The Starfishers called them ambergris. Ambergris was the foundation of their economy.
The nodes were used in instel communicators. There was no substitute. The Seiners controlled the only supply, and, consequently, the market and price.
Countless were the organizations which would pay almost any price for near-instantaneous communication across interstellar distance.
Moyshe benRabi and Masato Storm had been sent among the Seiners to try to find a way for their employers, Confederation Navy, to seize the harvestships and ambergris industry. They had succeeded and failed. They had found the information…
And had elected to become Starfishers themselves.
The hydrogen streams boasted a complex ecology. It included the predatory “shark,” which subsisted principally upon starfish. Evolution had equipped starfish with only one truly credible defensive weapon. Intellect.
Deep-space evolution had begun eons before the condensation of Old Earth’s sun. The modern starfish species had a remembered history spanning billions of years. They had seen countless planet-born races come and go. They knew the value of their waste.
Over the past thousand Terran years, an eye’s blink in the life of a starfish, shark numbers had exploded insanely. A new species was coming into being. It reasoned feebly, bred obsessively, and hunted in cooperative packs which now, sometimes, numbered as many as a thousand predators. The survival of the starfish species had come into sudden doubt.
Their Old Ones had deliberated with almost immoderate haste. A decision had been reached. They turned their intelligence to finding a means of contacting the tiny, hard, warm creatures who lived in the metal shells questing around their wakes.
They had struck a bargain with the original Starfishers. Ambergris in return for the protection of human weapons. It had been a good bargain. The sharks had been kept at bay for two hundred years.
Another mere blink of Time’s eye.
Then the ever more numerous sharks had developed the tactic of assailing the protectors before the protected.
Danion had enlisted landsmen as emergency replacements for heavy casualties suffered during one such attack. Her leaders had hoped to draw high quality technicians who might be seduced away from their lives in Confederation. Instead, they had attracted scores of spies sent in hopes of capturing control of a harvestfleet. Confederation’s Bureau of Naval Intelligence had sent senior field agents Moyshe benRabi and Masato Igarashi Storm.
The two had found what promised to be a home.
Sirens wailed throughout Danion.
Amy jerked out of her seat. “Moyshe! Battle stations! We must be coming out of the flash wave.”
BenRabi surged out of the bedroom, climbing into his jumpsuit as he came. “Let’s go, honey.” He dragged her into the passageway outside, where a pair of electric scooters nursed charger sockets. He seized one, she the other. “See you, love,” he said as he sailed away.
He pulled to the center of the passage and opened the scooter up. The walls blurred past. People were running in the pedestrian lanes. Scooters hurtled at him from the opposite direction. There were near collisions at every cross corridor. A voice like that of a god kept booming, “Battle stations. Battle station.”
Damn, damn, damn, Moyshe thought. I shouldn’t be going back under so soon.
Five vast and tangled ships began nosing out of the intense nova light. The blowfly vessels still swarmed around their wounds, and between them and the derelict tumbling along in their midst, guarded by their shell of fire. One by one, the five great ships rolled to present their heaviest weapons outward from a common center.
Two: 3049 AD
The Contemporary Scene
A ship came into being slightly below the surface of a dust lake rilling a crater on a nameless moon circling a world far in toward the center of the galaxy. The most centerward world of Ulant lay a thousand light years rimward. No human being had traveled this part of space before.
Astronomers on the primary, had they been watching, would have been astonished by the geyser which exploded from the crater’s flat dust face.
No astronomers were watching. They, like soldiers, wives, derelicts, and children… like everyone who lived on that world, were engaged in a death struggle so demanding they had ceased caring whether their satellite existed.
The ship that bobbed to the dust’s surface looked like a giant doughnut with a beer can shoved through the hole and held in place by thin straws. One tall vane, like a shark’s fin, rose from the torus, leaning away from the cylinder. A globe surmounted it.
The whole vessel was dead black. Not even a hull number broke its lack of color.
It was a tiny ship. The beer can was just sixty meters tall. The outer diameter of the doughnut barely spanned sixty-five meters. The curves of the vessel were broken only by a handful of antennae, two missile launch bays, and the snouts of laser and graser batteries. She was a deadly little beast, designed solely to kill.
She was a museum piece. Literally. And the nastiest little shark of a warship ever conceived by the mind of Man.
She was a Climber left over from the Ulantonid War. She had been dragged from the War Museum at Luna Command and reactivated especially for this mission.
She was the first Climber to space since the war’s most desperate days—because Climbers were almost as deadly to their crews as to the enemies they stalked. Only the absolute imperative of racial survival would see them used in combat again.
Luna Command had that much heart. The Climber Fleets had been too destructive of the minds and bodies of their crews.
The little ambushers had changed the course of the Ulantonid War. And had filled the sanitariums of Confederation with walking wounded, the few survivors of service within their sanity-devouring fields of concealment.
The Climber generated a field in her torus which drove her into a dimension beyond hyper-space, called Null, where she remained virtually undetectable till she returned to Hyper or Norm to attack.
Climbers in schools had destroyed whole Ulantonid fleets.
