A ship came into being slightly below the surface of a dust lake
rilling a crater on a nameless moon circling a world far in toward
the center of the galaxy. The most centerward world of Ulant lay a
thousand light years rimward. No human being had traveled this
part of space before.
Astronomers on the primary, had they been watching, would have
been astonished by the geyser which exploded from the
crater’s flat dust face.
No astronomers were watching. They, like soldiers, wives,
derelicts, and children . . . like everyone who
lived on that world, were engaged in a death struggle so demanding
they had ceased caring whether their satellite existed.
The ship that bobbed to the dust’s surface looked like a
giant doughnut with a beer can shoved through the hole and held in
place by thin straws. One tall vane, like a shark’s fin, rose
from the torus, leaning away from the cylinder. A globe surmounted
it.
The whole vessel was dead black. Not even a hull number broke
its lack of color.
It was a tiny ship. The beer can was just sixty meters tall. The
outer diameter of the doughnut barely spanned sixty-five meters.
The curves of the vessel were broken only by a handful of antennae,
two missile launch bays, and the snouts of laser and graser
batteries. She was a deadly little beast, designed solely to
kill.
She was a museum piece. Literally. And the nastiest little shark
of a warship ever conceived by the mind of Man.
She was a Climber left over from the Ulantonid War. She had been
dragged from the War Museum at Luna Command and reactivated
especially for this mission.
She was the first Climber to space since the war’s most
desperate days—because Climbers were almost as deadly to
their crews as to the enemies they stalked. Only the absolute
imperative of racial survival would see them used in combat
again.
Luna Command had that much heart. The Climber Fleets had been
too destructive of the minds and bodies of their crews.
The little ambushers had changed the course of the Ulantonid
War. And had filled the sanitariums of Confederation with walking
wounded, the few survivors of service within their sanity-devouring
fields of concealment.
The Climber generated a field in her torus which drove her into
a dimension beyond hyper-space, called Null, where she remained
virtually undetectable till she returned to Hyper or Norm to
attack.
Climbers in schools had destroyed whole Ulantonid fleets.
This Climber had the most remarkable crew of any Navy had ever
spaced.
Her Ship’s Commander was Manfred, Fleet Admiral Graf von
Staufenberg, First Deputy Chief of Staff of Confederation Navy. He
had seen Climber duty toward the end of the war. The ship’s
First Watch Officer was Melene Telle-eych Cath, Defender Prime of
Ulant, or Minister of Defense. Her Operations Officer was
Ulant’s Principal Peacemaker, or Chief of the General Staff,
Turone Wahl-chyst Forse. Her Gunnery Officer and his leading mates
were Star Lords of the Toke. One was the Star Lord who commanded
Confederation’s Marine Toke Legion. The others ranked him in
the Caste of Warriors.
There was no man or woman aboard, of any of five races, who
ranked below the equivalent of Admiral or General, and none of them
were not decision-makers.
A well-placed missile could have crippled the defenses of
humanity and all its neighbors.
Admiral Wildblood, the lady who directed Navy’s Bureau of
Naval Intelligence, and Admiral Beckhart, who ran her department of
dirty tricks, had two of the more menial assignments in Operations.
One watched the hyper detection gear, the other the passive radar
scans.
Star Lords and all, they slept in hammocks slung from the
Climber’s central structural member, or “keel.”
They shared the one toilet and did without the shower that had
never existed. In Climb they used portable chamberpots and smelled
one another’s stinks as had the Climbermen of an age gone
by.
One and all, they had come to see for themselves the growing
disaster Ulantonid explorers had been bemoaning for years.
They had seen film. They had questioned witnesses. In some cases
they had begun to act. But they had had to see with their own eyes
before they could finally believe.
They had to watch the war going on below. On the primary of the
moon.
A race from farther in toward the galactic core was
systematically exterminating every sentient creature it
encountered. The natives of this world were their latest
victims.
The people aboard the Climber came of races which had fought
bitterly in the past. There was little love among some of them now.
But never, in the most desperate, heated days of their contention,
had any considered eradicating their enemies. Their wars had been
tests of racial wills, with territorial causes.
This world was the fourth assailed by the centerward race since
its discovery by Ulantonid explorers. The first three worlds were
lifeless now. The aggressors even shunned their use as bases.
