Stainless Steel Visions

"Rim Hordes, coming closer, bent on rapine and destruction. To stop them you order some spacers from the shipyard; schedules are late — they don't arrive on time. The Horde fleet descends. They break down this door and here, right in this office blood. "

"Stop!" the admiral gasped weakly, his face blanched white. A desk commander who had never seen action, as Jason had guessed.

"The contract is yours — but you have a deadline. Thirty days. One minute after that and you don't get a deci of a credit. Do you agree?"

Jason looked up at Kerk and Meta, who with instant warrior's decisions made their minds up, nodding at the same time.

"Done," Jason said. "But the billion is free and clear. We'll need supplies, aid from your space navy, material and perhaps men as well to back us up. You will supply what we need."

"It could be expensive," Admiral Djukich groaned, chewing at his lower lip. "Blood…" Jason whispered, and the admiral broke into a fine sweat as he reluctantly agreed.

"I'll have the papers drawn up. When can you begin?"

"We've begun. Shake hands on it and we'll sign later." He pumped the admiral's weak hand enthusiastically. "Now, I don't suppose you have anything like a manual that tells us how to get into the ship?"

"If we had that we wouldn't have called you here. We have gone to the archives and found nothing. All the facts we did discover are on record and available to you — for what they are worth."

"Not much if you killed forty-seven volunteers. Five thousand years is a long time, and even the most efficient bureaucracy loses things over that kind of distance. And of course the one thing you cannot mothball are instructions how to unmothball a ship. But we will find a way! Pyrrans never quit, never. If you will have the records sent to our quarters, my colleagues and I will now withdraw and make our plans for the job. We shall beat your deadline."

"How?" Kerk asked as soon as the door of their apartment had closed behind them.

"I haven't the slightest idea," Jason admitted, smiling happily at their cold scowls. "Now, let us pour some drinks and put our thinking caps on. This is a job that may end up needing brute force, but it will have to begin with man's intellectual superiority over the machines he has invented. I'll take a large one with ice if you are pouring, darling."

"Serve yourself," Meta snapped. "If you had no idea how we were to proceed, why did you accept?"

Glass rattled against glass and strong beverage gurgled. Jason sighed. "I accepted because it is a chance for us to get some ready cash, which the budget is badly in need of. If we can't crack into the damn thing, then all we have lost is thirty days of our time."

He drank and remembered the hard-learned lesson that reasoned argument was usually a waste of time with Pyrrans and that there were better ways to quickly resolve a situation. "You people aren't scared of this ship, are you?"

He smiled angelically at their scowls of hatred, the sudden tensing of hard muscles, the whine of the power holsters as their guns slipped toward their hands, then slid back out of sight.

"Let us get started," Kerk said. "We are wasting time and every second counts. What do we do first?"

"Go through the records, find out everything we can about a ship like this. Then find a way in."

"I fail to see what throwing rocks at that ship can do," Meta said. "We know already that it destroys them before they get close. It is a waste of time. And now you want to waste food as well, all those animal carcasses. "

"Meta, my sweet — shut up. There is method to the apparent madness. The navy command ship is out there with radar beeping happily, keeping a record of every shot fired, how close the target was before it was hit, what weapon fired the shot, and so forth. There are thirty spacers throwing spatial debris at the battleship in a steady stream. This is not the usual thing that happens to a mothballed vessel and it can only have interesting results. Now, in addition to the stone-throwing, we are going to launch these sides of beef at our target, each spacegoing load of steak to be wrapped with twenty kilos of armilon plastic. They are being launched on different trajectories with different speeds. If any one of them gets through to the ship, we will know that a man in a plastic space suit made of the same material will get through as well. Now, if all that isn't enough burden on the ship's computer, a good-sized planetoid is on its way now in an orbit aimed right at our mothballed friend out there. The computer will either have to blow it out of space — which will take a good deal of energy. Or if it is possible it may fire up the engines. Anything it does will give us information, and any information will give us a handle to grab the problem with."