The Fleet 01 Read online

  “Make for it!” Yuriko directed.

  “If the system is inhabited by hostile entities,” said the Nag, and her tone was incontestably less abrasive than in the past, “the risk of being destroyed is incalculable.” Pause. “Owing to lack of data.”

  “We have two CPs,” Yuriko answered stonily. “If it turns out that that is the home system of the enemy, our arrival”—she had never grown used to saying “I” when the ship seemed to have such a personality of her own—“will trigger their defences. They omitted to remove the CP that you retrieved from the wreckage. That indicates they may not have understood its function. Program it with all data concerning our destination including the likelihood of its being the enemy’s lair. Prime it to launch itself if they attack us, using maximum acceleration until it enters FTL. Set the other, the issue one, to do the same if it appears likely that without overt attack we’re being lured into a trap. Program yourself to go to FTL and make for the nearest Fleet base as soon as both have been launched, whether or not I am conscious at the time.”

  “Analysing,” said the Nag, which indicated that Yuriko’s commands so far were questionable but not a priori unacceptable in the light of her built-in principles.

  But abruptly the pilot grew impatient. She recalled something she had heard mentioned in bull sessions during her training, yet never been able to confirm.

  “Nag! There’s supposed to be a command ‘Grand Fleet Emergency’! Does it exist?”

  “Yes,” the computer acknowledged after much too long a delay. That, if nothing else, ought to have warned her.

  But it didn’t.

  “And it overrides general orders?”

  Her hands were clenched; her breathing was a gasp. “Under certain conditions.”

  “Is an encounter with a previously unknown but demonstrably hostile alien race one of the conditions?”

  This time the pause was longer yet. When it ended:

  “Yes.”

  “Then I invoke Grand Fleet Emergency!” cried Yuriko, and after that she was, as she’d been told, in absolute control.

  This much, at least, was reconstructable—because there was no other way she could have made her ship obey so foolhardy an order.

  As the days of his ordeal passed, Tschweeit lost his original brash confidence. His elation at being alone faded as he discovered how many rivals were already slinking among the exiguous cover, beating him to all the game worth eating, ahead of him at springs and streams with improvised weapons—branches, rocks—ready for use if anyone disturbed them. He had managed to refill his drink container, but he had used up his solid food and found little to replace it. On the one occasion he did manage to kill a fair-sized quarry with a well-timed pounce, he had scarcely had time to snatch a mouthful before he was sent reeling by a charge from someone bigger and faster, who seized his prize and vanished with it.

  Badly weakened by the attack, which left him bruised and aching, as darkness fell on the ninth day, he reviewed his situation and concluded it was parlous. For the first time the possibility crossed his mind that he might be one of those who did not come back ...

  From the relative security of a high tree-crotch he surveyed the dark landscape. By now he Dad traversed almost the entire area, and knew how hostile and treacherous it was. Only at the very edge of the permitted range might there be a chance—

  Overhead, something bloomed in the sky: a flash, a streak of light. A meteor, quite big enough to reach the ground. Perhaps it was an omen. Although he habitually scoffed at such, his family believed in signs and portents. Whether they were right or wrong, what else now did he have for guidance? He marked the spot where it most probably had landed and resolved to head that way tomorrow.

  It was a slow, exhausting journey. He was still limping, thanks to the unknown who had assaulted him, as well as hunger-weak. Sustaining himself on foul-tasting insectoids and chewing plant stems despite the bitterness of their juice in order to conserve his precious water, starting at every noise and darting pointlessly into hiding, he did not reach the impact point until day’s end.

  And then, crawling warily over a flat-topped rock, he saw what had actually tumbled from on high.

  A hammer-blow shook the scoutship stem to stern just as she emerged into normal space. The view-screens blanked and emergency lights reported massive damage to all systems. Yuriko cursed her hotheadedness. Of course! If the aliens possessed the means of ambushing a ship in FTL, it followed that they could detect an approaching intruder!

  But this wasn’t an attack from outside. The explosion had occurred within the hull ...

  “The CP!” she exclaimed in horrified realisation. What a damnably ingenious booby trap! Why had the Nag not—?

  She had no time to wonder. The Nag was dead, and she was probably as good as, though the automatic seal on the control room had trapped enough air for a few minutes. As though in a trance she rehearsed motions drilled into her during training: donned her emergency suit with its puny shields, its rudimentary computer, its limited reserves of food and oxygen ...

  Maybe someone would be able to work out, from the last CP she had dispatched, where she had most likely made for after sending it. Maybe there would be convertible vegetation on a nearby planet. Maybe she could survive there until someone came to rescue her.

  Maybe its inhabitants would treat her as they had the crew of Chrysanthemum ...

  The lights on the control boards were winking out as the circuitry failed.

  Now or never!