This Climber had the most remarkable crew of any Navy had ever spaced.
Her Ship’s Commander was Manfred, Fleet Admiral Graf von Staufenberg, First Deputy Chief of Staff of Confederation Navy. He had seen Climber duty toward the end of the war. The ship’s First Watch Officer was Melene Telle-eych Cath, Defender Prime of Ulant, or Minister of Defense. Her Operations Officer was Ulant’s Principal Peacemaker, or Chief of the General Staff, Turone Wahl-chyst Forse. Her Gunnery Officer and his leading mates were Star Lords of the Toke. One was the Star Lord who commanded Confederation’s Marine Toke Legion. The others ranked him in the Caste of Warriors.
There was no man or woman aboard, of any of five races, who ranked below the equivalent of Admiral or General, and none of them were not decision-makers.
A well-placed missile could have crippled the defenses of humanity and all its neighbors.
Admiral Wildblood, the lady who directed Navy’s Bureau of Naval Intelligence, and Admiral Beckhart, who ran her department of dirty tricks, had two of the more menial assignments in Operations. One watched the hyper detection gear, the other the passive radar scans.
Star Lords and all, they slept in hammocks slung from the Climber’s central structural member, or “keel.” They shared the one toilet and did without the shower that had never existed. In Climb they used portable chamberpots and smelled one another’s stinks as had the Climbermen of an age gone by.
One and all, they had come to see for themselves the growing disaster Ulantonid explorers had been bemoaning for years.
They had seen film. They had questioned witnesses. In some cases they had begun to act. But they had had to see with their own eyes before they could finally believe.
They had to watch the war going on below. On the primary of the moon.
A race from farther in toward the galactic core was systematically exterminating every sentient cre
ature it encountered. The natives of this world were their latest victims.
The people aboard the Climber came of races which had fought bitterly in the past. There was little love among some of them now. But never, in the most desperate, heated days of their contention, had any considered eradicating their enemies. Their wars had been tests of racial wills, with territorial causes.
This world was the fourth assailed by the centerward race since its discovery by Ulantonid explorers. The first three worlds were lifeless now. The aggressors even shunned their use as bases.
Even the Warriors of Toke could not comprehend the destruction of intelligent life simply because it was intelligent.
The Warriors believed battle to be a crucible for purification of the soul, a road to honor and glory, grimly majestic and godlike. For them combat was almost an end in itself. They fought one another when there were no outsiders.
They were perfectly aware of the distinction between victory and obliteration. They were as appalled by the excesses of the centerward race as were any of their shipmates.
They had come to see for themselves. And the grim truth burned in the Climber’s display tank.
The world’s atmosphere was alive with spiderwebs of coherent light. Energy and particle beams hacked air and space like the flailing swords of a thousand ancient armies. The planet people had the technological edge. The exterminators had the numbers and determination. Their ships clouded the stars.
They had overwhelmed the world’s off-planet protection months ago. Now they were pounding the on-world defenses, and were making their initial landings.
Star-bright, short-lived pinpoints speckled the world’s surface.
“They’re using nuclears!” Ulant’s Defender growled. Even during their war’s bitterest hour, neither human nor Ulantonid had violated each other’s worlds with nuclear weapons. By tacit agreement those had been confined to vacuum.
“They know we’re here,” Beckhart called out. “Seven destroyer displacement ships are headed this way.”
“Very well,” Graf von Staufenberg replied. “Melene, most of that looks like it’s happening in the troposphere. They’re probably not pushing one in a thousand warheads through to the surface.”
The Star Lord who commanded all Star Lords boomed, “Every one through destroys. The defense net weakness. Soon it will be two of a thousand. Then four.”
“Not to mention what the radioactivity will do in the long run. Makes you wonder why they’re forcing it with landings. Here. This south tropic archipelago. They’ve punched an open corridor down there.”
“Hell of a defense,” someone muttered. “Damn near as tough as Stars’ End. I wouldn’t want to try breaking it.”
“How long till those destroyers are pushing us?” von Staufenberg asked.
“They’re humping it in Norm. Four or five minutes for the closest. Looks like some other stuff starting to move, too.”
“Can’t we do anything?” the D.N.I. demanded.
Von Staufenberg replied, “We could bloody a few noses. It wouldn’t change anything. We couldn’t do that with a hundred Climbers. There’re just too damned many of them. Okay, let’s give the people in the other compartments a look. I want everybody to see it. We’ll have some decision to make on our way home.”
“The Warriors have decided,” said the Star Lord of the Marine Toke Legion.
“He speaks for Toke,” his non-Service superior added. “For Toke there can be but one decision. We will come to them here. Alone if we have to.”
“It’s not that easy for me, Manfred,” Melene said. “We’re an adventurous species but I’m handicapped by democratic traditions and faith in peace. We don’t organize quickly or well.”
Von Staufenberg chuckled. “You did before.”
The Defender was older than he. She had been a soldier throughout the Ulantonid War.
“I expect we will again. We can do anything when we decide to pull together. It’s the decision process that’s so abominably slow.”
