Edmond Hamilton
Battle for the Stars
THE TWO THOUSAND CENTURIES
The Era of Interplanetary Exploration and Colonization—1971–2011.
The Era of Interplanetary Frontiers—2011–2247.
The Era of Interplanetary Secession—2247–2621.
The Era of Interstellar Exploration—2300–2621.
The Era of Interstellar Colonization—2621-62,339.
The Era of the Federation and United Worlds—62,339–129,999.
The Era of the Star Kings—130,000–202,115.
CHAPTER 1
It was no place for a man to be.
Men were tissue, blood, bone, nerve. This place was not made for them. It was made for fire and force and radiation. Go home, men.
But I can't, thought Jay Birrel. Not yet. My feet ache. I didn't sleep well. I want to see my wife, but I can't go home. I have to go on into this place where a human being looks as pathetic as an insect in a furnace.
Such thoughts made Birrel uneasy. He disliked imaginative thinking and imaginative people, he regarded himself as a tough, practical man. They had a job to do and that was all there was to it, and he might as well quit mooning about it. He straightened up a little more. He was always doing that, trying to gain a little height, so that when he gave an order to a man he would not have to look up to him. It seemed a little foolish to do it, but he could not quite get over the nagging consciousness that his height was only average.
He said, “Radar?'
Joe Garstang, beside him, answered without turning. “Nothing has been monitored yet. Not yet.'
Garstang was a younger man than Birrel, but he was so big and broad and slow-speaking that he made you think of a rock. The rock could worry, though. Birrel sensed the worry now and thought.
He concealed his own profound distaste at the prospect they were watching. It was comparatively quiet here in the bridge, with only a muted chattering from the calc-room just aft. The place was almost like a metal-and- plastic shrine, with the broad control-banks as its mechanical altar, Venner and the two technicians their silent ministrants, and he and Garstang watching the screens like anxious supplicants.
The screens were not really windows. They were the final sensitive parts of a chain of incredibly complicated mechanisms that took hold of some of the faster-than-light radar information flowing into the ship, and translated it into visual images. But they looked like windows — windows through which smashed the light of a thousand thousand suns.
This place was cluster N-356-44, in the Standard Atlas. It was also hellfire made manifest before them. It was a hive of swarming suns, pale-green and violet, white and yellow-gold and smoky red, blazing so fiercely that the eye was robbed of perspective, and these stars seemed to crowd and rub and jostle each other. Up against the black backdrop of the firmament, they burned, pouring forth the torrents of their life-energy to whirl in cosmic belts and maelstroms of radiation. Merchant ships would recoil aghast from the navigational perils here. Unfortunately, this was not a merchant ship.
There was a rift in the cluster, a narrow cleft between cliffs of stars, which was roofed by the flame-shot glow of a vast, sprawling nebula. It was the only possible way into the heart of the cluster, this channel. Had others gone in this way? Were they still in here? That was for them to find out.
He looked at the looming, overtopping cliffs of stars that went up to the glowing nebula above and down to a fiery shoal of suns below. He thought of Lyllin, waiting for him in the quiet house back at Vega. He thought that he had no business having a wife.
'Radar?” he asked again.
Garstang looked at the tell-tales and said, “Still nothing.” He turned, his heavy brows drawn together into a frown, and said doggedly, “It still seems to me that if they're in here, we should have come in with the whole squadron.'
Birrel shook his head. He had his own doubts riding him, but, once you started showing doubt, you were through. He had made his decision, he had committed them, and now he had to look confident about it no matter how lonely and exposed he felt.
'That could be exactly what Solleremos wants. With the right kind of ambush, a whole squadron could be clobbered in this mess. Then Lyra would be wide open. No. One ship is enough to risk.'
'Yes, sir,” said Garstang.
'The hell with you, Joe,” said Birrel. “Say what you're thinking.'
'I am thinking that it was not my lucky day when you picked the Starsong for your flagship. That's all.'
The ship moved onward through the fiery channel, toward the pair of red binary stars that marked its end. The binaries hardly seemed to change size, the swarm of stars on either side of them seemed to creep back with infinite slowness, even though the ship moved at very many times the speed of light. Once, thought Birrel, such velocities had been thought flatly impossible. Then the light-speed barrier had been cracked by the ultradrive which altered the basic mass-speed ratio by bleeding off mass as energy and storing it, then automatically reconverting it into mass when a ship decelerated. At such velocities, Birrel felt that it was ridiculous for him to be chafing at their slowness. He always felt that, and he always chafed.
Looking at the upper screen that showed the flaring, billowing belly of the nebula above them, like the underside of a burning ocean, Birrel said to Garstang, “Does it seem to you that the pace is speeding up? I mean, this jockeying for power between the Sectors has gone on a long time, ever since Earth lost real authority. But it seems different lately, somehow. More incidents, more feeling of something driving ahead toward a definite goal, a plan and a pattern you can't quite see. You know what I mean?'
Garstang nodded. “I know.'
The computer banks back in the calc-room clicked and chattered. Relays kicked, compensating course, compensating tides of gravitic force quite capable of breaking a ship apart like a piece of flawed glass. The two red binaries gave them a final glare of malice and were gone. They were out of the channel.
A star the color of a peacock's breast lay dead ahead.
Venner, the anxious and alert young officer who stood not far from Garstang, said, “That's the nearest star with E-type worlds, sir. We've plotted five others farther in.'
Garstang looked at Birrel.
Birrel shrugged. “If they're based in here, it'd be on an E-type. Take them one by one.'
Garstang gave his orders. Birrel watched the blaze of peacock-blue grow swiftly. No ambush in the channel, so now what? Ambush on the world of the blue star? Or nothing? Time and money wasted and maybe it was all just a feint on Solleremos’ part, trying to draw the Fifth here while a move was made somewhere else.
Suddenly Birrel felt old and tired. He had been in the squadron for almost twenty years, ever since he was seventeen, and in all these years the great game of stars, the strain, the worry, had never let up.
It must have been nice in a way, Birrel thought, in the old days a couple of centuries ago when the United
