Doomstar

21

Later that night, or what passed for night, after Larith had gone to her cabin and they had the wardroom to themselves, Sekma listened to the full account of Kettrick's meeting with Seri and what had happened afterward.

And he asked, "Why didn't you get in touch with me?"

"Because I wanted to go to the White Sun. I wanted that million credits. I didn't believe in the Doomstar, and I didn't connect Seri with it even then. Not till Gurra."

Boker said, "You were following us when you came to Thwayn." Sekma nodded. "How?"

"I was keeping a close eye on everything that moved from Ree Darva. Seri took off in Starbird, and a few days later you took off in Grellah on the identical course. If you'd been anybody else I might not have thought much about it except you'd have poor pickings. But being Johnny's old friend and shipmate Boker, I thought it a remarkable coincidence. Particularly after it developed that you had suddenly come into money and laid in a stock of trade goods that were pronouncedly Kettrick in choice."

He turned a cold eye on Kettrick. "You're lucky I didn't catch up to you at Gurra. Because I knew what you were up to."

Boker looked curiously at Sekma. "Then you knew all the time he was with us at Thwayn. Why didn't you say something about it? You must have known Flay was hiding him."

"When I was at Gurra," Sekma said, "I talked to Nillaine. She told me that Johnny had been there, and that he was on his way to the White Sun to rob the Krinn. She wanted to be very sure that I would go after him and catch him quickly. It didn't seem right, remembering how Nillaine had used to love him."

Kettrick winced, and Sekma nodded. "It is a pity. There was something wrong about the whole village, something scared and secret. They wouldn't talk about Seri, but they wanted Johnny caught. I suppose they believed that even though you would tell me about the Doomstar, the delay would be enough to guarantee that Seri could accomplish his mission. On top of that, like spiteful children, they wanted you punished."

He turned again to Boker. "When I did find you at Thwayn, and you told that lie about Pellin which you must have known I'd catch, and you had Flay's three sons breathing down your neck, it was not so difficult to imagine what was going on."

He smiled briefly. "At that point, to be blunt about it, you became unimportant. The vital thing was for me to get after Starbird, which I did at the earliest possible moment. I was prepared to fight it out with Flay, using the whole ship's armament if necessary, even though it would have meant the end of you. Fortunately he believed my story."

"Even so," said Kettrick, "you got to Kirnanoc too late."

"That's right. Silverwing didn't even enter into the picture then. She was gone. All I had was Starbird in the repair dock, her cargo just sold, her crew sitting around waiting for the work to be finished, and Seri…well, Seri was supposedly on his way elsewhere as a passenger on an Achernan ship, to arrange for new ladings so Starbird wouldn't go home empty. We were shown his name on the list. I began to wonder if I were wrong. I was hoping the Firgals hadn't killed you because there were an awful lot of questions I wanted to ask."

"Then why," said Kettrick, "the hell weren't you watching for us?"

"I was. But the minute they got Boker at the board asking for Starbird, they caught his listing and withdrew it, so that it didn't come through. We had no way of knowing that you had landed, or that Boker and the others had been picked up. Under normal circumstances I would have asked Port Authority to let me know directly you requested a landing, and not have waited for the official teletype. As it was, I didn't dare to call attention to you.

"The Achernans had done everything they could to block and hamper us. They spied on us, tapped our communicator lines and bugged our offices…there were excellent reasons for my being in such a hurry to get away. If they'd caught you, Johnny, or if Ssessorn had had just a little more time to add up all the items…the man Chai knocked out under the ship, the cut fence, what you were doing in the Market…I don't think he'd have let us take off, I–C or not."

Hurth had been listening, frowning, occasionally rubbing the still tender scar on his side. Now he said, "Why is it only us, Sekma? Only us against the Doomstar? There's the whole Cluster, and it's their necks as well."

Kettrick said, "Something must have been done since we talked on Earth. Through official channels, I mean…planetary security forces, the I–C, the general intelligence network. You certainly were not depending entirely on one weak reed named Kettrick."

"We've done what we could," Sekma said, "but you know how it goes. On every civilized world the politicians are worrying about the next election, and the intellectuals are terribly busy with their theories on the perfectibility of mankind, and mankind itself is sitting on its broad duff, stuffing its face and procreating, and none of them want to be bothered with nasty things like Doomstars. They refuse to believe, just as you did. And the people who do believe in the Doomstar and are actively working for it simply smile blandly and lie to us. So the most we've had is the repetition of rumors we had already heard, and a few leads that didn't go anywhere, or at least were not conclusive enough to warrant any action. Oftentimes the local authorities haven't been too eager to give us information."

He sighed, the weariness and frustration of the past months showing clearly in his face.

"And all the time you're walking on eggshells, because you don't know. The official, the security man, the tribesman, the semiape you're talking to, the governor or the curodai…any one of them may be the enemy, and you don't know, not even in the I–C. I can swear that more than once our enquiries have been deliberately buried. There are people like Ssessorn on many worlds, fighting a delaying and beclouding action while they await the Word, and these are the ones who will shout the loudest for surrender when it comes."

"The lust for power," said Glevan heavily, "is a greater evil than the lust for gold."

"Quite," said Sekma, "but of course they don't call it that any more, even to themselves. They do these things for the noblest of motives. Even Ssessorn, I'm sure, would never admit that he's acting out of sheer greed for power and hatred of the human races."

"Well, the hell with their motives," said Kettrick. "I'm only interested in beating them. What kind of a thing is it that poisons a star? How is it delivered? You talk about scanning the planet, as though you expect it to be set up on the ground."

