Raiders From the Rings Read online

The web was gentle but firm, adhering to itself but not to its victim as the inactivated strands fell to the floor like strips of gauze bandage. But the girl started struggling violently the moment he came near and the webs tightened perceptibly.

  “Just hold still,” Ben said. “The more you fight the more they tighten up and the harder it is to get them free.”

  The girl only struggled harder. Ben cut a mass of strands that were holding her right arm behind her neck; then he cut the left arm loose. Half-released, the girl twisted around suddenly and bit his arm as hard as she could.

  Ben jerked away. “Say, stop that!”

  “Then get away from me,” the girl said viciously.

  “I’m only trying to release you.”

  “Don’t you ever touch me!” the girl said. “If you so much as come near me you’re going to get bitten.”

  Ben sat back and glared at her. The radio was chattering with incoming signals now, and the ship was jarring violently as ground-to-air missiles exploded too close for comfort. In anger Ben snatched a cleaning towel from the rack and unceremoniously stuffed it into the girl’s mouth, tying the corners behind her ears. “Now go ahead and bite,” he said. “I’m going to get this web off before you choke yourself in it.”

  She continued to struggle, making indignant noises through the towel, as Ben cut the rest of the tangle web free. He dodged flailing arms and legs as she hit him in the jaw with her knee, and then in the pit of the stomach with a bare heel. Once she was untangled, he pulled away the gag. Her teeth were chattering and she could hardly talk. “Just keep away from me,” she cried, backing away from him and across the cabin toward her brother. “Just don’t come near me.”

  There was no doubting it: the girl was terrified, almost incoherent with fear. “I’m not going to touch you,” Ben said. “I’m not even going to lay a finger on you.”

  “Go ahead and lie,” the girl shot back at him. “You can’t fool me.”

  Ben spread his hands helplessly. “What’s she afraid of?” he asked her brother.

  “What do you think she’s afraid of? What are we supposed to think you kidnaped her for?”

  “To be a mauki, of course,” Ben said.

  “What’s a mauki?”

  “Why, a mauki’s a … a mauki,” Ben said, staring at the youth. The Earthman sounded as though he had never heard the word before, and Ben’s confusion deepened. What could he say to explain, if these people were really ignorant of a mauki’s place in the Spacer world? That a mauki was the wife of a Spacer? His companion in the dreadful loneliness of a Spacer’s life? The mother of his boys? The proud and loyal head of the Spacer family? A mauki was all of these things, of course, and far more that was not so easy to express — at least not now, to two hostile Earth people.

  At the control panel the radio chatter was becoming more insistent by the moment, and Ben’s confusion gave way to suspicion. Earthmen couldn’t be this ignorant; it had to be a trick to draw his attention away from the ship, and obviously escape had to come first. The girl was huddling against the wall, her bathing suit still damp, her lips and fingers blue. Angrily Ben threw open the hatchway to the rear compartment of the ship and pulled out a bundle of clothes. “Here,” he said, tossing them to the girl. “Get out of those indecent things and get some clothes on. And let’s get something straight. I’m going to move this ship out to the rendezvous point one way or another. You two can stay out of my hair while I’m doing it. If you don’t, so help me I’ll wrap you both in tangle webs and let you choke until we get there. Now take your choice.”

  The girl clutched at the clothes and disappeared into the rear compartment, slamming the hatchway behind her. Her brother relaxed and slumped down on a stool. “Anything you say,” he said.

  “What’s your name?” Ben asked.

  “Barron. Tom Barron. Her name is Joyce, and if you leave her alone I won’t interfere with you.”

  The ship lurched again, violently. Ben caught a shock bar and sat down at the control panel. If anything, the barrage in space around them was becoming more intense, and the radio was chattering incoherently. Ben twirled the dial, searching for the command frequency that would connect him with his squad leader, so that he could signal that he was away free and clear. He found the frequency, but there was nothing but static, and a confused babble of voices. The ship was following a pre-set escape orbit for the moment; but without contact there would be no way to locate the orbit ship for rendezvous.

