Hoddan did not worry about his followers--captives--noting the
obsolescence of the space fleet into which they presently drifted.
Ancient hulks and impractical oddities did not seem antique or freakish
to them. They had no standards in such matters. The planet Darth seemed
slightly off to one side in space, at some times, and at others it
seemed underfoot while at others it looked directly overhead. At all
times it moved visibly, while the spaceboat and the ships in orbit
seemed merely to float in nearly fixed positions. When the dark part of
Darth appeared to roll toward the spaceboat again all the bright specks
which were ships about them winked out of sight and there were only
faraway stars and a vast blackness off to one side like nothingness made
visible.
[Illustration]
The spearmen were wholly subdued when there was light once more and
eccentric shapes around them. There was a ring-ship--the hull like a
metal wheel with a huge tire, with pipe passages from the tire part to
the hub where the control room was located. It seemed unbelievable that
such a relic could still exist, dating as it did from the period before
gravity-fields could be put into spacecraft. It would have provided a
crazy sort of gravity by spinning as it limped from one place to
another. Whoever had collected this fleet for the emigrants from Colin
must have required only one thing--that there be a hull. Given something
that would hold air, a Lawlor drive, a gravity-unit, and air apparatus
would turn it into a ship that could go into overdrive and hence cross
the galaxy at need. Those who bargained with the emigrants had been
content to furnish nothing more than that.
But this could not be appreciated by Hoddan's involuntary crew. The
spaceboat drew up alongside the gigantic hulk which was the leader's.
The seven Darthians were still numbed by their kidnaping and the
situation in which they found themselves. They looked with dull eyes at
the mountainous object they approached. It had actually been designed as
a fighter-carrier of space, intended to carry smaller craft to fight
nonexistent warships under conditions which never came about. It must
have been sold for scrap a couple of hundred years since, and patched up
for this emigration.
Hoddan waited for the huge door to open. It did. He headed into the
opening, noticing as he did so that an object two or three times the
size of the spaceboat was already there. It cut down the room for
maneuvering, but a thing once done is easier thereafter. Hoddan got the
boat inside, and there was a very small scraping and the great door
closed before the boat could drift out again.
Hoddan turned to his companions--followers--victims, once the spaceboat
was still.
"This," he said in a manner which could only be described as one of
smiling ferocity, "is a pirate ship, belonging to the pirate fleet we
passed through on the way here. It's manned by characters so murderous
that their leaders don't dare land anywhere away from their home
star-cluster, or all the galaxy would combine against them, to
exterminate them or be exterminated. You've joined that fleet. You're
going to get out of this boat and march over that ship yonder. Then
you're going to be space pirates under me."
They quivered, but did not protest.
"I'll try you for one voyage," he told them. "There will be plunder.
There will be pirate revels. If you serve faithfully and fight well,
I'll return you to Don Loris' stronghold with your loot after the one
voyage. If you don't--" He grinned mirthlessly at them--"out the air
lock with you, to float forever between the stars. Understand?"
The last was pure savagery. They cringed. The outside-pressure meter
went up to normal. Hoddan turned off the visionscreens, so ending any
view of the interior of the hold. He opened the port and went out.
Sitting in something like continued paralysis in their seats, the seven
spearmen of Darth heard his voice in conversation outside the boat. They
could catch no words, but Hoddan's tone was strictly businesslike. He
came back.
"All right," he said shortly. "Thal, march 'em over."
Thal gulped. He loosened his seat belt. The enlistment of the seven in
the pirate fleet was tacitly acknowledged. They were unarmed save for
the conventional large knives at their belts.
"Frrrd, _harch!_" rasped Thal with a lump in his throat. "Two, three,
four. _Hup_ two, three, four. _Hup_--"
Seven men marched dismally out of the spaceboat and down to the floor of
the huge hold. Eyes front, chests out, throats dry, they marched to the
larger but still small vessel that shared this hold compartment. They
marched into that ship. Thal barked, "_Halt!_" and they stopped. They
waited.
Hoddan came in very matter-of-factly only moments later. He closed the
entrance port, so sealing the ship. He nodded approvingly.
