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A curt and authoritative and well-recognized voice snapped, "All ships keep formation on flagship. Course coordinates...." The voice gave them. "There's a clump of enemy ships beginning to organize! We hit them!" The fleet of Kandar came around the gas-giant world and flung itself at the fleet of Mekin. It seemed that everything was subject to intolerable delay.
But we won't stay here to be killed as his proxy! Not without fighting first!" A voice, crisp: "Target globe launched, sir." "Low-power overdrive toward the gas-giant planet. One-twentieth second. Five, four, three, two, one!" There was the unbearable double sensation of going into, and breakout from, overdrive simultaneously.
On Kandar, the population knew that there had been a battle off the gas-giant planet, but they did not know the result. The Mekinese fleet had not come. The fleet of Kandar had not returned. The caretaker government met in council and desperately made guesses. It arrived at no hopeful conclusion whatever.
The gas-giant planet far behind, and the only inner one on this side of the sun, would return their pulses only after minutes. Meanwhile the radars reported very faintfully, but they only repeated previous reports. "No new object within half a million miles," said Baird, after a suitable interval. Presently he added: "Nothing new within three-quarter million miles."
The gas-giant planet outward from the sun was a perceptible disk instead of a diffuse glow. The oxygen-planet to sunward showed again as a lighted crescent. Presently Baird, in a human spacesuit, accompanied the Plumie into the Niccola's air lock and out to emptiness. His magnetic-soled shoes clung to the Niccola's cobalt-steel skin.
There was a count-down of seconds, and the abominably unpleasant sensation of breakout, and the ship was in normal space again. There was the sun of Garen, burning peacefully in a vast void with millions of minute, unwinking lights in the firmament all about it. There was a gas-giant planet, a mere fifteen million miles away. Further out there were the smaller, frozen worlds.
He knew from Diane's expression that there was no sound in the headphones except the frying noise all main-sequence stars give out, and the infrequent thumping noises that come from gas-giant planets' lower atmospheres, and the Jansky-radiation hiss which comes from everywhere. The skipper swore. The Plumie ship lay broadside to, less than a score of miles away. It shone in the sunlight.
She set up two instruments which would measure the angle, bearing, and distance of the two planets now on this side of the sun the gas-giant and the oxygen-world to sunward. Their orbital speeds and distances were known. The position, course, and speed of the Niccola could be computed from any two observations on them.
For long, sweating, unbearable minutes nothing happened except that the fleet of Kandar went hurtling through space with no sensation or direct evidence of motion. The gas-giant planet dwindled, but not very fast. The bright specks on the screens which were enemy ships seemed to separate as they drew nearer. But all happened with infinite and infuriating deliberation. It was worth waiting for.
It would have assembled itself at that breakout point, but it would still arrive in a disorderly mob. One's point of arrival could not be too closely figured at the high speeds of overdrive. So when the Mekinese came, they would not be in formation. Bors called the flagship, when the gas-giant planet was in line and a barrier against the radio waves.
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