Time lag

584 A. C. C.

As they neared the end of the journey, he sent her to his cabin. An escape suit — an armored cylinder with propulsors, air regenerator, food and water supplies, which she could enter in sixty seconds — occupied most of the room. “Not that I expect any trouble,” he said. “But if something should happen... I hope you can make it down to the surface. He paused. The officers on the bridge moved quietly about their tasks; the engines droned; the distorted stars of near light velocity framed his hard brown face. There was a thin sheen of sweat on his skin; not fear but an effort to say something.

“I love you, you know,” he finished. Quickly, he turned back to his duties. Elva went below.

Clad in a spaceman’s uniform, seated on the bunk, enclosed in toning metal, she felt the inward wrench as the agoratron went off and speed was converted back to atomic mass. The cabin’s private viewscreen showed stars in their proper constellations again, needle-sharp against blackness. Vaynamo was tiny and blue, still several hundred thousand kilometers remote. Elva ran fingers through her hair. The scalp beneath felt tight, and her lips were dry. A person couldn’t help being afraid, she thought. Just a little afraid.

She called up the memory of Karlavi’s land, where he had now lain for sixty-two years. Reeds whispered along the shores of Rovaniemi, the wind made a rippling in long grass, and it was time again for the lampflowers to blow, all down the valley. Dreamlike at the edge of vision, the snowpeaks of the High Mikkela floated in an utter blue.

I’m coming back, Karlavi, she thought.

In her screen, the nearer vessels were glinting toys, plunging through emptiness. The further ones were not visible at this low magnification. Only the senses of radar, gravpulse, and less familiar creations, analyzed by whirling electrons in a computer bank, gave any approach to reality. But she could listen in on the main intercom line to the bridge if she chose, and hear those data spoken. She flipped the switch. Nothing yet, only routine reports. Had the planet’s disc grown a trifle?

Have I been wrong all the time? she thought. Her heart stopped for a second.

Then: “Alert! Condition red! Alert! Condition red! Objects detected, approaching nine-thirty o’clock, fifteen degrees high. Neutrino emissions indicate nuclear engines.”

“Alert! Condition yellow! Quiescent object detected in orbit about target planet, two-thirty o’clock, ten degrees low, circa 75.000 kilometers distant. Extremely massive. Repeat, quiescent. Low level of nuclear activity, but at bolo-metric temperature of ambient space. Possibly an abandoned space fortress, except for being so massive.”

“Detected objects identified as space craft. Approaching with average radial velocity of 250 KPS. No evident deceleration. Number very large, estimated at five thousand. All units small, about the mass of our scoutboats.”

The gabble went on until Golyev’s voice cut through: “Attention! Fleet Admiral to bridge of all units. Now hear this.” Sardonically “The opposition is making a good try. Instead of building any real ships — they could only have constructed a few at best — they've turned out thousands of manned warboats. Their plan is obviously to cut through our formation, relying on speed, and release tracking torps in quantity. Stand by to repel. We have enough detectors, antimissiles, negafields, to overwhelm them in this department too. Once past us, the boats will need hours to decelerate and come back within decent shooting range. By that time we should be in orbit around the planet. Be alert for possible emergencies, of course. But I only expect standard operations will be necessary. Good shooting!”

Elva strained close to her screen. All at once she saw the Vaynamoan fleet, sparks, but a horde of them, twinkling among the stars. Closer! Her fingers strained against each other. They must have some plan, she told herself. If I’m blown up in five minutes — I was hoping I’d get down to you, Karlavi. But if I don’t, goodbye, goodbye.

The fleets neared each other: on the one side, ponderous dreadnaughts, cruisers, auxiliary warcraft, escorting swarms of transport and engineer ships; on the opposite side, needle-thin boats whose sole armor was velocity. The guns of Chertkoi swung about, hoping for a lucky hit. At such speeds it was improbable. The fleets would interpenetrate and pass in a fractional second. The Vaynamoans could not be blasted until they came to grips near their home world. However, if a nuclear shell should find its mark now — what a blaze in heaven!

The flagship staggered.

“Engine room to bridge. What’s happened?”

“Bridge to engine room. Gimme some power there! What in all destruction —?”

“Sharyats to Askol. Sharyats to Askol. Am thrown off course. Accelerating. What’s going on?”

“Look out!”

“Fodorev to Zuevots! Look alive, you bloody fool! You’ll ram us!”

