The Days of Glory Page 14

  Slavesdream and Stormwind both know this. That is why Slavesdream-as-Stormwind has the power to save the Beasts. That is why Stormwind-as-Slavesdream takes a dramatic revenge on Alexander Blackstar of Home.

  THE BATTLE OF THE KARNAK SYSTEM

  David Starbird, high lord of the House of Stars, imagined the taste of blood in his mouth. He tried to make the dull pain in his right hand transform itself into a querulous lust to strangle and stab. His hot eyes searched the cold blackness of the screen in front of him and read his victory in the pattern. But there was no impassioned triumph in his stare no matter how hard he tried. His conscience still had its doubts.

  Eagleheart reached Karnak less than a minute ahead of him, with nowhere at all to go. The precious minutes he needed in order to land were simply not there. There was no alternative but to stand and fight, or to run and be hounded until he did.

  Starbird raised the gloved wreckage of his hand and held it in front of the screen so he could see both the bagful of shattered fingers and the cloud of beaten ships at the same time. It was a theatrical gesture which gave him very little satisfaction.

  As he reached the end of the alignment path, the Beasts, maintaining a tight, clustered formation, went into a simple evasion pattern. He concluded from the rigid pattern that the whole fleet was locked together. The Human ships made no immediate attempt to lock on to individual targets. Doing so would have set them up in the screens of all the Beast ships. Instead they began to try and outmaneuver the Beasts.

  Shots were fired in profusion as the Humans poured around tie clustered Beasts like flies around decaying meat.

  There was little damage sustained by either side while the Humans were still in the rear. But gradually they eased around their quarry and the Beasts began to die.

  Starbird could visualize Eagleheart searching his mind for a plan—some miracle maneuver which would nullify his numerical inferiority and give him an even chance. Starbird gloated that there was no such gambit even if Eagleheart had the time to execute it. Seconds ticked away while the tentative englobing of the Beasts continued, and the rhythmic flight of the Beasts took them in a random dance over light-years of empty space around and within the Kamak system.

  He found himself enjoying the game of cat and mouse, though more as a game than a matter of life and death. White light seared his screens from time to time, but the ship never gave the frightening shudder that would bring the reality of the battle into the control room. At the moment there was only the dull ache of his hand and a calculating determination to smash the Beasts for good and all.

  He balanced the fingers of his good hand on the control panel, and piloted the ship with confident skill. He watched Beast ships erupting into grey blurs on the screen as his control gunner fired again and again. The Beast ships were slowly but surely surrounded in all three dimensions.

  And then they broke. While the Human ships were spread at their thinnest, the Beasts broke formation and every individual ship made its own bid to escape. Eagleheart had given up the battle and was trying to save what fives he could. Anything which survived would not be a fleet. It would be scattered all over space. The Humans would never allow it to unite again.

  Then Starbird’s few brief moments of victory ended in a blaze of silver on a side screen away to his left. His smile drained away and a splash of pain from his hand made him snatch it back to his chest. The silver arrowhead streaked into his loose, globular formation.

  “Stormwind!” he breathed. He had not heard Eagleheart’s appeal. His eavesdropping had ended after the lift-off from Sapia. He had not even guessed that Eagleheart might try, nor that Stormwind might respond. For once, he was not one move ahead of the Beasts. He had outguessed them for long enough—it was their turn again now.

  The Beasts had obviously seen and understood as well. The ships which a moment before had begun to run for their lives had now completely overcome their panic. They were turning to attack and engage while the Humans still paused in surprise.

  Neither Beasts nor Humans had any semblance of a formation, but the Ursides had, and they were using it to maximum effect. They carved their way through the Human fleet like a knife.

  THE HERO’S SHADOW

  Saul Slavesdream was Stormwind. He was drunk with his power.

  Richard Stormwind was on Diadema, waiting in Slaves-dream’s ship, alone.