  Five minutes later Ben was still searching for contact, without success. He could catch only fragments of chatter from the radio. Somebody trapped on the surface was broadcasting frantically for a rescue craft; somebody else with a cargo of wheat in tow between Earth and the moon had lost his null-gravs and was trying to reach a squad leader before a ground missile found him a sitting duck. From time to time a blanket of static blotted out everything. In growing alarm, Ben sent out his contact signal, but still there was no answer.

  Something was wrong. By now every ship that had cleared into space should have made contact and be homing in on the orbit ship under direct radio control. This above all was critical to an effective escape; it had been rehearsed until every crewman knew the procedure to follow under every predictable circumstance from heavy barrage to merely token resistance.

  Once more the ship lurched, nearly throwing Ben out of his seat. He snapped on the rear view screen in time to see one of his own air-to-air rockets flash out to intercept a pursuing Earth missile. It exploded, uncomfortably close, and the concussion wave jarred the ship again.

  Suddenly, he saw something else. As the ship turned slightly in its outward course, the pale disk of Earth’s moon filled the view screen. Somewhere beyond, Ben knew, the orbit ship was waiting. But now, as he started to look away, a dozen long black shadows moved out in silhouette across the moon’s yellow disk like phantoms in the blackness. They were moving, and moving fast, moving outward, already far beyond his own ship.

  They were not missiles. They were too large and swift for that, and they were moving into deep space beyond Earth’s orbit. A moment later they had passed across the disk of the moon and were gone again into blackness, far out of range of the escaping raiders.

  Only one thing was possible. They were space craft. But they looked like no ships that Spacers had ever launched.

  Ben heard a swift intake of breath and saw Tom Barron staring at the view screen over his shoulder. “Did you see that?” Ben asked.

  “I saw it,” Tom Barron said.

  “What were they?”

  The Earthman’s eyes were bright. “Ships,” he said. “Hundreds of ships, maybe thousands. That was just one squadron.”

  “You mean Earth ships?” Ben asked incredulously.

  But Tom Barron was shouting for his sister, throwing the rear compartment open in excitement. “They’ve launched the fleet,” he cried. “Joyce, they’ve done it, just the way they promised! This raid must have been the trigger.”

  Ben Trefon stared at them. The girl was dressed in baggy Spacer fatigues, three sizes too large for her, with the cuffs and sleeves rolled up. She hugged her brother, squealing with excitement. “Did you actually see them?”

  “No doubt about it. And if they’ve thrown up one squadron, that must mean the whole fleet is going out!”

  “Going out where?” Ben broke in.

  Tom Barron laughed. “You’ll find out, soon enough. Don’t worry, there won’t be a one of you that doesn’t find out! You think you can raid us and raid us, steal our food, steal our women — well, you’ll see. You’ve made your last raid.”

  Numbly, Ben turned back to the control panel. It was incredible. Of course, Earth had always been heavily fortified for defensive action against the raiders, even though their ignorance of space techniques had made their efforts feeble. And it was true that Earth had even launched a punitive expedition from time to time in futile attempts to strike back at the Spacers. Once in a while an Earth ship had hijacked a Spac
er patrol ship or a small cargo ship moving through the Asteroid Belt, shooting down the crew and gutting the ship. But these had been minor harassments to the Spacers, clumsy and foolish gestures and nothing more. There had never been anything even approaching a major assault by Earthmen against the Spacer strongholds. The very idea was ridiculous. Even if ships had somehow been built, it took crews to man them. And that was the flaw. Cruel and treacherous as they were, everyone knew that Earthmen were basically cowards when it came to space flight.

  And deep space was no place for cowards.

  Ben turned his attention back to his radio. The whole idea of an Earth fleet attacking Spacers was laughable. The shadows he had seen must have been missiles of some sort, some new defense maneuver. Maybe that was what his father had been thinking of when he warned about trouble on its way.

