orbit was only approximately known, and subject both to perturbation and deliberate change. Dorcas needed exact knowledge. She must operate indicators and computers of nonhuman workmanship so delicately that Hraou-Captain had no idea he was under surveillance. Thereafter she must guess what her best tactics might be, calculate the maneuvers, and follow through.
When the results were in: “Here goes,” she said into the hollowness around. “For you, Arthur—” and thought briefly that if the astronomer could have roused in his grave on Tertia, he would have reproved her, in his gentle fashion, for being melodramatic.
Sun Defter plunged.
Unburdened by tonnes of water, she made nothing of ten 9’s, 20, 30, you name it. Her kzin crew must often have used the polarizer to keep from being crushed, as Dorcas did. “Hai-ai-ai!” she screamed, and rode her comet past the moon, amidst the stars, to battle.
She never knew whether the beings aboard the warship saw her coming. Things happened so fast. If the kzinti did become aware of what was bearing down on them, they had scant time to react. Their computers surely told them that Sun Defter was no threat, would pass close by but not collide. Some malfunction? The kzinti would not gladly annihilate their iron gatherer. When the pre-calculated instant flashed onto a screen before her, Dorcas punched for a sidewise thrust as great as the hull could survive. It shuddered and groaned around her. An instant later, the program that she had written cut off the grapnel field.
Those masses she had painstakingly lugged outside—they now had interception vectors, and at a distance too small for evasion. Sun Defter passed within 50 kilometers while objects sleeted through Vengeful Slasher. The warship burst. Armor peeled back, white-hot, from holes punched by monstrous velocity. Missiles floated out of shattered bays. Briefly, a frost-cloud betokened air rushing forth into vacuum. The wreck tumbled among fragments of itself. Starlight glinted off the ruins. Doubtless crew remained alive in this or that sealed compartment; but Vengeful Slasher wasn’t going anywhere out of orbit, ever again.
Sun Defter swooped past Secunda. Dorcas commenced braking operations, for eventual rendezvous with her fellow humans.
The moon was a waste of rock, low hills, boulderfields, empty plains, here and there a crater not quite eroded away. Darkling in this light, under Sol it would have been brighter than Luna, powdered with yellow which at the bottoms of slopes had collected to form streaks or blotches. The sun threw long shadows from the west.
Against them, Rover shone like a beacon. Saxtorph cheered. As expected, the kzinti had left her on the hemisphere that always faced Secunda. The location was, however, not central but close to the north pole and the western edge. He wondered why. He’d spotted many locations that looked as good or better, when you had to bring down undamaged a vessel not really meant to land on anything this size.
He couldn’t afford the time to worry about it. By now the warboats had surely learned of the disaster to their mother ship and were headed back at top boost. Kzinti might or might not suspect what the cause had been of their supertug running amok, but they would know when Rover took off—in fact, would probably know when he reached the ship. Their shuttles, designed for strictly orbital work, were no threat. Their gunboats were. If Rover didn’t get to hyperspacing distance before those overtook her, she and her crew would be ganz kaput.
Saxtorph passed low overhead, ascended, and played back the pictures his scanners had taken in passing. As large as she was, the ship had no landing jacks. She lay sidelong on her lateral docking grapples. That stressed her, but not too badly in a gravity less than Luna’s. To compound the trickiness of descent, she had been placed just under a particularly high and steep hill. He could only set down on the opposite side. Beyond the narrow strip of flat ground on which she lay, a blotch extended several meters across the valley floor. Otherwise that floor was strewn with rocks and somewhat downward sloping toward the hill. Maybe the kzinti had chosen this site precisely because it was a bitch for him to settle on.
“I can do it, though,” Saxtorph decided. He pointed at the screen. “See, a reasonably clear area about 500 meters off.”
Laurinda nodded. With the boat falling free again, the white hair rippled around her delicate features, Saxtorph applied retrothrust. For thrumming minutes he backed toward his goal. Sweat studded his face and darkened his tunic under the arms. Smell like a billy goat, I do, he thought fleetingly. When we come home, I’m going to spend a week in a Japanese hot bath. Dorcas can bring me sushi. She prefers showers, cold—He gave himself entirely back to his work. Contact shivered. The deck tilted. Saxtorph adjusted the jacks to level Shep. When he cut the engine, silence fell like a thunderclap. He drew a long breath, unharnessed, and rose. “I can suit up faster if you help me,” he told the Crashlander.
