 CHAPTER XII. They came twenty from the east and twenty from the west, in a thunder of hooves, squealing and screaming in their bloodlust, with prowlers a black wave going before them. They struck the guerns, the prowlers slashing lanes through them while the unicorns charged behind, trampling them, ripping into them with their horns, and smashing them down with their hooves as they vented the pent-up rage of their years of confinement. On the back of each was a rider whose long spear flicked and stabbed into the throats and bellies of guerns. The retreat was halted and transformed into milling confusion. He led his own groups in the final charge, the pre-arranged wedge attack, and they split the guern force in two. The ship was suddenly just beyond them. He gave the last command to Lake and Craig. Now, into the ship! He scooped up a blaster from beside a fallen guern and ran toward it. A guern officer was already in the airlock, his face pale and strained as he looked back and his hand on the closing switch. He shot him and ran up the ramp as the officer's body rolled down it. Unicorn hooves pounded behind him and twenty of them swept past, their riders leaping from their backs to the ramp. Twenty men and fifteen prowlers charged up the ramp as a warning siren shrieked somewhere inside the ship. At the same time the airlocks, operated from the control room, began to slide swiftly shut. He was through first, with Fenrir and Sagan. Lake and Craig, together with six men and four prowlers, squeezed through barely in time. Then the airlocks were closed and they were sealed in the ship. Alarm bells added their sound to the shrieking of the siren, and from the multiple compartment shafts came the whir of elevators dropping with guern forces to kill the humans trapped inside the ship. They ran past the elevator shafts without pausing, light and swift in the artificial gravity that was only two-thirds that of Ragnarok. They split forces as long ago planned, three men and four prowlers going with Charlie Craig in the attempt to take the drive room, Lake and the other three men going with him in the attempt to take the control room. They found the man-way ladder and began to climb, Fenrir and Sagan impatiently crowding their heels. There was nothing on the control room level and they ran down the short corridor that their maps had showed. They turned left into the corridor that had the control room at its end, and into the concentrated fire of nine waiting guerns. Fenrir and Sagan went into the guerns, under their fire, before they could drop the muzzles of their blasters, with an attack so vicious and unexpected that what would have been a certain and lethal trap for the humans was suddenly a fighting chance. The corridor became an inferno of blaster beams that cracked and hissed as they met and crossed, throwing little chips of metal from the walls with snapping sounds and going through flesh with sounds like soft tapings. It was over within seconds, the last guern down and one man still standing beside him, the blonde and nervous lake. Thompson and Barber were dead and Billy West was bracing himself against the wall with a blaster hole through his stomach, trying to say something and sliding to the floor before it was ever spoken. And Sagan was down, blood welling and bubbling from a wound in her chest while Fenrir stood over her with his snarling, a raging scream as he swung his head in search of a still living guern. Humboldt and Lake ran on, Fenrir raging beside them and into the control room. Six officers, one wearing the uniform of a commander, were gaping in astonishment and bringing up their blasters in the way that seemed so curiously slow to Humboldt. Fenrir, in his fury, killed two of them as Lake's blaster and his own killed three more. The commander was suddenly alone, his blaster half lifted. Fenrir leaped at his throat and Humboldt shouted the quick command, Yes, arm! It was something the prowlers had been taught in their training and Fenrir's teeth clicked short of the commander's throat while his paws sent the blasters spinning across the room. The commander stared at them with his swarthy face a dark gray and his mouth still gaping. How, how did you do it? he asked in heavily accented taran. Only two of you! Don't talk until you're asked a question, Lake said. Only two of you! The thought seemed to restore his courage as sight of the ship had restored Norse that night and his tone became threatening. There are only two of you and more guards will be here to kill you within a minute. Surrender to me and I'll let you go free. Lake slapped him across the mouth with a backhanded blow that snapped his head back in his shoulders and split his lip. Don't talk, he ordered again, and never lie to us. The commander spit out a tooth and held his hand to his bleeding mouth. He did not speak again. Tip and freckles were holding tightly to his shoulder and each other, the racing of their hearts like a vibration and he touched them reassuringly. All right now, all safe now, he said. He called Charlie Craig. Charlie, did you make it? We made it to the drive-room, two of us and one prowler, Charlie answered. How about you? Norman and I have the control room, cut their drives to play safe. I'll let you know as soon as the entire ship is ours. He went to the view-screen and saw that the battle was over. Chiara was letting the searchlight burn again and prowlers were being used to drive back the unicorns from surrendering Gerns. I guess we won, he said to Lake. But there was no feeling of