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Bob noticed a brief flash in his peripheral vision, then his radio died. "Uh oh." He was jetting ten meters above the surface, a bagful of Phinons in each hand. Immediately he hit the jets and blasted straight down to the surface, there to take whatever cover he could amongst the lumps and ridges of ice.

After clearing the shaft and arguing with Pops, Bob had mumbled an inexpert prayer that the old man would somehow be following him soon. But getting back to the ship with the Phinons was his first priority, yet carrying two Phinons along with him would tax his jet-maneuvering computer to the limit unless he found a reasonably balanced way to carry them. (Pops' power suit, having been designed to accommodate even unwieldy sorts of weapons platforms, did not have that limitation. Bob swore that he'd upgrade the minute he was back on Luna.)

Unfortunately, he also wanted to be able to keep his weapons at the ready, but after a short period of experimentation, it became clear to the lieutenant that he couldn't have it both ways. Not unless he wanted to walk. He didn't.

He'd had to put down right outside the shaft opening and minutes had elapsed before Bob actually took hold of the handles again, one in each hand, and holding the rescue bags extended, jumped off the surface and headed toward the Hyperlight. He'd had to go gently to avoid tumbling, and had made it about a third of the way back to where the ship lay grounded, listening to Pops and Rick commenting about how the ranks of Phinons were thinning, when his radio died.

On the way down Bob let go of the bags. They'd likely bounce a bit but would pretty much stay where they fell despite the trivial surface gravity. He had a weapon out of its holder and in hand by the time his feet hit the ground and his gripfields held him fast.

Bob didn't know what had taken out his radio. He called up his suit diagnostics and queried, and was shown a readout indicating that the radio node on his right shoulder had reached a peak temperature of 2043 Kelvins, but had rapidly cooled to nondangerous levels.

"Rick? Pops?" he called and silence came back. "Dammit. One of those bastards must have nicked me." Nicked was right—a straight-on shot from a Phinon X-ray laser would have flash vaporized Bob's suit material and the resulting explosion would have been the equivalent of having a grenade go off one millimeter away.

Bob had come down into a notch where two thin ridges about three meters high intersected. He had a clear view of the terrain in the direction of the ship, but there could be any number of Phinons on the other side of the ridges by now.

A full minute passed and nothing happened.

Since he wasn't about to try flying to the ship again, Bob collected up the two Phinons, but this time holding both handles in his left hand. He began the trek back to the ship. After four steps he turned around to see if anyone was back there.

Five Phinon faces were looking at him.

The aliens were hovering just above the ridges, and all had weapons pointed at him. Bob felt two conflicting instincts; one to start shooting and the other to hold the rescue bags in front of him like a shield. The latter impulse, with a push from intuition, won out.

Unbelievably long, uneventful, seconds passed.

They don't know what the hell to do, Bob thought. They can see that I have two of them, but they don't know why, or what it means. Judas Priest! They don't look angry or mad. They just look confused. Still, Bob was certain that they'd figure out what to do if he started shooting. Or walking again.

Then like a single unit, the Phinons slowly descended to the surface. They maintained their confused stares at Bob, and after they were all down, they just stood there, watching, as the lieutenant remained immobile.

Shit, shit, shit! Now what? Throw my captives at them and bolt? They'll cut me to shreds the second I'm clear of the bodies. And I can't get all five of them with my gun. I don't even have a Goddamn grenade on me! I gave them all to Pops. 

Without warning, the ground hit him on the feet like an enormous hammer and threw Bob and the Phinons right off the surface and into space, and he was briefly blinded by the flare of the blast from the detonation of Pops' suit. He was tumbling, and he could feel the gentle, sequential bursts from the jets as his suit, having sensed its situation, was trying to bring him into a stable orientation. It seemed to be taking an unusually long time. Bob was still holding on to the Phinons. He put his gun away and blindly shifted one of the aliens to his right hand. He was stable again within seconds, and abruptly his suit vision returned.

It was an awesome scene. The randomly chosen orientation the suit had stopped him in placed him with the mass of the comet looming on his left, and less than a hundred meters away, the still brightly luminous shaft of incandescent gas pouring out of the hole where, Bob now knew, Pops had died. Everywhere partial, glowing Phinons were scattering into the velvet abyss, and after a few seconds of observation Bob noted that he was also a part of this scattering, his proper motion having in only seconds separated him more than two hundred additional meters from the surface of the icy world. Looking more carefully, Bob saw that some of the Phinons around him were still whole, noticed that maneuvering jets were flaring from their suits, and realized that these were the same ones who had intercepted him on the way back to the ship.

