Refuge

Chapter 15. Aranimas Again

Oh no, Ariel thought. Aranimas!

The alien pirate’s cold visage regarded them.

His face was vaguely human, but had definite overtones of lizard. The eyes, for instance, were widely set, almost on the sides of his face. They were barely close enough together to give him binocular vision-but, unnervingly, Aranimas didn’t much bother with binocular vision. Most of the time one eye focused on whatever he was looking at while the other roved, apparently supplying peripheral vision.

At the moment he was focusing on Derec with both eyes. “Derrrrec,” he said. High-pitched, trilling, his voice was the most hateful thing Ariel had ever heard. “Arrriel.”

Glaring at them, he altered the focus of his comm and shrank to distance without moving, his humanoid figure coming into view from the waist up. In this view much of his alienness wasn’t obvious, but they both had seen him in person. He was as tall seated as Derec was standing, and his disproportionately long arms had three times the span of a tall human’s. Thin body, thin neck, domed, thinly haired head, pale skin. Dark eyes, angry now.

“Wherrre is the Key to Perihelion? You escaped with it instead of leading me to robots.”

After a heart-stopping moment-Derec gulped, temporarily shocked out of his sickness-Ariel said, with only a faint tremor in her voice, “We lost it in the wreck. W-we’ve been in hospital on Earth-”

“You lie. I detected three bursts of Key static about this planet. The firrrst, weeks ago, began elsewhere. The last two began and ended here. Only the Key broadcasts in this manner!”

They looked at each other sickly. Before they could speak, the pirate pulled a small, gleaming, gold pencil out of a pocket. Ariel choked, and she heard a gulp from Derec, too. A pain stimulator! It was, she knew, something like a human neuronic whip, but even more intense. Or perhaps Aranimas was just more violent with its use. It did no damage if not overused, like a neuronic whip, but no one was tough enough to take more than one “treatment” before deciding to cooperate.

“You will tell all, and tell trrrue, or I kill you slow with this.”

They did not doubt his sincerity. Nor would he listen to anything until he had taken the ship apart. They couldn’t just give him the Key, even if it could have been of use to him -it was initialized only for humans. He wanted robots, among other things-power most of all.

Derec reached over and cut the channel.

“We have another option,” he said, turning to her. “\\fe could use the Key, call agent Donovan, and put the whole problem in the laps of the TBI and whatever Spacer authorities are on Earth. Or we can try to deal with Aranimas ourselves.”

“Deal with him-how?” she said skeptically.

“I don’t mean bargain. Ariel, you should use the Key.” His plans were clearly hardening as he spoke. “I think I can ram that clumsy ship when he closes with us.”

Ariel felt herself pale. “No, Derec!”

“It’s the only way! We can’t let him live. He’s too dangerous-”

“But-” Her face cleared. “We can use the Key at the last instant.”

Derec looked at her. The burst of adrenaline that had washed away his illness was fading. She determined that she would not use the Key unless he did, and he seemed to realize that.

“Okay, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll pretend to surrender-”

He reached for the comm, but she grabbed his wrist. “No, Derec, it won’t work! He’ll never leave this ship maneuverable while he closes!”

“It’s the only chance we’ve got,” he said. “Our only weapon is the jet-and the nose of the ship! I’d like to fire the rocket at him, but he’d never pass in front of it.”

Ariel sighed, but she was unable to think of anything better.

“Okay. Go get the Key. I’ll fly the ship.”

Derec nodded in relief, clearly not up to it.

When they tuned back into the comm channel, Aranimas was howling in his nonhuman voice, so shrilly as to make her teeth ache.

“You will not brrreak communications again, humans! You-”

“Very well! We have conferred and agreed to accede to your demands,” she said. “We ask only that you guarantee our lives, or we’ll destroy the Key in front of your eyes.”

“You will not destroy the Key! I kill slow-”

“Not if we’re dead first,” said Derec, sounding tired and exasperated-the sound of a father dealing with wrangling children. “We want your promise.”

The alien fell silent and studied them for a cold-blooded moment. “Verry well. You have my promise I will not kill you if you give me the Key, undamaged.”

Ariel had a moment in which she wondered if the alien might keep that promise. But it didn’t matter; Derec was right. He had to die. She felt a momentary pang for the harmless and spiritless Narwe slaves with whom Aranimas manned his ship.

Derec pulled the Key out of his shirt and showed it to him. While Aranimas stared greedily at it, Ariel, at the controls, asked casually, “Shall we maneuver to match you?”

“No, I maneuver.”

There was a tense few minutes while the alien turned from them to his controls, rolled his ship, waited, waited, waited, then burned toward them. At the end of the burn the ship was not far away and still passing slowly. Again it rolled, now plainly visible: a vast, ungainly mass of half a dozen or more hulls stuck together. How Aranimas balanced that thing along a center of mass so he could fire rockets without spinning out of control, all without computer aid, Ariel couldn’t imagine.