victory, none of the elation he thought he would have. Segan was dying alone in the alien corridor outside. Segan, who had nursed beside him and fought beside him and laid down her life for him. I want to look at her, he said to Lake. Fenrir went with him. She was still alive, waiting for them to come back to her. She lifted her head and touched his hand with her tongue as he examined the wound. It was not fatal, it need not be fatal. He worked swiftly, gently, to stop the bleeding that had been draining her life away. She would have to lie quietly for weeks, but she would recover. When he was done he pressed her head back to the floor and said, "'Lie still, Segan girl, until we can come to move you. That for us and Fenrir will stay here with you.' She obeyed and he left them, the feeling of victory and elation coming to him in full then. Lake looked at him questioningly as he entered the control room and he said, "'She'll live.' He turned to the Guern commander. "'First I want to know how the war is going.' "'I!' the commander looked uncertainly at Lake. "'Just tell the truth,' Lake said, "'whether you think we'll like it or not.' "'We have all the planets, but Earth itself,' the commander said. "'We'll have it soon.' And the Terrans on Athena? "'They're still working for us there.' "'Now,' he said, "'you will order every Guern in this ship to go to his sleeping quarters. They will leave their weapons in the corridors outside and they will not resist the men who will come to take charge of the ship.' The commander made an effort toward defiance. "'And if I refuse?' Lake answered, smiling at him with the smile of his that was no more than a quick showing of teeth and with the savage eagerness in his eyes. "'If you refuse, I'll start with your fingers and break every bone to your shoulders. If that isn't enough, I'll start with your toes and go to your hips, and then I'll break your back.' The commander hesitated, sweat filming his face as he looked at them. Then he reached out to switch on the all-stations communicator and say into it, "'Attention, all personnel. You will return to your quarters at once, leaving your weapons in the corridors. You are ordered to make no resistance when the natives come.' There was a silence when he had finished and Humboldt and Lake looked at each other, bearded and clad in animal skins but standing at last in the control room of a ship that was theirs, in a ship that could take them to Athena, to Earth, to the ends of the galaxy. The commander watched them, on his face the blankness of unwillingness to believe. "'The air-locks,' he said. We didn't close them in time. We never thought you would dare to try to take the ship, not savages in animal skins.' "'I know,' Humboldt answered. We were counting on you to think that way.' "'No one expected any of you to survive here.' The commander wiped at his swollen lips, wincing, and an almost child-like petulance came into his tone. "'You weren't supposed to survive?' "'I know,' he said again. We've made it a point to remember that. The gravity, the heat and cold and fever, the animals, why didn't they kill you?' "'They tried,' he said, but we fought back, and we had a goal to meet you-gurns again. You left us on a world that had no resources, only enemies who would kill us, the gravity, the prowlers, the unicorns. So we made them our resources. We adapted to the gravity that was supposed to kill us, and became stronger and quicker than guerns. We made allies of the prowlers and unicorns who were supposed to be our executioners, and used them tonight to help us kill guerns. So now we have your ship.' "'Yes, you have our ship.' Through the unwillingness to believe on the commander's face and the petulance there came the triumph of vindictive anticipation. "'The savages of Ragnarok have a guern cruiser. But what can they do with it?' "'What can we do with it?' he asked, almost kindly. "'We've planned for two hundred years what we can do with it. We have the cruiser, and sixty days from now we'll have Athena. That will be only the beginning, and you guerns are going to help us do it.' For six days the ship was a scene of ceaseless activity. Men crowded it, asking questions of the guern officers and crew, and calmly breaking the bones of those who refused to answer, or who gave answers that were not true. Prowlers stalked the corridors, their cold yellow eyes watching every move the guerns made. The little mockers began roaming the ship at will, unable any longer to restrain their curiosity and confident that the men and prowlers would not let the guerns harm them. One mocker was killed then, the speckle-faced mocker that could repeat messages verbatim. It wandered into a storage cubicle where a guern was working alone, and gave him the opportunity to safely vent his hatred of everything associated with the men of Ragnarok. He broke its back with a steel bar and threw it screaming into the disposal chute that led to the matter-converter. A prowler heard the scream, and an instant later the guern screamed, a sound that died in its making as the prowler tore his throat out. No more mockers were harmed. Only one Ragnarok boy was killed. Three fanatical guern officers stole knives from the galley and held the boy as hostage for their freedom. When their demands were refused, they cut his heart out. Lake cornered them a few minutes later, and, without touching his blaster, disemboweled them with their own knives. He smiled down upon them as they writhed and moaned on the floor, and their moans were heard for a long