As the only human out there, Bob was sure they'd notice him soon.

Bob scanned the sky around him and it took only moments to locate all five of the Phinons who had been thrown off the comet with him, for all had to employ suit jets to orient themselves, and the tiny flares were easy to differentiate from the pinpoint stars despite some of them being over a kilometer away by now.

"Where the hell is the ship!" Bob shouted into the hollow of his helmet. Without his communications, he had no idea what had happened to Rick and the Hyperlight. Had she been shaken off the surface, too? Her gripfields were much stronger than those in Bob's suit. On the other hand, staying on the surface might have been more damaging to the ship than being tossed off. "Where are you, Rick?" He searched the surface of the comet, but by now the explosion had played out and Bob found he had no idea of where to look for the ship.

He gave up the search for a second and looked once again for the Phinons. Now he could see that all had suit jets flaring, and that they were all coming toward him. And worse, even more were now pouring up into the sky from other tunnels from other areas on the surface.

Suddenly the head of one of the Phinons of the gang of five exploded, and its remains vectored off towards Bob's feet. Bob smiled. He recognized the signature of an anti-personnel laser set on full.

He looked, with respect to his orientation, up, and there above him was the (glorious!) silhouette of the Hyperlight, APL cluster fully extended, and the airlock door open, waiting for him. Again the APL erupted, and Bob turned in time to see another Phinon die.

And also in time to see two Phinon fighters rise into space from beyond the curve of the comet.

Bob hit his jets, blasting at full, aiming for the airlock.

* * *

Rick Vander Kam was not having a good time. Left alone in the ship, there was nothing he could do to help his friends and was forced to simply monitor and record what Pops and Bob were doing. He found that trying to pay attention to both sets of action since they split up was extremely difficult.

Although at first monitoring the views coming from both men, since Bob's return initially consisted of nothing but images of the shaft, Rick was able to focus on the fight Pops was having. Once Bob got to the door, Rick again tried to pay equal attention to both. Rick listened to the exchanges between the two men but decided not to interrupt, even after Bob had blown the door but seemed ready to drop into the shaft to help Pops.

When Bob finally jetted off the surface after tangling with the two Phinon-filled rescue bags, Rick again focused on the battle within the comet, and offered encouragement when he saw that Pops was close to killing all comers.

He wasn't paying attention when Bob's return went dead, and only turned in time to watch the screen flicker once and go black.

"Oh, shit. What happened to Bob?" Rick muttered. Immediately Rick set up a replay of the last few seconds of signal from Bob and called up a telemetry analysis program. One of the rules learned early in the days of space exploration was "Never turn off the radio!" How a signal dies can tell one a lot about what happened to the transmitter. Rick reached the instant of failure and the analysis routines expanded the signal trace, showing a maze of squiggly lines on the screen that all suddenly went flat. That was actually the best news that Rick could have hoped for. It meant that the problem probably originated with the transmitter. Otherwise, telemetry signals from other parts of Bob's suit would have shown distortions just before the transmitter failure.

While concentrating on the loss of signal from Bob's suit, Rick still was listening with a fraction of his attention to the audio coming back from Pops. He heard Pops say: "Aw shit. Bob, where are you?"

Rick knew he'd never forget his last few words with Pops, nor the sick feeling he'd had inside when he saw the descending cloud of Phinons that Pops was looking at, and knew what the old commander was about to do.

The explosion still surprised him.

A thousand things went through Rick's mind all at once, but the most important was the intuitional technical sidebar relating the explosive force of a suit self-destruct to the probable magnitude of cometary surface movement at the radial distance of the Hyperlight from ground zero. Instantly Rick was out of his seat and into the pilot's, with one hand motion killing the gripfields and activating the Hyperlight's repulsors.

The ship bounced off the surface simultaneously with the glare from the suit explosion suddenly illuminating the control bubble. Rick glanced back to his monitoring station. All the screens were blank.

There was no reason to examine the LOS trace from Pops' suit.

Rick stayed in the bubble and started searching for Bob. He had all of the scanners going and had redirected the visuals from the APL system to the nav screen because it allowed for better magnification.

There was so much to search, Rick found, as he watched the scattering Phinon bodies. With a few adjustments Rick was able to focus only on bodies that seemed to be keeping station and a fixed orientation. He expected to find one—or none, if Bob was dead. He found six.

A soft chime sounded calling Rick's attention to the Dykdar scanners. "Rats," was all Rick could say as the display indicated that two Phinon ships were on their way out of the comet.

