Return to the Stars

18

The place was like a star-captain's nightmare.

To the eye, the Broken Stars would have seemed only a region where the points of starry light were somewhat denser, through which the small ship seemed to creep.

But the radar and sensor instruments saw it differently. They saw a region where the debris of shattered suns, long, cool, and dark, whirled in small ovaloids, in spinning little maelstroms, in cones and disks and nests of wreckage. Splintered stones and dust that had once been planets lay in drifts. And the many surviving suns of the wrecked star-clusters flared out fiercely as background.

The computers that took the radar impulses and directed the cruiser's flight along the chosen course were clacking like the chattering teeth of hysterical old women. Hull Burrel, hunched over the board, listened to that uproar and watched the rapidly changing symbols, only occasionally reaching out his hand to give the computers a new course. But when he did so, it was done with all the speed of which he was capable.

Gordon and Shorr Kan, standing behind him, looked at the viewplate which showed only the swarming points of light through which they seemed barely to move. They looked then at the flashing radar screen, and were awed.

"I was in Orion Nebula once, but that was child's play compared to this," said Gordon. "Have we got a chance at all?"

"We have," said Hull, "if we don't run into a bit of it too complicated for the radar to sense in time. But I'll tell you how you can improve our chances about a hundred percent."

"How?"

"By getting off my neck!" Hull roared, without turning. "Go and sit down. I can fly this damned suicide mission better without jawbone help."

"He's right," said Shorr Kan, and nodded to Gordon. They drew back. "There's nothing you and I can do now... but wait! Yes, there is one thing we can do. Back in a minute."

He went aft. Gordon sat down wearily in one of the chairs at the rear of the bridge that were intended for top-brass to sit in and harass worried pilots.

Hull had told them that radar showed no sign of pursuit at all. He had explained that when the counts saw them dive into the Broken Stars, they would write them off as finished. And, he had added, they were probably right.

Shorr Kan came back holding a couple of plastic flasks filled with a pale, slightly milky-looking liquor. He grinned sardonically at Gordon.

"I was pretty sure that Obd Doll would have something stored away. The counts of the Marches are a hard-drinking lot. Here, have one."

Gordon took the flask, but stared up at Shorr Kan in amazement. "A drink? Now? In this?" And he jerked his head toward the radar screen. "Any minute, one stray chunk of drift..."

Shorr Kan sat down. "Quite right. And can you think of a better time for drinking?"

Gordon shrugged. Maybe Shorr Kan made sense, at that. All Hull wanted them to do was to keep quiet and let him make his long-shot gamble for life. Very well, then. He would keep quiet. He lifted the flask and drank.

The liquor might look a little like milk and it was bland going down, but it was hellfire when it hit his insides.

"Better than anything we had in the Dark Worlds," said Shorr Kan.

"I remember," said Gordon, "when Lianna and I were your prisoners at Thallarna... how long ago that seems!... you said you'd offer us a drink but you didn't keep the stuff around because it would spoil your pose as the austere patriotic leader."

Shorr Kan smiled wryly. "And much good it did me in the end." He looked at Gordon with a kind of admiration. "I had the whole galaxy in my grasp, and then you came along. By God, I have to hand it to you. You really were a spoiler."

Gordon turned and looked, startled, toward the view-plate. Nothing there seemed to have changed but there was a new sound, a screeching and screeking along the hull.

"Relax, Gordon," said Shorr Kan. "Just tiny particles, probably no bigger than atoms. Nothing to get jumpy about." He added, "When I think about it, in spite of the remarkable things you've done, you've nearly always had the jumps."

Gordon said between his teeth, "It seems a natural reaction when one's life is in danger."

"Look at me," said Shorr Kan. "I'm in as much danger as you. More, because if we get out of this mess there's more trouble waiting for me. I'm flying for my life... the second time... me that was lord of the Dark Worlds. But do I get upset? Not a bit. If Shorr Kan has to go, he'll go with his head high."

He raised the flask with a theatrical gesture, but the smile on his dark face was mocking.

Gordon shook his head. There were times when Shorr Kan just reduced him to silence.

"So drink up and be of good heart," said Shorr Kan. "We'll get through, all will go well with you, and you'll save my neck when we get there... I hope!"

The computers were chattering even more wildly, and when Gordon glanced forward he saw that the symbols were flashing in a swift stream across the radar screen. It seemed to him that Hull Burrel, hunched over the board, had his head bent in resignation, bowing to the inevitable end. Gordon turned his own head quickly away.

