Med Ship
- Автор: Лейнстер Мюррей
- Год: 2002
- Язык: английский
- Год: Baen
- ISBN: 0-7434-3555-9
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «Med Ship». Краткое содержание книги:
The nearest-object indicator showed something moving toward the Med Ship. There was a small object headed toward the planet from empty space. Calhoun put on double acceleration to intercept it.
The spacephone growled: Med Ship! What do you think you're doing?
Getting in trouble, said Calhoun briefly.
Med Ship! the voice rasped. Keep out of the way of our missile! It's a megaton bomb!
Calhoun said irrelevantly: Those who in quarrels interpose, must often wipe a bloody nose. He added, I know what it is.
Calhoun aimed his ship. He knew the capacities of his ship as only a man who'd handled one for a long time could. He knew quite exactly what it could do.
The rocket from remoteness—the megaton-bomb missile—came smoking furiously from the stars. Calhoun seemed to throw his ship into a collision course.
The rocket swerved to avoid him, though guided from many thousands of miles away. There was a trivial time-lag between the time its scanners picked up a picture and transmitted it, and the controlling impulse reached the missile in response. Calhoun counted on that. But he wasn't trying for a collision. He was forcing evasive action.
He secured it. The rocket slanted itself to dart aside. Calhoun threw the Med Ship into a flip-flop and slashed the missile with his own ship's rocket flame. . . .
"The whole thing's nonsense," said Calhoun. "We'll get there, and we've been three months on the way and the situation is six months old and either it's all been compromised or it's long forgotten and nobody will like being reminded of it. And we've wasted our time and talents on a thankless job that doesn't exist, and couldn't. The universe has fallen on evil days, Murgatroyd! And we are the victims!"
Murgatroyd leisurely uncurled his tail from about his nose. When Calhoun talked at such length, it meant sociability. Murgatroyd got up, and stretched, and said, "Chee!" He waited. If Calhoun really meant to go in for conversation, Murgatroyd would join in. Murgatroyd frisked a little, to show his readiness for talk.
"Chee-chee-chee!" he said conversationally.
"I notice that we agree," said Calhoun. "Let's clean up."
He began those small items of housekeeping which one neglects when nothing can happen for a long time ahead. Books back in place. Files restored to order. The special-data reels Calhoun had been required to study. Calhoun made all neat and orderly against landing and possible visitors.
Presently the breakout clock indicated twenty-five minutes more in overdrive. Calhoun yawned again. As an interstellar service organization, the Med Service sometimes had to do rather foolish things. Governments run by politicians required them. Yet Med Service representatives always had to be well-informed on problems which appeared. During this journey Calhoun had been ordered to read up on the ancient insanity once called the art of war. He didn't like what he'd learned about the doings of his ancestors. He reflected that it was lucky that such things couldn't happen anymore. He yawned again.
He was strapped in the control-chair a good ten minutes before the ship was due to return to a normal state of things. He allowed himself the luxury of still another yawn. He waited.
The warning tape whirred a second time. A voice said, "When the gong sounds, breakout will be five seconds off." There was a heavy, rhythmic tick-tocking. It went on and on. Then the gong and a voice said: "Five—four—three—t—"
It did not complete the count. There was a tearing, rending noise and the spitting of an arc. There was the smell of ozone. The Med Ship bucked like a plunging horse. It came out of overdrive two seconds ahead of time. The automatic, emergency-rockets roared and it plunged this way and changed course violently and plunged that, and seemed to fight desperately against something that frustrated every maneuver it tried. Calhoun's hair stood on end until he realized that the external-field indicator showed a terrific artificial force-field gripping the ship. He cut off the rockets as their jerkings tried to tear him out of his chair.
There was stillness. Calhoun rasped into the space-phone:
"What's going on? This is Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty! This is a neutral vessel!" The term "neutral vessel" was new in Calhoun's vocabulary. He'd learned it while studying the manners and customs of war in overdrive. "Cut off those force-fields!"
Murgatroyd shrilled indignantly. Some erratic movement of the ship had flung him into Calhoun's bunk, where he'd held fast to a blanket with all four paws. Then another wild jerking threw him and the blanket together into a corner, where he fought to get clear, chattering bitterly the while.
"We're noncombatants!" snapped Calhoun—another new term.
A voice growled out of the spacephone speaker.
"Set up for light-beam communication," it said heavily. "In the meantime keep silence."
Calhoun snorted. But a Med Ship was not an armed vessel. There were no armed vessels nowadays. Not in the normal course of events. But vessels of some sort had been on the watch for a ship coming to this particular place.
He thought of the word "blockade"—another part of his education in the outmoded art of war. Canis III was blockaded.
He searched for the ship that had him fast. Nothing. He stepped up the magnification of his visionscreens. Again nothing. The sun Canis flamed ahead and below, and there were suspiciously bright stars which by their coloring were probably planets. But the Med Ship was still well beyond the habitable part of a Sol-class sun's solar system.
Calhoun pulled a photocell out of its socket and waited. A new and very bright light winked into being. It wavered. He stuck the photocell to the screen, covering the brightness. He plugged its cord to an audio amplifier. A dull humming sounded. Not quite as clearly as a spacephone voice, but clear enough, a voice said:
"If you are Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty, answer by light beam, quoting your orders."
Calhoun was already stabbing another button, and somewhere a signal-lamp was extruding itself from its recess in the hull. He said irritably:
"I'll show my orders, but I do not put on performances of dramatic readings! This is the devil of a business! I came here on request, to be a ministering angel or a lady with a lamp, or something equally improbable. I did not come to be snatched out of overdrive, even if you have a war on. This is a Med Ship!"
The slightly blurred voice said as heavily as before:
"This is a war, yes. We expected you. We wish you to take our final warning to Canis III. Follow us to our base and you will be briefed."
Calhoun said tartly:
"Suppose you tow me! When you dragged me out of overdrive you played the devil with my power!"
Murgatroyd said, "Chee?" and tried to stand on his hind legs to look at the screen. Calhoun brushed him away. When acknowledgment came from the unseen other ship, and the curious cushiony drag of the towing began to be felt, he cut off the microphone to the lightbeam. Then he said severely to Murgatroyd:
"What I said was not quite true, Murgatroyd. But there is a war on. To be a neutral I have to appear impressively helpless. That is what neutrality means."
But he was far from easy in his mind. Wars between worlds were flatly impossible. The facts of space travel made them unthinkable.
Yet there seemed to be a war. Something was happening, anyhow, which was contrary to all the facts of life in modern times. And Calhoun was involved in it. It demanded that he immediately change all his opinions and all his ideas of what he might have to do. The Med Service could not take sides in a war, of course. It had no right to help one side or the other. Its unalterable function was to prevent the needless death of human beings. So it could not help one combatant to victory. On the other hand it could not merely stand by, tending the wounded, and by alleviating individual catastrophes allow their numbers to mount.
"This," said Calhoun, "is the devil!"
"Chee!" said Murgatroyd.