Even the Warriors of Toke could not comprehend the destruction
of intelligent life simply because it was intelligent.
The Warriors believed battle to be a crucible for purification
of the soul, a road to honor and glory, grimly majestic and
godlike. For them combat was almost an end in itself. They fought
one another when there were no outsiders.
They were perfectly aware of the distinction between victory and
obliteration. They were as appalled by the excesses of the
centerward race as were any of their shipmates.
They had come to see for themselves. And the grim truth burned
in the Climber’s display tank.
The world’s atmosphere was alive with spiderwebs of
coherent light. Energy and particle beams hacked air and space like
the flailing swords of a thousand ancient armies. The planet people
had the technological edge. The exterminators had the numbers and
determination. Their ships clouded the stars.
They had overwhelmed the world’s off-planet protection
months ago. Now they were pounding the on-world defenses, and were
making their initial landings.
Star-bright, short-lived pinpoints speckled the world’s
surface.
“They’re using nuclears!” Ulant’s
Defender growled. Even during their war’s bitterest hour,
neither human nor Ulantonid had violated each other’s worlds
with nuclear weapons. By tacit agreement those had been confined to
vacuum.
“They know we’re here,” Beckhart called out.
“Seven destroyer displacement ships are headed this
way.”
“Very well,” Graf von Staufenberg replied.
“Melene, most of that looks like it’s happening in the
troposphere. They’re probably not pushing one in a thousand
warheads through to the surface.”
The Star Lord who commanded all Star Lords boomed,
“Every one through destroys. The defense net weakness.
Soon it will be two of a thousand. Then four.”
“Not to mention what the radioactivity will do in the long
run. Makes you wonder why they’re forcing it with landings.
Here. This south tropic archipelago. They’ve punched an open
corridor down there.”
“Hell of a defense,” someone muttered. “Damn
near as tough as Stars’ End. I wouldn’t want to try
breaking it.”
“How long till those destroyers are pushing us?” von
Staufenberg asked.
“They’re humping it in Norm. Four or five minutes
for the closest. Looks like some other stuff starting to move,
too.”
“Can’t we do anything?” the D.N.I.
demanded.
Von Staufenberg replied, “We could bloody a few noses. It
wouldn’t change anything. We couldn’t do that with a
hundred Climbers. There’re just too damned many of them.
Okay, let’s give the people in the other compartments a look.
I want everybody to see it. We’ll have some decision to make
on our way home.”
“The Warriors have decided,” said the Star Lord of
the Marine Toke Legion.
“He speaks for Toke,” his non-Service superior
added. “For Toke there can be but one decision. We will come
to them here. Alone if we have to.”
“It’s not that easy for me, Manfred,” Melene
said. “We’re an adventurous species but I’m
handicapped by democratic traditions and faith in peace. We
don’t organize quickly or well.”
Von Staufenberg chuckled. “You did before.”
The Defender was older than he. She had been a soldier
throughout the Ulantonid War.
“I expect we will again. We can do anything when we decide
to pull together. It’s the decision process that’s so
abominably slow.”
“Your decisions were made years ago, Melene,”
Beckhart growled from his radar boards. “Don’t try to
snow us. I can give you the names and hull numbers of a hundred new
construction ships you’ve got tucked away in places you never
thought we’d look.”
“Admiral Beckhart?” von Staufenberg queried.
“I have my sources, sir. They’re rearming as fast as
their shipbuilding industry can space hulls. They come off the line
looking like commercial ships, only they’ve got drive
potential up the yang-yang, and they never get delivered to any of
the transport outfits. They disappear for a while, then turn up
somewhere else with guns dripping off them.”
“Why wasn’t High Command informed of this,
Beckhart?”
“Because my sources are in the Defender’s office.
And I knew why they were rearming. You wouldn’t have bought
it. Half of High Command is still trying to refight the Ulantonid
War. I let it go on playing that game because people were seeing
enough of those new ships to get nervous and start us a secret
building program of our own. So we’re on our way
too.”
“Beckhart . . . Your logic baffles me.
Totally baffles me. I have the distinct feeling that you’ll
have to explain it to a Board of Inquiry. What else have you hidden
from us?”