time by the other guerns in the ship before they died. No more humans were harmed. They discovered that operation of the cruiser was relatively simple, basically similar to the operation of tarant ships as described in the textbook the original lake had written. Most of the operations were performed by robot mechanisms, and the manual operations, geared to the slower reflexes of the guerns, were easily mastered. They could spend the forty-day voyage to Athena in further learning and practice, so on the sixth day they prepared to depart. The unicorns had been given the freedom they had fought so well for, and reconnaissance vehicles were loaned from the cruiser to take their place. Later there would be machinery and supplies of all kinds brought in by freighter ships from Athena. Time was precious, and there was a long, long job ahead of them. They blasted up from Ragnarok on the morning of the seventh day, and went into the black sea of hyperspace. By then the guern commander was no longer of any value to them. His unwillingness to believe that savages had rested his ship from him had increased until his compartment became his control room to him, and he spent the hours laughing and giggling before an imaginary view-screen, whereon the cruiser's blasters were destroying over and over the Ragnarok town and all the humans in it. But Narth, who had wanted to have them all tortured to death for daring to resist capture, became very cooperative. In the control room his cooperation was especially eager. On the twentieth day of the voyage they had let him have what he had been trying to gain by subterfuge, access to the transmitter when no men were within hearing distance. After that his manner abruptly changed. Each day his hatred for them and his secret anticipation became more evident. The thirty-fifth day came with Athena five days ahead of them. The day of the execution they had let him arrange for them. Stars filled the trans-dimensional view-screen, the son of Athena in the center. Humboldt watched the space to the lower left, and the flicker came again, a tiny red dot that was gone again within a microsecond, so quickly that Narth and the sea beside him did not see it. It was the quick peek of another ship, a ship that was running invisible with its detector screens up, but which had had to drop them for an instant to look out at the cruiser. Not even the Gerns had ever been able to devise a polarised detector screen. He changed the course and speed of the cruiser, creating an increase in gravity which seemed very slight to him, but which caused Narth to slew heavily in his seat. Narth straightened and he said to him, "'Within a few minutes we'll engage the ship you sent for.'" Narth's jaw dropped, then came back up. "'So, you spied on me?' One of our Ragnarok allies did, the little animal that was sitting near the transmitter. There our means of communication. We learned that you had arranged for a ship en route to Athena to intercept us and capture us." "'So, you know?' Narth asked. He smiled, an unpleasant twisting of his mouth. "'Do you think that knowing will help you any?' "'We expect it to,' he answered. "'It's a battleship,' Narth said. "'It's three times the size of this cruiser, the newest and most powerful battleship in the Gern Fleet. How does that sound to you?' "'It sounds good,' he said. "'We'll make it our flagship.'" "'Your flagship! Your flagship!' The last trace of pretense left Narth and he let his full and wrangling hatred come through. You got this cruiser by trickery and learned how to operate it after a fashion because of an animal-like reflex abnormality. For forty-two days you accidental mutants have given orders to your superiors and thought you were our equals. Now your fool's paradise is going to end!' The red dot came again, closer, and he once more altered the ship's course. He had turned on the course-analyzer and it clicked as the battleship's position was correlated with that of its previous appearance. A short yellow line appeared on the screen to forecast its course for the immediate future. "'And then,' he asked curiously, turning back to Narth, "'And then we'll take all of you left alive back to your village. The scenes of what we do to you and your village will be televised to all Gern-held worlds. It will be a valuable reminder for any who have forgotten the penalty for resisting Gerns.' The red dot came again. He punched the battle-stations button and the board responded with a row of ready-lights. "'All the other Gerns are by now in their acceleration couches,' he said. "'Strap yourself in for high-acceleration maneuvers. We'll make contact with the battleship within two minutes.' Gernath did so, taking his time, as though it was something of little importance. "'There will be no maneuvers. They'll blast the stern and destroy your drive immediately upon attack.' He fastened the last strap and smiled, taunting assurance in the twisted unpleasantness of it. The appearance of this battleship has very much disrupted your plans to strut like conquering heroes among the slaves on Athena, hasn't it?' "'Not exactly,' Humboldt replied. "'Our plans are a little broader in scope than that. There are two new cruisers on Athena, ready to leave the shops ten days from now. We'll turn control of Athena over to the humans there, of course, then we'll take the three cruisers and the battleship back by way of Ragnarok. There we'll pick up all the Ragnarok men who are neither too old nor too young and go on to earth. They will be given training on routes in