The Annals of the Heechee

19 THE LAST SPACE FIGHT

Even when you see for yourself, you don’t always believe what you’re seeing. I didn’t. It was insane.

But it was there. The JAWS ships, in STL flight, hurtling toward the kugelblitz; and, from the kugelblitz, hurtling toward them, little bits of somethings that spurted out of the swirling, mustard-colored blurs. The little somethings were not blurred at all. They were bright metal.

They looked very much like spaceships.

There really could not be very much doubt of that. We were at extreme range for such tiny objects, but the True Love had first-rate instrumentation. What we saw we saw in optical and IR and X-ray and all the other photon frequencies there were, and we “saw” it as well through magnetometers and gray-detectors; and all confirmed unmistakably the terrible fact:

The kugelblitz had launched an armada.

I might have expected almost anything else, but not that. I mean, what use did the Foe have for spaceships? I could not answer that question, but ships they were. Big ones! Armored ones! A thousand and more of them, it looked like, and every one of them slipping into an immense cone formation and bearing directly down on the game, tiny, hopelessly outnumbered clutch of JAWS cruisers.

“Blow their goddamn rocks off,” yelled General Julio Cassata, and, you know, I yelled along with him.

I couldn’t help it. It was a fight, and I was rooting for my side. There was no doubt the fight had commenced. You can’t see rays in space, not even the converted Heechee digger rays that were the JAWS fleet’s main armament, but there were bright flashes of chemical explosions and worse, startlingly visible, as the JAWS ships launched their secondary missiles.

The myriad Foe vessels bored on. They were untouched.

Considered purely as spectacle, it was, my God, tremendous. Even though at the same time it was terrifying. Even if I didn’t know exactly what was going on.

It was my very first space battle. For that matter, it was everybody else’s first, too, because the last fight between ships in space had been between the Brazilians and the ships of the People’s Republic of China, nearly a century before, in that last bloody and inconclusive struggle that led to the foundation of the multinational Gateway authority. So I was no expert on what should have happened next, but what did happen was a lot less than I could have expected. Ships should have exploded or something. Bits and pieces of wreckage should have flown all over.

There wasn’t any of that.

What happened was that the cone of Foe ships opened up and surrounded the battling JAWS vessels. They englobed them; and then they well . . . what they did, they vanished. They just disappeared, leaving the JAWS cruisers huddled together in space.

And then the cruisers disappeared, too.

And then, just below us, the Watch Wheel itself ffickered and was gone.

Space was empty around us. There was nothing to be seen except the pearly whirl of the Galaxy below, the distant external firefly galaxies, the smoky yellow blobs of the kugelblitz.

We became visible to each other; it was too lonesome otherwise. We looked at each other uncomprehendingly.

“I wondered if something like this might happen,” said Albert Einstein, soberly sucking his pipe.

Cassata roared: “Damn you! If you know what’s going on, tell us!”

Albert shrugged. “I think you’ll see for yourself,” he said, “because I imagine it will be our turn next.”

And it was. We looked at each other, and then there was nothing else to see. Nothing outside the ship, I mean. Nothing but the pebbly gray of faster-than-light travel. It was like looking out of an airplane window into dense fog.

And then it wasn’t.

Fog vanished. The ship’s sensors could see clearly again.

And what we suddenly saw, without warning, was solid, familiar black space and stars . . . and even a planet and a moon . . . and, yes, I knew what they were. That planet and that moon were the ones human eyes (or nearly human eyes) had looked at for half a million years.

We were in orbit around the Earth; and so were a good many other artifacts I recognized as JAWS cruisers, and even the immense Watch Wheel itself.

It was more than I could handle.

I thought I knew what to do about that, though, because when things are too much for me there is always one thing I can do to get help. I did it. “Albert!” I cried.

But Albert just went on gazing out at the Earth and the Moon and the other objects outside the True Love, and smoking his pipe, and didn’t answer.