The Chaos Weapon (11 page)

The whole operation had been rapidly executed. Before the lifecraft had even come to rest on the ramp, the spacelock doors closed behind them, and the strong song of some unknown drive immediately began to thrust the host-ship on its way. They had to wait through a long acceleration period before the lock finally was filled with air and they could leave their little ship.

The man with brown coveralls who came into the lock to receive them had a weapon in his hand, and a strange glint of amusement in his eyes as they climbed out.

“Well, what have we
here? A space-marshal and a thin chicken. Curious what things one nets in space! Drop all your armaments, Marshal, nice and slowly. On this ship there’s no way you can win an argument.”

After a swift look at the man’s face, Wildheit did as he was told. He was familiar with the expressions of professional survivors. A second man came to the hatch and led the way into the ship, the armed man following. The second man also betrayed the same killer instincts.

Although he was familiar with most types of spacecraft built in the galaxy, Wildheit found the vessel as different internally as he found it strange externally. While all the craftsmanship was identifiably human work, the actual design was the product of a school with no obvious roots or connections with those known to Wildheit. Familiar though the functions of many of the instruments seemed, the mechanisms and technology were strange. Only occasional items appeared to be of contemporary manufacture. Among these was a Chaos detector and a computing assembly similar to the units Wildheit had seen at ChaosCenter.

They were led into a cabin paneled with genuine wood. At a desk sat a third man in brown coveralls, with a fourth and fifth standing to each side of him. The seated man eyed them with the same interested amusement as had his companion.

“A space-marshal, eh? Pieces begin to fit. I take it that Saraya’s behind this somewhere?”

“You know Saraya?” asked Wildheit.

“You might say we’ve been acquainted for quite a long time.” The speaker shot an amused glance at his companions. “Saraya never learns.”

“Who are you?”

“Names? I am Kasdeya. The one with the gun on your spine is Jequn, and your guide through the ship was Asbeel. On my right stands Gadreel, with whom I advise you not to pick a quarrel; and on my left meet Penemue, who you would be unwise to challenge intellectually. We five are what I think you would call
adventurers, perhaps even renegades. Don’t underestimate our desperation or our willingness to kill.”

“I’m already acquainted with the look in the eyes of the damned.”

“Good! We’ve achieved a point of understanding. But now you have the advantage of us, Marshal. Who are you, and what were you doing in a lifecraft on the edge of the galaxy?”

“I’m Space-Marshal Jym Wildheit, presently on Federation business.”

“What business?”

“You don’t expect me to answer that?”

“Without duress, probably not.” Kasdeya’s amused eyes circled his companions. “Not that we shy from refined violence if the need arises. But if I’ve the smell of this aright, we’ve more to gain by cooperation than by coercion. I’m going to throw out a few questions to see if we’ve a common interest. Those you don’t answer we may extract from you the hard way later—depending on our need and our humor.”

“That’s a Federation capital offense.”

“Don’t make me laugh! We don’t care a damn for your stupid laws. The whole Federation’s a structure of no consequence. It’s a mere flea in the hairs of the rabid dog whose tail we’re twisting. Our enemies would make your enemies seem like bosom friends by comparison. Let me make one point very clear to you, Marshal. In the game you’ve somehow entered, you’re so far out of your class you might as well never have been born.”

As he spoke, a great, soundless explosion in space picked up the ship and shook it with a series of bone-jerking shocks. For a moment the lights darkened to the dull level of an emergency supply, and then were reestablished. Kasdeya was already on his feet.

“Speaking of enemies, the rabid dog runs at our heels. We’re going to have to kick one of the bitch’s fangs out. This conversation will be continued later.”

Kasdeya and three of the men leaped for the door. Jequn motioned with his gun that Wildheit and Roamer
should pass through into a smaller cabin beyond, the door of which he then locked from the outside.

Three more vast, soundless explosions racked the ship, shaking it so extremely that Wildheit feared the hull would fracture. Fortunately, no such disaster took place, and it became obvious that here was a vessel whose construction lay beyond his broad experience. Then the voices of strange weapons began to speak from the ship, and the soundless shakings, though frequent, grew less severe.