  And Slavesdream had his ship and his identity, and was living Stormwind to the full. Saul Slavesdream attacked with a precision and a fury that only Stormwind was capable of. His ships were on a preconceived flight plan, which he modified with a continuous stream of orders. His ships slashed the Human fleet into tatters, soaring through the loose cloud and back again. The gunners hardly ever missed and they lost only a handful of ships. It was an attack which was steeped in Stormwind’s arrogance and Stormwind’s boldness. And it had Stormwind’s brilliant success.

  The Humans, still fighting the battle they had engineered, and totally unprepared for the way things had gone, wavered and hesitated. Moments lost in confusion destroyed any chance they might have had—and that was slight. A few precious seconds when Starbird was silent—and the men who flew the Human ships had no ideas—was all Slavesdream needed to assure him of a dramatic and majestic victory.

  Slavesdream had not even considered what the other Beast ships might be doing when he made his onslaught, but when the shock was over and he needed them, they were there and fighting with new heart and new determination, riding on the triumphant tide of his fury. His insulting recklessness had shattered the Humans, and suddenly there was no doubt at all who was hunter and who was prey as the Beasts threw themselves through the sky.

  Starbird still had a fractional edge in terms of the actual number of ships involved in the battle, but the discrepancy was disappearing, and his position was absolutely hopeless. There was no chance whatsoever of finding a coherent counterattack. It was the turn of the Human commander to think in terms of immediate flight or heavy loss.

  Starbird, though, made the wrong choice. It was the first 103 time in the campaign—probably the first in the entire war. His hand hurt and he was sick with the reaction to his triumph being turned to fear. He delayed the order to run. Moments that should have been spent in aligning were lost in futile fight.

  Eagleheart poured orders into high-omega, taking over from Slavesdream and uniting the efforts of the whole fleet. No one eavesdropped now, and it could have done the Humans no good if they had. Eagleheart’s formation did not tighten, but it took on a certain shape. There was an elegance to its murderous precision. It made brief patterns which flowed and separated, slicing the Human fleet into incoherent ribbons, leaving trails of bright dots helpless in empty space while groups of Beast ships cut out and overwhelmed single enemy ships.

  Saul Slavesdream completed his fifth sweep through the battle area. The ships following him had curled away in long lines to fit into Eagleheart’s grander pattern, but Slavesdream still followed Stormwind’s lone paths with unbridled aggression and arrogant flair. As he pulled the ship round from clear space, he surveyed what he had done; the results spread panoramically across four of his screens. It was perfect and beautiful. Eagleheart’s ships, joined and supported by his own, made full use of what he had given them.

  With the exultation of a great and successful warrior, he hurled Stormwind’s ship after a wayward Human ship and watched his control gunner blast it into dust. Then there were ships all around him again, pale shadows that were Beasts and clear, frightened sparks that were Humans. The Humans were not wasting computer time trying to evade the enemy—they were aligning at last, far too late.

  Saul Slavesdream had won a battle for Stormwind, and claimed such a terrible price for his victory that the Humans now were in grave danger of losing the war in a matter of minutes.

  THE PRICE OF SUCCESS

  Alexander Blackstar had been one of the leaders as the Humans lifted from Sapia. He was one of the first to get right round the fle
eing Beasts and come in from ahead. When Slavesdream’s force made its devastating attack, he was on the far side of the globe of ships, and watched the whole maneuver with awed astonishment from a safe position. Helplessly, he watched the dagger formation cut through and through again, and then separate and become part of the larger plan. His gunners blazed away at Beast ships but hit nothing and were never under imminent threat themselves.

  Blackstar kept his eyes on the ship that was the point of the dagger as it cut back and forth, a powerful individual who went his own way instead of joining Eagleheart’s deadly dance. His fingers worked the controls rapidly to keep that one ship in his sights, and work his way closer to it. He felt absolutely certain that this particular spark—identical to any other—was the ship of Richard Stormwind. He was correct about the ship, and perhaps—for the time being— about its captain. He felt sure that only Stormwind would have attacked like that and brought it off with such style. Only Stormwind would linger as he turned from one sweep into another, as he twice saw this ship do.

