The Star Fox

The lake frothed. Waves swept up its beaches. A sighing went among the trees, and Meroeth rose from below. Briefly her great form blotted out the sun, where it crawled toward noon, and animals fled down wilderness trails. Then, with steadily mounting velocity, she flung skyward. The cloven air made a continuous thunderclap. Danielle and Madelon Irribarne put hands to tormented ears. When the shape was gone from sight, they returned to each other’s arms.

“Radar, report!” Heim called through drone and shiver.

“Negative,” Vadász said.

Higher and higher the ship climbed. The world below dwindled, humped into a curve, turned fleecy with clouds and blue with oceans. The sky went dark, the stars blazed forth.

“Signal received on the common band,” Vadász said. “Jubalcho must have spotted us. Shall I answer?”

“Hell no,” Heim said. “All I want is her position and vector.”

The hollow volume of Meroeth trapped sound, bounced echoes about, until a booming rolled from stem to stern and port to starboard. It throbbed in Heim’s skull. His open-faceplate rattled.

“Can’t find her,” Vadász told him. “She must be far off.” But she found us. Well, she has professional detector operators. I’ve got to make do with whatever was in camp. No time to recruit better-trained people.

We should be so distant that she’d have to chase us for some ways to get inside the velocity differential of her missiles. And she should decide her duty is to stay put. If I’ve guessed wrong on either of those, we’ve hoisted our last glass. Heim tasted blood, hot and bitter, and realized he had caught his tongue between his teeth. He swore, wiped his face, and drove the ship.

Onward and outward, New Europe grew smaller among the crowding suns. Diane rose slowly to view. “Captain to radio room. Forget about everything else. Lock that maser and cut me in on the circuit.” Heim reached for racked instruments and navigational tables. “I’ll have the figures for you by the time you’re warmed up.”

If we aren’t destroyed first. Please … let me live that long. I don’t ask for more. Please, Fox has got to be told. He reeled off a string of numbers.

In his shack, among banked meters that stared at him like troll eyes, Vadász punched keys. He was no expert, but the comsystem computer had been preprogrammed for him; he need merely feed in the data and punch the directive “Now.” A turret opened to airlessness. A transceiver thrust its skeletal head out for a look at the universe. A tight beam of coherent radio waves speared from it.

There were uncertainties. Diane was orbiting approximately 200,000 kilometers on the other side of New Europe, and Meroeth was widening that gulf with ever-increasing speed. But the computer and the engine it controlled were sophisticated; the beam had enough dispersion to cover a fairly large circle by the time it reached the target area; it had enough total energy so that its amplitude then was still above noise level.

Small, bestrewn with meteoritic dust, in appearance another boulder among thousands on the slope of a certain crater wall, an instrument planted by the men from the boat sat waiting. The signal arrived. The instrument—an ordinary microwave relay, such as every spaceship carries by the score, with a solar battery—amplified the signal and bounced it in another tight beam to another object high on a jagged peak. That one addressed its next fellow; and so on around the jagged desert face of the moon. Not many passings were needed. The man’s-height horizon on Diane is about three kilometers, much greater from a mountaintop, and the last relay only had to be a little ways into that hemisphere which never sees New Europe.

Thence the beam leaped skyward. Some 29,000 kilometers from the center ofDiane, it found Fox II.