  But one thing was certain: if he couldn’t establish contact with his squad leader and do it soon, he would be in plenty of trouble trying to locate the orbit ship. He flipped off the automatic signal and began transmitting by hand signal, carefully probing in all quadrants of space around his ship.

  Suddenly there was a response as a wave of static blotted out the blanket of overlying radio chatter. “Squad 13 here,” a voice came through. “Who’s contacting?”

  Ben breathed a sigh of relief. “Unit 4, Squad 7,” he said. “Can you hear me?”

  “Just barely, but you’re coming through, Unit 4. Why are you contacting?”

  “No response from Squad 7 leader,” Ben returned. “I’m reporting in for a track on Orbit 3.”

  There was a burst of static, and his contact became blotchy. He waited, then again caught the message. “Sorry, Unit 4. Squad 7 leader never got off, and the orbit ship has been hit. We’re crippled ourselves.”

  “Do you need help?” Ben felt his hands trembling on the microphone. With the orbit ship knocked out —

  “You’d never find us,” Squad 13 came back. “And we’re out of contact with the command ship — not even sure it’s functional — so it wouldn’t be any help. Follow disaster orders and get yourself out of there, boy. Any way you can. They’re really coming after us.”

  Static broke in again, and Ben snapped off the transmitter after a vain attempt to re-contact. He took a deep breath, trying to think. Something had happened to the escape plan, something catastrophic enough to disrupt communications almost completely and throw the retreating raiders into a disaster pattern. Of course, raid plans often had to be changed somewhat to get ships and their cargoes back to the orbit ship safely, but disaster pattern meant disorganized retreat — essentially every man for himself and don’t look for support.

  And that could only mean that somehow this raid had really exploded a powder keg.

  There was only one thing to do — to move and move fast, forgetting organized plans and heading out for the original rendezvous point by any means he could get there. If the raid still had a command ship, it would be waiting there to collect the stragglers and direct their orbits home.

  Ben turned to his captives and pointed to the acceleration cots at the rear of the cabin. “Strap down,” he said.

  “What are you planning to do?” Tom Barron asked.

  “I’m going to travel,” Ben retorted. “And if you two don’t want to be squashed against the bulkhead, you’d better strap down tight.”

  “You’re wasting your time,” Tom Barron said. “There’s no place for you to go. You people are going to be wiped out of the sky.”

  “Maybe so,” Ben Trefon said. “But if you think I’m going to sit around and wait for them to come and get me, you’ve got a surprise in store.”

  They strapped down.

  • • •

  For Ben Trefon the next few hours were a nightmare that taxed his ingenuity and navigational skill to the utmost. All of his life he had been taught navigation; it was part of a Spacer’s heritage to pilot ships. He had grown from childhood with intimate contact and knowledge of the great wilderness of space that lay beyond planetary boundaries in the solar system. But he had never before been forced to put all of his knowledge to the test so abruptly or under such pressure.

  He knew that until he had contacted his command ship and joined with the other raiders into some sort of organized retreat he was a sitting duck for any kind of assault weapon the Earth forces chose to throw at him. A squadron of ships could provide a blanket of protective coverage for themselves; a single ship could depend only on its own small store of counter weapons. Now, as he accelerated to the limit of his tolerance, he was even more vulnerable because he would have so little time between detection of an assault weapon and the moment of explosion. Three times in rapid succession he “hooked” Earth missiles, each time barely getting them detonated before they struck his ship. In the blackness around him there was no sign of other ships, but the periodic flash of a contact explosion on all sides of him told him that out in the blackness other raiding ships were following the same course he was.

  At one point in his wild flight his scanning radar picked up an unidentified object almost directly in his course. He dodged it, and his floodlights picked out the battered hull of another Spacer S-80 tumbling end-over-end on a witless course, with a gaping hole torn in her side — a derelict that would ultimately take up its own orbit around the Earth like a discarded first-stage shell.