  He watched with grim concentration as the ship disposed of a faded dot that was a Human ship, and worked his own ship closer in dexterous pursuit. The Beast ship moved rapidly and with little deviation from a straight line. Black-star was able to gain a little by moving fractionally faster, but dared not go too fast in case he lose his quarry on a fast turn.

  His gunners blasted two Beast ships that got uncomfortably close, and sporadic splashes of light and the occasional slight shudder reminded him constantly of the danger he was in. But he was after that one ship, and he would not look after his own safety. He wanted to meet Richard Stormwind, the man whom rumor had made into a near myth, even if it was another man who actually fired the fatal shot.

  The ship was not consciously trying to avoid him, but it managed to stay tantalizingly out of confident range. The control gunner fired once or twice, but was too optimistic. If the Beast returned the fire, he felt no sign.

  Starbird’s voice came from the high-omega apparatus, saying “Align for Alph. Align for Alph.” It was a belated decision, and it might not save enough ships to continue the war.

  Blackstars hand hovered reluctantly over the incoder. A second or two and he would be locked on Stormwind’s ship. The whole battle seemed to be hanging, as though poised. The Beasts were aligning too, but whether for Alph or for Diadema, he could only guess.

  He locked on Stormwind’s ship and the control gunner was an instant too slow in firing. The Beast had seen the danger and had sideslipped. The control gunner fired twice more, and Bellsong cursed as nothing came of it. The Beast ship weaved but did not fire back. Blackstar concluded that the rear-screen gun must be burnt out or jammed. The kill was his for the taking.

  Abandoning all thought of alignment, he gave chase.

  Similarly forsaking its chance of aligning, Stormwind’s ship swung desperately to try and maneuver another gun into firing position. But Blackstar was too close and too keen.

  Both fleets aligned and disappeared from the screens on maximum velocity. Only two ships remained in the Kamak system: the pursuer and the pursued.

  And the mad hunt went on. Saul Slavesdream found himself near Karnak's sun and in dire trouble. The Human ship was always on his tail, and the gun on the rear screen had seized. Unless he could get away at least long enough to change the positions slightly he had no chance at all.

  Had he known what Judson Deathdancer had done in the system where he had found himself trapped, he might have adopted the same course of action, but it was not one of the insane plans which flashed through his mind.

  He turned round to the control gunner: a taciturn Urside who was Stormwind’s second-in-command. “What can we do?” he asked.

  Mistream looked back at him. He had been glad to join the battle and answer Eagleheart’s call for help, and he had been impressed by Slavesdream’s attack. But he would far rather be with the real Stormwind by his side. He had no answer to offer.

  Slavesdream became aware for a horrible instant that he was Saul Slavesdream of Vespa and not Stormwind of Sa-bella, but the moment passed and his resolve did not weaken. Courage still held him in his assumed role.

  “What would Stormwind do?” demanded Slavesdream, aloud, although the question was really addressed to himself. Mistream, beside him, shrugged his shoulders eloquently.

  Slavesdream looked behind him at the rear screen, without stopping his fingers in their eager plucking at the control board. Then he measured the great red orb of Karnak's sun and the smaller red dots that were Kamak and its sister planet. He was not sure which one was Kamak, but an idea that was not quite insane was forming.

  He swerved the general direction of his escape pattern toward the nearer of the red dots, centering it on the control screen and keeping it nearby. He was by no means sure that this was the habitable world, but he was willing to take any available chance.

  Blackstar, following, saw that Slavesdream was heading for the planet. He got a little closer while the Beast ship altered the trend of its escape pattern; and Bellsong released a hopeful shot which could not have missed by very much.

  For a moment Blackstar thought that Slavesdream was going to attempt a landing and thereby set himself up as the perfect target for long seconds. Then he dispelled the thought and sought another explanation.

