At the center of the screen Lal saw a tiny white dot that drifted slowly across the field of stars. That couldn't be the Enemy. It couldn't be closer than ten thousand kilometers. The detonation of the Vengeance would have been quite effective at that range, but the jump should have been more accurate.
Apparently the same thought had occurred to e'Kraft, who said, "Navigation, how far is the Vengeance from target?"
"Ten kilometers. The enemy craft is less than nine meters long."
Less than nine meters long. The smallest insterstellar craft the Dorvik ever made was more than a kilometer wide. The Enemy was superior to anything Lal had imagined. If only there were some way to capture the Enemy craft, to learn its secrets. Possibly even more important, to learn what monster would annihilate a sun.
"Detonate the Vengeance"
And the screen turned gray.
E'Kraft spoke. "The entire mass of the wagon has been converted to energy, Puissance."
Lal stared stupidly: it was so anticlimactic. They had just created more energy in a second than the average G-class star produces in an hour, yet this explosion was observable only as a blank image screen, or the motion of a tiny hand on the dial of a gravitic surge detector. It would take ten hours for the light from that explosion to reach them. Even then it would set houses afire on the blue planet.
How close it had been... another few seconds and the Enemy might have completed its obscene mission, and so doomed the Dorvik race. For the moment at least, all was saved. He turned to e'Kraft and saw relief mirrored in his eyes.
"General, I--"
He was interrupted by the reappearance of the General's aide. "Puissance, we detected a grave disturbance after the detonation."
"After?"
"Yes, Puissance. Somehow the intruder survived the detonation."
"That's impossible!" shrieked lal, even as he accepted the awful truth. Nothing made by men could withstand the vast fireball that the Vengeance has become. What were they fighting?
The game might already be over. Lal's eyes looked across the Imperial gardens, but his mind saw a wave of hell creeping out ever so slowly from an annihilated star. The energy from such a detonation would vaporize planets a hundred parsecs away; and the destruction would creep on, confined to the speed of light but pushing inexorably across the galaxy. His race would know of the explosion, and would retreat before the swelling sphere of oblivion, but little by little the galaxy would be taken away from them, until every planet was lifeless and his race...
"See! The maggots have guessed what we're going to do. That was a nasty jolt they gave us, don't you think, Gyrf?
"The maggots are trying to avoid the big fry, but they can't save themselves." He paused, overcome by anticipations of delight. "We'll watch the fire spread from nest to nest-for ten thousand years we'll watch them burn."
The other creature agreed enthusiastically, its earlier anger almost forgotten. Neither of them noticed a slight wavering in the air behind them. The distortion was in the far infrared and near microwave. The changing refractive indicesd moved through the visibvle, the ultraviolt, the gamma. Sill Gyrd and Arn were too engrossed to notice.
"The converter is set to go when we jump, Arn. What's keeping you?"
"The navigation, of course. This is a galactic jump we're making. Give me a few more seconds."
"Idiot"