Cushioned by the internal field, Elva felt only the minutest fraction of that immense velocity change. Even so a wave of sickness went through her. She clutched at the bunk stanchion. The desk ripped from a loose mooring and crashed into the wall, which buckled. The deck split open underfoot. A roar went through the entire hull, ribs groaned as they bent, plates screamed as they sheared. A girder snapped in twain and spat sharp fragments among a gun turret crew. A section broke apart, air gushed out, a hundred men died before the sealing bulkheads could close.

After a moment, the stabilizing energies regained interior control. The images on Elva’s screen steadied. She drew a shaken lungful of air and watched. Out of formation, the Askol plunged within a kilometer of her sister ship the Zuevots — just when that cyclopean hull smashed into the cruiser Fodorev. Fire sheeted as accumulator banks were shorted. The two giants crumpled, glowed white at the point of impact, fused, and spun off in a lunatic waltz. Men and supplies pinwheeled from the cracks gaping in them. Two gun turrets wrapped their long barrels around each other like intertwining snakes. Then the whole mess struck a third vessel. Steel chunks exploded into space.

Through the noise and the human screaming, Golyev’s voice blasted. “Pipe down there! Belay that! By Creation, I’ll shoot the next man who whimpers! The enemy will be here in a minute. All stations, by the numbers, report.”

A measure of discipline returned. These were fighting men. Instruments fingered outward, the remaining computers whirred, minds made deductive leaps, gunners returned to their posts. The Vaynamoan fleet passed through, and the universe exploded in brief pyrotechnics. Many a Chertkoian ship died then, its defenses too battered, its defenders too stunned to ward off the tracking torpedoes. But others fought back, saved themselves, and saw their enemies vanish in the distance.

Still they tumbled off course, their engines helpless to free them. Elva heard a physicists clipped tones give the deduction from his readings. The entire fleet had been caught in a cone of gravitational force emanating from that massive object detected in orbit. Like a maelstrom of astronomical dimensions, it had snatched them from their paths. Those closest and in the most intense field strength — a fourth of the armada — had been wrecked by sheer deceleration. Now the force was drawing them down the vortex of itself.

“But that's impossible!” wailed the Askol’s chief engineer. “A gravity attractor beam of that magnitude… Admiral, it can’t be done! The power requirements would bum out any generator in a microsecond!”

“If s being done,” said Golyev harshly. “Maybe they figured out a new way to feed energy into a space distorter. Now, where are those figures on intensity? And my slide rule...Yeh. The whole fleet will soon be in a field so powerful that — Well, we won’t let it happen. Stand by to hit that generator with everything we’ve got.”

“But sir... we must have — I don’t know how many ships — close enough to it now to be within total destruction radius.”

“Tough on them. Standby. Gunnery Control, fire when ready.’’

And then, whispered, even though that particular line was private and none else in the ship would hear: “Elva. Are you all right down there? Elva!”

Her hands had eased their trembling enough for her to light a cigarette. She didn’t speak. Let him worry. It might reduce his efficiency.

Her screen did not happen to face the vortex source and thus did not show its destruction by the nuclear barrage. Not that that could have registered. The instant explosion of sun-center ferocity transcended any sense, human or electronic. Down on Vaynamo surface, in broad daylight, they must have turned dazzled eyes from that brilliance. Anyone within a thousand kilometers of those warheads died, no matter how much steel and force field he had interposed. Twoscore Chertkoian ships were suddenly manned by corpses. Those further in were fused to lumps. Still further in, they ceased to exist save as gas at millions of degrees temperature. The vessels already crashed on the giant station were turned into unstable isotopes, their very atoms dying.

But the station itself vanished. And Vaynamo had only the capacity to build one such monster. The Chertkoian ships were free again.

“Admiral to all captains!” cried Golyev. “Admiral to all captains. Let the reports wait. Clear the lines. I want every man in the fleet to hear me. Stand by for message.

“Now hear this. This is Supreme Commander Bors Golyev. We just took a rough blow, boys. The enemy had an unsuspected weapon, and cost us a lot of casualties. But we’ve destroyed the thing. I repeat, we blew it out of the cosmos. And I say, well done! I say also, we still have a hundred times the strength of the enemy, and he’s shot his bolt. We’re going on in. We’re going to -”

“Alert! Condition red! Enemy boats returning. Enemy boats returning. Radial velocity circa 50 KPS, but acceleration circa 100 G.”

“What?”

Elva herself saw the Vaynamo an shooting stars come back into sight.