Okay, how much time before those ships arrive? Not much. Let's see if I can find Bob. Not that one. Another Phinon. Phinon. Phinon. There he is! Thank God he's alive! Damn, he's not looking toward the ship—probably doesn't know I'm above him. Those Phinons are after him. Rick hit the switch that opened up the exterior airlock door. I'll kill the Phinons, Bob. You just get your ass up here. The APL fired. Rick watched the Phinon die.

Bob watched, too. Rick could actually see the lieutenant look in his direction, and silently rejoiced when his jets fired even as the APL killed another alien. Then Rick saw the Phinon ships, too. This is going to be close! 

Rick burst out of the control bubble to wait for Bob at the airlock. The wait was interminable even though he could calculate the number of seconds that must elapse before Bob would hit the lock.

Five, four, three, two— CLANG. You're early, Bob. Rick hit the switch to close the lock, saving Bob the precious seconds to do so himself, then activated the slam repressurization and the lock came up to full atmosphere in two seconds.

The inner lock door opened and Bob thrust out the Phinons to Rick. "Throw these in the stateroom," he ordered.

"Two ships are coming," Rick said.

"Saw 'em," Bob replied. His suit split like a clamshell and Bob was on his way to the pilot's bubble before its pieces hit the floor.

Rick hauled the two Phinons to the aft stateroom and threw one on each bunk. What would Pops think? Rick wondered. This had been his room. For an instant Rick wondered if he should jolt the Phinons with another dose of Sammi's drug. He looked at his watch and was shocked to realize that less than twenty minutes had elapsed since Bob had first knocked them out. He left them in the rescue bags for now—that was the safest place for them.

Rick went forward and dropped into the copilot's seat. He noticed that the shields were up but the ship was still near the comet. "I'm keeping the comet between us and the Phinon ships until I have our vector for home laid in," Bob said, not looking up from what he was doing.

Rick monitored all of the scanners. With the Dykdar he could see the trace of the Phinon ships. They'd split up and were suddenly coming at them from opposite directions from around the comet.

"Okay, got it," Bob said. "Time to fight or time to run or some reasonable combination thereof." The Hyperlight accelerated away from the comet and the Phinon ships were instantly after them.

The Phinons fired missiles, wicked little darts moving out at incredible accelerations. Bob avoided two of them easily, but a third hit the shields. "No sweat," Rick said, watching the indicators. "We took that one okay."

"Great. We'll be in hyperspace in thirty seconds," Bob said. "Just hold them off."

Rick trained the Hyperlight's weapons on the marginally closer of the two Phinon ships. He fired the laser and two "smart rocks," kinetic kill vehicles driven by small sequential matter-antimatter explosions. The first smart rock overloaded the Phinon's shields and it collapsed to nothing but a smile of satisfaction on Rick's face.

There was a bright flash through the bubble, like a flare igniting. The Hyperlight shuddered, then settled down. "God dammit! What was that?" Bob yelled.

"X-ray laser. Power density way, way, up there! Holy shit!" Rick said.

"Yeah. Holy shit and the drive is gone," Bob replied.

Rick was already checking the diagnostics. "We had a squib burn-through of the shields. Right above the port hyperdrive nacelle. That one's wrecked."

"Gonna be a long walk home," Bob said.

"Hell no!" Rick shouted, but he was looking at the weapons display. He'd sent the remaining complement of smart rocks at the Phinon fighter.

It did the trick.

"Hell, no!" Rick said again, springing up from the chair. "The sublight drive is gone, Bob. But we only need one nacelle for hyperdrive. Just give me a half hour in the engine compartment."

Rick grabbed his tools and diagnostics equipment from the locker and was soon sprawled on the aft deck, working like a maniac.

"Bad news," Bob said over the comm a short time later. "The Dykdar shows a couple more ships on their way. I'm going to run up the reaction drive. Might as well buy what time we can."

Lying on the deck, Rick could feel the rumble as the reaction drive flared to life, but it was the last thing he noticed outside himself and the hyperdrive motor.

The Hyperlight only needed one unit, but the remaining one had been balanced to work with another, and the adjustments necessary to get it to function by itself were many and complicated. Still, Rick rose to the occasion and in exactly 29 minutes turned over and shouted, "Hyperdrive, now!"

And they were on their way back home.

* * *

Bob lost track of how long he had been staring out the window at the monochrome phantasmagoria of hyperspace. Lacking anything else to do after getting the drive online, Rick had gone off to take a shower ten, twenty—maybe sixty minutes ago. Bob didn't know.