He’s too close,she thought, panicky. They hadn’t time to get much velocity for the impact-or to set the Key! Even as she thought, she glanced at Derec, who started squeezing the corners of the Key. She slammed the rocket on, spinning the ship on its secondaries-the gyro, more economical of fuel, was much too slow.

Aranimas might be flying a clumsy conglomerate, but he was a skilled pilot-and it was a battlewagon. It had adequate sensors even aft, where the rockets were. The pirate spotted their maneuver and blasted aside, not bothering to scream at them over the comm channel.

Ariel looked over at Derec, slammed into her seat by the acceleration; the Key was ready, but they weren’t. The alien ship was above them, then beside them, even as she struggled to turn nose on toward it. Too late-Aranimas had slid aside.

Ariel instantly cut the jet and started to spin ship, not to get too far away-Aranimas’s gunners would have them in their sights the instant they cleared the near zone. Aranimas shrewdly slapped on more side thrust when he saw which way she was turning, in order to widen the gap between them.

Then the collision alarm rang.

They heard Aranimas yelling for the first time since the battle began. Ariel fought them onto a line with the alien ship, too busy to look about.

“The rock is moving!” Derec cried.

The chunk of rock that had swung in behind them and had gradually been overtaking them was now accelerating toward them at about a Standard gravity-and the bolo registered the temperature of rocket exhaust.

Wolruf’s face appeared beside the diminished figure of Aranimas on their board.

“Hold him, Derec! I come!”

What Aranimas said was not intelligible, but energy lanced from the big ship at the rock. The rock vaporized, its outline flashing away in puffs of incandescent vapor as the guns bore. Those same mighty weapons had vaporized cubic meters of ices and snow at near absolute zero on the ice asteroid where Aranimas had first found Derec.

Underneath the flimsy camouflage was a little Star Seeker like their own.

Ariel’s vision dimmed as she cut in the rockets’ full power. In a moment, she cut them off. Her head bobbed against the headrest, and the ship was again diving toward Aranimas. He rolled and blasted to avoid them, and something monstrous slapped their flank, making the ship ring.

“Puncture!” Derec gasped, but she had no time. She had to hold him till Wolruf got there-

Aranimas rolled his big ship again, and again blasted to avoid her, throwing off his gunners’ aim. Good job, he doesn’t have computerized./ire control, Ariel thought.

She was confronted with a split-second tactical problem. In moments they’d be past the alien ship, too soon to roll nose-on toward it. Aranimas had seen their intent and was going the other way. So she rotated further in the direction the nose was pointed, to bring their tail toward the enemy.

At the critical moment she blasted, and fire splashed over Aranimas’s ship. It must have rung like a bell. There was a great outrush of air and assorted particles. Ariel was grateful she couldn’t see well enough to tell if the particles were kicking.

In a flashing moment they were past, and the reflected flame glare died, and Aranimas was moving again, fire spurting from points on the ungainly hulls. Another kind of fire flashed, their own ship gonged when hit, jolted again, as Ariel’s head rattled against the headrest and alarms yelled; Derec was saying something as she spun the ship as rapidly as shaking hands would let her. Mistake! she thought. Should never have blasted away from him; now they were far enough away for the gunners to sight them.

Clenching her teeth, Ariel rolled the ship again, trying to ignore the hits, hoping one wouldn’t disable them-or kill them. A single stray bolt would

“We’re still in their near zone,” said Derec, breathlessly. “Glancing hits only -”

True.she thought, smiling mirthlessly -they were still alive!

And then they had completed their roll, much farther from Aranimas than she liked, and she blasted back. No more hits; the uneven outline of the alien ship grew and grew in their vision screens, and she breathed more evenly.

Then she had a moment of wonder: she felt better because she was not going to be killed by Aranimas’s gunners in the next few moments. But she was trying to commit suicide by ramming his ship!

Aranimas began to slide aside and she automatically corrected, centering on the dark bulk. What should she do?

“Wolruf is closing fast, but I don’t know if she’s still maneuverable,” said Derec tensely. “She got hit hard.”

“Give her a call?”

Then Aranimas’s ship loomed monstrous and the alien had arranged a surprise: a gun on the hull swung to bear on them. What prodigies of effort had gotten it ready in the short time the battle had taken, they would never know. It was a full-sized gun, though its first bolt was weak, an aiming shot.

Aranimas’s gunners were not the timid Narwe. They were starfish-shaped creatures about whom Ariel knew little; they avoided the light and breathed a slightly different atmosphere than the rest of the crew. She felt no compunction about them, and spun the ship aside. Aranimas saw that and moved to prevent her from pointing her rockets at the new gun.

