step.
It was Chandra’s nightmare, he realized. Relativistic missiles were inboundand he needed to get to Command . It would be the height of stupidity to die here, vaporized by a missile or with his neck broken by the sharp edge of a stair.
He thumped down another stair, and that left only his head still on the companion, tilted at an angle that cramped his windpipe and strained his spine.Six gravities… His vision was totally gone. He couldn’t seem to breathe. Without the drugs, Terrans could only rarely stay conscious at more than six and a half gravities. He had to get off the stair or his neck was going to be broken by the weight of his head.
With a frantic effort he tried to roll, his palms and heels fighting for traction against the tile, fighting the dead weight that was pinning him like a silver needle pinning an insect to corkboard. Vertigo swam through his skull. He fought to bring air into his lungs. He gave a heave, every muscle in his body straining.
With a crack, his head fell off the stair and banged onto the tile. Despite the pain and the stars that shot through the blackness of his vision he felt a surge of triumph.
Gravity increased. Martinez fought for consciousness.
And lost.
When he woke, he saw before him a window, and beyond the window a green countryside. Two ladies in transparent gowns gazed at the poised figure of a nearly naked man who seemed to be hovering in a startlingly blue sky. Above the man was a superior-looking eagle, and on the grass below the two ladies were a pair of animals, a dog and a small furry creature with long ears, both of whom seemed to find the floating man interesting.
It occurred to Martinez that the man in the sky wasn’t alone. He, Martinez, was also floating.
His heart was thrashing in his chest like a broken steam engine. Sharp pains shot through his head and body. He blinked and wiped sweat from the sockets of his eyes.
The man still floated before him, serene and eerily calm, as if he floated every day.
It was only gradually that Martinez realized he was looking at a piece of artifice, at one of the trompe l’oeil paintings that Montemar Jukes had placed at intervals in the corridors.
The engines had shut down again. Now weightless, Martinez had drifted gently from the deck to a place before the painting.
He gave a start and looked frantically in all directions. The companion leading to Command was two body lengths away. So far as he knew, the emergency, the battle, or whatever it was, had not ended.
He swam with his arms to reorient himself, and kicked with one foot at the floating man. He shot across the corridor, absorbed momentum with his arms—pain shot through his right wrist—and then he did a kind of handspring in the direction of the companion.
He struck the companionway feet first and folded into a crouch, which enabled him to spring again, this time through the hatch atop the companion.
From there it was a short distance to Command’s heavy hatch. The door was armored against blast and radiation and would have been locked down at the beginning of the emergency. Martinez hovered before the hatch, his left hand clutching at the hand grip inset into the door frame, his right stabbing at the comm panel.
“This is the captain!” he said. “Open the door!”
“Stand by,” came Mersenne’s voice.
Stand by?Martinez was outraged. Who did the fourth lieutenant think he was, some snotty cadet?
“Let me into Command!” Martinez barked.
“Stand by.” The irritating words were spoken in an abstract tone, as if Mersenne had many more important things on his mind than obeying his captain’s orders.
Well, perhaps he did. Perhaps the emergency was occupying his full attention.
But how much attention did it take to open a damn hatch?
Martinez ground his teeth while he waited, fist clamped white-knuckled around the hand grip. Lieutenant Husayn floated up the companion and joined him. Blood floated in perfect round spheres from Husayn’s nose, some of them catching on his little mustache, and there was a cut on his lip.
There hadn’t been the regulation warning tone sounded for high gee—or for no gee, for that matter. Probably there hadn’t been time to give the order. Martinez wondered how many injuries Dr. Xi was coping with.
After Martinez had been waiting nearly a minute, the hatch slid open with a soft hiss. He heaved on the hand grip and gave himself impetus for the command cage.
“I have command!” he shouted.
“Captain Martinez has command!” Mersenne agreed. He sounded relieved. He was already drifting free of the command cage, heading toward his usual station at the engines display.
Martinez glanced around the room as he floated toward his acceleration cage. The watch were staring at their displays as if each expected something with claws to come bounding out of them.
“Missile attack, my lord,” Mersenne said as Martinez caught his acceleration cage. The cage swung with him, and he jacknifed, then inserted his feet and legs inside. “At least thirty. I’m sorry I didn’t let you into Command, but I didn’t want to unseal the door until I was certain the missiles had all been dealt with—didn’t want to irradiate the entire command crew if there were a near miss.”
It grated, but Martinez had to admit Mersenne was right.
“Any losses?” he asked.
“No, my lord.” Mersenne floated to a couch next to the warrant officer who had been handling the engines board, then webbed himself in and locked the engine displays in front of him. “We starburst as soon as we saw the missiles incoming, but when we hit eight gravities, there was an engine trip.”
Martinez, in the act of webbing himself onto his couch, stopped and stared.“Engine trip?” he said.
“Engine number one. Automated safety procedures tripped the other two before I could override them. I’ll try to get engines two and three back online, and then work out what happened to engine one.”
So now he knew why he’d suddenly found himself floating. The engines had quit, apparently on their own, and in the middle of a battle.
He pulled his displays down from over his head, heard them lock, began a study of the brief fight.
The Naxids hadn’t attacked in the Osser system, as Chandra’s war game had predicted. They’d waited for Chenforce to proceed to the next system, Arkhan-Dohg, where the hot, humid world of Arkhan supported a population of half a billion, mostly heat-loving Naxids, and cold, glacier-ridden Dohg supported a billion more, for the most part furry Torminel.
Chenforce hadn’t found anything to shoot at in Osser, and there was very little traffic in Arkhan-Dohg. The Naxids knew they were coming, and every ship that could move was being routed away from them.
Even though Chenforce was finding few targets at present, they were still creating a massive disruption in the rebel economy. The hundreds of ships fleeing Chenforce weren’t carrying cargoes to the appropriate destination. Not only were cargoes being routed well out of their way, many cargoes were stalled waiting for transport, and elsewhere industries were failing for want of supply.
The Naxid attempt to swat them from the sky had occurred when the squadron was two days into the Arkhan-Dohg system. Chenforce was suddenly painted with tracking lasers. Mersenne had immediately gone to general quarters and orderedIllustrious to accelerate as rapidly as possible away from the other ships. BeforeIllustrious was on its new heading, the sensor operators were reporting brief flares that showed incoming missiles making last-instant course corrections.
Most of the missiles targeted the swarm of decoys cruising ahead of Chenforce, but a few got through the screen to target the squadron itself, all to be destroyed by point-defense weapons. By that time the number one engine onIllustrious had tripped off and the cruiser was drifting, its captain floating bruised and unconscious in the corridor outside his office.
The Battle of Arkhan-Dohg, from the first alarm to the destruction of the last incoming missile, had taken a little less than three minutes.
“One failure in the point-defense array,” Husayn reported from the weapons station. “Antiproton gun three failed after one shot.”
“Just like Harzapid,” muttered Mersenne.
“How many decoys do we have in the tubes?” Martinez asked Husayn.
