The invaders had posted their fleet in standard patrol orbits. Otherwise they did nothing to camouflage themselves. It bespoke a confidence that chilled David Falkayn.
As his speedster neared Vanessa, he picked up ship after ship on his instruments. One passed so close that his viewscreens needed little magnification to show details. She was a giant, of Nova class, with only subtle outward indications that the hands which built her were not human. Her guns thrust across blackness and crowding constellations; sunlight blazed off her flanks; she was beautiful, arrogant, and terrifying.
Falkayn told himself he was not duly terrified. Himself wondered how big a liar he was.
His receiver buzzed, a call on the universal band. He flipped to Accept. The dial on the Doppler compensator indicated that the battleship was rapidly matching vectors with him. The image which looked out of the screen was—no, scarcely that of a Vanessan, but a member of the same species. It gabbled.
"Sorry, no spikka da—" Falkayn braked. Conquerors were apt to be touchy, and yonder chap sat aboard a vessel which could eat a continent with nuclear weapons and use his boat afterward for a toothpick. "I regret my ignorance of your various languages."
The Kraok honked. Evidently he, she, or yx did not know Anglic. Well, the interspeech of the Polesotechnic League . . . "Loquerisne Latine?"
The being reached for a vocalizer. Without such help, humans and Kraoka garbled each other's sounds rather badly. Adjusting it, the officer asked, "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?"
"Huh?" Falkayn's jaw hit his Adam's apple.
"Ich haben die deutsche Sprache ein wenig gelehrt," said the Kraok with more pride than grammar, "bei der grosse Kapitän."
Falkayn gripped tight to his pilot seat, and his sanity, and gaped.
Aside from being hostile, the creature was not an unpleasing sight. About two meters tall, the body resembled that of a slim tyrannosaur, if one can imagine tyrannosaurs with brown fur. From the back sprang a great, ribbed dorsal fin, partly folded but still shimmering iridescent. The arms were quite anthropoid, except for four-fingered hands where each digit had an extra joint. The head was round, with tufted ears, blunt muzzle, eyes smaller than a man's.
Clothing amounted to a brassard of authority, a pouch belt, and a sidearm. Falkayn could therefore search his memory and discover which of the three Kraokan sexes the officer belonged to: the so-called transmitter, which was fertilized by the male and in turn impregnated the female. I should've guessed, he thought, even if the library on Garstang's didn't have much information on them. The males are short and meek and raise the young. The females are the most creative and make most of the decisions. The transmitters are the most belligerent.
And right now are tracking me with guns. He felt altogether isolated. The throb and murmur of the boat, the odors of recycled air and his own sweat, his weight under the interior gee-field, were like an eggshell of life sensation around him. Outside lay starkness. The power of the League was distant by multiple parsecs, and these strangers had declared themselves its enemies.
"Antworten Sie!" demanded the Kraok.
Falkayn groped with half-forgotten bits of Yiddish that he had sometimes heard from Martin Schuster, during his apprenticeship. "Ikh . . . veyss . . . nit keyn . . . Deitch," he said, as slowly and clearly as possible. "Get me . . . ah mentsch . . . uh, zeit azay git." The other sat motionless. "Damn it, you've got humans with you," Falkayn said. "I know the name of one. Utah Horn. Understand? Utah Horn."
The Kraok switched him over to another, who squatted against a background of electronic apparatus. Unhuman tones whistled from an intercom. The new one turned to Falkayn.
"I know some Latin," yx said. In spite of a vocalizer, the accent was thick enough to spread on pumpernickel. "You identify."
Falkayn wet his lips. "I am the Polesotechnic League's factor on Garstang's," he said. "A messenger capsule brought me word about your, uh, advent. It said I had permission to come here."
"So." More whistles. "Indeed. One boat, unarmed, we allow to make landings at Elan-Trrl. You make trouble, we kill."
"Of course I won't," Falkayn promised, unless I get a chance. "I will proceed directly. Do you want my route plan?"
Yx did. The boat's pilot computer sent numbers to the battleship's. The track was approved. Maser beams flashed through space, alerting other vessels to keep an eye on the speedster. "You go," said the Kraok.
"But this Utah Horn—"
"Commander Horn see you when want to. Go." The screen blanked and Falkayn went. The acceleration strained his internal field compensators.
He gusted air from his lungs and stared outward. Hitherto, as he sped toward Thurman's Star, the view had been dominated by Beta Centauri, unwinking, almost intolerably brilliant across two-score light-years. But now the sun of Vanessa showed a visible disc. It wasn't that kind of type B supergiant: but nevertheless impressive, a white F7, seething with prominences, shimmering with corona. If his shield screens should fail, its radiation would strike through the hull and destroy him.
Well, he gulped, I wanted to be a dashing adventurer. So here I am, and mostly I want to dash.
He stretched, opposed muscles to each other, worked out some of his tension. Then he felt hungry and went aft to build a sandwich; and when he had eaten and lit his pipe, a certain ebullience returned. For he was a bare twenty years old.
When he got his journeyman's papers, he was one of the youngest humans ever to do so. In large part, that was thanks to his role in the trouble on Ivanhoe. To set a similar record for a Master Merchant's certificate, he needed another exploit or two. Beljagor's message had made him whoop for glee.
Now it turned out that he was up against something more formidable than he had imagined. But he remained a scion of a baronial house in the Grand Duchy of Hermes. Mustn't let the side down, eh, what?
At a minimum, if he did nothing but convey word to Sector HQ about what had happened, that would bring him to the notice of the higher-ups. Maybe old Nick van Rijn himself would hear about this David Falkayn, who was so obviously being wasted in that dismal little outpost on Garstang's.
He practiced a reckless grin. It looked better than last year. While his face remained incurably snub-nosed, it had lost the chubbiness that used to distress him. And he was large and blond and rangy, he told himself, and had excellent taste in clothes and wine. Also women, he added, becoming more smug by the minute. If only he weren't the sole human on his assigned planet—Well, perhaps this mysterious Horn person had brought along some spare females. . . .
Vanessa grew in the vision ports, a reddish globe mottled with green and blue, sparked with reflections off the small seas. Falkayn wondered what the inhabitants called it. Being colonists themselves, whose civilization had not fallen apart during the long hiatus in Kraokan space travel as had happened on other settlements, they doubtless had a single language. Why hadn't Thurman done the usual thing in such cases, and put the native name of his discovery into the catalogues?
Quite probably because men couldn't wrap their larynxes around it. Or maybe he just felt like dubbing the planet "Vanessa." Judas, what a radium-plated opportunity an explorer had! What girl could possibly resist an offer to name a whole world for her?
Another warship in sentry orbit became discernible. Falkayn stopped dreaming.