The way the enemy was arranged, they were going to come at us from three points of a triangle. If we accelerated towards one, we might have a chance to deal with him individually before he had reinforcements. I asked Frazzle to head at maximum acceleration towards the nearest shuttle. We were shortly moving ever faster in its direction. The remaining two showed sudden evidence of turning to try and adjust to our new trajectory, but they were playing catch-up, due to the distances involved.
I didn't know if the long-distance mass detectors were current with our timeline or if they lagged behind. Frazzle reassured me that they used some form of quantum wave analysis and their information was only a fraction of a second behind current positions. I relaxed a bit since the geometry of the situation was playing out in our favor.
The shuttles on Frazzle's display suddenly lit up in red, all at about the same time. He became agitated and yelled, “Watch outs! Deys shooting!”
They had coordinated their shots to intercept our path. In response, I ordered him to put us into a gradual turn towards the second nearest shuttle. As the ship began to veer off its course, I aligned the weapons display and locked the laser designator on my original target. It was headed straight for us at its maximum acceleration and I recognized that the pilot might not be able to swerve fast enough to avoid a long-distance shot. Just as the shuttle began to move off of my display, I triggered the gun. There wasn't any flash or sound and I belatedly realized that I missed the recoil of a human weapon. It was sort of anti-climactic – to shoot an all-destroying pulse and not to have any evidence to show that it had been shot. Funny what you think of in situations like that!
As soon as the pulse was away, I centered the designation display on the next shuttle. By then it was apparent that it was one of the plasma cannon-armed ones. Once again I could see the bolt coming from a long way away. The glow of the plasma moved far faster than the actual charge and it gave you a hellish view of what was about to hit you. This guy was a good shot, too. The damned bolt hit us right on the bow! There was a flash and the deflection field strength meter red-lined. The field held, though, creating a brilliant aurora display as the plasma streamed over the edges, safely far from our ship.
Frazzle was rapidly flipping switches and keying instructions at his station. I yelled at him to turn towards the final shuttle and fired my weapon at the same moment, hoping that the laser designation and computer system would retain the second target despite the plasma blast. He complied and our ship began to loop around in a wild turn.
I realized belatedly that both of my first two shots had been accurate. Frazzle gave an excited and shrill whistle and I turned to see what had disturbed him. He was pointing at the proximity display. It only showed one shuttle left. We were winning!
We continued to turn towards the final shuttle, but suddenly the main boards lit up in red again. Frazzle started entering commands rapidly and our acceleration slowed drastically. I linked into his mind since I had no confidence that his speech was up to the task. He was working hard to re-route the ship's power away from one of the propulsion vanes. The remaining Pug had hit us with an anti-matter bolt and it had just grazed the third vane, destroying the outboard section. The remainder of the vane was about to melt down due to the excess power that was flowing into it, but Frazzle got it shut down rapidly with no additional damage.
Now it was a simple shooting duel. They had nearly as much range as we did, although we were shooting a much larger and more powerful pulse. I scrambled to get the computer display locked down on the enemy, who was by now, gyrating wildly in an attempt to avoid our countershot.
It was difficult; he was swerving around so much. The only good thing about it was I figured he couldn't aim very well while going through such maneuvers. I worked my joystick and finally achieved a lock. The laser designator fixed on his craft and he began even wilder swerves as he sensed the targeting. We were still closing at a high rate of speed although our velocity increase had slowed considerably as a result of going to two-thirds power.
I watched the guy try to shake the laser-lock as we approached. It was no use. He couldn't do it. I continued to wait, wanting to make sure of my shot.
We flashed by a group of rocks that were innocently orbiting each other in their path around the star. As we did, I was startled to see about half of them vanish. I realized that the Pug was still shooting at us! He was moving too wildly to aim accurately, but a shot fired randomly could still hit us and if it hit us directly, it might destroy our ship. I triggered off an extended burst of pulses. No single shot this time. I wanted to send enough his way that even if the first pulse didn't hit him, he'd have a deuce of a time avoiding the follow-ups.