  Suit secure, she hit the switch that transformed the Nag’s control room into a re-entry capsule, programmed to land at the most promising destination within range—and should also have launched her final CP—only that, of course, had been ruined by the explosion. The shock of separation from the rest of the hull almost blacked her out. When she recovered, to see the bluish-green half-disc of an Earthlike world above her, seeming to fall towards her, threatening to crush her, she had to fight primordial terror before she could register the information she was hearing. Temperature range tolerable; atmosphere breathable; adequate free water; presence of CHON life-forms—carbon-hydrogen-oxygen-nitrogen ...

  “I found it!” she whispered. This could, this must, be the home of the attackers. And she couldn’t let anybody know! She couldn’t warn the Fleet! Whereas her arrival would serve as a warning to the aliens!

  Fool! Fool!

  She was on the verge of pressing the detonator button, to convert herself and everything around her into plasma, when the impersonal mechanism of her suit forestalled her. Being obliged to maximise its occupant’s chances of survival, it had automatically compounded an all-purpose vaccine against infection by foreign micro-organisms, which it now injected into her leg. Her vision swam. Nauseated, she shut her eyes. They remained closed; and she unconscious, until the frail craft made its planetfall.

  When she awoke, she found herself amid a rocky landscape dotted with trees that were not trees and bushes that were not bushes, under a grey sky smeared with high, thin cloud. At least, she thought dully, she hadn’t landed in a deathtrap zone like that around Port, where huge predators vied with carnivorous plants ...

  But if she was right in identifying this as the home world of those who had wrecked Chrysanthemum, there must be at least one large predator here. And a terribly dangerous one, at that.

  Having eaten and drunk sparingly, having conducted a cautious remote survey of the area, she ventured forth in search of anything her equipment might convert into digestible food. She returned at sundown with a bagful of samples. Her path led past a flat-topped rock.

  Alien.

  The Change having progressed sufficiently far within his body, Tschweeit responded with the ingrained reflexes of his kind, fundamentally those invoked by any rival’s intrusion on a Khalian male’s range, but multiplied by the fact that this stranger was trespassing on the root
planet of his species. So when the creature—not unlike a Khalian in shape, albeit with absurdly long limbs, and as he noted with dismay, much bigger than himself but to all appearances off guard—passed unsuspectingly below his vantage point, he pounced.

  It was as though he had attacked the rock he sprang from.

  Except that rocks don’t spin around and deal you such a blow you go soaring through the air for twice your body length and land ridiculously sprawling in the dirt.

  Yuriko stared anxiously about her. Was this creature alone?

  Was it a wild beast, or was it a member of the dominant race? Certainly it must be cunning, if not intelligent, for none of her suit’s instruments had detected its presence until the last moment, when its leap had triggered defences honed for generations at Port.

  She looked at it again, and this time noticed that it wore a sort of braided baldric from which hung a pair of containers—one had split, and was leaking what looked like water—and a crude club. No mere animal, therefore. And by the same token, far more frightening.

  But how to reconcile a beast like this, save in respect of savagery, with the ones that had ambushed Chrysanthemum?

  It was no use guessing. Setting down her sample bag, she approached the creature warily. It struggled to rise, uttering noises that she took to be menacing, but fell back, betrayed by one of its hind limbs that appeared to be dislocated or maybe broken. After that, it slumped as though abandoning all hope of resistance.

  Should she kill it? After all, according to preliminary readings the constituents of organic material here were close enough to those on Earth to be transformed into nourishment by the food converter in what she must now think of not as a control room or a re-entry vehicle, but as her survival capsule. And if Chrysanthemum had been attacked by members of the same species ...

  She sighed wearily. She didn’t know. And, bad though matters were already, she would certainly make them worse if her first act here were to eat a rational being.

  The creature was clearly in too much pain to offer any more trouble for a while at least. She ventured to remove the burst container, prepared at any moment to dodge a slashing blow, and analyse the few drops that remained in it. The contents proved indeed to be water. Well, she had plenty of that, thanks to a condenser that pulled it by litres out of the air. She returned to the capsule and came back with as much as the damaged container could hold.

  Having set it down beside the alien, she retreated a metre or two, and waited.

  For long moments the alien hesitated. Its attitude, naturally, conveyed nothing more to her than uncertainty, though doubtless—like any large species—it must possess some kind of body language. What was more, apparently it employed odour-signals, for something acrid was eluding the filters on her suit, as the stench of burning defeated the screens around Port.

  Abruptly it seized the container and drained it.

  Whether its subsequent posture indicated thanks, Yuriko had no idea, but she hazarded that it might rather express puzzlement. If it was given to making unprovoked attacks it was unlikely to be used to receiving a gift in exchange. It might be a good idea to rub the point in. She refilled the container—which she had already begun to think of as a canteen, despite its peculiar shape—and this time offered it together with the plants she had gathered, in case the alien regarded them as edible. She had food to keep her going for a day or two, and could collect more samples in the morning. Then once again she waited.

  The creature’s injuries, she realised, were worse than she had imagined. Even since she first offered the water, the weak hind limb had swollen visibly, and the whole overlong, sinuous torso was curved to the side where her counterblow had landed. But there was no help for that. The general outline of the creature might seem more or less familiar; as to its internal organs, though, its bones—if there were bones ...

