The ripped sky closed upon itself with a stunning, thundering crash. After a minute or two the noise and the shock-wave ebbed away. Silence.
The men began to get up again. But Birrel did not move.
The cruiser came back. This time it was even lower. Garstang must have tickled her belly on the peaked roofs. Good God, thought Birrel, he's overdoing it. This time the stones were shaking loose, the whole town rocking from that tremendous shock-wave.
When it was over, a long, thin shape came in through the doorway. It was the leader of the tall, native men who had brought Birrel here. He was not smug and secret now. His face was a mask of fear and rage as he spoke to Tauncer.
"You said that if we helped you, you would keep all other outsiders away!"
"We will," said Tauncer. "Listen—"
"Yes, listen," mocked Birrel. "Listen to it coming back. It'll keep coming back, unless I walk out of here, until—"
Dow hit him across the mouth to silence him. The tall man stood hesitating. Then the Starsong roared back over, and this time it did seem as though the roof was going. When it had passed, the man's hesitation was gone. With a kind of desperate haste, he grabbed Birrel's arm and shoved him toward the open doorway.
"Oh, no," said Tauncer, starting forward. "You can't do that."
The tall man turned on him a face livid with frustrated anger, and he took that anger out on Tauncer.
"Shall the children of kings be destroyed to serve mongrels such as you? Shall I call my people in?"
Birrel, heading toward the door, saw outside it the crowd of tall, pale-cloaked men who had gathered. Tauncer saw them too and he stopped, his face dark and wary.
Still full of resentment at being so easily trapped, Birrel could not forego the gesture of flicking dust off his sleeves before he went through the door. Tauncer's dark eyes showed a gleam of amusement at this bit of bravado, but it stirred the man Dow to rage.
He cried violently, "Are we just going to stand here and let him go?"
Tauncer shrugged. "Why, yes, there are times when you just stand and do nothing and this is one of them."
Birrel went out through the door and through the scared, angry crowd outside it. They glared their hatred at him, but no one stopped him, no one followed him. He snatched the porto out of his pocket and talked fast to Garstang. Then, without trying to make a dignified exit, he stretched his legs and ran like the devil toward the desert.
The cruiser dropped down ahead of him, as black and big against the stars as a falling world. The lock yawned open, and Garstang was inside it to meet him. He started to ask what had happened, but Birrel pushed him bodily away down the corridor, heading for the bridge.
"Get in there and do your stuff, Joe. We've got three Orionid cruisers coming this way up the planet's radar-shadow, and I don't know how close they are."
Garstang's square face got dismal, but his step quickened and his voice crackled orders as they went past the radar and calc-rooms to the bridge. The intercom went suddenly crazy and men jumped at the control-banks. The last thing Birrel heard before the howling roar of take-off drowned everything was Garstang observing complainingly that this sort of thing was hard on a ship.
They went up and away from the planet. Garstang's orders had been designed to shove them out on a course exactly opposite from the course the Orionids must be using to come in. Just as those others were using the planet's radar-shadow to sneak in undetected, so the Starsong was using the opposite radar-shadow to sneak out. But the cone of shadow would pinch out very soon.
"Less than a half-hour," said Garstang, looking through a filter-port at the blazing peacock sun that was sliding back as they pulled out. "It's pretty close quarters yet, but we'd better hit it and get all the start we can before they spot us—we can't jam three of them."
Birrel nodded, grimly agreeing. Ultra-light-speed missiles, with their deadly warheads, each had their own independent radar to home on their targets. A cruiser's defense against them was not armor, but incredibly powerful shafts of electromagnetic force that jammed the radar of oncoming missiles and sent them wandering astray. You could jam against the fire of one ship, maybe even two if you were lucky. You could not jam against three, they would inevitably saturate and smother your defense.
Garstang gave the order for full acceleration schedule, the sirens wailed warning. Despite the unseen autostasis that cradled frail human bodies against impossible pressures by swaddling them in a matrix of force, they felt a wrenching deep in their brains and guts as the Starsong plunged ahead.
At fantastically mounting speeds the ship raced toward the two red binaries that guarded the entrance to the channel. The scanners and ultra-radar had come into play, replacing normal vision, making their cunning illusion of sight. Birrel watched the two red double stars hungrily. Then on the intercom radar-room said dismally,
"They've come on the 'scope, sir. Three N-16s, overhauling us at a five to three-point-six ratio."
Birrel glanced at Garstang. "It figures. Tauncer would have messaged them to keep right after us—they didn't have to land and then take off again."
Garstang nodded silently. Now the Starsong was beginning to pass between the two huge red binaries into that thicker sprawl of stars through which the channel led. He glanced at the tell-tales, then ordered their acceleration schedule cut back. There was, Birrel knew, nothing else he could do. The channel ahead was not straight and you could not take it too fast—in that swarm of suns the fabric of a ship could be torn apart in some deadly resultant-point of gravity drags, or vaporized in collision. The only thing was that the Orionids were still coming up on them.
But Birrel said nothing. This was Garstang's job and he let him do it. The enormous pairs of red suns flashed past them on either side and were gone, and they were in the channel. Under his feet he could feel the Starsong quiver, wincing and flinching like a live thing now and again as some new combination of gravitic forces wrenched at her. On either side of them now the overhanging cliffs of stars seemed to topple toward them. He looked upward at the nebula, like a glowing thundercloud roofing the channel, and then down at the shoaling suns below.
Garstang said flatly, "We didn't get away quite fast enough. They'll be barreling in here after us and they'll have us in range before we ever get through the channel."
"As far as I can see," said Birrel, "we've got only one way out of it."
He looked up at the screens again, at the vast glow of the nebula overhead.
Garstang was silent for a moment. Then he said, "I was hoping you wouldn't think of that."