He kept part of his attention on the scanners, and no Phinons had followed them into hyperspace. That was good.

Still, it didn't change the fact that he'd lost a man.

Rick finally came forward and slumped into the copilot's chair. His hair was still wet. Ah, ten minutes ago, Bob thought.

"I guess I should thank you for saving my life," Bob said.

"Saved mine, too. But you're welcome. To repay me you can pilot us back home."

"The best I can do is the Solar System," Bob answered. "We have almost no reaction mass left. Our velocity relative to the Sun once we drop out of drive is going to be around eight hundred kps. But we're going to have to drop out early because I don't want to get too close to the Hague Limit. I still remember that artwork Pops showed us of a hyperdrive motor hitting it while activated."

"What artwork?"

"Oh. Sorry. I forgot. You were dancing with Paula when he showed me. Anyway, thirty-five hours from now we're dropping out and then we'll just coast through the Solar System. But shit, it's going to take us over forty days just to get to the orbit of Pluto, and we're not going to get any farther in than the orbit of Uranus."

"Space is big," Rick said. "Damn."

Bob ran his hand through his hair, then put his hands behind his head and leaned back. He sighed. "Rick, what the hell happened to Pops? Did you see it?"

Perceptively, Rick said, "He didn't have a choice, Bob. And there was nothing we could do." Rick briefly described what he'd seen on the monitors. "I didn't even get a decent chance to say good-bye."

"I owe my life to Pops, too," Bob said. "If he hadn't done what he did, the Phinons would have killed me soon. Some leader I am. First Pops saves my ass, then you save it again, and even after I'm back aboard you have to save it a third time or we'd be toast back there at the comet."

"You're forgetting what's in the back stateroom," Rick said. "You brought the live Phinons back to the ship. That's what's important. That's what Chris sent us out here to do. Pops knew what price might have to be paid. So did my dad. So did you."

"Dammit, I know that!" Bob said. "It just doesn't feel that simple."

After that there wasn't much to say—or do, except to wait until breakout. Bob took his own shower, then returned to the control bubble and refined his estimates for breakout time, and calculated just how close to the inner system he'd be able to bring his crippled ship.

Of course, once they left hyperdrive, they could always radio for help, but that would mean the Belt would find out about them. And the hyperdrive.

Rick came forward again. "I was just checking on the aliens. I took them out of the bags. They're not stirring yet, but I don't know what the hell we're going to do with them the whole time we're coasting back into the system. I don't think we have enough ampoules to keep them sedated that long, and even if we did it would probably kill them, I'd think."

"Yeah. I think we're going to have to send out an SOS, but I'd rather the Belt didn't find us first."

"We're coming back awfully late, anyway," Rick said. "Maybe Chris will have the Patrol monitoring deep space for us continuously."

"Good point," Bob said. "Only I think it will be Knoedler who will be looking for us."

"I don't suppose it matters. The jig is up once we show up with the Phinons anyway. I just hope Sammi can actually perfect her bugs once she has those guys."

Bob was looking at Rick when he mentioned Sammi, but this time he thought he detected a change in Rick from how he usually talked whenever her name came up. He decided to keep the topic going.

"I'm sure she will," Bob said. "She's an awfully smart girl. A genius. That intimidates the hell out of me. Of course, so do you on that score, Rick. You can keep up with her."

"Somehow I don't think IQ is the first thing on Samantha's list when she thinks about men. I've never found that to be true of any other women," Rick said. "Hell, it's not true of me when I think about women," he added with a grin.

"You don't think she finds your intelligence attractive?" Bob asked, continuing the subtle inquisition.

"Attractive? Certainly. But not sufficient. And quit trying to be sneaky. You're no good at it. You know I like her, and I know you like her. But one thing I know that you don't is that she likes you, too."

"What? Bullshit," Bob said. He'd lost control of this conversation.

"No, it's not bullshit. Once the sorrow is gone, she'll admit that you get her all steamy. You think that you're the first uniformed stud that a technogeek like me has lost out to? Buddy, I know the signs."

"Okay, then, what's Paula's angle?" Bob asked. "She didn't even see me when we were introduced."

"My family has a lot of money," Rick reminded him.

"So you're saying she's just a gold-digging bitch?"

"Don't call her that!" Rick said, suddenly angry.

"Aha!" Bob replied, but then Rick stomped out.

* * *

Rick finished administering another dose of PMDP to each of the Phinons. Although he recalled that the dosages he was giving would have kept a bull elephant under for three days, he'd found it necessary to sock the aliens with another dose every twelve hours or they began to show evidence of waking up.