“You want an honest answer, or one that will please
you?” Beckhart did not make many friends. He retained his
position principally because no one else could do his job as
well.
“Beckhart!”
“Several things, sir. Ongoing operations. If they work
out, we’ll be in good shape for meeting these
monsters.”
“Monsters?” Melene demanded. “There’s no
evidence . . . ”
“Melene, the Admiral is a xenophobe. In fact, he
doesn’t like people very much. Tell me what you’re
doing, Beckhart.”
“There’s a chance I’m on the threshold to the
solution of the Sangaree problem. Some new data was on its way in
before we left. I’ll probably want to borrow von Drachau
again.”
“What else?”
“Still too tentative for discussion. A possible
breakthrough in communications and weapons technologies. I
won’t discuss it now. Not here.”
“Beckhart . . . ”
“Security privilege. Sir. Log it if you like.”
Von Staufenberg wheeled on the Director of Naval Intelligence.
She shrugged. “You won’t get anything from me, either,
Manfred.”
“Damn! All right, let’s get moving. Time’s
running out, and everybody’s got to have a look at
this.”
Cumbers were the most cramped vessels since Gemini. Circulating
the forty-odd beings aboard was a slow, uncomfortable process.
“She’s about to start shooting,” Beckhart said
of the nearest destroyer. “She has. Missile swarm. We have
four minutes to hide.”
“How do you like that? Didn’t even try to find out
who we were or what we wanted.”
“This is the Ship’s Commander,” von
Staufenberg said into the public address system. “We’re
under fire. Engineering, stand by to go Null.” Thirty seconds
before the swarm arrived, he ordered, “Take her up to ten
Bev. First Watch Officer, a gesture is in order. Program me an
attack approach on the vessel shooting at us.”
The Ulantonid’s feathery antennae stirred, quivered. The
action was comparable to a human’s pleased chuckle.
The Star Lords were in Weapons Department already, hoping they
would be allowed to play with their deadly toys.
“One missile,” said von Staufenberg. “Right up
her wake.”
It was the classic Climber attack strategy. Drives were a
warship’s soft spot. They simply could not be designed so
that thrust apertures could be shielded as well as the remainder of
the vessel.
The dust in the crater flowed together suddenly, smashing in
like the Red Sea on Pharaoh’s chariots. The doughnut ship had
vanished.
“Take her all the way to forty Bev,” von Staufenberg
ordered. “I doubt they know enough to look for our Hawking
Point, but let’s get that cross-section down anyway.”
One of the curiosities about the Climber was that no other race
known to humanity had ever developed it. And for humans it had been
an accidental by-product of other research.
Twenty-three minutes passed before the First Watch Officer
reported, “Attack position, Commander.”
“Weapons, Ship’s Commander. One missile. Stand by.
Detection, when we go down I want you to get the ranges and vectors
on everything you can see. We’ll do what we can. And I want
the tape rolling. Ship’s Services, vent heat while
we’re Norm. All right. Everybody ready? Take her down,
Engineering.”
Heat accumulation was the biggest weakness of the Climber. There
was no way to shed heat in Null. And a Climber often had to stay up
for days while enemy warships hunted her.
The Climber was no warship in the slug-it-out sense. She was a
hit-and-run fighter dependent on surprise for her
effectiveness.
The Defender Prime brought them down just four kilometers behind
the destroyer. The Climber rocked. The missile accelerated at 100
g. It arrived before the destroyer knew it was coming.
“One for the good guys,” Beckhart grumped as the
Climber went up again.
“What was that?” von Staufenberg demanded.
“Admiral, you’re giving them valuable information
just by blowing them out of space. You’re telling them we can
do it. You’ll get them wondering how. Head home before we
give them any hard data. Let’s save the surprises for when
they’ll do some good.”
Von Staufenberg reddened. There was no love lost between him and
Beckhart.
“He’s right, Manfred,” the Defender Prime
interjected. “You almost wasted the Climber advantage by
committing them piecemeal during the war. They would have more
effective if whole fleets had appeared suddenly. We would not have had
time to adapt.”
“Of course. Of course. I was thinking with my guts.
Program a course for the mother, Melene.”
Climbers did not have a long range. A mother ship awaited this
one a hundred light-years homeward. A small armada protected
her.
This Climber’s crew regarded themselves highly.