  Later he picked up the tentative probing of an Earth spy satellite, one of the crudely instrumented space vehicles that Earthmen had thrown up in an attempt to identify approaching Spacer craft and provide target information to assault weapons on the surface. Those vehicles had never done their job very effectively, but this one was a real threat now, pointing a sure electronic finger at Ben’s ship and proving stubbornly tenacious when Ben tried to baffle its detection apparatus with maneuvering. The little S-80 lurched and bucked; Tom and Joyce Barron clutched the rails of their cots as Ben used his ship’s side jets and null-grav units in combination to try to shake off his tormentor. Finally, in desperation, he fired three of his few remaining homing shells, hoping that in the confusion of objects to detect the satellite’s detecting mechanism would break down. Luck was with him; one of the shells took the spy satellite out of the sky with a flash of blue light, and Ben shifted course a dozen times in the next ten minutes in hopes of losing the followup missiles that were bound to come.

  His instruments had calculated the approximate rendezvous point. As the hours passed, Ben knew he must be closing in on it, yet when he broke radio silence he could hear no response except disorganized chatter. Presently even the chatter grew more sparse. He began to feel strangely alone, as though he were the only ship left in the sky.

  Then, abruptly, there was a signal from close at hand and another Spacer ship hailed him. It was a twenty-man cruiser, one of the largest in the raiding fleet, and it was moving in at a tangent to Ben’s S-80.

  “Sound off and identify,” the signal came.

  “Unit 4, Squad 7,” Ben returned. “Are you the command ship?”

  “This is Unit 17, Squad 1,” the voice came back. “We’re taking command.”

  “What’s happened?” Ben said.

  “We’ve been booby-trapped, that’s what’s happened.”

  “But what about the orbit ship?”

  “It took three shells. We had to abandon it, cargo and all. The Raid Commander is aboard here now. Better stand by for briefing.”

  There was a pause and some static. Then the commander’s voice came across. “Unit 4? Is that Ben Trefon?”

  “Yes, sir. My squad leader didn’t make it, I’m told. What happened?”

  “No data yet,” the commander said. “All we know is that we’ve been hit hard. They’ve actually destroyed half the raiding fleet, either on the ground or spaceborne. We’ve lost our orbit ship and its cargo as well.”

  It was worse than Ben had dreamed. No raid in centuries had lost more than five per cent of its ships. “They must have known the strikepoint,” he said.
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br />   “There’s more to it than that,” the commander returned. “I’m afraid this has been a minor skirmish, so far.”

  “I don’t understand, sir.”

  “I mean we’re at war,” the answer came back. “Somehow they’ve raised an armada into space, and it’s bypassed our raiding fleet altogether. Right now it’s headed out for the Rings. That means they’re actually going to try to fight us in space. And from the count we have of their ships, we’ve got a war on our hands, not just a dog fight.”

  For a long moment Ben was silent. It was true, then. The shadows had been ships — Earth ships. He felt a cold knot in the pit of his stomach. “What are my orders, sir?”

  “Until we know what they intend to do, each ship in this raid squadron should go back to its home post, as quickly as possible. The Council and your father should be briefed without delay; that will be your job. Do you have any prisoners?”

  “Too many prisoners,” Ben said sourly, and reported what had happened.

  “Well, I’m afraid you’re hung with them until you get back to Mars,” the commander said. “This ship is already full of casualties.”

  “That’s all right,” Ben said. “I can handle them.”

  “Then get moving, and good luck,” the fleet commander said. “Stand by for further orders when you get there. And my greetings to your father, Ben. I’m afraid he was right about this raid.”

  The signal snapped off, leaving unsaid the thing that loomed largest at Ben Trefon’s mind. With the limitations of shortwave transmission, there was no means of swift communication between planets. That meant that if an armada of Earth ships was moving out toward the orbits of Mars and the asteroids, there would be no warning of their approach until the first fragments of the raiding fleet limped home.

  But if this were really an all-out war, one of the first targets of an Earth armada would be the Spacer outposts on Mars. Swiftly Ben Trefon began plotting his course for the fastest powered flight to Mars that his fuel supply would allow. It was up to him to get word to his father and the other Mars outposts — and he knew that with all the speed he was capable of, he might still arrive too late.