He looked again at the hands, the ones that had been damaged when Pops had pulled them apart. They were getting better. It looked like the Phinons had incredible powers of regeneration. Perhaps that was also why the drug didn't work so well—the alien physiology might simply have regenerated whatever binding sites were deactivated by the PMDP, rather than waiting for the drug to clear out on its own.

Rick found the questions interesting, but not compelling. There were people on the Moon who could answer those questions. What was of much more concern to him was that he and Bob didn't have enough ampoules to keep the Phinons out for the entire duration of their return to Earth-Luna. Or till their rescue, rather, since no matter what they did, they'd have to call for help.

Bob entered the stateroom. "Same thing?" he asked.

"Yeah. They start stirring after twelve hours. We have enough of the drug to keep them out for a week or so, but after that we'd either better have a cage ready or be rescued," Rick replied.

"It's another consideration," Bob said.

"Look at the hands," Rick said, pointing. "They're growing back. That hand there is the one that was shattered. You'd never know it now."

Bob held up his own hand. "This is the hand I lost when I stole Hague away from the Belt. This one they put on still doesn't feel right."

"Breakout is in a few minutes?" Rick asked, changing the subject.

"Right. That's why I came back here. I want you up front to help me find out exactly where we are ASAP. That will help us narrow down our options."

"Okay."

They went up to the control bubble and took their seats. Only seconds later the Hyperlight emerged from hyperspace right on the mark, and the reappearance of the stars out of the monochrome was spectacular.

Really spectacular.

"Those aren't all stars," Rick said after a few seconds of staring.

"Damn right they're not," Bob said. "Where in the hell are we? And what do the scanners show?"

What the scanners showed was hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of spaceships. What their eyes revealed was the brilliant dazzle of nothing any more exciting than a powerful reaction drive, multiplied thousands of times, scattered as far as the eye could see so it was nearly impossible to separate them from the distant stars.

"Oh my God," the lieutenant said. "The Phinons put reaction drives on their spaceships."

"Which means they want to come inside the Hague Limit. That proves that Chris was right. The Phinons really didn't have a two-element drive," Rick said.

"Look at how many there are," Bob said. "They could be using chemical rockets and it wouldn't make a hell of a lot of difference. Humans haven't built that many spaceships in our entire history."

For the next ten minutes the two shut up and tried to sort out their situation. They had emerged, surprisingly, less than one astronomical unit from the Hague Limit. This drew a sharp look from Rick. "We were less than twenty seconds away from tearing the ship to pieces," he said.

"Sorry," Bob said. "I was shooting for ten seconds, but I wanted to be cautious," he added, although he was even more shocked than Rick that they'd come out so close.

In addition, they'd come out inside a Phinon fleet. Bob determined that the fleet was moving on a vector 22 degrees different from their own, and the average fleet velocity was, at this moment, though the ships were accelerating, about 200 kps relative to the Sun. Surprisingly, the ships didn't seem at all interested in the Hyperlight, for none were turning in her direction, nor activating their sublight engines to catch them even though they were still (barely) outside the Limit.

"I've got some spectral data from their drives," Rick said. "Looks like ordinary matter-antimatter stuff within an open Dykstra field bubble, at a fractional percentage ratio. I suppose it could be partial mass conversion instead. It's a little hard to tell but I think the drive in your courier boat is more efficient than these are.

"Have you figured out where these ships are going?"

"Let's have a look," Bob said, and he threw up their position on a screen graphic of the Solar System. "See, we're headed up from Solar south, and so are they. But they're heading in deeper than we are, and—" Bob expanded the scale at the center of the screen. "Oh, shit. Jupiter. They're going to Jupiter."

"Biggest planet first, I guess," Rick said. "There are over four million people in the Jupiter satellite system."

"Won't be long and there won't be any," Bob said. "Not unless we can stop them."

They looked again at the vast array of brilliant pinpoints. By now they were certain that their velocity had taken them outside the confines of the fleet, but that was hardly a comfort.

"Well, skipper?" Rick asked after a moment.

"Let's rig up a power boost for the transmitter, Rick. We have nothing to be coy about anymore. We're going to blanket the entire Solar System with our mayday and SOS, both widespread laser and good old E and M. The Phinon Project is no longer a secret."

"I'll get right on it," Rick said. "I agree, we have to tell everyone. I just hope to hell it will make a difference."

"Ultimately, it will," Bob said. He looked again at the Phinon fleet. "But not to the people at Jupiter."

 

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