“Of course,” she replied. “Not that I have much experience.” Never mind modesty. It had been impossible to maintain without occasional failures, by four people crammed inside this little hull. Laurinda had blushed all over, charmingly, when she happened to emerge from the shower cubicle as Saxtorph and Ryan came by. The quartermaster had only a pair of shorts on, which didn’t hide the gallant reflex. Yet nobody ever did or said anything improper, and the girl overcame her shyness. Now a part of Saxtorph enjoyed the touch of her spidery fingers, but most of him stayed focused on the business at hand.
“Forgive me for repeating what you’ve heard a dozen times,” he said. “You are new to this kind of IRON situation, and could forget the necessity of abiding by orders. Your job is to bring this boat back to Dorcas and Kam. That’s it. Nothing else whatsoever. When I tell you to, you throw the main switch, and the program we’ve put in the autopilot will take over. I’d’ve automated that bit also, except rigging it would’ve taken time we can ill afford, and anyway, we do want some flexibility, some judgment in the control loop.” Sternly: “If anything goes wrong for me, or you think anything has, whether or not I’ve called in, you go. The three of you must have Shep. The tug is fast but clumsy, impossible to make planetfall with, and only barely provisioned. Your duty is to Shep. Understood?”
“Yes,” she said mutedly, her gaze on the task she was doing. “Besides, we have to have the boat to rescue Juan and Carita.”
A sigh wrenched from Saxtorph. “I told you—” After Dorcas’ flight, too few energy boxes remained to lift either of them into orbit. Shep could hover on her drive at low altitude while they flitted up, but she wasn’t built for planetary rescue work, the thrusters weren’t heavily enough shielded externally, at such a boost their radiation would be lethal. Neither meek nor defiant, Laurinda replied, “I know. But after we’ve taken Rover to the right distance, why can’t she wait, ready to flee, till the boat comes back from Prima?”
“Because the boat never would.”
“The kzinti can land safely.”
“More or less safely. They don’t like to, remember. Sure, I can tell you how they do it. Obvious. They put detachable footpads on their jacks. The stickum may or may not be able to grab hold of, say, fluorosilicone, but if it does, it’ll take a while to cut its way through. When the boat’s ready to leave, she sheds those footpads.”
“Of course. I’ve been racking my brain to comprehend why we can’t do the same for Shep.”
The pain in her voice and in himself brought anger into his. “God damn it, we’re spacers, not sorcerers! Groundsiders think a spacecraft is a hunk of metal you can cobble anything onto, like a car. She isn’t. She’s about as complex and interconnected as your body is. A few milligrams of blood clot or of the wrong chemical will bring your body to a permanent halt. A spacecraft’s equally vulnerable. I am not going to tinker with ours, light-years from any proper workshop. I am not. That’s final!” Her face bent downward from his. He beard her breath quiver. “I’m sorry, dear,” he added, softly once more. “I’m sorrier than you believe, maybe sorrier than you can imagine. Those are my crewfolk down and doomed. Oh, if we had time to plan and experiment and carefully test, sure, I’d try it. What should the footpads be made of? What size? How closely machined? How—detached-explosive bolts, maybe? We’d have to wire those and—Laurinda, we won’t have the time. If I lift Rover off within the next hour or two, we can pick up Dorcas and Kam, boost, and fly dark. If we’re lucky, the kzin warboats won’t detect us. But our margin is razor thin. We don’t have the days or weeks your idea needs. Fido’s people don’t either; their own time has gotten short. I’m sorry, dear.”
She looked up. He saw tears in the ruby eyes, down the snowy cheeks. But she spoke still more quietly than he, with the briefest of little smiles. “No harm in asking, was there? I understand. You’ve told me what I was trying to deny I knew. You are a good man, Robert.”
“Aw,” he mumbled, and reached to rumple her hair.
The suiting completed, he took her hands between his gloves for a moment, secured a toolpack between his shoulders where the drive unit usually was, and cycled out.
The land gloomed silent around him. Nearing the horizon, the red sun looked bigger than it was. So did the