A ship came into being slightly below the surface of a dust lake
rilling a crater on a nameless moon circling a world far in toward
the center of the galaxy. The most centerward world of Ulant lay a
thousand light years rimward. No human being had traveled this
part of space before.
Astronomers on the primary, had they been watching, would have
been astonished by the geyser which exploded from the
crater’s flat dust face.
No astronomers were watching. They, like soldiers, wives,
derelicts, and children . . . like everyone who
lived on that world, were engaged in a death struggle so demanding
they had ceased caring whether their satellite existed.
The ship that bobbed to the dust’s surface looked like a
giant doughnut with a beer can shoved through the hole and held in
place by thin straws. One tall vane, like a shark’s fin, rose
from the torus, leaning away from the cylinder. A globe surmounted
it.
The whole vessel was dead black. Not even a hull number broke
its lack of color.
It was a tiny ship. The beer can was just sixty meters tall. The
outer diameter of the doughnut barely spanned sixty-five meters.
The curves of the vessel were broken only by a handful of antennae,
two missile launch bays, and the snouts of laser and graser
batteries. She was a deadly little beast, designed solely to
kill.
She was a museum piece. Literally. And the nastiest little shark
of a warship ever conceived by the mind of Man.
She was a Climber left over from the Ulantonid War. She had been
dragged from the War Museum at Luna Command and reactivated
especially for this mission.
She was the first Climber to space since the war’s most
desperate days—because Climbers were almost as deadly to
their crews as to the enemies they stalked. Only the absolute
imperative of racial survival would see them used in combat
again.
Luna Command had that much heart. The Climber Fleets had been
too destructive of the minds and bodies of their crews.
The little ambushers had changed the course of the Ulantonid
War. And had filled the sanitariums of Confederation with walking
wounded, the few survivors of service within their sanity-devouring
fields of concealment.
The Climber generated a field in her torus which drove her into
a dimension beyond hyper-space, called Null, where she remained
virtually undetectable till she returned to Hyper or Norm to
attack.
Climbers in schools had destroyed whole Ulantonid fleets.
This Climber had the most remarkable crew of any Navy had ever
spaced.
Her Ship’s Commander was Manfred, Fleet Admiral Graf von
Staufenberg, First Deputy Chief of Staff of Confederation Navy. He
had seen Climber duty toward the end of the war. The ship’s
First Watch Officer was Melene Telle-eych Cath, Defender Prime of
Ulant, or Minister of Defense. Her Operations Officer was
Ulant’s Principal Peacemaker, or Chief of the General Staff,
Turone Wahl-chyst Forse. Her Gunnery Officer and his leading mates
were Star Lords of the Toke. One was the Star Lord who commanded
Confederation’s Marine Toke Legion. The others ranked him in
the Caste of Warriors.
There was no man or woman aboard, of any of five races, who
ranked below the equivalent of Admiral or General, and none of them
were not decision-makers.
A well-placed missile could have crippled the defenses of
humanity and all its neighbors.
Admiral Wildblood, the lady who directed Navy’s Bureau of
Naval Intelligence, and Admiral Beckhart, who ran her department of
dirty tricks, had two of the more menial assignments in Operations.
One watched the hyper detection gear, the other the passive radar
scans.
Star Lords and all, they slept in hammocks slung from the
Climber’s central structural member, or “keel.”
They shared the one toilet and did without the shower that had
never existed. In Climb they used portable chamberpots and smelled
one another’s stinks as had the Climbermen of an age gone
by.
One and all, they had come to see for themselves the growing
disaster Ulantonid explorers had been bemoaning for years.
They had seen film. They had questioned witnesses. In some cases
they had begun to act. But they had had to see with their own eyes
before they could finally believe.
They had to watch the war going on below. On the primary of the
moon.
A race from farther in toward the galactic core was
systematically exterminating every sentient creature it
encountered. The natives of this world were their latest
victims.
The people aboard the Climber came of races which had fought
bitterly in the past. There was little love among some of them now.
But never, in the most desperate, heated days of their contention,
had any considered eradicating their enemies. Their wars had been
tests of racial wills, with territorial causes.
This world was the fourth assailed by the centerward race since
its discovery by Ulantonid explorers. The first three worlds were
lifeless now. The aggressors even shunned their use as bases.