Shortly after I removed my finger from the trigger button, his display marker disappeared. I turned to the others and yelled, “I'm an Ace!”
They looked puzzled and it was a bit of a come-down for me. I had to explain that five aerial kills were what it took to be called an Ace. They still didn't get it, so I shut up on the topic and shut the weapon system down.
Frazzle reported that he'd gotten the power re-routed and there was no additional damage to our ship, but because of the hit, it wouldn't be able to go FTL until we'd been repaired.
“Where can we repair the damage?” I asked.
“Oh, dats easy. Deres a shipyard orbiting the planet. Deys vets at fixing ships. We can get fixed there.”
Despite my initial thought that he was suggesting that we would go in and get neutered by the 'vets,' I agreed that we should head that way.
I asked him, mentally, if there would be a problem with the Pug-bears at the repair facility. He thought that there would be a large contingent of Pugs and that would be the problem. Most of the orbital stations only had one or two Pug-bears in residence at any one time. The creatures preferred to stay on the surface where they could hunt and exercise their feral instincts. They were more comfortable there and probably would not be easily found to come up in a shuttle.
I thought that we'd have to do something that would discommode the Pugs to give us time to arrange the necessary repairs. Looking over Frazzle's shoulder, I noticed that the mass detector showed a large group of rocks just a few degrees off of our path. I pointed at them and asked him to match their velocity.
It took some doing, but he eventually got us slowed down and into position about fifty klicks away from the rocks. Some of them were stone, but most of them were composed largely of ice. This was just what I needed to carry out my bombardment plan. It took some doing, but I finally convinced him to close in on one of the larger ice balls. It was rotating slowly and had a lot of large rocks in it, held together by what appeared to be water ice.
We shot the targeting laser at the object and the spectrum of the emitted gasses showed that the ice was nearly pure H2O. The next thing was to capture the object. That wasn't as hard as I'd feared. Frazzle was able to extend the artificial gravity field outside the ship and he created an intense gravitational point source that was powerful enough to move the kilometer-in-diameter ball of ice toward the ship.
I didn't want it too close, so I asked him to set course for the equator of the planet and to arrange to drag the ball behind. This was going to be just like cosmic bowling!
The ship wasn't able to accelerate rapidly due to the damaged vane and, even if it could, the mass of the ice was so great that it slowed us down considerably. Nevertheless, we made progress towards our target. We were now far past the in-system side of the asteroid belt and had about five minutes light to go to reach the planet's orbit. It was coming around the sun towards us. Frazzle took a look and said that it was just getting into summer, based on the polar inclination. I didn't know about that, but I thought that it might be going to be a very wet season for them.
We accelerated the ice ball to a few miles per second in its path toward the planet. I thought that would be fast enough. I didn't want to destroy the target, only soak it down. We stopped accelerating and maintained a steady progress. It was going to take us hours to get into position, so I suggested to the others that we take a break.
Now, it might seem that all of this combat had taken a long time, but it was less than an hour since Erin and I had been speaking in the cafeteria. Neither of the other two evinced a desire to break away, so I went off to get a drink and use the bathroom by myself. They might be able to sit through my inaugural space combat with no need to relieve themselves, but the closer I got to the toilet facility, the more I needed to go. I guess I wasn't as cool a character as I tried to pretend.
I took the time to eat some more in the cafeteria. Whistle kept me company and we conversed a bit about how the ship might be repaired. He stated that it wasn't unknown for ships to strike rocks when passing through debris zones and the shipyard was set up to handle any repair. The only problem would be to get past the Pugs and controlling Pug-bears.
I thought that meant direct, on-station intervention by us humans. The only way I could see us getting the repairs done was to actually take the station and kill all of the opposition. I asked him how many Pugs would be in the facility and his mental image was discouraging. The station was quite large and maintained living facilities for over a hundred Pugs. They were mostly used for labor, being stronger than the Sunnys, but they were also armed and could prove to be a force that would be hard to overcome. I asked him for the layout and his description gave me an idea.