  Help?

  She was shaken with astonishment. How short a time had passed since she was thinking only of revenge on those who had smashed her brother’s ship!

  But there were Earthfolk who did that kind of thing! What were they called—prats? No, pirates. And corsairs and buccaneers and such. And they did it to their own kind. Maybe, just maybe, her brother’s kidnappers had been curious, or snapping at all intruder they thought had no right to be ill their volume or space, or …

  No: she was too weary, and still too logy from the all-purpose vaccine, to pursue the idea any further. The best she could manage was to comfort herself with the reflection that at least she was creating a better impression than if she had killed and eaten her new acquaintance.

  On the subject of eating: did any of what she had collected appeal? Apparently not much. The beast had discarded most of the samples—which she now retrieved—but retained one thick, sappy stem and gnawed it, though without visible enthusiasm.

  I think, Yuriko said to herself, I may have arrived in a backward area. When humans first landed on the Moon, were there not still Stone Age tribes in New Guinea?

  Looking around at the near-desert, she nodded with satisfaction at her own insight.

  But—the thought-train rolled on—if a spacecraft had been spotted landing in such a backward area, it would still not have been very long, even in those days, before the Great Powers showed up. So I suppose I’m accidentally an ambassador, aren’t I?

  There was, she concluded, nothing more she could do before she had slept. There was no way she could provide shelter for the injured stranger. She dared not carry it into the capsule, where it would be exposed to alien micro-organisms; besides, her food converter was too basic to be adapted, like more advanced models, to cope with the needs of nonhumans ...

  In passing, she wondered whether the chemical mix her suit had injected contained a euphoric. It did, but it also included a substance designed to prevent knowledge of the fact from affecting the recipient’s judgment. Accordingly, after a quick check of the vicinity to make sure the alien was still there—and wondering whether it would be in the morning—Yuriko switched her suit to bunk mode and shortly was fast asleep.

  Tschweeit had never been so humiliated! To have been effortlessly tossed hind-over-fore by a non-Khalian, that thereupon compounded the insult by not according him an honourable end of the kind demanded by his helplessness in defeat, but instead brought drink and what presumably it took to be food—as though dealing with a miserable plant-eater, as though he were some kind of cattlish or shweep being fattened for a future meal! It was unbearable! And, worst of all, he had been too feeble to refuse!

  The air around him reeking with the stink of shame, he strove to crawl away in search of a private place to die. He could not move. Too many of his muscles had been torn by that incredible blow, and he suspected some internal organ had been ruptured as badly as his drink container. If he had had a weapon he could direct against himself …

  But there was nothing within reach: nothing sharp, nothing sufficiently poisonous. Would that a tscherpent might chance by and crush him to a pulp and gobble up his body!

  No such luck. As the night wore away, his misery gave place to fury. Why should there be, anywhere in the universe, aliens that did not understand concepts of decency and honour? Manifestly there were, and because of that they deserved nothing better than enslavement, conversion into bio-circuitry, or processing for food!

  A light drizzle started to fall. That made his anger fiercer, even as his mind drifted into blankness spawned of exhaustion. By dawn, when the rain had passed, the shame-reek had been washed away, and only the traces of his rage remained.

  “He must have put up a tremendous fight!” was the verdict of the Khalian officer who approached the alien craft just after sunrise.”He’s obviously badly hurt, but—well, just check that odour! I’d never have believed that a youngling like him could be so angry!”

  “And,” added one of his companions in an admiring tone, “instead of making off
in search of help he stayed to guard the alien and stop it from escaping.”

  “That’s right. We don’t even have to trap it. It’s trapped itself. Of course, there may be active weaponry inside the ship, but its design matches the style of that bigger one we took without the slightest trouble because it was totally unarmed, and certainly no major weapons were used against this—what’s his name? No, cancel that. If he already had an adult name, he wouldn’t be here, would he? What’s his designation?”

  From the flyer overhead, whence the operation was being co-ordinated, a message shrilled back: “Correct. He is not yet named save by sex, clan and caste.”

  “Which clan?”

  The Over-commander uttered: “Tschweeit!” with the requisite additional inflections.

  “Really!” The officer wished he could groom himself to show appropriate pride, but he was wearing armour, just in case. “That’s my clan, you know.”

  “I do,” said the Over-commander dryly. “Congratulations to your kin. This junior has earned an adult name, that’s definite. Send a snatch-group to retrieve him.”

  “And if the alien emerges—?”

  “Snatch it too, of course! The ones we captured off the unarmed ship were in too bad a state to endure more than a superficial physical examination. We need a specimen in good shape so we can analyse their weaknesses.”

  As though pre-empting all objection, the Over-commander added brusquely, “Yes, I know you don’t approve of that kind of thing! But, like it or not, you have to accept that our prey here at home evolved on the same planet as we did, so we learned their vulnerable points in the course of nature. Now, though, we’re up against unnatural opposition, so what our forebears did by trial and error we must do by trial without the error. Granted?”