the handling of ships. We expect to find no difficulty in breaking through the Guern lines around earth, and then, with the addition of the earth-ships, we can easily capture all the Guern ships in the solar system.' "'Easily,' Narth made a contemptuous sneer of the word. "'Were you actually so stupid as to think that you biological freaks could equal Guern officers who have made a career of space warfare?' "'We'll far exceed them,' he said. "'A space battle is one of trying to keep your blaster beams long enough on one area of the enemy ship to break through its blaster shields at that point, and at the same time try to move and dodge fast enough to keep the enemy from doing the same thing to you. The ships are capable of accelerations up to fifty gravities or more, but the acceleration limiter is the safeguard that prevents the ship from going into such a high degree of acceleration or into such a sudden change of direction that it would kill the crew. We from Ragnarok are accustomed to one-point-five gravity, and can withstand much higher degrees of acceleration than Guerns or any other race from a one-gravity world. To enable us to take advantage of that fact, we have had the acceleration limiter on this cruiser disconnected.' "'Disconnected!' Narth's contemptuous regard vanished in frantic consternation. "'You fool! You don't know what that means. You'll move the acceleration lever too far and kill us all!' The red dot flicked on the view-screen, trembled, and was suddenly a gigantic battleship in full view. He touched the acceleration control, and Narth's next words were cut off as his diaphragm sagged. He swung the cruiser in a curve, and Narth was slammed sideways, the straps cutting into him and the flesh of his face pulled lopsided by the gravity. His eyes bulging went blank with unconsciousness. The powerful blasters of the battleship blossomed like a row of pale blue flowers, concentrating on the stern of the cruiser. A warning siren screeched as they started breaking through the cruiser's shields. He dropped the detector screen that would shield the cruiser from sight but not from the blaster beams, and tightened the curve until the gravity dragged heavily at his own body. The warning siren stopped as the blaster beams of the battleship went harmlessly into space, continuing to follow the probability course plotted from the cruiser's last visible position and the course by the battleship's robot target tracers. He lifted the detector screen to find the battleship almost exactly where the cruiser's course analyzers had predicted it would be. The blasters of the battleship were blazing their full concentration of firepower into an area behind and to one side of the cruiser. They blinked out at sight of the cruiser in its new position and blazed again a moment later, boring into the stern. He dropped the detector screen and swung the cruiser in another curve, spiraling in the opposite direction. As before, the screech of the alarm siren died as the battleship's blasters followed the course given them by the course analyzers and target tracers that were built to presume that all enemy ships were acceleration limiter equipped. The cruiser could have destroyed the battleship at any time, but they wanted to capture their flagship unharmed. The maneuvering continued, the cruiser drawing closer to the battleship. The battleship, in desperation, began using the same hide-and-jump tactics the cruiser used, but it was of little avail. The battleship moved at known acceleration limits, and the cruiser's course analyzers predicted each new position with sufficient accuracy. The cruiser made its final dash in a tightening spiral, its detector screen flickering on and off. It struck the battleship at a matched speed, with a thump and ringing of metal as the magnetic grapples fastened the cruiser like a lead to the battleship's side. In that position neither the forward nor stern blasters of the battleship could touch it. They remained only to convince the commander of the battleship that further resistance was futile. This he did with a simple ultimatum to the commander. This cruiser is firmly attached to your ship. Its acceleration limiter disconnected. Its drives are of such sufficient power to thrust both ships forward at much higher degree of acceleration than persons from one gravity world can endure. You will surrender at once, or we shall be forced to put these two ships into a curve of such short radius, and at an acceleration so great that all of you will be killed. Then he added, If you surrender, we'll do somewhat better by you than you did with the humans two hundred years ago. We'll take all of you on to Athena. The commander, already sick from acceleration that would have been negligible to Ragnarok men, had no choice. His reply came, choked with acceleration sickness and the greater sickness of defeat. We will surrender. Earth regained consciousness. He saw Humboldt sitting beside him as before, with no Gern rescuers crowding into the control room with shouted commands and drawn blasters. Where are they? He asked. Where is the battleship? We captured it, he said. You captured? A Gern battleship? It wasn't hard, he said. It would have been easier if only Ragnarok men had been on the cruiser. We didn't want to accelerate to any higher gravities than absolutely necessary because of the Gerns on it. You did it. You captured the battleship. North said, his tone like one dazed. He wet his lips, staring, as he contemplated the unpleasant implications of it. You are freak mutants