The marshall was not surprised to find Roamer’s face ashen white, and he turned to comfort her.

“Take it easy, little frog! I don’t think our new companions are the type to let themselves get into a situation they can’t handle.”

“Oh … the ship?” Roamer shook her head. “That doesn’t worry me. Its patterns continue way into the future. Therefore it won’t be harmed. But the men themselves are old—nearly as old as this ship.”

“How old, Roamer?”

“Six—seven thousand years. Violent patterns that reach right back in time. Dabria was one of their kind, too.”

“Dabria the Guardian?”

“Yes. He too was very old. He thought nobody knew—but I knew because I could read his patterns.”

“And this frightens you?”

“Dabria was a terrible man. Only such a man could have contained the seers. But the men on this ship are even more terrible than Dabria. How can anyone be that old?”

“I’m not even convinced that they are that old. But the galaxy grows remarkably small. Kasdeya was one of the group who triggered a disaster in a place called Edel, on which the Chaos Weapon was operating. Apparently he also knows Saraya of the Terran Chaos-Center, for whom we work. And we also find that Saraya himself has no discernable origins either. With Dabria, we seem to have a total of seven men, none of whom fit properly into the scheme of things as we
understand it. Where do they come from, Roamer?”

“I don’t know, but …”

A sudden shiver possessed the whole ship—not the brutal bucking of the previous explosions, but a more subtle, almost sensual movement that entered both the vessel’s fabric and the bodies of its occupants. The sensation lasted for about two minutes. During all that time Coul gripped with tight, intangible talons deep into Wildheit’s shoulder and drew his symbiotic sustenance directly from the marshal’s heart.

“What was that?” asked Roamer.

“They went through some sort of space-jump, probably to escape their pursuers. But it wasn’t a subspace jump. It was … something else …”

If the jump had been intended as an escape maneuver, it was a failure. No sooner had the peculiar sensation ceased than the great, soundless buffeting began again with an increase both in frequency and intensity. To Wildheit it was painfully apparent that no craft, no matter how well constructed, would be able to take that level of punishment for very long. Yet Roamer had predicted the ship’s continued existence. These two facts were irreconcilable, and the appearance of buckling and stress fractures in the bulkheads suggested strongly that Roamer was wrong. Unless the buffeting quickly ceased, the vacuum-integrity of the hull had to fail. Only the appearance of some new factor could preserve the Chaos prediction. And one was suddenly provided.

Jequn, this time without his weapon, burst suddenly into the cabin. “Marshal—we’ve been cleverly ambushed in space. If we can’t fight our way out, it’ll be the end of all of us. And that includes both of you. For the sake of self-preservation, are you prepared to man a weapon for us?”

“Against whom?”

“It would take too long to explain. Suffice it to say they’re the possessors of the Chaos Weapon.”

“If I help, I want my questions answered and no more constraint when the battle’s done.”

“Help us get
out of this, and you can dictate your own terms.”

Jequn dashed from the cabin again, leaving the door open. Dragging Roamer by the hand, Wildheit followed fast. Jequn stopped before a weapon cockpit and motioned to the marshal to occupy it. Knowing nothing of the weapon or its capability, Wildheit slipped into the seat and felt the controls fall naturally under his fingers. With very few seconds of exploration of the ranging and direction devices, he gained sufficient insight into the operating principles to feel confident that he could use the device to marginal effect. The fire control was too obvious to be missed.

Roamer wedged herself behind the cockpit seat so that they both had a view of the screen which displayed the range and position of the myriad ships of an enemy space-force ranged in massive ambush. Wildheit selected a target and began to trim the controls to fetch it centrally into the firing sight, but Roamer stopped him.

“Not there—here!”