  Then he guessed what Slavesdream was going to do.

  KARNAK

  Kamak is a bleak, depressing world. It is all the wrong color: its grass is almost blue, its sky is a delicate mauve. There is nothing actually wrong with the world, but it is a little unsettling. Hence it is unsettled.

  It is possible that some might think its strangeness beautiful. The weird play of light when the sun sets is unlike anything that can be seen on any of the inhabited worlds. The strange, gnarled trees whose boles tie themselves in knots are attractive in their own way. They come in all shapes and sizes, all over the continents of the planet, every species being subject to the same weird affliction.

  Nobody understands why Kamak is the way it is. Nobody really cares. The universe gets along very well without it. There are millions of worlds that are perfectly habitable without even thinking about Karnak.

  CRASH ON KARNAK

  Slavesdream hurled the ship into a tight arc which took him in a circle round the planet. There was no gravitational effect, but it took careful control to bring the ship in close. Blackstar stuck tight to his tail; but as the two ships got closer and closer to the planet, Blackstar began to merge with the red blur of the horizon. Slavesdream abandoned the slight sway which he had maintained to make shooting difficult and concentrated wholly on getting further down into the atmosphere.

  As he circled the planet, he spiralled closer to the surface of Kamak. The blurred, deceptive horizon straightened out but did not alter its position on the screen. It was all guesswork piloting the ship: he had no idea how close he was. He could not guess from the curvature because he did not know how large the planet was in real terms.

  Blackstar was totally invisible, but he knew that he had nowhere near the time required for a landing. But with luck he could turn the ship and get in the first shot as the Human ship appeared over the horizon. He took the ship a little lower, to make sure that he was as undetectable as possible, and spun tire ship. The inertial-adjustment apparatus screamed at the maneuver, and several dials on the control board told him that tire shield was having difficulties with the atmospheric friction. The friction was not nearly as bad as it would have been had they been in space but there was trouble nevertheless. Blackstar’s ship hurtled over the horizon almost as soon as he made the maneuver, and one of the side-screen gunners opened fire. But now the ships were too close and moving far too quickly across each other’s screens. The shots all missed.

  Slavesdream wheeled the ship again, and the omega-drive gave up the struggle. It kicked him sideways and cut out altogether. He scrambled back to the control panel, which was flashing warning lights all over the place. He s
aw the red surface of the planet suddenly limned in startling red clarity and filling the control screen. He fired all the girdle motors and pulled the ship’s nose right up, but he continued to fall. He wrestled for lift but only managed forward speed. Blackstar’s silver dot appeared again on the rear screen, but Slavesdream must have been lost in the blur because he did not fire.

  It did not matter now whether Blackstar shot them down or not. They were lost. Slavesdream could accomplish nothing by his frantic attempts to oppose the fall. He searched the screen for water to cushion the impact, but there was only desolate moor and mountain. He gained a great deal of forward velocity as he arced down, and the ground sped by as it came up to meet him. He threw the girdle motors into reverse in an attempt to lose airspeed, but the ship was doomed.

  He felt the jar and shear as the ship tore into the crown of a small piece of woodland. All his spacedrive motors were still blazing, and he must have blasted the trees into nothing. There was a brief moment of freedom while the ship broke like an eggshell and bounced slowly from one group of trees to another. The gravity cushion and the shield—which had hung on when the omega-drive had started malfunctioning, and saved the ship from utter destruction on the way down—finally cut out, and Slavesdream and the Ur-sides were hurled across the room by suddenly released inertia. The spaceship was cut into two, and the pieces be- gan to fragment. A hole appeared in the control room and widened rapidly, splintering three of the screens. Slaves-dream was hurled out of the gap into the waiting arms of a twisted tree which supported him for a few crazy seconds and then dropped him heavily on to the humus-cushioned ground. There did not seem to be a single part of his body that was not hurt, but as the shock died he was surprised to find that he was reasonably undamaged and even able to stand up.