Imagine the sound of three hands clapping—multiplied by half a dozen octaries. Such a roar enveloped Mav now as he stood atop a large tree stump, attempting to introduce Captain Koko Featherstone-Haugh to the group of lamviin refugees that he steadfastly refused to call his followers.
A thing with poison-dripping spines had tried to kill me on that very stump not too many days before. Now I hoped that the rattlesnakes and various other nasty creatures could take care of themselves. To lamviin, this artificial desert was an overly humid, purely temporary billet—the only place they were even moderately comfortable aboard ship.
“It isn’t our custom,” Koko was telling them, “to welcome anybody in the name of the Confederacy or any other collective. But I think you’re nice, those I’ve met of you, and I’m very happy that you’re here.”
For some idiotic reason, I had been asked to stand beside the oddly-assorted pair. I was happy that Lucille was there with me, smiling, holding my hand. The ugly things that Sermander had clearly enjoyed saying about her still rankled, but I had not told her about them.
Mymy was off being fitted for a nine-legged smartsuit so rhe could see the rest of the ship without drowning in an attempt to breathe. I looked forward to seeing rher dressed in the height of Confederate fashion.
-3-
Somebody shouted, “Showtime!”
The great ship hesitated, then tipped into the atmosphere. Twelve kilometers in diameter, seven and a half miles across, a world unto herself, with her own mountains, deserts, prairie, ocean, she had never been constructed for such a mission. Inertialess, suspended only by the glare of tachyons from her underside, she skipped, skidded, her leading edge glowing until she was a starship no longer, but a highly improbable gigantic flying thing, high above the scarlet Sodde Lydfan seas.
In an otherwise comfortable living-room recliner, Captain Koko Featherstone-Haugh gripped the arms in grim concentration. I wondered whether, under their fur, gorillas could sweat.
Tom Paine Maru
had no control room—rather, her control-room was inside the captain’s head, wherever that happened to be at the moment. I suddenly heard the structure of the chair-arms fracture with the stress which she put on them, in counterpoint to a constant low moaning in the ship’s tortured structure.
I sat in the crude, upright wooden chair that had served me so well as a weapon, in the fight in that sailor’s bar on Afdiar. My considerate friends had saved it for me, bloodstains and all, as a souvenir.
From the ceiling overhead, strangely enough, came music: some hoarse-voiced woman shouting something about “The Wrecking Ball”. I certainly hoped not. Far beneath us, visible through a floor that had become a window, pink-orange foam frothed over the shallow seas of a dry planet. The broad wakes of two mighty warfleets pointed straight at one another, steaming full speed to keep an appointment with racial death.
We were trying not to be late for the occasion, ourselves.
“There she is!” shouted Couper, pointing a finger like an excited child at the gigantic flagship in the center of the great Podfettian fleet.
“Rhe,” corrected Mav, “the
Wemafe.
It means ‘bird of peace’. Rhe is the largest warship ever constructed in the history of civilization.”
He looked out through a real window—at least I think it was a real window—at a bright blue ocean where I had been sailing with the captain not very long ago. “Our civilization, that is, Lamviin civilization. I am still having difficulties absorbing the magnitude of—”
“
Tom Paine Maru
is not a warship,” insisted Pololo.
For the first time, Koko opened her eyes. She looked up fiercely at all of us. “Why yes she is, dear. We go now to make war on war itself!”
“The
Awe-Inspiring Refulgence!”
Mymy’s voice was louder than Couper’s. Rhe had grown up in a thinner atmosphere than rhe was breathing now. Also, rhe had six orifices to speak through. Rhe pointed to the middle of the Fodduan fleet. “Mav, we’ve got to stop this!”
“I am afraid, my dear surhusband,” Vyssu replied, reflecting her husband’s calm demeanor, “that it is in the hands, as few as they may be per individual, of our new friends. May I have some more tea, Francis?”