Golyev tried hard to shout down the panic of his officers. Would they stop running around like old women? The enemy had developed something else, some method of accelerating at unheard-of rates under gravitational thrust. But not by witchcraft! It would be an internal-stress compensator developed to ultimate efficiency, plus an adaptation of whatever principle was used in the attractor vortex. Or it could be a breakthrough, a totally new principle, maybe something intermediate between the agoratron and the ordinary interplanetary drive... "Never mind what, you morons! They’re still only a flock of splinters! Kill them!”

But the armada was roiling about in blind confusion. The detectors had given mere seconds of warning, which were lost in understanding that the warning was correct and in frantically seeking to rally men already shaken. Then the splinter fleet was in among the Chertkoians. It braked its furious relative velocity with a near-instantaneous quickness for which the Chertkoian gunners and gun computers had never been prepared. However, the Vaynamoan gunners were ready. And even a boat can carry torpedoes which will annihilate a battleship.

In a thousand fiery bursts, the armada died.

Not all of it. Unarmed craft were spared, if they would surrender. Vaynamoan boarding parties freed such of their countrymen as they found. The Askol, under Golyev’s personal command, stood off its attackers and move doggedly outward toward regions where it could use the agoratron to escape. The captain of a prize revealed that over a hundred Vaynamoans were aboard the flagship. So the attempt to blow it up was abandoned. Instead, a large number of boats shot dummy missiles, which kept the defense fully occupied. Meanwhile a companion force lay alongside, cut its way through the armor, and sent men in.

The Chertkoian crew resisted. But they were grossly outnumbered and outgunned. Most died under bullets and grenades, gas and flamethrowers. Certain holdouts, who fortified an apartment, were welded in from the outside and left to starve or capitulate, whichever they chose. Even so the Askol was so big that the boarding part took several hours to gain full possession.

The door opened. Elva stood up.

At first the half-dozen men who entered seemed foreign. In a minute — she was too tired and dazed to think clearly — she understood why. They were all in blue jackets and trousers, a uniform. She had never seen two Vaynamoans dressed exactly alike. But of course they would be, she thought in a vague fashion. We had to build a navy, didn’t we?

And they remained her own people: fair skin, straight hair, high cheekbones, tilted light eyes which gleamed all the brighter through the soot of battle. And, yes, they still walked like Vaynamoans, the swinging freeman's gait and the head held high, such as she had not seen for... for how long? So their clothes didn't matter, nor even the guns in their hands.

Slowly, through the ringing in her ears, she realized that the combat noise had stopped.

A young man in the lead took a step in her direction, “My lady — ”he began.

“Is that her for certain?” asked someone else, less gently. “Not a collaborator?”

A new man pushed his through the squad. He was grizzled, pale from lack of sun, wearing a sleazy prisoner's coverall. But a smile touched his lips, and his bow to Elva was deep.

“This is indeed my lady of Tervola,” he said. To her: “When these men released me, up in Section Fourteen, I told them we'd probably find you here. I am so glad.”

She needed a while to recognize him. “Oh. Yes.” Her head felt heavy. It was all she could do to nod. “Captain Ivalo. I hope you're all right.”

“I am, thanks to you, my lady. Someday we’ll know how many hundreds are alive and sane — and here! — because of you.”

The squad leader made another step forward, sheathed his machine pistol and lifted both hands toward her. He was a well-knit, good-looking man, blond of hair, a little older than she: in his mid-thirties, perhaps. He tried to speak, but no words came out. and then Ivalo drew him back.

“In a moment,” said the ex-captive, “Let's first take care of the unpleasant business.”

The leader hesitated, then, with a grimace, agreed. Two men shoved forward Bors Golyev. The admiral dripped blood from a dozen wounds and stumbled in his weariness. But when he saw Elva, he seemed to regain himself. “You weren't hurt,” he breathed, as if the words were holy. “I was so afraid...”

Ivalo said like steel: “I've explained the facts of this case to the squad officer here, as well as his immediate superior. I’m sure you’ll join us in our wish not to be inhumane, my lady. And yet a criminal trial in the regular courts would publicize matters best forgotten and could only give him a limited punishment. So we, here and now, under the conditions of war and in view of your high services —”

The squad officer interrupted. He was white about the nostrils. “Anything you order, my lady,” he said. ‘You pass the sentence. Well execute it at once.”

“Elva,” whispered Golyev.

She stared at him, remembering fire and enslavements and a certain man dead on a barricade. But everything seemed distant, not quite real.