“Your decisions were made years ago, Melene,” Beckhart growled from his radar boards. “Don’t try to snow us. I can give you the names and hull numbers of a hundred new construction ships you’ve got tucked away in places you never thought we’d look.”
“Admiral Beckhart?” von Staufenberg queried.
“I have my sources, sir. They’re rearming as fast as their shipbuilding industry can space hulls. They come off the line looking like commercial ships, only they’ve got drive potential up the yang-yang, and they never get delivered to any of the transport outfits. They disappear for a while, then turn up somewhere else with guns dripping off them.”
“Why wasn’t High Command informed of this, Beckhart?”
“Because my sources are in the Defender’s office. And I knew why they were rearming. You wouldn’t have bought it. Half of High Command is still trying to refight the Ulantonid War. I let it go on playing that game because people were seeing enough of those new ships to get nervous and start us a secret building program of our own. So we’re on our way too.”
“Beckhart… Your logic baffles me. Totally baffles me. I have the distinct feeling that you’ll have to explain it to a Board of Inquiry. What else have you hidden from us?”
“You want an honest answer, or one that will please you?” Beckhart did not make many friends. He retained his position principally because no one else could do his job as well.
“Beckhart!”
“Several things, sir. Ongoing operations. If they work out, we’ll be in good shape for meeting these monsters.”
“Monsters?” Melene demanded. “There’s no evidence…”
“Melene, the Admiral is a xenophobe. In fact, he doesn’t like people very much. Tell me what you’re doing, Beckhart.”
“There’s a chance I’m on the threshold to the solution of the Sangaree problem. Some new data was on its way in before we left. I’ll probably want to borrow von Drachau again.”
“What else?”
“Still too tentative for discussion. A possible breakthrough in communications and weapons technologies. I won’t discuss it now. Not here.”
“Beckhart…”
“Security privilege. Sir. Log it if you like.”
Von Staufenberg wheeled on the Director of Naval Intelligence. She shrugged. “You won’t get anything from me, either, Manfred.”
“Damn! All right, let’s get moving. Time’s running out, and everybody’s got to have a look at this.”
Climbers were the most cramped vessels since Gemini. Circulating the forty-odd beings aboard was a slow, uncomfortable process.
“She’s about to start shooting,” Beckhart said of the nearest destroyer. “She has. Missile swarm. We have four minutes to hide.”
“How do you like that? Didn’t even try to find out who we were or what we wanted.”
“This is the Ship’s Commander,” von Staufenberg said into the public address system. “We’re under fire. Engineering, stand by to go Null.” Thirty seconds before the swarm arrived, he ordered, “Take her up to ten Bev. First Watch Officer, a gesture is in order. Program me an attack approach on the vessel shooting at us.”
The Ulantonid’s feathery antennae stirred, quivered. The action was comparable to a human’s pleased chuckle.
The Star Lords were in Weapons Department already, hoping they would be allowed to play with their deadly toys.
“One missile,” said von Staufenberg. “Right up her wake.”
It was the classic Climber attack strategy. Drives were a warship’s soft spot. They simply could not be designed so that thrust apertures could be shielded as well as the remainder of the vessel.
The dust in the crater flowed together suddenly, smashing in like the Red Sea on Pharaoh’s chariots. The doughnut ship had vanished.
“Take her all the way to forty Bev,” von Staufenberg ordered. “I doubt they know enough to look for our Hawking Point, but l
et’s get that cross-section down anyway.” One of the curiosities about the Climber was that no other race known to humanity had ever developed it. And for humans it had been an accidental by-product of other research.
Twenty-three minutes passed before the First Watch Officer reported, “Attack position, Commander.”
“Weapons, Ship’s Commander. One missile. Stand by. Detection, when we go down I want you to get the ranges and vectors on everything you can see. We’ll do what we can. And I want the tape rolling. Ship’s Services, vent heat while we’re Norm. All right. Everybody ready? Take her down, Engineering.”
Heat accumulation was the biggest weakness of the Climber. There was no way to shed heat in Null. And a Climber often had to stay up for days while enemy warships hunted her.
The Climber was no warship in the slug-it-out sense. She was a hit-and-run fighter dependent on surprise for her effectiveness.
The Defender Prime brought them down just four kilometers behind the destroyer. The Climber rocked. The missile accelerated at 100 g. It arrived before the destroyer knew it was coming.
“One for the good guys,” Beckhart grumped as the Climber went up again.
“What was that?” von Staufenberg demanded.
“Admiral, you’re giving them valuable information just by blowing them out of space. You’re telling them we can do it. You’ll get them wondering how. Head home before we give them any hard data. Let’s save the surprises for when they’ll do some good.”
Von Staufenberg reddened. There was no love lost between him and Beckhart.
“He’s right, Manfred,” the Defender Prime interjected. “You almost wasted the Climber advantage by committing them piecemeal during the war. They would have more effective if whole fleets had appeared suddenly. We would not have had time to adapt.”
“Of course. Of course. I was thinking with my guts. Program a course for the mother, Melene.”
Climbers did not have a long range. A mother ship awaited this one a hundred light-years homeward. A small armada protected her.