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Chapter 16

He had hoped that the royalist invaders would create enough of a diversion to distract attention from Bronson Star's getaway. He had strongly suspected that the landing would not be a great surprise to the rulers of Dunlevin; he had not anticipated that the invading force, in its entirety, would be wiped out by nuclear blast. (Surely there could have been no survivors.) He had envisaged a nasty little battle but with fatal casualties deliberately kept to a minimum so that there could be a show trial afterward with public humiliation of Paul, Lania and their adherents. But military and political leaders do not always see eye to eye—and the military have always been prone to use steam hammers to squash gnats.

Meanwhile—how trigger happy were the crews of the fortress satellites? Would they shoot first and ask questions afterward or would they try to talk Bronson Star into surrender? (Their Air Force colleagues had given up the chase saying, before they turned away, "You've had your chance. You'll never get past the forts.") Did the satellite crews know about the Gunderson Gambit? It was supposed to be a closely guarded secret of the Federation Survey Service—but Mortdale knew (had known) about it. And if Mortdale had known. . . .

"Susie," he asked urgently, "was the general ever in the Marines? The Federation Survey Service Marines, that is. . . ."

"Why do you ask, John? He's dead now. What does it matter what he was."

Cold-blooded little bitch! thought Grimes angrily. The general, with all his faults, had been more of Grimes's breed of cat than Paul and Lania or, come to that, Susie and Hodge.

"This is important," he said. "Was he ever in the Marines?"

"Yes," she admitted sulkily. "Quite a few of the refugees, the military types, entered Federation service. He got as high as colonel, I believe. . . ."

And as a colonel, thought Grimes, he'd have had access to all manner of classified information. He hoped that there were no ex-colonels of Marines in the satellites. It was extremely unlikely that there would be.

He said, "Put the radar on long range. See if you can pick up any of the orbital forts."

She said, "There're all sorts of bloody blips—some opening, some closing. They could be anything."

"They probably are," said Grimes.

Then again a strange voice came from the transceiver. "Fortress Castro to Bronson Star. This is your last chance. Inject yourself into closed orbit and prepare to receive our boarding party—or we open fire!"

"You can't!" cried Susie to Grimes.

"I have to," he said. "Look at the gauges. You wouldn't be able to breathe what's outside the ship but it's still more atmosphere than vacuum. I can't risk the Gunderson Gambit—yet."

He had anticipated this very situation, reasoned that a show of compliance would be the only way to avoid instant destruction. Already he had thrown the problem into the lap of the computer; all that he had to do now was switch over from manual to automatic control.

"Inject into orbit!" came the voice of Fortress Castro. "We are tracking you. Inject into orbit—or. . . ."

"Tell them that we're injecting," said Grimes to Susie. .

He threw the switch, heard and felt the arrhythmic hammering of the drive as Bronson Star was pushed away from her outward and upward trajectory. He hoped that Fortress Castro's commander was relying more upon the evidence presented by his computer than the display in his radar tank. It would be some time before the ship's alteration of course would be visually obvious.

He got up from the command chair, went to his own radar. That large blip must be the orbital fort, that tiny spark moving away from it, toward the center of the screen, the vehicle carrying the boarding party. He turned his attention from the tank to the board with the array of telltale gauges; the dial at which he looked registered particle contact rather than actual pressure. Outside the ship there was vacuum to all practical intents and purposes—the practical intents and purposes of air-breathing organisms. But the sudden—it would have to be sudden—propagation of a temporal precession field would mean the catastrophic, intimate intermingling of those sparsely scattered atoms and molecules, those charged particles, with all matter, living and inanimate, within the ship.

At this distance from the planet the risk was still too great.

Grimes stared into the radar tank. Would Bronson Star reach apogee before the shuttle caught her? Would he be justified in using thrust, to drive the ship to a higher altitude in a shorter time? He decided against this. Fortress Castro's computer would at once notify the shuttle's commander—and that vehicle was close enough now to use its light weaponry, automatic guns firing armor-piercing bullets that would pierce the shell of the unarmored Bronson Star with contemptuous ease, crippling her but not destroying.

"What the hell's going on up there?" came Hodge's voice from the intercom.

"We are temporarily in orbit," said Grimes. "I shall initiate Mannschenn Drive as soon as possible."

"I hope," said Susie—who, as a spaceperson of sorts, was beginning to get some grasp of the situation—"that it will be soon enough."

"Shuttle to Bronson Star," came a fresh voice from the NST transceiver. "Have your after airlock ready to receive boarders."

"Willco," said Susie, looking at Grimes, her eyebrows raised in unspoken query.

He grinned at her with a confidence that he did not feel.

The ship's computer, pre-programmed, took over. Grimes had forgotten to instruct it to sound any sort of warning before starting the Mannschenn Drive. He heard the hum of the rotors as they commenced to spin, the faint murmur that rapidly rose to a high-pitched whine. He saw colors sag down the spectrum, the warped perspective. And it was as though the control room had been invaded by a swarm of tiny, luminous bees, each miniscule but intense flare the funeral pyre of a cancelled-out atom. But there was no damage done—not to Susie, not to himself, not to the ship. And not, he hoped, to Hodge.

The pyrotechnic display abruptly ceased.

Grimes pulled his vile pipe out of his pocket, filled and lit it, looked up and out of the familiar—comforting now rather than frightening—blackness with the writhing, iridescent nebulosities that, in normal space-time, were the stars.

He said, "As soon as the mass proximity indicator shows that there's nothing dangerously close we'll set trajectory. And then . . . Bronsonia, here we come!"

"Not so fast," said Susie, her voice oddly cold. "Not so fast. You have only a few fines to pay on Bronsonia. Hodge and I face life imprisonment or rehabilitation. And that—need I tell you?—is just another word for personality wiping."

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Framed