Imperial Stars 1-The Stars at War (33 page)

He led the remaining trooper and Chang to a door. "In here." When his companions were through, he dogged it shut behind them. "Now down, all the way." On the spiral stair his injury did trouble him. His thin, dark lips skinned back from his teeth as he forced the pace.

There were no Slayor in the sub basement, not yet. Even the auxiliary lights failed, though, as Chang emerged from the stairwell. Before he could think of escape, the two Zanat had electric torches out.

Liosh went ahead with such confidence that he hardly needed light. At last he came to the door he was seeking. "Escape tunnel," he explained to Chang, "in case of such embarrassments as this. I hope there's a vehicle left at the far end."

The passage was several hundred meters long, with only thin orange beams of light stabbing into the blackness ahead. Then the scout pilot smelled fresh air ahead, night-cool and moist. Liosh swarmed up a metal ladder. "You next," he called. Very conscious of the trooper's rifle at his back, Chang climbed.

A belt of thick, shrubby vegetation had hidden the vehicle park from the spaceport. Two or three pieces of heavy armor still sat there, squat and deadly, but most were already in the fight; their passage had flattened wide swathes of the native plant life.

Liosh ignored the behemoths, heading instead for lighter, swifter transport. A military historian would have called it an armored personnel carrier; Chang had seen similar machines on several human worlds.

The trooper scrambled into the driver's compartment. Liosh and Chang went round to the rear of the vehicle. The contact officer turned to open its double doors—and Chang, at last unwatched for an instant, drew his pistol and sapped the Zan behind the right ear.

Liosh fell bonelessly. The scout pilot raced back to the trooper, who was cursing as he tried to coax the machine's engine to life. The sight of the handgun froze him. "Out," Chang ordered. He clubbed the second alien into unconsciousness.

He paused for a moment over Liosh, pistol in hand. But shouts came echoing up from the mouth of the tunnel—and the Zan, after all, had been trying to save him. He turned and trotted toward the field. The smell of sap from crushed plants filled his nostrils.

He dug his handset from a pocket. "On my way!" he shouted.

"Took you long enough,"
Praise of Folly
said tartly. "Things have been lively out here."

That, the scout pilot saw as he emerged from the undergrowth, was putting it mildly. Several armored vehicles blazed on the tarmac; they and the burning port buildings gave all the light there was.

Chang ran past corpses of Zanat and Slayor flung every which way in death, past wrecked spacecraft. He knew a moment's relief when he realized that
Praise of Folly
had been away from the worst of the fighting. Then a bullet whistled past his ear and another spanged viciously from concrete, and he realized that the greater distance did nothing for
his
safety.

Still, he was only one more shape moving through darkness, not likely to draw much fire and not a good target if he did.
Praise of Folly
stood tall a couple of hundred meters ahead.

He did not spy the Slayor until almost too late. The local slashed at him with a sword—no rapier this, but a great two-handed claymore. The blow went wide. Chang fired at point-blank range, and also missed. He threw his pistol in the native's face. The Slayor went down, keening. Chang did not look back. He flew up
Praise of Folly
's boarding ladder three rungs at a time.

"Out of here!" he bawled the instant the airlock doors were sealed behind him. "They have more things to worry about now than us."

Praise of Folly
outran the missiles that came streaking after her, sped toward free space. Chang whooped and punched for champagne.

His glee proved short-lived, for the Zanat spacecraft in orbital patrol were more alert than the distracted planetary forces. The radio crackled with challenges, which he ignored. Radar and contragrav detector warned of ship-to-ship missiles, faster and more deadly than ground-based weapons.

"Take 'em out," Chang said, adding quickly, "Chemical warheads only. One day soon we'll have to deal with these people, and I don't want to be remembered for screwing up a whole planet with an electromagnetic pulse from our atomics."

But he did not want to be shot out of the sky, either, and did not tell
Praise of Folly
to degrade its counter-missiles' performance. With better sensors and stronger contragravs, they easily destroyed the attackers. Small puffs of red and gold flame blossomed astern.