A second bolt flashed at them, but the gunners lacked Aranimas’s own savage efficiency.

“Another puncture, and our antenna’s out,” said Derec calmly.

His calmness calmed her, and she made one more attempt to ram. In turning away from her jet, Aranimas had run before their nose. She cracked on full power and they were hurled back into their seats. Her vision dimmed. She thought it was the power fading.

Too slow; the huge, bloated body of the enemy slid sideways even as it grew monstrous before them. Then the vision screen erupted in one pale flare, pale because the safety circuit wouldn’t transmit the whole visual part of the flash: the sensor had taken the next hit from the gun.

“There went our bow!” Derec cried.

Ariel gulped, half expecting to see space before her, but they hadn’t lost that much of the bow. With the vision out, she could only crouch, panting, at her board, the rocket off, hoping for

“The Key-trigger it-” she cried, turning to him, knowing in a flashing moment that it was too late-they’d hit-

The ship jolted, and the impact was quite different from the gun hits. They were thrown forward against their straps, the ship shuddered, metal squealed, something broke-all in an instant-then they were free, the ship floating quietly.

Air hissed out, alarms still burring and shrilling. All communications out, no exterior view. Ariel touched her controls and the attitude jets responded; she could turn and burn again. But they were blind.

“Suits!” said Derec. “ And see if the auto-circuit can give us more eyes.”

Suits first,she thought. When the air goes out of a small ship, it can go fast. Should have had them on all along, if they’d had time.

They scrambled into their suits in a free-fall comedy that was deadly serious. Every moment Ariel expected the lancing fire of a hit, but the ship continued serenely on its way.

They didn’t bother to try communications, knowing that the gun’s bolt, or the impact, must have destroyed the forward antennas. Vision, however, could be brought in from any quarter of the ship. Only the bow eyes were out. After a bit of fumbling, they found an undamaged sensor that bore toward their late battle.

“What…what is it?” Ariel asked, awed.

“I was about to ask you,” Derec said. “You know more about Aranimas’s ship, you were on it longer-”

“That was before my amnesia,” she said.

“Oh.”

“I think-one of the hulls, broken free?”

They had only a partial view of it-it was below the sensor’s view. Only a spinning, irregular curve of dark metal, with an occasional highlight gleaming, here and there a projection-derricks, turrets, landing ports, sensors-and interior beams?

“It can’t be the whole ship,” Derec said finally. “But what happened to it?”

Ariel took a deep breath, found the air inside her suit rank with her sweat. “I’ll turn around!” she said, chagrined. “I didn’t realize how tense I was.”

She wasn’t thinking. I’ll never be a combat pilot, she thought shakily. Wasted minutes looking into a view I could’ve adjusted-Or do pilots get used to this kind of thing?

But the human race had no combat pilots. No telling how well they could perform. Grimly, she thought, if there are many of Aranimas’s kind in space, we may have to learn.

“Aranimas-he disintegrated!” Derec said.

The big composite ship was now a dozen big pieces in a cloud of hundreds of smaller ones. They looked at each other. Derec’s face was as blank as she felt her own to be.

“Did we do that?” she asked.

“I don’t see how-Wolruf!”

After a moment she nodded. “You must be right. But where did she get the guns?”

Derec just shook his head.

If anybody was alive over there, they weren’t disposed to do any more shooting. The wreckage was retreating slowly. Ariel came to herself with a start.

“We’ve got to get back over there-”

“Frost, yes!”

But how?”

It wasn’t easy, but they worked it out. The view they had gave them bearings. They chose a spot that would enable them to miss any of the junk, and rotated the ship until its blind nose pointed along that bearing. Ariel then placed her hands on the board, looked into darkness, and thought, now we find out how good a pilot you are, girl.

In a moment she was back on Aurora, about to do her first solo takeoff. She had had that very thought, or something very close to it, and even more nervousness than now. Now, though, she was in shock. The memories went on and on, the takeoff, the acceleration seeming more fierce than ever now that she had to remain conscious, the relief as the jets shut down, and then the indescribable free, floating sensation of one’s first solo orbit.

“Ariel?”

Her instructor-

“Ariel?”

With a shake, she brought herself out of it. “Sorry. Memory fugue.” As her hands moved over the board-taking care to push the buttons on the real board instead of the remembered one-the memories went on, flashed back, picked up details; A whole chunk of her past restored to her by a chance thought, a chance repetition of forgotten circumstance.

She burned for ten seconds and rolled the ship to study the junk. There should be detectors back there that would tell them how fast they were moving relative to the junk, but they weren’t working. The junk still seemed to be receding. Ariel rolled and blasted for another twenty seconds, again looked.

“That should do it.”

They had only to wait, floating toward the wrecked ship aft-end first, ready to burn to brake down.

“How did she do it?”