The station rotated slowly along its central hub with its six arms making it look like a starfish. The various groups of aliens maintained residential space complete with artificial gravity in separate arms. The central hub was set up with a grapple system on one end to allow smaller ships to dock there for light repair work.
The Pugs lived in one of the arms, the resident Pug-bears reserved two for their exclusive personal use and the Sunnys lived in one. The other two were warehouses for the inventory of ship parts and also provided docking space for the five shuttles.
The facility was prepared to repair anything from our star ship to mining craft, so fixing our damaged vane wouldn't be a problem. It was also the site where two additional FTL ships were being assembled. These were in synchronous orbit with the station, but not always attached. The Sunnys normally shuttled parts and assemblies over to them with small, one-person tugs.
The miner's comm reports indicated that one ship was just getting past the skeleton stage and the other was now ready for EmDrive and FTL system installation. It still was a long way from completion, since the habitat systems and the control interfaces were yet to be shipped up from the planet's manufacturing centers. Neither was ready to fly, so they wouldn't pose a problem with our docking at the station's hub.
I discussed the station with Whistle and convinced myself that I understood the system well enough to know how to get rid of the majority of the Pugs. I'd simply destroy their residence arm with the anti-matter gun. Most of them remained in the arm unless they were engaged in repair work. As long as there wasn't any ship currently docked that was undergoing repair, the Pugs could mostly be counted on to be in their residence. There they maintained an atmospheric gas mixture that was more felicitous to their biology than the one that the Sunnys and Pug-bears found healthful. I remembered how the atmosphere of Earth would actually kill the Pugs. This meant that the creatures that I most needed to dispose of would be clumped up where I could get them all easily.
Meanwhile, we were approaching the planet and we had to do some maneuvering. It was a lot more difficult since we were towing a huge mass of ice with our power down by a third. The whole process wore me out. It took several hours to get the ship into high orbit around the equator of the planet, but Frazzle finally did it. He'd had some help from some of the other Sunnys who'd spelled him for a bit, but he was a real trooper and handled the majority of the operation himself.
We were orbiting in the opposite direction of the planetary spin. We could see the desert area between the coastal mountain ranges clearly. There were lots of clouds on the seaward sides of the ranges, but the air over the desert was uniformly unobstructed by clouds. We were going opposite to the spin and the landscape moved quickly below us.
It was simple to turn the ship and decelerate a bit. This dropped our orbit. Once we'd moved down a couple of hundred miles, we really braked, slowing the ice ball down correspondingly. As we started to lose altitude, I told Frazzle to release the gravity field. He must have known what I was going to do. He was by no means easy to fool, but he did balk a bit about dropping the mass on the planet. I reassured him that it would break up and fall as rain, ending on the desert.
He hadn't quite put two and two together, so he was amazed at my intent when I explained to him that the water would cause the Pug-bears' eggs to fail to hatch, thus alleviating a lot of the pressure on the Sunnys. It wouldn't do any harm to the adult Pug-bears, unless they happened to drown or be hit by some of the rocks embedded in the ice, but I figured they'd be set back considerably by the loss of their breeding grounds and crop of eggs.
He turned off the point gravity source, leaving the ice ball to slowly fall on its own as we accelerated back into higher orbit. I'd planned better than I knew because it rapidly lost altitude during two orbits. It was moving against the rotation of the planet and the instant it hit the outer edges of the atmosphere, the ice began to break up.
Meanwhile, I had Whistle on the comm unit and he was able to contact the resistance organization on the surface. The Sunnys hadn't much of a resistance, mostly taking passive actions that would slow the Pug-bears' actions just a little bit. However, they were quite excited to hear that we were going to help them.
While we were dropping the ice ball, the rest of the Sunnys had assembled in the bridge's stadium seating and held a quiet discussion as they watched the operation. They finally reached a decision and just after we released the mass to drop, they announced that they wanted to transport to the surface and help the resistance.