Far sooner than most pilots would have dared, he went over to hyperdrive. He was so exhilarated that the surge was over before he remembered he should have been sick.

He gunned
Praise of Folly
for all the ship was worth, trying to get out of detector range before his pursuers went FTL. For most of an hour, he thought he'd done it. Then a point of light winked on in the detector display, far behind but indisputably there. He swore and shifted vectors. The enemy followed. He swore again. He had already seen that the Zanat had good FTL instrumentation.

"Just have to run them into the ground, then," he muttered.

But the bogey refused to disappear. After awhile, another crawled onto the edge of the screen, and then two more. All were prominent echoes, warcraft for certain.

He tried to console himself with the truism fallen back on by every captain in trouble since the days of ships on Terran seas: a stern chase is a long chase. But when he looked at the detectors, he saw that it would not be long enough.

It was several days later, ship's time, when he and the computer finished commiserating with each other over his poor choice of drinking establishments. By then his lead, almost a light-year when he set out, had melted to hardly more than half an AU. The Zanat ships were maneuvering into englobement formation: if they surrounded him and touched his drive field with all theirs at once, they and he would be thrown into normal space together, with all the odds in their favor in the ensuing slugging match.

"I'll have to go sublight myself first," he decided unwillingly: the last resort of an outmatched pilot. "Maybe," he added without much belief, "they'll lose me." If the ploy would ever work, the Nebula was the place for it. Gas and dust could play merry hell with gadgetry.

"Any particular thick patches close by?" he asked hopefully.

The computer was silent for nearly a minute while it searched its memory and added corrections for several centuries of proper motion. At last it said, "As it happens, yes. We're near a Herbig-Haro object."

"New one on me," the scout pilot admitted.

"What is it?"

"A luminous nebula with a denser center that—"

"Say no more; that's exactly what we need. They'll have to have their engines linked to their detectors and drop out of hyperdrive the moment we do, or else overshoot and lose me for good. FTL, half an AU is nothing. Set our course so that when we and they break out, they'll be smack in the middle of that denser center." Chang let his optimism run wild. "One of them might even emerge coincident with a rock, and lower the odds. Can we fight three?"

"Not with our store of missiles depleted as it is," the computer answered at once. The scout pilot sighed.
Praise of Folly
went on, "Reconsider your plan. Herbig-Haro objects are—"

Chang was not about to be balked by mechanical mutiny. "Execute, and no chatter," he said harshly. "Override command."

The silence that fell had a reproachful quality to it.
Praise of Folly
changed course. Like hounds after a rabbit, the Zanat ships followed.

Chang's nails bit into his palms. His lead was a bare half-AU now, hardly seventy-five million kilometers. If this Herbig-Haro whatsit didn't show up soon, the Zanat would force him out of hyperdrive and fight on their own terms.

Praise of Folly
gave a sudden, sickening lurch. Her normal-space instruments came back to life—and at that same instant, every alarm in the ship went off. Red lights flared, claxons hooted, bells jangled, a commotion to wake the dead.

Chang did not even notice it. His mouth hanging open, he was staring in disbelief at the viewscreens. "What the bleeding hell is a star doing there?" he said in something like a whispered scream.

A star it was, a crimson monster.
Praise of Folly
could hardly have been more than fifteen million kilometers from the edge of its chromosphere. Had Chang been on the surface of a planet at that distance, its great orb would have stretched across almost two-thirds of the sky.

He could peer deep through the tenuous gases of its outer atmosphere, could gauge the temperature of the swirling currents by their colors: here a ruby so deep the eye almost refused to register it, there a coruscating uprush of brighter, molten red. It was like looking down on a stormy ocean of flaming wine.

The sight held Chang fascinated until he absently wiped his hand across his forehead. It came away slick with sweat. As the alarms could not, that reminded him where he was. Another few seconds and he would cook, no matter how well-shielded the ship was. His finger jabbed the hyperdrive switch.