"You can break ranks now," he said. "There's food and such stuff around.
The ship's yours. But don't turn knobs or push buttons until you've
asked me what for!"
He went forward, and a door closed behind him.
He looked at the control board, and could have done with a little
information himself. When the ship was built, generations ago, there'd
been controls installed which would be quite useless now. When the
present working instruments were installed, it had been done so hastily
that the wires and relays behind them were not concealed, and it was
these that gave him the clues to understand them.
The space ark's door opened. Hoddan backed his ship out. Its rockets had
surprising power. He reflected that the Lawlor drive wouldn't have been
designed for this present ship, either. There'd probably been a quantity
order for so many Lawlor drives, and they'd been installed on whatever
needed a modern drive-system, which was every ship in the fleet. But
since this was one of the smallest craft in the lot, with its low mass
it should be fast.
"We'll see," he said to nobody in particular.
Out in emptiness, but naturally sharing the orbit of the ship from which
it had just come, Hoddan tried it out tentatively. He got the feel of
it. Then as a matter of simple, rule-of-thumb astrogation, he got from a
low orbit to a five-diameter height where the Lawlor drive would take
hold by mere touches of rocket power. It was simply a matter of
stretching the orbit to extreme eccentricity as all the ships went round
the planet. After the fourth go round he was fully five diameters out at
aphelion. He touched the Lawlor drive button and everybody had that very
peculiar disturbance of all their senses which accompanies going into
overdrive. The small craft sped through emptiness at a high multiple of
the speed of light.
Hoddan's knowledge of astrogation was strictly practical. He went over
his ship. From a look at it outside he'd guessed that it once had been a
yacht. Various touches inside verified that idea. There were two
staterooms. All the hull-space was for living and supplies. None was for
cargo. He nodded. There was a faint mustiness about it. But there'd been
a time when it was some rich man's pride.
He went back to the control room to make an estimate. From the pilot's
seat one could see a speck of brightness directly ahead. Infinitesimal
dots of brightness appeared, grew swiftly brighter and then darted
outward. As they darted they disappeared because their motion became too
swift to follow. There were, of course, methods of measuring this
phenomenon so that one could get an accurate measure of one's speed in
overdrive. Hoddan had no instrument for the purpose. But he had the
feel of things. This was a very fast ship indeed, at full Lawlor thrust.
Presently he went out to the central cabin. His followers had found
provisions. There were novelties--hydroponic fruit, for instance--and
they'd gloomily stuffed themselves. They were almost resigned, now.
Memory of the loot he'd led other men to at Ghek's castle inclined them
to be hopeful. But they looked uneasy when he stopped where they were
gathered.
"Well?" he said sharply.
Thal swallowed.
"We have been companions, Bron Hoddan," he said unhappily. "We fought
together in great battles, two against fifty, and we plundered the
slain."
"True enough," agreed Hoddan. If Thal wanted to edit his memories of the
fighting at the spaceport, that was all right with him. "Now we're
headed for something much better."
"But what?" asked Thal miserably. "Here we are high above our native
world--"
"Oh, no!" said Hoddan. "You couldn't even pick out its sun, from where
we are now!"
Thal gulped.
"I ... do not understand what you want with us," he protested. "We are
not experienced in space! We are simple men--"
"You're pirates now," Hoddan told him with a sort of genial
bloodthirstiness. "You'll do what I tell you until we fight. Then you'll
fight well or die. That's all you need to know!"
He left them. When men are to be led it is rarely wise to discuss policy
or tactics with them. Most men work best when they know only what is
expected of them. Then they can't get confused and they do not get ideas
of how to do things better.
* * * * *
Hoddan inspected the yacht more carefully. There were still traces of
decorative features which had nothing to do with space-worthiness. But
the mere antiquity of the ship made Hoddan hunt more carefully. He found
a small compartment packed solidly with supplies. A supply-cabinet did
not belong where it was. He hauled out stuff to make sure. It was ... it
had been ... a machine shop in miniature. In the early days, before
spacephones were long-range devices, a yacht or a ship that went beyond
orbital distance was strictly on its own. If there were a breakdown, it
was strictly private. It had to repair itself or else. So all early
spacecraft carried amazingly complete equipment for repairs. Only liners
are equipped that way in recent generations, and it is almost unheard-of
for their tool shops to be used.