Birrel shrugged. "Have you got any better idea? Anyway, it's not an order. This is your ship."
"Is it?" Garstang said sourly. "If it was, we wouldn't be here now. All right." He turned back and spoke into the communicator. "New course, north and zenith thirty-eight degrees. Full autopilot."
Young Venner, over at the control-banks, flashed a startled glance before he could compose his face. I know how you feel, thought Birrel. We're all scared, you're not alone.
The Starsong shot upward, plunging high into an area so choked with stellar radiance that it made the channel seem like sunless space. The manual control banks went dark and dead. Now, from the calc-room back of the bridge, a new sound came, different from the normal, occasional bursts of chattering. This was a steady sound, a sound of authority, the voice of the Starsong speaking. She was flying herself now. The men aboard, commander and captain and crew, were her charges, dependent on her cold, mechanical wisdom and her vision and her strength. They had set up on the calculators what they wanted her to do and now there was nothing for them but to wait.
The Starsong spiraled higher, her radar system guiding her on a twisting evasive path between the clotted stars. Then Birrel saw a great, glowing edge slide across the fore screen and grow into a vastness of dust and cosmic drift, illuminated by the reflected glow of the half-smothered stars it webbed.
Radar reported that the three Orionid cruisers had come into the channel. But the Starsong was already skimming through glowing arms that reached like misty tentacles searching for more stars to entrap. Once in the cloud, she would be screened from the cruisers' long-range radar by the most effective jamming device in space—the billions of billions of scattered atoms of the nebula itself.
Effective. Yes. But potentially as dangerous as Orionid warheads. For in a place where radar would work only at frighteningly short ranges, you could be onto a chunk of cosmic drift before the beams had time to tell the computers about it. All you had in the nebula was a chance, and not even a particularly good one. But against three cruisers you did not even have that.
Birrel went to the back of the bridge and strapped himself into a recoil-chair, beside Garstang and the others. Nothing moved now within the ship. The frail, breakable organisms of breath and heart and bone had abdicated their control. This was the hour of the ship, the hour of steel and flame and the racing electron, faster than human thought.
The Starsong spoke to herself in the calc-room, and plunged headlong into the cloud.
The universe was swallowed up in soft light, in racing, streaming tides of dust made luminous by reflection. Like an undersea ship of old, the Starsong raced with the gleaming currents and burst through denser, darker deeps, where the stars were faint and far away, to leap once more into a glory of wild light, where the dust-drowned suns burned like torches in a mist. And the metallic voices in the calc-room rose to an unhuman crying as the computers strained to take in the overwhelming surge of data from the short-range radar, analyze it, and send imperative commands to the control-relays.
They had almost a sound of insane music to them, those voices, and the Starsong seemed to dance to the music, whirling and swaying between the fragments of drift that threatened her with instant destruction if she faltered for the fraction of a second. Three times before, in his service, Birrel had been through this ordeal, yet that did not keep him from feeling half-dazed, clinging to the chair and laboring for breath as he felt and listened. The same illusion gripped him now that had mastered him before when forced to run a nebula—the feeling that the suns and star-worlds were all gone, that he was enwrapped in the primal fire-mists of creation. Mighty tides seemed to bear the ship forward, everything was a whirl and boil of light, millrace currents seemed to rush them endlessly through infinity, with all space and time cancelled out. He wondered briefly, once, whether the Orionids had followed them in and then he forgot them. The agony, the intoxication and the terror were far too great to admit any petty worries about anything human.
But at last, with almost shocking abruptness, they broke into clear space and the cloud was behind them and they were out in the fringe-edge of the cluster. Like men enchanted waking from a dream, Birrel and Garstang stood erect again, and the voice of the Starsong was stilled and human voices spoke once more.
Birrel went into the com-room and made contact with his squadron far ahead. He gave orders, and then rejoined Garstang on the bridge.
"Brescnik's on his way," he said. "Can you keep clear?"
"I can," said Garstang, and ordered full power. They were passing out of the last fringe-stars of the cluster and he had nothing between him and the Pleiades now but light-years of elbow-room. He took full advantage of it.
After what seemed a long interval, radar reported that the three Orionids had come out of the cluster by the channel, and then had turned around and gone back into the cluster.
Garstang looked at Birrel. "They didn't risk the nebula, and now they've seen the squadron coming."
Birrel thought of Tauncer, and smiled.
The squadron neared them, moving with majestic consciousness of its own power and authority. In the screens, when they joined it, there was nothing to be seen but a few far-separated flecks of metal gleaming in the light of the distant Pleiades. But Birrel saw it as it was, forty-four ships awesome in their massiveness, thousands of men, all that made up the mighty Fifth. And he felt, as he always did, both the throb of pride that he had been given its leadership and the nagging doubt that he or any man was good enough to lead it.
The hard, excited voice of Brescnik, the Vice-Commander, came rapidly as they joined.
"So there is an Orionid base in there! By God, we'll soon—"
"No," Birrel cut in. "There was no base in there. There was a trap, for me—but I still don't know just why they set it. Stand by."
He sat down at the coding machine and set up a message. Top secret, in the code that only the governor and the commanders of the five squadrons knew, to Ferdias at Vega, briefly detailing his encounter with Tauncer.
"—am unable to explain interest in Earth, and your alleged plans concerning it. Suggest attempt to distract from some other objective. Await instructions. Birrel."
In a remarkably short time the answer came back.
"Report Vega at once with full squadron." And it added, "Unfortunately, no distraction. Ferdias. "
Birrel sat looking at the cryptic tape for a long time after they had got under way in obedience to it. He did not understand it, could find no possible explanation for it. But all the same it made him feel, more strongly than ever, that premonition that the pace, the tempo, of the great game for suns was indeed about to step up still faster, and that that was not good, not good at all.