Even the Warriors of Toke could not comprehend the destruction
of intelligent life simply because it was intelligent.
The Warriors believed battle to be a crucible for purification
of the soul, a road to honor and glory, grimly majestic and
godlike. For them combat was almost an end in itself. They fought
one another when there were no outsiders.
They were perfectly aware of the distinction between victory and
obliteration. They were as appalled by the excesses of the
centerward race as were any of their shipmates.
They had come to see for themselves. And the grim truth burned
in the Climber’s display tank.
The world’s atmosphere was alive with spiderwebs of
coherent light. Energy and particle beams hacked air and space like
the flailing swords of a thousand ancient armies. The planet people
had the technological edge. The exterminators had the numbers and
determination. Their ships clouded the stars.
They had overwhelmed the world’s off-planet protection
months ago. Now they were pounding the on-world defenses, and were
making their initial landings.
Star-bright, short-lived pinpoints speckled the world’s
surface.
“They’re using nuclears!” Ulant’s
Defender growled. Even during their war’s bitterest hour,
neither human nor Ulantonid had violated each other’s worlds
with nuclear weapons. By tacit agreement those had been confined to
vacuum.
“They know we’re here,” Beckhart called out.
“Seven destroyer displacement ships are headed this
way.”
“Very well,” Graf von Staufenberg replied.
“Melene, most of that looks like it’s happening in the
troposphere. They’re probably not pushing one in a thousand
warheads through to the surface.”
The Star Lord who commanded all Star Lords boomed,
“Every one through destroys. The defense net weakness.
Soon it will be two of a thousand. Then four.”
“Not to mention what the radioactivity will do in the long
run. Makes you wonder why they’re forcing it with landings.
Here. This south tropic archipelago. They’ve punched an open
corridor down there.”
“Hell of a defense,” someone muttered. “Damn
near as tough as Stars’ End. I wouldn’t want to try
breaking it.”
“How long till those destroyers are pushing us?” von
Staufenberg asked.
“They’re humping it in Norm. Four or five minutes
for the closest. Looks like some other stuff starting to move,
too.”
“Can’t we do anything?” the D.N.I.
demanded.
Von Staufenberg replied, “We could bloody a few noses. It
wouldn’t change anything. We couldn’t do that with a
hundred Climbers. There’re just too damned many of them.
Okay, let’s give the people in the other compartments a look.
I want everybody to see it. We’ll have some decision to make
on our way home.”
“The Warriors have decided,” said the Star Lord of
the Marine Toke Legion.
“He speaks for Toke,” his non-Service superior
added. “For Toke there can be but one decision. We will come
to them here. Alone if we have to.”
“It’s not that easy for me, Manfred,” Melene
said. “We’re an adventurous species but I’m
handicapped by democratic traditions and faith in peace. We
don’t organize quickly or well.”
Von Staufenberg chuckled. “You did before.”
The Defender was older than he. She had been a soldier
throughout the Ulantonid War.
“I expect we will again. We can do anything when we decide
to pull together. It’s the decision process that’s so
abominably slow.”
“Your decisions were made years ago, Melene,”
Beckhart growled from his radar boards. “Don’t try to
snow us. I can give you the names and hull numbers of a hundred new
construction ships you’ve got tucked away in places you never
thought we’d look.”
“Admiral Beckhart?” von Staufenberg queried.
“I have my sources, sir. They’re rearming as fast as
their shipbuilding industry can space hulls. They come off the line
looking like commercial ships, only they’ve got drive
potential up the yang-yang, and they never get delivered to any of
the transport outfits. They disappear for a while, then turn up
somewhere else with guns dripping off them.”
“Why wasn’t High Command informed of this,
Beckhart?”
“Because my sources are in the Defender’s office.
And I knew why they were rearming. You wouldn’t have bought
it. Half of High Command is still trying to refight the Ulantonid
War. I let it go on playing that game because people were seeing
enough of those new ships to get nervous and start us a secret
building program of our own. So we’re on our way
too.”
“Beckhart . . . Your logic baffles me.
Totally baffles me. I have the distinct feeling that you’ll
have to explain it to a Board of Inquiry. What else have you hidden
from us?”
