The rage toward which Ghrul-Captain rushed filled heaven. The air in which he crouched recalled to him an equatorial desert on Kzin. An overloaded cooling system gusted and whined. It was time to go into sundiver mode.
Firehunter could have done so automatically. This, though, was his flight. Whether or not any other Hero ever knew, each thing he did raised his honor, was a blow he himself struck at the enemy. He stabbed the manual override. "Hro-oo!" His roar echoed through his cave.
Steam vented from a thousand pores in the metal shell that enclosed the hull. The optics did not show it to his eyes, but the instruments did. The craft must take care of this for him, sensors gauging moment by moment how much to release. Calculation had shown that, given close control, there should be enough, just enough, to see him through the danger zone-if the calculations and the data upon which they drew were nearly enough correct. He had to trust them as he trusted his weapons. A Hero did.
And he was still the master of the wild hunt ahead. Again the control displays showed him what they would do of themselves and when. He heeded them as he would have heeded the scent of a quarry. But again it was he who cut off the drive. Now let the planet sling him halfway around itself and cast him forth at more than cometary speed. For those three and a half hours, while the instruments drank down what knowledge they could, he must watch and wait-only that, if all went well. If not, he must choose what to do and do it. Nobody could have programmed for every unforeseeable violence. The fact brought no sense of helplessness. He had the heat to fight, with copious drinks and his own endurance. Meanwhile, he lurked watchful, as if in ambush.
Nevertheless awe came upon him. Under these conditions, optics were altogether inadequate, yet he saw, however partially and blurrily, he felt, he defied. Firehunter flew between two walls that towered and reached beyond sight, one red-hot, geysering in mountainous lightning-shot clouds, shuddering beneath them until he imagined he could feel the thunders in his bones, the other a white-hot furnace out of which licked crimson tongues of flame. A thin opal haze shimmered everywhere around the spacecraft, fantastically writhing, where long livid arcs leaped and knots exploded into bursts of gigantic sparks. Ghrul-Captain sailed amidst a wreck of the gods.
Over and over again he roared at it, his challenge, his triumph. A crash smote his hearing. Firehunter reeled. The noise became a hailstorm that dashed against metal and rang in his cave.
That smote through!
Ghrul-Captain saw the brief cloud gush out. Immensity swallowed it. An alarm keened. Readouts raced crazily over the pilot panel. Ghrul-Captain knew himself for a warrior suddenly stabbed.
Something had riddled the outer hull. It had not pierced the inner, but the water cells were ruptured and the fluid of life boiling away.
The bombardment ceased. He had passed whatever it was, or it had ended. No matter. It had slain him.
"No!" he bellowed, and snatched for the override. Start the drive. At full boost, he might break free before he baked.
Weightlessness took him, like a falling off an infinite cliff. Lights still shone, ventilation whispered. But nothing responded to his claws. He glared at the panel. The gravity polarizers were dead. He had no thrust.
How? flashed through him. An integrated system, well armored- But the damage to the massive water circulators and everything that regulated them, the escape of those tonnes, vibrations, resonances, yes, the plunge in temperature-he was breathing air gone wintry-yes, that could have disrupted critical circuitry. Then safety locks cut in and the fusion generator shut down. Nothing was left but the energy reserve in the accumulators.
That's as well, he thought starkly. Radiation from reactions running free would have killed me in minutes.
Which would have been better. Easier.
"No!" he snarled. A Hero did not surrender.
He was on trajectory, outward bound. The chilling gave him a short respite before temperature mounted. It might level off, as he receded, before he was cooked dead.
If he survived, it would be an exploit unmatched in history. None could then deny him his birthright, and more, much more.
If not, this remained his deed, wholly and entirely his, which nothing could ever take from him.