The Star Fox

Heim went to the saloon for a snack. He found Vadász with a short red-haired colonist who slurped at his cup as if he had newly come off a Martian desert. “Ah, mon capitaine,’’ the latter said cheerily, “je n’avais pas bu de café depuis un sacre longtemps. Merci beaucoup!”

“You may not have much to thank me for in a while,” Heim said.

Vadász cocked his head. “You shouldn’t look so grim, Gun—sir,” he chided. “Everybody else is downright cocky.”

“Tired, I guess.” Heim slumped into the Aleriona settle.

“I’ll fix you up. A grand Danois of a sandwich, hm?” Vadász bounced out. When he returned with the food, he had his guitar slung over his back. He sat down on the swinging his legs, and began to chord and sing:

“There was a rich man and he lived in Jerusalem,
Glory, hallelujah, in-ro-de-rung!—”

The memory came back. A grin tugged at Heim’s lips. Presently he was beating time; toward the end, he joined in the choruses. That’s the way! Who says we can’t take them? He returned to the bridge with a stride of youth.

And time fled. And battle stations were sounded. And Savaidh appeared in the viewports.

The hands that had built her were not human. But the tool was for the same job, under the same laws of physics, as Earth’s own lancers. Small, slim, leopard-spotted for camouflage and thermal control, leopard deadly and beautiful, the ship was so much like his own old Star Fox that Heim’s hand paused. Is it right to kill her—this way?

A legitimate ruse of war. Yes. He punched the intercom. “Bridge to radio. Bridge to radio. Begin distress signal.”

Meroeth spoke, not in any voice but in the wailing radio pattern which Naval Intelligence had long known was regulation for Alerion. Surely the lancer captain (was this his first command?) ordered an attempt at communication. There no reply. The gap closed. Relative speed was slight by spaceship standards; but Savaidh grew swiftly before Heim’s eyes.

Unwarned, the Aleriona had no reason to doubt this was one of their own vessels. The transport was headed toward Mach limit; not directly for The Eith, but then, none of them did, lest the raider from Earth be able to predict their courses. Something had gone wrong. Her communications must be out. Probably her radio officer had cobbled together a set barely able to cry, “SOS!” The trouble was clearly not with her engines, since she was under power. What, then? Breakdown of radiation screening? Air renewal? Thermostats? Interior gee field? There were so many possibilities. Life was so terribly frail, here where life was never meant to be.

Or … since the probability of her passing near the warship by chance, in astronomical immensity, was vanishingly small … did she bear an urgent message? Something that, for some reason, could not be transmitted in the normal way? The shadow of Fox II lay long and cold across Alerion.

“Close spacesuits,” Heim ordered. “Stand by.” He clashed his own faceplate shut and lost himself in the task of piloting. Two horrors nibbled at the edge of consciousness. The lesser one, because least likely, was that the other captain would grow suspicious and have him blasted. The worst was that Savaidh would continue her rush to Cynbe’s help. He could not match accelerations with a lancer.

Needles wavered before his eyes. Radar—vectors—fan-pulse—Savaidh swung about and maneuvered for rendezvous. Heim cut drive to a whisper. Now the ships were on nearly parallel tracks, the lancer decelerating heavily while the transport ran almost free. Now they were motionless with respect to each other, with a kilometer of vacuum between. Now the lancer moved with infinite delicacy toward the larger vessel.

Now Heim rammed down an emergency lever. At full sidewise thrust, Meroeth hurtled to her destiny.

There was no time to dodge, no time to shoot. The ships crashed together. That shock roared through plates and ribs, ripped metal apart, hurled unharnessed Aleriona to their decks or against their bulkheads with bone-cracking violence.

A spaceship is not thickly armored, even for war. She can withstand the impact of micrometeorites; the larger stones, which are rare, she can detect and escape; nothing can protect from nuclear weapons, when once they have struck home. Meroeth’s impact speed was not great, but her mass was. Through Savaidh she sheared. Her own hull gave way. Air purled out in a frosty cloud, quickly lost to the light-years. Torn frameworks wrapped about each other. Locked in a stag’s embrace, the ruined ships tumbled on a lunatic orbit. Aurore flared radiance across their guts; the stars looked on without pity.

“Prepare to repel boarders!”