The Star Virus

Two waves of missiles sped away from the Stond in rapid succession. Each missile in the forward wave masked from the enemy's defense scanners a partner in the rear echelon, so that in the split second after the former was destroyed the latter could slip through unopposed. It was a use of misdirection that Rodrone himself had devised.

There were two ways of meeting a missile attack: with anti-missiles or deflector fields. Either method was a matter of precise focusing and tended to leave the defender wide open for a few microseconds after application. The Streall ship, however, clearly had very quick responses. Rodrone's battle display plate showed the first wave meet total destruction, then most of the second wave immediately afterwards by a fresh defense volley. Even so, a few flashed onwards to blossom satisfyingly among the assemblages of turrets and casings.

Momentarily the Streall ship disengaged itself into three parts, assessing damage and considering procedure. All big Streall ships seemed to be capable of fractioning themselves indefinitely, as if held together by willpower.

Against such a ship, an opening masking volley had been the biggest gun in Rodrone's armory. Its comparative ineffectiveness made escape even more imperative. He issued crisp orders to Braxon, the man in the pilot's seat. Despite the fact that the interior of the ship was normally proof against inertial changes, they all felt a sudden surge as the Stond slipped into overdrive.

Moodily Rodrone slipped from the weapons desk, prowling around the control room with a worried scowl on his face. He tried to remind himself that their lives need not seriously be in danger. If overhauled and trapped by the Streall, it would be easy to get away scot-free once they got what they were after. The Streall were not vindictive in a personal sense. But it was as if a fever had gripped him. The thing in the crate, whatever it was, had acquired an exaggerated, ludicrous value in his eyes.

In the first few seconds the Streall almost lost them. Interstellar travel is of necessity faster than light; and while the Streall ship could pace them easily, escape maneuvers depended on the fact that if the velocity difference between two ships was itself in excess of c, they found it hard to locate each other. Each time they knew the Streall had a fix on them, they changed direction, slipping once again into a murky half-invisibility until the pursuers, somehow, guessed their quadrant and once again moved into the same velocity bracket.

"They're getting closer." It was Clave speaking. As usual he tried to sound unconcerned, but there was a tension in his dry voice.

"Hurry it up, dammit!" Rodrone growled at the pair who were meantime busy on the other side of the control room. They were scanning star maps of the district, at the same time trying to build up a local picture by taking space-strain readings. Such a project would normally take hours to do properly; Rodrone, unreasonably, was expecting them to come up with results within minutes by using their intuitive instincts. The possibility that there were no results to come up with he refused to admit to himself.

Savagely he kicked the crate that was the focus of all the trouble, trying to catharsize his frustration.

"Stellar comet!" one of the map readers announced. They had found what they were looking for.

"Is it big enough?"

"Maybe. Anyway there isn't another near enough."

They typed on keys, conveying coordinates to the pilot board. Almost immediately the ship changed direction again.

"Here we go," Braxon said tightly. "Keep your fingers crossed!"

Dead silence suddenly permeated the whole ship. Most of them had never experienced this tactic before, and those who had did not wish to do so again. Stellar comets, swift, ceaseless travelers that swung in blazing parabolas around one slow-moving star after another, occurred by the million all over the galaxy, even in the outer parts of the lens. But the comets that were commonly found in the outlying regions were midgets; here in the Hub they were simply enormous, streaming islands of gas and rubble extending for light-years.

Although incredibly tenuous, the interior of such a comet was dense by the standards of interstellar space. To plunge into one at super-light speeds was little short of suicidal. There was no possibility of avoiding collisions with the scattered chunks of rock, and the gas that made up the bulk of the comet could build up an intolerable friction at high velocity despite being constituted of only a few atoms per cubic foot.