On a half hunch, the marshal swung to the position indicated by her finger which was near but not coincident with one of the targets on the screen. The co-ordinates located easily within the firing sight, and he pressed the fire control. The strange weapon sounded, and six seconds later the target disappeared from the screen. Wildheit’s eyes opened appreciably. There was no way in which he himself could have found the exact intercept position except by correction after a number of ranging shots. Roamer’s ability to read in advance the entropic change associated with the ship’s destruction had enabled her to predict with the utmost accuracy where the target would be at the instant the weapon-fire reached that point.

He glanced back at Roamer. “That’s something new in space gunnery. Which one now?”

Her finger silently selected a new position near one of the targets. Wildheit swung the firing sight to cover it, and fired. As he watched, the blip representing the
target vessel actually moved toward the spot at which he had directed the weapon-fire and then disappeared from the screen as it reached the coincident point. In the back of his mind the thought occurred to him that Roamer herself constituted a Chaos Weapon of no mean potential.

He began a pattern of rapid firing wherever Roamer’s finger rested, without bothering to witness the destruction of one target before sighting on the next. The results were dramatic. Not a single shot was wasted, and the rapid mode of completely effective fire was eating decisively into the great horde of ships that had menaced the screen.

All their knowledge of the targets and results was drawn from the electronic representation on the screen before them, but in his mind’s eye Wildheit had a clear picture of the harder realities of the space battle. The disappearing blips from the screen gave little hint of the gigantic explosions, the short-lived scream of air escaping from fractured hulls, the crucially damaging heat and radiation from super-critical power plants, the mega-blasts from magazines in the process of destruction, and the growing menace of space-debris and lifecraft ever-spreading to impede the progress of the remaining ships.

AS the battle progressed, so the great, soundless buffetings to which they had been subjected gradually lessened and finally ceased. The screens clearly showed that units of the opposing space-force were beginning to peel away and retreat from the fight. Although the
battle was obviously won, Roamer’s fingers continued to indicate fresh targets, and Wildheit continued firing until the last of the stragglers had moved beyond the range of the ship’s weapons.

In the heat of the battle, Wildheit had been so completely dedicated to the problems of maintaining rapid fire to Roamer’s directions that he had spared no thought to the proportions of their mutual success. Now, as the battle faded, his eyes strayed to the counters on the control panel. The diagrammatic tally, in a base-twelve notation, indicated the equivalent of two hundred and nineteen—and every single shot had taken a ship out of space. Amazing!

Aware suddenly that they had gained an audience, Wildheit turned to find that on the cessation of the battle the five men of the ship had gathered to watch the disposal of the stragglers.

Kasdeya finally spoke. “Such marksmanship’s not only incredible, Marshal, it’s impossible!”

“Just one of my better days,” said Wildheit, with a wry smile.

“I’m not joking, Marshal. We know the potential of that weapon and the limits of human capability with it. You exceeded them both by an unbelievable margin. How?”

Wildheit looked questioningly at Roamer, and she turned to the questioners.

“The patterns of Chaos already bore the traces of their destruction. It was only necessary to resolve the timing and positioning.”

“For a single incident, and with calculations taken from a broad enough baseline, of course it’s possible to run a Chaos calculation of that sort—in about two days.” Kasdeya’s brow was full of earnest speculation. “In no way is it possible to calculate hundreds of Omega points virtually instantaneously.”

“It is possible if you can
see
the patterns.” Her voice remained perfectly level, but she was obviously aware of the impact of her statement.

The five men of the ship stopped, transfixed by a shaft of disbelief
around which a thread of growing hope was joyfully entwined.

“You crazy chicken!” said Kasdeya at last. “Are you telling me you can read the patterns direct?”

“It’s true,” said Wildheit. “Had it not been for that ability we’d still have been on the Rhaqui ship which was destroyed by the Chaos Weapon.”

Kasdeya’s face was filled with a sudden comprehension.

“
Ah
, that explains a great deal! A while back, we noticed a distortion of the continuum which suggested the Chaos Weapon was at work, but we couldn’t think of a target on the Rim important enough to cause our enemies to expend so much power. According to our instruments, the weapon must have been using energy at the rate of about ten stellar masses per second. We went to investigate—and found nothing but the two of you in a lifecraft. At the time the facts didn’t add up at all.”