He thought of Lianna. It was strange how, when everything was getting unreal to him in the slow freezing terror of approaching dissolution, she remained quite real. Even if he survived, he felt that she was lost to him. But he thought of her, and was glad.

"You know, I've had an idea for a long time," Shorr Kan was saying, "that you're sort of a grain of sand in the machine, Gordon. I mean, you take someone out of his own context, his own time-frame, and hurl him into the future where he's got no business to be, and you put everything out of kilter. See how your coming, from the very first, has upset things all across the galaxy."

Gordon said dryly, "What you mean is that I upset the private plans of one Shorr Kan, that's all."

"Possibly," said Shorr Kan, with a courtly wave of his hand. "But tell me, what the devil was it like, that past time you came from? I asked you that before, but then you were lying to me and I couldn't believe a word of it."

"To tell you the truth," said Gordon, "it's getting just a little vague in my own mind." He drank and considered. "There was a man named Keogh who told me that this future I had been in before was all a dream. I just hated the Earth as it was, he said, so I made up fantasies about star-kingdoms and great wars beyond the suns. Of course at that time we didn't have anything approaching star-flight, so it must have all seemed pretty wild to him."

"We have a name for people like that," said Shorr Kan. "Planet-huggers. Hang tight to your mother-world's apron strings, because if you get away from it you might find something awfully nasty and upsetting."

Gordon glanced forward again. "Right at this moment," he said, "I'm not so sure that people who take that view are so awfully wrong."

Seen past the dark, hunched silhouette of Hull Burrel, the scene in the viewplate had slowly changed.

The points of fire that were suns seemed to be closer together. It was as though the ship was moving toward a rampart of suns, and surely they were not going to try to go that way. Hull would surely change course soon.

But time went on and he did not. Gordon drank again. The mighty blazing rampart of suns seemed closer, and still Hull did not alter course. Gordon felt a growing impulse to go and pound on Hull's arm, to make him veer off, but he fought it down. He didn't know a bloody thing about piloting a starship, and they had put the ship and themselves into Hull's hands and there was nothing to do but wait.

Shorr Kan seemed to understand how he felt. He said, "Less drift between the suns. Their attraction tends to gather up a good bit of debris. That's why he's going that way."

"Thank you for reassuring the nervous novice," said Gordon. "It's good of you."

Shorr Kan smiled. "I'm an awfully sympathetic person. Have another."

They sat, and drank, and Gordon tried not to look at the viewplate again or listen to the computers clacking. Time seemed to run on forever and it was almost a painful shock of change when the viewplate showed that they were out of the star-swarm and into the dark, clear deeps of open space.

Hull Burrel's great paw slammed down on the automatic pilot control. The big Antarian turned to them and for the first time in that flight they saw his face.

It was wild, exalted, and his voice came to them as a kind of hoarse triumphant shout.

"By God, I did it! I ran the Broken Stars!"

And then, as he looked at them, sitting with the nearly-emptied flasks in their hands, the wildness and excitement left him. He came back and stood over them, towering.

"I'll be everlastingly damned." he said. "While I did it, you two have been sitting here and drinking your heads off!"

Shorr Kan answered calmly, "You asked us not to bother you. Well, have we?"

Hull's craggy face turned scarlet. His chest heaved, and then he roared with laughter.

"Now," he said, "now I've seen everything. Get me one of those flasks. I think I want to get a little drunk myself."

They were out of the Marches, and the pure white fire of Fomalhaut gleamed like a beacon ahead.

It was many hours before Hull Burrel came back to the bridge, stretching and yawning. He started laughing again as he looked at Gordon and Shorr Kan.

"Through the Broken Stars with two topers," he said and shook his head. "Nobody will ever believe it."

"The whole fleet of Fomalhaut is on alert," he told them. "We're to land at the royal port on Hathyr."

"Any message for me?" asked Gordon.

The Antarian shook his head.

So that, Gordon thought, was that.

The radar screen showed ships far out from Fomalhaut cruising in stand-by formation.

"It's a good fleet," muttered Hull. "It's awfully good, and proved it in the fight off Deneb. But it's not very big, and the counts will eat it up."

The diamond sun swept toward them, and then the growing sphere of its largest planet. Hull brought the ship down over the far-spread towers of Hathyr City, toward the vast hexagonal mass of the royal palace. They landed in the small port behind it.

It seemed very strange to Gordon to step out and breathe natural air again, and look at a sun without a filter window in between.