But there was the remnant of a shop on the yacht that Hoddan had in hand
for his errand to Walden. He'd told the emigrant leaders that he went to
ask for charity. He'd just assured his followers that their journey was
for piracy. Now--
He began to empty the cubbyhole of all the items that had been packed
into it for storage. It had been very ingenious, this miniature repair
shop. The lathe was built in with strength-members of the walls as part
of its structure. The drill press was recessed. The welding apparatus
had its coils and condensers under the floor. The briefest of
examinations showed the condensers to be in bad shape, and the coils
might be hopeless. But there was good material used in the old days.
Hoddan began to have quite unreasonable hopes.
He went back to the control room to meditate.
He'd had a reasonably sound plan of action for the pirating of a
space-liner, even though he had no weapons mounted on the ship nor
anything more deadly than stun-pistols for his reluctant crew. But he
considered it likely that he could make the same sort of landing with
this yacht that he'd already done with the spaceboat. Which should be
enough.
If he waited off Walden until a liner went down to the planet's great
spaceport, he could try it. He would go into a close orbit around Walden
which would bring him, very low, over the landing grid within an hour or
so of the liner's landing. He'd turn the yacht end for end and apply
full rocket power for deceleration. The yacht would drop like a stone
into the landing grid. Everything would happen too quickly for the grid
crew to think of clapping a force field on it, or for them to manage it
if they tried. He'd be aground before they realized it.
The rest was simply fast action. Hoddan and seven Darthians,
stun-pistols humming, would tumble out of the yacht and dash for the
control room of the grid. Hoddan would smash the controls. Then they'd
rush the landed liner, seize it, shoot down anybody who tried to oppose
them, and seal up the ship.
And then they'd take off. On the liner's rockets, which were carried for
emergency landing only, but could be used for a single take-off. After
one such use they'd be exhausted. And with the grid's controls smashed,
nobody could even try to stop them.
It wasn't a bad idea. He had a good deal of confidence in it. It was the
reason for his Darthian crew. Nobody'd expect such a thing to be tried,
so it almost certainly could be done. But it did have the drawback that
the yacht would have to be left behind, a dead loss, when the liner was
seized.
Hoddan thought it over soberly. Long before he reached Walden, of
course, he could have his own crew so terrified that they'd fight like
fiends for fear of what he might do to them if they didn't. But if he
could keep the space-yacht also--
He nodded gravely. He liked the new possibility. If it didn't work,
there was the first plan in reserve. In any case he'd get a modern
space-liner and a suitable cargo to present to the emigrants of Colin.
And afterward--
There were certain electronic circuits which were akin. The Lawlor
drive unit formed a force field, a stress in space, into which a nearby
ship necessarily moved. The faster-than-light angle came from the fact
that it worked like a donkey trotting after a carrot held in front of
him by a stick. The ship moving into the stressed area moved the stress.
The force fields of a landing grid were similar. A tuning principle was
involved, but basically a landing grid clamped an area of stress around
a spaceship, and the ship couldn't move out of it. When the landing grid
moved the stressed area up or down--why--that was it.
All this was known to everybody. But a third trick had been evolved on
Zan. It was based on the fact that ball lightning could be generated by
a circuit fundamentally akin to the other two. Ball lightning was an
area of space so stressed that its energy-content could leak out only
very slowly, unless it made contact with a conductor, when all bets were
off. It blew. And the Zan pirates used ball lightning to force the
surrender of their victims.
Hoddan began to draw diagrams. The Lawlor drive-unit had been installed
long after the yacht was built. It would be modern, with no nonsense
about it. With such-and-such of its electronic components cut out, and
such-and-such other ones cut in, it would become a perfectly practical
ball lightning generator, capable of placing bolts wherever one wanted
them. This was standard Zan practice. Hoddan's grandfather had used it
for years. It had the advantage that it could be used inside a gravity
field, where a Lawlor drive could not. It had the other advantage that
commercial spacecraft could not mount such gadgets for defense, because
the insurance companies objected to meddling with Lawlor drive
installations.