"According to the best scientific conjecture…and I assure you that we've had some of the best brains in the Cluster, the ones we could trust, wringing themselves dry…the launching mechanism would have to be on the ground. It's a seeding operation, apparently. That is to say, the change in the sun is not made at one stroke, but in a number of strokes that continue to stimulate a growing reaction. The theory is that a fairly small launcher is set up, capable of delivering a series of very high-speed missiles. The warheads carry an artificially made cobalt isotope and a catalyst. These react with the cobalt atoms normally present in the sun and create still another isotope, violently unstable. Up to a certain critical point the action is reversible. Beyond that point the reaction is self-feeding and the sun turns itself into a gigantic cobalt bomb, destroying all life that may exist for millions of miles around it.

"Obviously, the missiles could not be launched from a ship, because the occupants thereof would fry in their own gamma rays if they waited around for the full operation. If the launcher is on the ground, they can rack up their warheads in an automatic loader and depart in safety."

Kettrick nodded. "All right. Let's get out the charts, then. I know the world of the Krinn probably better than anyone in the Cluster, though that isn't saying much. Maybe we can figure the likeliest spots. And you could almost double your capability by using the lifeboats as auxiliaries…"

"Not both of them. I'd have to keep one in case we spotted the launcher somewhere that the cruiser couldn't land. But the other one, yes." He got out the charts.

Most of the remainder of the time they were in jump was spent in planning, except for the mealtimes and the sleeptimes, and one time when Kettrick found himself alone with Larith.

She had kept to her cabin a great deal. She had known early on, of course, that they were not bound for Trace. When Sekma told her she had only said, "I am sorry you didn't believe me." And her face had been as masklike and unreadable as Kettrick remembered it that night at Ree Darva. Since then she had hardly spoken, joining the others briefly at meals and then vanishing again, tightly wrapped in a shell of…what? Hurt pride that she had not been trusted, despair that she had failed in her mission? Or was it fear…fear of the Doomstar, of what might happen to Seri, and again, despair that she had failed in her mission? Kettrick didn't know.

When he came upon her unexpectedly in the wardroom she looked at him with eyes so deeply shadowed that he wondered if she had slept at all. "I'm sorry," she murmured, and tried to move past him to the door. He caught her and held her.

She was wearing a green I–C coverall, loaned to her so that she might change out of her single dress. He could feel her body through the hard masculine cloth, the beautiful body he had once joyed in, softly firm and supple and smoothly curved and vibrantly alive. Now it was rigid under his hand, and the feeling of vibrancy in it was only the all-pervading, nerve-rasping quiver that permeated every fiber during jump, the straining of each separate atom to retain its identity against a force that willed it to dissolve into chaos.

She brought her head up and said, "Let me go, Johnny. You have nothing to do with me any more. Nothing."

"I believe you," he said. He did not let her go. She was so close to him that he was aware of her warmth and the faint fragrance of her hair. She was beautiful. Deep inside him he felt something like the stabbing of a knife. "Did you ever love me, Larith?"

"That's a foolish question, Johnny."

"I suppose it is." He took his hand away. "All right."

He left her, crossing the small room, and she spoke from behind him with a bitterness that shocked him.

"You shouldn't have come back. Did you think we needed you? Did you think we were dying for lack of you? Why didn't you just leave us alone!"

She was gone then, pushing with a small shiver of revulsion past Chai. Kettrick remembered that Seri had never permitted the Tchell inside the house when she was there.

Chai snorted gently. She did not say anything. The perfect lady, Kettrick thought, in spite of her fur.

He poured himself a drink and did not drink it. He sat staring at it and forgot it was there.

After a long while he realized that for almost the first time since leaving Earth he had thought of a girl named Sandra and wished her well.

Some time later they came out of jump.

The White Sun blazed in the sky ahead of them, one of the few hot white stars in the Hyades, a savage young warrior among the middle-aged and mellow suns. The fierce light beat at the cruiser's safety shields.

The radiation counters showed normal.

"Temporary reprieve," muttered Kettrick. "Or were we wrong?"

Sekma did not answer.

They stared from the shielded windows of the bridge at the world of the Krinn swimming through the glare. There was no doubt about which planet might have been chosen as a platform from which to launch the Doomstar. The two small inner worlds were semi-molten, the outer three impossible because of poisonous atmosphere, gravitation, or cold. The world of the Krinn alone supported life. After its own fashion.

The surface markings of the planet began to show in patchy glimpses between high cloud cover and the much lower clouds of smoke and dust. Kettrick made out the heliograph flash of white deserts, the black lava blotches of volcanic zones, the crinkled desolation of mountain ranges still raw and cruel with youth, the basins of shallow seas drying in the sun. Still closer, and he could see the great winding river courses and the green of the fertile belts.

The radarman said sharply, "Sir!"

At almost the same instant, while Weapons Control was in the act of starting to range and the ports were sliding open, according to prearranged plan, Communications cried out, "Sir! A message coming through…"

It came through clearly, in spite of the hiss and crackle of atmospherics.

"Silverwing to cruiser. Watch your counters and consider whether you wish to live. Too bad you came so late." With a hint of sibilant laughter, the voice added, "Goodbye."

In the intense silence that followed, the radarman said, "She's gone."

No radar, no killer beam nor missile could follow Silverwing into the limbo of not-space. The men in the bridge stood still, a little stunned by the swiftness of what had happened. Kettrick saw that Sekma's face was ashen under the golden bronze and he thought that his own must be the same.

The world of the Krinn raced toward them. The White Sun blazed.

And the radiation counters gave a small premonitory leap.