The abused engines groaned, but the wrench that sent
Praise of Polly
FTL was the most welcome thing he had ever felt. The clamor of alarms faded away. Nothing whatever showed on the hyperdrive detector. Chang shivered. "One thing's certain, they never knew what hit 'em." Moths in a blowtorch—

He shivered again as reaction set in. That could have been him emerging in the center of a star . . . a star the computer had not known about. "You almost fried us both!" he howled.

There was no reply. He remembered his last command. "Override lifted," he said. "I want to hear what you have to say for yourself. Why did you think you were diving into a nebula instead of a star?"

"That should be obvious even to you," the computer said, testy as usual after an override. "When my navigation data was compiled, that star did not exist."

"Tell me another one," Chang snorted, "one I'll believe."

"Your ignorance is not my problem, except that it almost destroyed
Praise of Folly
, and you with it. You would not listen to my warning. As long ago as the end of the second century pre-Confederacy, astronomers knew that a Herbig-Haro object was the precursor to a star."

"You really mean it," the scout pilot said in wonder.

"Yes, I really do." The computer seemed determined to gets its own back. "Why do you think a Herbig-Haro object is luminous? The energy emitted by the slowly condensing cloud in the center ionizes the gas around it and makes it glow.

"But when gravitational contraction brings the cloud down to about the size of Sol's system—say, eighty AU's across—something new happens. Some of the energy inside stops going into heating the gas of the cloud and starts breaking up hydrogen molecules and such in the center: things are beginning to get hot in there.

"And when that energy gets diverted, there isn't enough gas pressure left to support the outside of the cloud any more. It falls in on itself over the next half a standard year or so, until it shrinks to a diameter of about eight-tenths of an AU. Then the heat and pressure generated by the collapse restore equilibrium and the new star becomes visible, with a surface temperature of 4,000° K or so."

"Visible! I should say so." Chang would never forget that fierce red glare. "Why hasn't any survey since the old Confederacy come by and noticed it?"

"There isn't much human traffic out this way,"
Praise of Folly
said with what sounded like an electronic shrug. "And no one on more traveled routes would have seen the star yet; its light simply hasn't traveled far enough. From its diameter and spectrum, it can hardly have been shining longer than twenty years."

"Twenty years," the scout pilot murmured. As the fear leached out of him, awe began to replace it, the awe of having been present at the biggest birth in recorded history.

"Shape direct course for home," he told
Praise of Folly
. "Now I have something to keep B'kila happy and the astrophysicists, too." His expression suddenly went mercenary. "I wonder how much I can get for the tapes."

The air inside B'kila's sanctum was conditioned to the same temperature as every other part of Salvage Service Central, but always seemed five Celsius colder. "Incompetent," she was saying, "fumbling, harebrained, lucky—lucky twice, which is more than anyone deserves." She sounded annoyed that Chang had come back at all.

He grinned like an impudent schoolboy. "Who is it who teaches that nothing matters like results? And how do you like my results, O mentor mine?"

"I can find flaws there too," she said grimly. "These Zanat of yours will have to be reckoned with. From your tapes, I'd rate their technology at the level of mid-twentieth century Terra: say, 130 pre-Confederacy. There can't be more than a couple of hundred planets in human space that can match them, and no three of those trust a fourth. Loki sadly included. Now a whole united species knows where we are."

"They had a fair notion before I met them," Chang replied. "And we can hope they also have the idea we're a good people to stay away from. They took out our first scouts, yes, but from what Liosh said they had to work for it. Then they sent four good-sized warships after
Praise of Folly
, and lost every one."

"No thanks to you," B'kila said.

"Ah, but they don't know that. What can they think? Either
Praise of Folly
handled all four of their bigger ships by itself, or else everything I told them about the Confederacy was true, and I had reinforcements waiting. Neither prospect can appeal to them."

B'kila smiled thinly. "You didn't make a hash of that," she admitted. "By all odds, it was the best you did out of the whole mission."

"Well, not quite," Chang said. His tapes and records had sent the entire astronomy department of the Collegium of Loki into ecstasies, and fetched even more than he expected. He had plenty for a really first-class spree, to make up for the one B'kila had cheated him out of.