who can capture a battleship. Maybe you will take Athena and Earth from us. But the animation of hatred returned to his face. What good will it do you? Did you ever think about that? Yes, he said. We've thought about it. Have you? North leaned forward, his face shining with the malice of his gloating. You can never escape the consequences of what you have done. The Gern Empire has the resources of dozens of worlds. The Empire will build a fleet of special ships, a force against which your own will be nothing and send them to Earth and Athena and Ragnarok. The Empire will smash you for what you have done, and if there are any survivors of your race left, they will cringe before Gerns for a hundred generations to come. Share that while you're posturing in your little hour of glory on Athena and Earth. You insist in thinking we'll do as Gerns would do, he said. We won't delay to do any posturing. We'll have a large fleet when we leave Earth, and we'll go at once to engage the Gern home fleet. I thought you knew we were going to do that. We're going to cripple and capture your fleet, and then we're going to destroy your Empire. Destroy the Empire, now? Narth stared again. All the gloating was gone, as he saw, at last, the quick and inexorable end. Now, before we can stop you. Before we can have a chance? When a race has been condemned to die by another race, and it fights and struggles and manages somehow to survive, it learns as a lesson. It learns it must never again let the other race be in position to destroy it. So this is the harvest you reap from the seeds you sowed on Ragnarok two hundred years ago. You understand, don't you? He asked, almost gently. For two hundred years the Gern Empire has been a menace to our survival as a race. Now the time has come when we shall remove it. He stood in the control room of the battleship and watched Athena's sun in the view-screen, blazing like a white flame. Segan, fully recovered, was stretched out on the floor near him, twitching and snarling a little in her sleep as she fought again the battle with the Gerns. Fenrir was pacing the floor, swinging his black, massive head restlessly, while Tip and Freckles were examining with fascinated curiosity the collection of bright medals that had been cleaned out of the Gern Commander's desk. Lake and Craig left their stations, as impatient as Fenrir, and came over to watch the view-screen with him. "'One day more,' Craig said. "'We're two hundred years late, but we're coming into the world that was to have been our home.' "'It can never be now,' he said. "'Have any of us ever thought of that, that we're different to humans and there's no human world we could ever call home?' "'I've thought of it,' Lake said. Ragnarok made us different physically and different in the way we think. We could live on human worlds, but we would always be a race apart and never really belong there.' "'I suppose we've all thought about it,' Craig said. "'And wondered what we'll do when we're finished with the Gerns. "'Not settle down on Athena or Earth in a little cottage with a fenced-in lawn where it would be adventure to watch the 3D shows after each day at some safe routine job.' "'Not back to Ragnarok,' Lake said. "'With medals and supplies from other worlds they'll be able to do a lot there, but the battle is already won. There will be left only the peaceful development, building a town at the equator for big winter, levelling land, planting crops. We could never be satisfied with that kind of a life.' "'No,' he said, and felt his own restlessness stir in protest at the thought of settling down in some safe and secure environment. "'Not Athena or Earth or Ragnarok, not any world we know.' "'How long until we're finished with the Gerns?' Lake asked. "'Ten years? We'll still be young then. Where will we go, all of us who fought the Gerns and all of the ones in the future who won't want to live out their lives on Ragnarok? Where is there a place for us, a world of our own?' "'Where do we find a world of our own?' he asked, and watched the star clouds creep toward them in the view-screen, tumbled and blazing and immense beyond conception. "'There's a galaxy for us to explore,' he said. "'There are millions of suns and thousands of worlds waiting for us. Maybe there are races out there like the Gerns, and maybe there are races such as we were a hundred years ago who need our help. And maybe there are worlds out there with things on them such as no man ever imagined. "'We'll go to see what's there. Our women will go with us, and there will be some worlds in which some of us will want to stay. And always there will be more restless ones coming from Ragnarok. Out there are the worlds and the homes for all of us.' "'Of course,' Lake said. "'Beyond the space frontier. Where else would we ever belong?' It was all settled then, and there was a silence as the battleship plunged through hyperspace, the cruiser running beside her and their drives moaning and thundering as had the drives of the constellation two hundred years before. A voyage had been interrupted then, and a new race had been born. Now they were going on again, to Athena, to Earth, to the farthest reaches of the Guern Empire, and on to the wild, unknown regions of space beyond. There awaited their worlds, and there awaited their destiny, to be a race scattered across a hundred thousand light-years of suns, to be an empire such as the galaxy had never known. They, the restless ones, the unwanted and forgotten, the survivors. The End of Space Prison by Tom Godwin.