* * * * *
Hoddan set to work with the remnants of a tool shop on the ancient yacht
and some antique coils and condensers and such. He became filled with
zest. He almost forgot that he was the skipper of an elderly craft which
should have been scrapped before he was born.
But even he grew hungry, and he realized that nobody offered him food.
He went indignantly into the yacht's central saloon and found his seven
crew-members snoring stertorously, sprawled in stray places here and
there.
He woke them with great sternness. He set them furiously to work on that
housekeeping--including meals--which can be neglected in a feudal castle
because strong outside winds blow smells away and dry up smelly objects,
but which must be practiced in a spaceship.
He went back to work. Suddenly he stopped and meditated afresh, and
ceased his actual labor to draw a diagram which he regarded with great
affection. He returned to his adaptation of the Lawlor drive to the
production of ball lightning.
It was possible to wind coils. A certain percentage of the old
condensers held a charge. He tapped the drive-unit for brazing current,
and the drill-press became a die-stamping device for small parts. He
built up the elements of a vacuum tube such as is normally found only in
a landing grid control room. He set up a vacuum-valve arrangement in the
base of a large glass jar. He put that jar in the boat's air lock, bled
the air to emptiness, and flashed the tube's quaint elements. He brought
it back and went out of overdrive while he hooked the entire new
assembly into the drive-circuit, with cut-outs and switches to be
operated from the yacht's instrument board.
Finished, he examined the stars. The nearby suns were totally strange in
their arrangement. But the Coalsack area was a space-mark good for half
a sector of the galaxy. There was a condensation in the Nearer Rim for a
second bearing. And a certain calcium cloud with a star-cluster behind
it was as good as a highway sign for locating one's self.
He lined up the yacht again and went into overdrive once more. Two days
later he came out, again surveyed the cosmos, again went into overdrive,
again came out, once more made a hop in faster-than-light travel--and he
was in the solar system of which Walden was the ornament and pride.
He used the telescope and contemplated Walden on its screen. The space
yacht moved briskly toward it. His seven Darthian crewmen, aware of
coming action, dolefully sharpened their two-foot knives. They did not
know what else to do, but they were far from happy.
Hoddan shared their depression. Such gloomy anticipations before
stirring events are proof that a man is not a fool. Hoddan's grandfather
had been known to observe that when a man can imagine all kinds of
troubles and risks and disasters ahead of him, he is usually right.
Hoddan shared that view. But it would not do to back out now.
He examined Walden painstakingly while the yacht sped on. He saw an
ocean come out of the twilight zone of dawn. By the charts, the capital
city and the spaceport should be on that ocean's western shore. After a
suitable and very long interval, the site of the capital city came
around the edge of the planet.
From a bare hundred thousand miles, Hoddan stepped up magnification to
its limit and looked again. Then Walden more than filled the telescope's
field. He could see only a very small fraction of the planet's surface.
He had to hunt before he found the capital city again. Then it was very
clear. He saw the curving lines of its highways and the criss-cross
pattern of its streets. Buildings as such, however, did not show. But he
made out the spaceport and the shadow of the landing grid, and in the
very center of that grid there was something silvery which cast a shadow
of its own. A ship. A liner.
There was a tap on the control-room door. Thal.
"Anything happening?" he asked uneasily.
"I just sighted the ship we're going to take," said Hoddan.
Thal looked unhappy. He withdrew. Hoddan plotted out the extremely
roundabout course he must take to end up with the liner and the yacht
traveling in the same direction and the same speed, so capture would be
possible.
He put the yacht on the line required. He threw on full power. Actually,
he headed partly away from his intended victim. The little yacht plunged
forward. Nothing seemed to happen. Time passed. Hoddan had nothing to do
but worry. He worried.
Thal tapped on the door again.
"About time to get ready to fight?" he asked dolefully.
"Not yet," said Hoddan. "I'm running away from our victim, now."