“There’s been too much suffering already,” she said.

She pondered a few seconds. “Just take him out and shoot him. ”

The officer looked relieved. He led his men forth. Golyev started to speak, but was hustled a way too fast.

Ivalo remained in the cabin. “My lady —” He began, slow and awkward.

“Yes?” As her weariness overwhelmed her, Elva sat down again on the bunk. She fumbled for a cigarette. There was no emotion in her. only a dull wish for sleep.

“I^’ve wondered... Don’t answer this if you don’t want to. You’ve been through so much.”

“That’s all right,” she said mechanically. “The trouble is over now, isn’t it? I mean, we mustn’t let the past obsess us.”

“Of course. Uh, they tell me Vaynamo hasn’t changed much. The defense effort was bound to affect society somewhat, but they've tried to minimize that, and succeeded. Our culture has a built-in stability, you know, a negative feedback. To be sure, we must still take action about the home planet of those devils. Liberate their slave worlds and make certain they can’t ever try afresh. But that shouldn’t be difficult.

“As for you. I inquired very carefully on your behalf. Tervola remains in your family. The land and the people are as you remember.”

She closed her eyes, feeling the first thaw within herself. “Now I can sleep,” she told him.

Remembering, she looked up with a touch of startlement. “But you had a question for me, Ivalo?”

“Yes. All this time. I couldn’t help wondering. Why you stayed with the enemy. You could have escaped. Did you know all the time how great a service you were going to do?”

Her own smile was astonishing to her. “Well, I knew I couldn’t be much use on Vaynamo,” she said. “Could I? There was a chance I could help on Chertkoi. But I wasn’t being brave. The worst had already happened to me. Now I need only wait...a matter of months only, my time... and everything bad would be over. Whereas, well, if I’d escaped from the Second Expedition, I’d have lived most of my life in the shadow of the Third. Please don’t make a fuss about me. I was actually an awful coward.”

His jaw dropped. “You mean you knew we’d win? But you couldn’t have! Everything pointed the other way!”

The nightmare was fading more rapidly than she had dared hope. She shook her head, still smiling, not triumphant but glad to speak the knowledge which had kept her alive. “You’re being unfair to our people. As unfair as the Chertkoians were. They thought that because we preferred social stability and room to breathe, we must be stagnant. They forgot you can have bigger adventures in, well, in the spirit, than in all the physical universe. We really did have a very powerful science and technology. It was oriented toward life, toward beautifying and improving instead of exploiting nature. But it wasn’t less virile for that. Was it?”

"But we had no industry to speak of. We don’t even now.”

“I wasn’t counting on our factories. I said, but on our science. When you told me about that horrible virus weapon being suppressed, you confirmed my hopes. We aren’t saints. Our government wouldn’t have been quite so quick to get rid of the plague — would at least have tried to bluff with it — if there weren’t something better in prospect. Wouldn’t they?

“I couldn’t even guess what our scientists might develop, given two generations which the enemy did not have. I did think they would probably have to use physics rather than biology. And why not? You can’t have an advanced chemical, medical, genetic, ecological technology without knowing all the physics there is to know. Can you? Quantum theory explains mutations. But it also explains atomic reactions, or whatever they used in those new machines.

‘Oh, yes, Ivalo. I felt sure we’d win. All I had to do myself was work to get us prisoners — especially me, to be quite honest — get us there at the victory.”

He looked at her with awe. Somehow that brought back the heaviness in her. After all, she thought, sixty-two years. Tervola abides. But who will know me? I am going to be so much alone.

Boots rang on metal. The young squad leader stepped back in. “That’s that,” he said. His bleakness vanished and he edged closer to Elva, softly, almost timidly.

“I trust,” said Ivalo with a rich, growing pleasure in his voice, “that my lady will permit me to visit her from time to time.”

“I hope you will,” she murmured.

“We temporal castaways are bound to be disoriented for a while,” he said. “We must help each other. You, for example, may have some trouble adjusting to the fact that your son Hauki, the Freeholder of Tervola —"

“Hauki!” She sprang to her feet. The cabin blurred around her.

“— is now a vigorous elderly man who looks back on a most successful life,” said Ivalo. “Which includes the begetting of Karlavi here. ”Her grandson’s strong hands closed about her own. “Who in turn,” finished Ivalo, “is the recent father of a bouncing baby boy named Hauki. And all your people are waiting to welcome you home.”