A party of officers awaited them. They bowed and escorted them toward the huge bulk of the palace. Others boarded the cruiser to take charge of Obd Doll and his crew.

The old kings of Fomalhaut coldly looked down once more at Gordon, and this time he felt like snarling up at them.

"I know my place now," he wanted to tell them. "So the hell with you!"

But Shorr Kan strode along with a approving smile on his dark face, as though he were a visiting royalty who found the palace small but rather nice.

Despite his despair, Gordon had cherished a little hope. He did not know he had until suddenly it died, and that was when they three came into a small room where Lianna and Korkhann waited for them.

She was as beautiful as ever and her face was cold and hard as marble when she looked at him.

He started to say something, but before he could speak Lianna had looked beyond him and her eyes went wide with shock.

"Shorr Kan!"

Shorr Kan bowed magnificently to her. "Highness," he said, "it gladdens me to see you again. True, you and I have had a few small bothers and fusses, but that's all in the past, and I can say that it's forgotten now."

Lianna stared at him, absolutely stunned. Gordon felt an unwilling but tremendous admiration for Shorr Kan at that moment. Raise up the armadas of the League of the Dark Worlds, smite the Empire and its allies, bring about an Armageddon of the whole galaxy, and then dismiss it all lightly as a few small bothers and fusses!

"I have to state," Gordon said, "that Shorr Kan... who, as you can see, did not die at Thallarna but escaped to the Marches... was the one who rescued us and enabled us to give warning of the counts' coming attack."

He added forcefully, "I have promised Shorr Kan, because we owe him our lives, that he is safe here."

She looked at him, quite without expression. Then she said tonelessly, "If that is so, you are welcome, Shorr Kan, as our guest."

"Ah, a return of hospitality," said Shorr Kan. "It was not so long ago that you were my guest at Thallarna, Highness."

This grandly-spoken reference to the time when Gordon and Lianna had been Shorr Kan's prisoners brought a cough from Hull Burrel, who sounded as though he were choking on suppressed laughter.

Lianna turned to him. "Captain Burrel, we have been in touch with Throon. Jhal Arn has told me that elements of the Empire fleet are already on their way here."

Hull shook his head. "I'm afraid that will do no good, Highness. The counts and Narath Teyn will know that they must strike at once."

All this time Korkhann had said nothing, peering at Gordon with those wise yellow eyes that seemed to pierce straight through to the brain. Now he stepped forward, feathers rustling as his wings swept up and the delicate clawed hands at their tips caught Gordon's arm.

"But the Magellanians?" he cried.

"The H'Harn?" said Gordon startled.

"Is that what they call themselves?" Korkhann had an intensity about him that Gordon have never seen before. "Listen, John Gordon. Before I left Throon, the emperor and his brother, Zarth Arn, let me read the old records of Brenn Bir's time, when the Magellanians came to this galaxy before. They must not come again. What I read..."

He stopped, his voice quavering out into silence. When he spoke again, it was in a low, carefully controlled tone.

"You know that I am a telepath. Not one of the strongest ones, but... I have felt a shadow over the galaxy... a shadow that deepens with each hour, dark, cold...."

Gordon shook his head. "We met only two of the H'Harn. One we never even saw. Shorr Kan killed the other one, to free us... we were in deadly danger..." And I hope that guarantees your neck, Shorr Kan, he thought. "But apparently there are only a few of them in the galaxy."

"They will come," whispered Korkhann. "They will come."

Lianna spoke. "One thing at a time. Narath and his beasts, and the counts, are enough to deal with now. Korkhann, will you see that our guests are made comfortable..."

She emphasized the word "guests" but Shorr Kan never turned a hair. He made another courtly bow and said to her, "Thank you, Highness, for your welcome. I've always wanted to visit Fomalhaut, for I've been told it's one of the most beautiful of the minor star-kingdoms. Until later!"

And with that truly regal wipe in the eye, he turned and went out with Hull Burrel and Korkhann.

Gordon saw Lianna turn toward him. Her face was still stone-white and there was no expression at all now in her eyes.

She came closer to him and her small hand flashed and gave him a stinging slap across the mouth.

Then her face changed. It moved like that of a nasty little girl having a tantrum. She put her head on his shoulder, and she said, "Don't you ever leave me again, John Gordon. If you do..."

He felt the wetness of tears against his cheek.

Incredulous, caught by wonder, Gordon held her. Not Zarth Arn, he thought. John Gordon.

That long trip back across the ages had been worth it, after all.