“Yes, certainly.” The gorilla poured a few drops onto a silvery rubber pad lying on the floor beside the alien. It would transmit the proper sensations to Vyssu without necessitating the ingestion of fluids.
The giant ship soared lower.
“I’ll be a politician’s nephew,” Couper observed professionally. “It’s the battle of Midway all over again, only with helicopters and dirigibles.” Having only Elsie’s whirlybirds as an example, the aliens had never invented fixed-wing aircraft. I made a note to ask someone about the battle Couper that had mentioned. “Why, this would almost be interesting, if they were playing with anything but atomic bombs down there.”
“Nasty ones,” Rogers grimaced. “With cobalt jackets.”
“I do not believe that the designers were malicious,” offered the Fodduan detective. “Please understand that cobalt is a commonly employed metal in our civilization. I, myself, did not realize what effect—”
“Even so, it was a mighty near thing.” Lucille toyed with a kood stick, “We have a specific mission out here, Mav, to clean up our own trash. There was a lot of debate over interfering with a totally different species. If those had been plain, old-fashioned low-yield nukes ... ”
Mav laughed like six people laughing. “Then perhaps we should be happy that they were not. The danger lasts for thousands of years, you say?”
She nodded, “Base nine or base ten. My mother’s culture never did invent them, not for warfare, anyway. But my father’s did. We’ve seen lots of them out here. Or at least their leavings: millions of minds and everything else on a planet, dead above the evolutionary level of a—”
“
Des,”
all three lamviin supplied at once.
“I’ll bet that’s Fodduan,” Owen Rogers suggested, “for Senator.”
“Here we go!” said Koko between her teeth.
The mighty vessel banked, bringing us out of the sun from the point of view of the two fleets. They were too far apart to see one another, although their aircraft had begun engaging, but they could certainly see us. The shadow cast by the great starship was dozens of kilometers in extent, a gigantic ominous footprint, precisely as her captain had intended it should be. Smoke poured from boiling places in the shallow sea where otherwise intelligent beings had died for their countries.
Fire lashed from
Tom Paine Maru’s
underside, millions of thumb-sized emitters creating a column of raw searing energy many meters in diameter.
“They were just about to throw out the first ball of the season,” Koko explained, “employing the biggest artillery I think I’ve ever seen.”
Koko’s Podfettian victim began to settle slowly, rher bow burnt off where a cannon loaded with a nuclear bomb had been. We were low enough now to see crew-beings scrambling over the sides into the hated sea.
Instantly, another burst of energy leaped out from the starship’s lower hull. An enormous Fodduan dirigible suddenly flashed out of existence.
“Gas-bags to deliver nukes?” Couper shook his head sadly.
“Maybe the last,” said Koko. “I’m hearing from the broach crews, now.”
The tidy patterns of each fleet had begun disintegrating as commanders realized the new threat they were facing. Despite the gorilla’s words, there was a third flash—not from
Tom Paine Maru’s
particle emitters this time—within a kilometer of the starship.
“Whew! That was sure close. One of those would’ve ruined our whole day!” Rogers wiped imaginary sweat from his brow. Personally, I could not help admiring the courage—Fodduan or Podfettian—that had launched that weapon against what must have seemed an invincible new enemy.
“Attention!” Koko demanded suddenly. I looked up, wondering what was going on, only to realize that her eyes were still closed. She was concentrating on her implant readings. “Attention all ships of both fleets! The war is over! Cease your hostilities immediately! This is the Solar Confederacy’s starship
Tom Paine Maru
ordering you to cease hostilities or perish! The war is over! I repeat, the war is over!”
Another
flash!
as a Podfettian cruiser emptied its artillery at us. The war might well be over, but it was going to be a long, noisy peace.
-4-
The decoratively-enameled deck pitched slowly beneath my feet in a languid swell that was all the thick, blood-colored seas of Sodde Lydfe were capable of generating. Allowing for the traditional lamviin attitude toward water, it may have seemed like a sizable storm to the frightened sailors who had been forced to abandon their vessel at the height of an engagement that had turned, for them, into a nightmarish fantasy.