They had the fortitude to directly address me and explain that they'd been considering trying to capture the human members of the crew and turn them over to the Pug-bears. They seemed embarrassed and they were definitely sorry they'd doubted our intentions.
They now believed that their best option was to leave the ship to help their fellows resist the Pug-bears. They thought that perhaps they could provide some assistance to the locals. They'd been discussing tactics and thought they could help best on the planet's surface. I was relieved since I still detected an aura of doubt surrounding them. We would be left with just the two original Sunnys and they'd proven themselves to be good allies.
Frazzle and Whistle made arrangements and it wasn't long before the group left the ship, moving down to the surface through a single transporter that had been kept hidden from the Pug-bears.
I wondered at this since the Pug-bears were capable of reading the Sunnys' minds easily. I didn't understand how they'd managed to keep secrets from the creatures. It turned out to be a sad story involving dedication and deception. There weren't enough Pug-bears on the surface to constantly monitor the entire Sunny population. The Pug-bears kept largely to themselves as long as the Sunnys continued to follow orders and provide material necessities and hunting targets. The Sunnys involved had all made up their minds to resist to their last breath and they'd sworn to kill themselves if they felt they were in danger of having their minds read. They'd followed through on it too. They all carried poison capsules that contained a nerve poison that would stop their minds instantly upon ingestion.
There had been a number of them who had eaten the poison the instant they were faced with a Pug-bear. The Pug-bears didn't care. If the Sunnys toppled over and died, that might be strange, but as far as they were concerned, Sunnys were interchangeable. Only recently had the oldest resident Pug-bear become concerned. The things were intelligent but naive. They'd never faced serious resistance and it took them a long time before they started to realize that there might be something going on.
Nevertheless, the transporter had been built and kept secret and the other Sunnys left the ship through it on their way to provide aid and direction to the planetary population. They were going to need it.
As it fell, the ice ball broke up in a spectacular fashion, spreading out in a huge cloud of spray. We could see fiery tracks as the embedded stones separated and fell, burning their way through the atmosphere. The surviving stones created havoc all along the desert strip completely around the globe and I was glad that we'd carefully targeted the inter-mountain region. No Sunnys lived there and they were unlikely to suffer much from the meteor fall. As it was, the impacts caused earthquakes and tsunamis that raced away from the shores on both coasts. The rain followed the stones down, falling as chunks of rapidly melting ice and tons of water that dropped along the desert area. I don't think the planet had ever experienced anything like the flood that covered parts of the desert strip. In ten more orbits, the show was over. The desert strip was covered by heavy clouds and there was nothing to be seen.
The surface Sunnys reported that some of the Pug-bears were raging around their cities, but most of them had hustled up into the mountains, heading for their breeding grounds to see what was happening. It was raining all over the globe now, except for the higher latitudes near both poles.
The Sunnys thought that the Pug-bears might be distracted enough to leave them alone for a considerable time. Their main problem was that there were Pug troops in most of the cities and those creatures were now leaderless and acting aggressively.
I had Frazzle suggest that they try to ally with the Pugs. I also directed him to tell them to create mass-triggered auto-cannons. These would be traps that would only shoot when they sensed the larger mass of a Pug-bear. Since they could be computerized, the Sunnys could console themselves with the idea that they hadn't actually pulled the trigger.
Frazzle looked at me quizzically and said, “Me don't likes de way you thinks, but this may be the only way to get rid of them. So, could it be alright?” He was trying to puzzle out the calculus of violence. It was natural for humans, but not for his race.
“Yes. It is alright!” I told him. “It's an old and perpetually bothersome problem. You usually can't defeat force without using force of your own. One of our ancient leaders once said, 'You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.'”
My wisdom was confusing to him. He shrugged his shoulders and asked, “What's an omelet?”
I was speechless. He normally caught my meaning and I'd reached the point of forgetting that he wasn't some odd-looking human. It was good to remember that he was as alien to me as the Pugs, although a lot more friendly. I replied, “Never mind. Our next step is to get our ship repaired. Will you place us in a docking orbit for the space-station?”