* * * * *
Another half hour. The course changed. The yacht was around behind
Walden. The whole planet lay between it and its intended prey. The
course of the small ship curved, now. It would pass almost close enough
to clip the topmost tips of Walden's atmosphere. There was nothing for
Hoddan to do but think morbid thoughts. He thought them.
The Lawlor drive began to burble. He cut it off. He sat gloomily in the
control room, occasionally glancing at the nearing expanse of rushing
mottled surface presented by the now-nearby planet. Its attraction bent
the path of the yacht. It was now a parabolic curve.
Presently the surface diminished a little. The yacht was increasing its
distance from it. Hoddan used the telescope. He searched the space ahead
with full-width field. He found the liner. It rose steadily. The grid
still thrust it upward with an even, continuous acceleration. It had to
be not less than forty thousand miles out before it could take to
overdrive. But at that distance it would have an outward velocity which
would take it on out indefinitely. At ten thousand miles, certainly, the
grid-fields would let go.
They did. Hoddan could tell because the liner had been pointed base down
toward the planet when the force fields picked it up. Now it wabbled
slightly. It was free. It was no longer held solidly. From now on it
floated up on momentum.
Hoddan nibbled at his fingernails. There was nothing to be done for
forty minutes more. Presently there was nothing to be done for thirty.
For twenty. Ten. Five. Three. Two--
The liner was barely twenty miles away when Hoddan fired his rockets.
They made a colossal cloud of vapor in emptiness. The yacht stirred
faintly, shifted deftly, lost just a suitable amount of velocity--which
now was nearly straight up from the planet--and moved with precision and
directness toward the liner. Hoddan stirred his controls and swung the
whole small ship. Here, obviously, he could not use the space-drive for
its proper purpose. But a switch cut out certain elements of the Lawlor
unit and cut in those others which made the modified drive-unit into a
ball lightning projector.
A flaming speck of pure incandescence sped from the yacht through
emptiness. It would miss-- No. Hoddan swerved it. It struck the liner's
hull. It would momentarily paralyze every bit of electric equipment in
the ship. It would definitely not go unnoticed.
"Calling liner," said Hoddan painfully into a microphone. "Calling
liner! We are pirates, attacking your ship. You have ten seconds to get
into your lifeboats or we will hull you!"
He settled back, again nibbling at his fingernails. He was acutely
disturbed. At the end of ten seconds the distance between the two ships
was perceptibly less.
He flung a second ball lightning bolt across the diminished space. He
sent it whirling round and round the liner in a tight spiral. He ended
by having it touch the liner's bow. Liquid light ran over the entire
hull.
"Your ten seconds are up," he said worriedly. "If you don't get out--"
But then he relaxed. A boat-blister on the liner opened. The boat did
not release itself. It could not possibly take on its complement of
passengers and crew in so short a time. The opening of the blister was a
sign of surrender.
The two first ball lightning bolts were miniatures. Hoddan now projected
a full-sized ball. It glittered viciously in emptiness, the plasma-gas
necessary for its existence furnishing a medium for radiation. It sped
toward the liner and hung off its side, menacingly. The yacht from Darth
moved steadily closer. Five miles. Two.
"All out," said Hoddan regretfully. "We can't wait any longer!"
A boat darted away from the liner. A second. A third and fourth and
fifth. The last boat lingered desperately. The yacht was less than a
mile away when it broke free and plunged frantically toward the planet
it had left a little while before. The other boats were already
streaking downward, trails of rocket-fumes expanding behind them. The
crew of the landing grid would pick them up for safe and gentle landing.
Hoddan sighed in relief. He played delicately upon the yacht's
rocket-controls. He carefully maneuvered the very last of the novelties
he had built into an originally simple Lawlor drive-unit. The two ships
came together with a distinct clanking sound. It seemed horribly loud.
Thal jerked open the door, ashen-white.
"W-we hit something! Wh-when do we fight?"
Hoddan said ruefully:
"I forgot. The fighting's over. But bring your stun-pistols. Nobody'd
stay behind, but somebody might have gotten left."
He rose, to take over the captured ship.
[Illustration]