Adjusting the soles of my feet for medium adhesion, I looked aft, through the haze of battle.
Tom Paine Maru’s
tachyon “cannon” (the same devices that drove her through space) had burned a blackened pit three meters across, straight through the
Amybo Kiidetz,
from rher ornately-decorated upper deck to rher specially-stiffened fighting keel.
Rhe was a comparatively new vessel, crisply painted where fire had not blistered the shocking pink that, on this world, served as naval camouflage. Smoke drifted from the smoldering hole that had been rher death wound. From time to time, I heard a muffled sound of small explosions. Only rher deeply-carved water-tight doors kept the vessel afloat this long.
Lucille stepped through the broach behind me.
“Wow,
art deco militaire!
I’ll bet that, if Aubrey Beardsley had been a nine-legged furry pseudo-crustacean, he’d approve. Too bad about all this damage, though. She’s absolutely beautiful, isn’t she, Whitey?”
“Rhe,” I corrected automatically.
But Lucille was absolutely right. From rher breathtakingly lovely, dramatic, downswept ramming-prow—embellished with floral scrolls ground deeply out of living stainless steel—to the upswept, equally figured cowling wrapped around rher gigantic pusher-fan, rhe was some three-eyed architect’s vision of harmony. Even rher gun-turrets flowed into the structure of the ship without interrupting those graceful lines.
Somewhere below, I knew, there would be a massively-shielded fission powerplant to drive the fan, crew-quarters, officers’ country, galleys, messrooms, communications shacks, every one of them alien in design, yet streamlined sufficiently in concept to be recognizable, admirable.
I was finding that I liked the lamviin, Fodduan or Podfettian. Maybe saving them from their ultimate fate was a presumptuous intrusion, as the Lieutenant had said, but I was glad we were doing it.
Time enough later for feeling guilty.
Lucille consulted her implant: “Through this door here, across to the other side of the deck, down three flights, and a left turn. Why do you suppose they bolted the nuke so firmly into the ribs of the ship?”
That, of course, was why we were here.
“Upstairs”, a dozen very busy technical squads were confiscating nuclear weapons via broach—then slapping them into stasis until somebody figured out what to do with them—those that had not been vaporized hastily because they had been armed. This particular bomb was presenting problems that called for a “primitive expert” once again.
One with training in dismantling the things.
Armorer-corporal Guess Who.
Poking the muzzle of my Dardick through the rainbow-enameled steel hatchway, I bent halfway over, then followed it into a big, deserted, low-ceilinged cross-corridor. Colors really got bright, once you were inside.
“Well, I can see now that my first theory was no good, after all, that rhe was intended as a giant manned—or make that ‘lammed’—torpedo ... ”
“Fire-ship,” Koko said. “A nuclear fireship.”
Lucille was right behind me, her suit-top brushing the overhead. I was having second thoughts about that pair of plasma-guns at my back. They did not have a “line” of fire, they had a field, a broad one, at that.
“Rhe is not a fire-ship, then,” I said. “Rhe is much too new, much too pretty. Also, it is much too early in the war. Later on, perhaps, when one side or another begins to get desperate ... But just look at how clean rhe is. Rher crew took pride in rher, Lucille. I feel awful about having done this to them. This is an absolutely gorgeous machine.”
Traversing the corridor, we passed several open doorways. Bending forward, I examined what could only be an auxiliary bridge: three massively ornate wheels, a clever periscope, binnacles for navigation in the shapes of mythical characters, radar set in expensive-looking framing, etched embellishments encompassing the telecommunications screens.
Aft, across the corridor, was a chart-room.
Lucille said, “It’s only a murdering-machine, Whitey, however well-gilded. What do you think, then, that it’s a self-destruct mechanism?”
“Not with that yield, the biggest fission-bomb I ever heard of, enough to vaporize a dozen ships this size, along with a major city for dessert. A bomb like that could turn even
Tom Paine Maru
into junk.”