The Ecolog, page 18
Phillips saw Briggs and said, "The supernova…" He was pale and shocked.
Briggs snapped, "All it can do is kill us, and that's no worse than what the Lorns have planned. Now get this ship moving! The Lorns won't wait!"
As he strapped himself into his seat, Briggs saw the Ecolog framed in the doorway. Her mask was still off, clutched in her hand, and her face was filled with a horrified dawning understanding of what was going on around her.
"You're going to blow up the sun!" she shouted.
Briggs answered, "Find a seat! Strap down!"
The rising whine of power indicated the drive had been engaged, but the stasis field prevented it from being felt. Above the canopy the sun swung out of view and the Magellanic Clouds—two fuzzy balls of stars—appeared. The ship was accelerating rapidly as it swung from the dayside to the nightside of the planet. The room darkened as they entered the planetary shadow. The Great Whirlpool came in sight, filling the sky.
The Ecolog was still standing, eyes round with shock.
The Lorns might or might not know he was here. They certainly would not expect him to attack against such odds. This time the element of surprise was in Briggs's favor.
"There they are," said Dutton.
Two dots of light had appeared on the viewscreen, moving against the background of the galaxy.
"Hit them," Briggs whispered.
Dutton gestured over the firing stud. The forward shifters hummed. A portion of the energy so recently drawn from the sun was shifted on a gravatic carrier wave to the first of the Lorn starships.
"She's badly damaged, sir," said Dutton.
"Hit again!" said Briggs.
The second energy shift must have reached the Lorns' own energy banks. There was a brief, brilliant flash, totally silent in the void.
"Nothing but an expanding globe of debris," reported Dutton.
"Good," said Briggs.
"But the other Lorn is taking evasive action."
"Hit him!"
"Missed."
"I'll take the controls."
"Yes, sir."
Briggs's fingers danced over the studs of the control console as if he were some sort of demonic concert pianist playing a concerto no one could hear. He felt a savage exhilaration that burned away all weakness, cleared his mind, banished weariness, made him feel young again.
The Lorn ship was large enough on the viewscreen so he could make out its structure quite clearly as, a moment later, it emerged from the planetary shadow into the sunlight. Abruptly the Corregidor, too, emerged from the shadow.
There was the sun, the same as always. The Corregidor had fallen into an attitude that made the sun shine directly down into the secondary control room through the canopy, which instantly changed color to protect them from too bright a light.
The Ecolog cried out, "The sun! It didn't explode!"
But Briggs was only dimly aware of her presence as he concentrated on his task.
Now the Corregidor and the Lorn ship were darting about like angry waterbugs, firing and running, firing and running. They were unusually close for a space battle, yet Briggs kept pressing in, narrowing the already narrow range.
The Lorn ship started to make a run for it.
In the split second before it reached top speed, Briggs nailed it.
It exploded in a brilliant, silent blaze of light.
All around him the crew went wild, leaping up and dancing and cheering, but Briggs remained in his chair, breathing heavily, finally whispering a single word.
"Beautiful."
As if waking from a trance, he blinked and looked around him. He frowned. The Ecolog had gone. He unstrapped himself.
Lurching to his feet, he lumbered from the control room in search of her. Dutton, glancing after him, took over the controls.
He searched for some time, asking questions, drawing surprised stares, occasionally barking into the intercom either an order for the resumption of normal operations or an inquiry about the Ecolog's whereabouts.
It was Chaplain Ellington who found her and called him. "She's here in the Manta launching chamber, Commodore, requesting transportation down to Abbutututikan."
"Hold her there."
Briggs hurried aft.
The Ecolog had donned her mask of office. She stood in the open air lock of Manta Four, straight and proud in blue tunic and black boots.
She said, "It's time to go to work, Commodore." Her voice was calm, faintly amused.
He stared at her a moment in silence. Awkwardly, he began, "I'm sorry. I can't go with you now. You see—"
She said softly, playfully, "You love them more than me."
"Who?" Briggs was thinking of the service, the fleet.
"The Lorns."
She stepped through the air lock.
It closed between them.
Briggs left the launching chamber and gave the command himself, "On the count of three. One, two, three." The air that escaped with the Manta sounded curiously like a sigh.
Through a porthole, Briggs watched the Manta descend. Chaplain Ellington stood nearby but did not disturb him. It was Dutton on the intercom who at last broke into his reverie.
"Your orders, Commodore?"
"Eh? What's that? Yes, I want all hands to shuttle up to the ship, then we're heading back for the war zone. I'll navigate."
Dr. Christina Enge entered the room. "I see you're feeling better, Commodore," she said.
He glanced at her. "Yes, Doctor. I'm quite recovered."
She said, "You had it all figured out, didn't you? Almost from the start."
He nodded. "As soon as I heard those voices on the radio speaking English, the picture was fairly clear. I was sure the people on this planet must have come from Earth or one of Earth's colonies. There are limits to the principle of parallel development, you see; it's impossible for exactly the same language to evolve independently on two different planets. That was my reasoning, and it's turned out I was right."
"But this is so far outside the borders of the known universe!" she exclaimed.
"Yes, and that fact supplied me with another part of the puzzle. Before we encountered the Lorns, the universe was not thought to have borders. Borders are the result of war, and the Lorns were the first race we met that presented a genuine challenge. It may seem strange, but early in the age of space, at the time of the massive interstellar migrations, human colonists flew off in all directions and kept going until they found something they liked. If they never returned, it was assumed they'd either found a place for themselves or perished. No one kept records or tried to map it all. Those were wild days, Doctor! I thought it safe to assume this planet was one of the colonies founded way back then. Today nobody would dare establish themselves so far away from the rest of humanity."
He stared out the porthole a while in silence; then he said softly, "The age of expansion is over for them down there, and for us too. Future historians may call our era the age of contraction. Living organisms don't take well to contraction, or to standing still. Growth is life! Mankind would have become extinct, you know, if we hadn't learned how to escape the Earth. Earth was well on the way to becoming the same as that unfortunate planet down there." He gestured toward the cloud-covered ball beyond the porthole. "We owe the survival of our whole species to those few individuals who made it possible for us to expand into space before it was too late, before the level of natural resources dropped too low for space technology to function. It was touch and go around the end of the twentieth century! A few more years would have made the difference between the star-voyaging creatures we are and the dwindling, defeated creatures we might have been. Make no mistake, mounting shortages would have forced a totalitarian regime on us; we would have had our own Ecolog, or someone very much like her, before the end."
She studied his somber face. "Do you think, Commodore, we will ever have another age of expansion?"
"If we beat the Lorns, yes."
She touched his arm. "What a grim prospect! Must it be a… a fight to the death?"
"I'm afraid so."
"But there's a moral question here. Do we have the right to wipe out a whole species?" Her tone was quiet, but contained an undercurrent of urgency. "Tell me, will we be right if we do that?"
Briggs smiled faintly. "As Ambrose Bierce put it, war is not fought to determine who is right, but who is left."
Ten hours later, all hands on board, the Corregidor broke orbit and accelerated rapidly. Commodore Abraham Briggs left the secondary bridge and, humming softly to himself, began a careful inspection of the weapons systems.
Faraday Nelson, The Ecolog