“You want an honest answer, or one that will please
you?” Beckhart did not make many friends. He retained his
position principally because no one else could do his job as
well.
“Beckhart!”
“Several things, sir. Ongoing operations. If they work
out, we’ll be in good shape for meeting these
monsters.”
“Monsters?” Melene demanded. “There’s no
evidence . . . ”
“Melene, the Admiral is a xenophobe. In fact, he
doesn’t like people very much. Tell me what you’re
doing, Beckhart.”
“There’s a chance I’m on the threshold to the
solution of the Sangaree problem. Some new data was on its way in
before we left. I’ll probably want to borrow von Drachau
again.”
“What else?”
“Still too tentative for discussion. A possible
breakthrough in communications and weapons technologies. I
won’t discuss it now. Not here.”
“Beckhart . . . ”
“Security privilege. Sir. Log it if you like.”
Von Staufenberg wheeled on the Director of Naval Intelligence.
She shrugged. “You won’t get anything from me, either,
Manfred.”
“Damn! All right, let’s get moving. Time’s
running out, and everybody’s got to have a look at
this.”
Cumbers were the most cramped vessels since Gemini. Circulating
the forty-odd beings aboard was a slow, uncomfortable process.
“She’s about to start shooting,” Beckhart said
of the nearest destroyer. “She has. Missile swarm. We have
four minutes to hide.”
“How do you like that? Didn’t even try to find out
who we were or what we wanted.”
“This is the Ship’s Commander,” von
Staufenberg said into the public address system. “We’re
under fire. Engineering, stand by to go Null.” Thirty seconds
before the swarm arrived, he ordered, “Take her up to ten
Bev. First Watch Officer, a gesture is in order. Program me an
attack approach on the vessel shooting at us.”
The Ulantonid’s feathery antennae stirred, quivered. The
action was comparable to a human’s pleased chuckle.
The Star Lords were in Weapons Department already, hoping they
would be allowed to play with their deadly toys.
“One missile,” said von Staufenberg. “Right up
her wake.”
It was the classic Climber attack strategy. Drives were a
warship’s soft spot. They simply could not be designed so
that thrust apertures could be shielded as well as the remainder of
the vessel.
The dust in the crater flowed together suddenly, smashing in
like the Red Sea on Pharaoh’s chariots. The doughnut ship had
vanished.
“Take her all the way to forty Bev,” von Staufenberg
ordered. “I doubt they know enough to look for our Hawking
Point, but let’s get that cross-section down anyway.”
One of the curiosities about the Climber was that no other race
known to humanity had ever developed it. And for humans it had been
an accidental by-product of other research.
Twenty-three minutes passed before the First Watch Officer
reported, “Attack position, Commander.”
“Weapons, Ship’s Commander. One missile. Stand by.
Detection, when we go down I want you to get the ranges and vectors
on everything you can see. We’ll do what we can. And I want
the tape rolling. Ship’s Services, vent heat while
we’re Norm. All right. Everybody ready? Take her down,
Engineering.”
Heat accumulation was the biggest weakness of the Climber. There
was no way to shed heat in Null. And a Climber often had to stay up
for days while enemy warships hunted her.
The Climber was no warship in the slug-it-out sense. She was a
hit-and-run fighter dependent on surprise for her
effectiveness.
The Defender Prime brought them down just four kilometers behind
the destroyer. The Climber rocked. The missile accelerated at 100
g. It arrived before the destroyer knew it was coming.
“One for the good guys,” Beckhart grumped as the
Climber went up again.
“What was that?” von Staufenberg demanded.
“Admiral, you’re giving them valuable information
just by blowing them out of space. You’re telling them we can
do it. You’ll get them wondering how. Head home before we
give them any hard data. Let’s save the surprises for when
they’ll do some good.”
Von Staufenberg reddened. There was no love lost between him and
Beckhart.
“He’s right, Manfred,” the Defender Prime
interjected. “You almost wasted the Climber advantage by
committing them piecemeal during the war. They would have more
effective if whole fleets had appeared suddenly. We would not have had
time to adapt.”
“Of course. Of course. I was thinking with my guts.
Program a course for the mother, Melene.”
Climbers did not have a long range. A mother ship awaited this
one a hundred light-years homeward. A small armada protected
her.
This Climber’s crew regarded themselves highly.