The Chalice of Death (18 page)

“The offer still goes,” Navarre said curtly.

He gave the signal for the second third of the fleet to enter the fray.

They came down from six directions at once, their heavy-cycle guns spouting flame. They converged inward on the Joran-Kariadi fleet, six light Morankimar vessels equipped for massive offensive thrusts.

The invaders were caught unaware; four Joran ships crumbled and died in the first shock of the unsuspected attack.

Kausirn was silent. Navarre knew, or hoped he knew, what the Lyrellan was thinking:
I had expected only six defending ships. If the Earthmen have these additional six, how many more may they have
?

The radar screen was crisscrossed with light. Navarre's original six plowed steadily forward, drawing the heaviest fire of the aliens and controlling it easily, while the six new ships plunged and swerved in daring leaps, weaving in and out of the alien lines so fast they could not even be counted.

Navarre gave another signal. And suddenly three of his offensive platoon leaped from view, blanked out like extinguished candles, and reappeared at the far end of the battlefield. They drove downward from their new angle of attack, while the remaining trio likewise jumped out of warp and back in again. Navarre picked up bitter curses coming from the harassed aliens.

Three more ships had perished. The odds were narrowing—forty-three against eighteen, now. And the aliens were definitely bewildered.

The tactic was unheard of; it was suicide to leave and reenter hyperspace in a confined area barely a thousand light-years on a side. There was the ever-present consideration that one ship might re-materialize in an area already occupied; the detonation would be awesome.

There was always the chance. But Navarre had computed it, and in actuality the chance was infinitesimal that two ships would re-enter the same space in such an area. It was worth the risk. Like leaping silver-bellied fish, his ships flicked in and out of space-time. And now the alien vessels moved in confused circles.

Flick
!

Two astonished Kariadi vessels thundered headlong into each other to avoid a Terran vessel that had appeared less than a light-minute away from them. The proximity strained the framework of hyperspace; the hapless ships were sucked downward, out of control, into a wild vortex.

Flick
!

Flick
!

Navarre's checkboard showed eleven invader losses already, and not one Terran ship touched. He grinned cheerfully as one of his six original attackers speared through the screens of a bedeviled Joran destroyer and sent it reeling apart.

“Kausirn? Are you convinced?”

No answer came this time.

Navarre frowned speculatively. So far the battle was going all Earth's way; but eventually the shattered and confused invader lines would re-group, and eventually they would realize that only twelve Earth ships opposed them, not hundreds.

Navarre gave one final signal. Suddenly, four more Terran ships warped into the area.

They were dummies, half-finished ships manned by skeleton crews. They carried no arms, only rudimentary defense-screens; Navarre had ordered them held in check for just this moment. And here they were.

At the same time the six warp-jumping ships stabilized themselves. Now sixteen Terran ships menaced the alien fleet at once, and there was no telling for the aliens how many more lurked in hidden reaches.

The armada milled hesitantly. Ships changed course almost at random.

Navarre's vessels formed into a tight wheel and spun round the confused aliens. He opened the communicator channels wide and said, “We have already destroyed thirteen of your number at no cost to ourselves. Will you surrender now, or do we have to pick you all off one by one? Speak up, Kausirn!”

Garbled noise came from the communicator—sure sign that more than one ship's captain was trying to speak at the same time. Navarre joyfully sensed indecision; he flashed one last-ditch signal along his communication channel, ordering the six defensive ships stationed round the planets to leave their base and join the fray. It was a rash move, but he knew the time had come to gamble all on the chance of success.

He heard Kausirn's cold steely voice saying insistently, “No! He's bluffing us! He
has
to be bluffing!”

The last six Terran ships winked into being, spitting death. The invader fleet rippled outward in disorganized retreat. Suddenly Navarre's subradio phones brought over the sound of a single agonized scream.

The sky was full of ships, now—twenty-two Terran ships, of which four were mere shells, and six more were so weighted with defense-screens that they were practically useless on offense.

“Well, Kausirn? Do we have to bring out the
real
fleet, now?”

No response.

Navarre wondered about the scream he had heard. “Kausirn?”

A new voice said suddenly, “The Lyrellan is dead. This is Admiral Garsignol of Kariad. By virtue of the authority vested in me by the Oligocrat Marhaill, I surrender to you the eighteen surviving Kariadi ships.”

A moment later another voice broke into the channel, speaking in Joran. The nineteen Joran ships were likewise surrendering. They saw resistance was futile.

It was over at last, Navarre thought, as he stared from the window of his office in the city of Phoenix, on Earth, looking outward at the thirty-seven alien vessels the battle had yielded.

Victory was sweet.

Earth now had forty-three ships of first-class tonnage, plus four more half-finished ones, and twelve more belonging to the Polisarch of Morank. The Polisarch would never miss his ships, Navarre thought. And Earth needed them.

Fifty-nine ships. That comprised a major armada in itself; hardly a hundred worlds in the universe could muster fleets of such size. Earth would be safe during the time of rebuilding. There would be no Second Empire, merely the free world of Earth.

Earth numbered barely twelve thousand, now. But time would remedy that. The ancient legend had spoken truth: the Chalice indeed held the key to immortal life. Earth, reborn phoenix-like from its ashes of old, had once again won its place in the roll of worlds.

Navarre looked out the broad window at the brightening hillside. The sun was rising; the city was stirring busily with the coming of day. He opened the window and let the air of Earth wash through the room, bright, clean, fresh. It was a time for beginning, he thought. In the days to come, a thousand million worlds would have cause to remember the name of the planet they had once forgotten.

Earth.

Starhaven

Chapter One

It was a secluded part of the beach, and the corrugated metal shack was set some distance back from the shimmering tideless sea, close to a grove of green and purple trees. Inside the shack, the man who called himself Johnny Mantell lay on his thin cot. He groaned in his sleep, then abruptly awakened. With Mantell, there was no dim half-world of drowsy transition. At once he was awake and thoroughly alive.

Alive—but for how long?

He stepped to the washstand that he'd made and looked at his face in the fragment of mirror nailed over the basin.

The tired, thirtyish face of a man who had been on the toboggan slide to nowhere for too many years stared back at him. His eyes, alight with intelligence though they were, bore the timid, defeated look of an outcast. His face was deeply tanned from roaming the beaches in this part of the planet Mulciber, “Vacation Paradise of the Universe,” as the advertisements proclaimed on the planets of the Galactic Federation, of which Earth was the capital.

Strange, he thought. He could see no change from the way he looked yesterday. Yet there had been a change, and a major one. Up to early this morning, he had been a beachcomber, managing to survive by selling brightly colored shells to tourists, as he had been doing for the past seven years.

But today, the day he had to leave Mulciber, he was a different man.

He was a fugitive from the law. He was a hunted killer.

In his own mental image, Mantell had always thought of himself as being a reasonably law-abiding man; one who held respect for the rights of others, not out of fear but through innate decency; it was, in fact, about the last thing he had—a small measure of his self-respect that a good many of the others seemed to lack. Just an average, decent sort of Joe who never went out of his way looking for trouble, but didn't let people push him around, either.

But this time he was really being pushed. And there was no way to push back.

Almost ever since he had arrived on Mulciber, Mantell had been putting off his departure, delaying because there was no special reason to go anywhere. Here, life was easy; by wading out a few yards into the quiet warm sea, all sorts of delicious fish and crustaceans could be caught by net or by hand. Nutritive fruits of many flavors grew on the trees all year round. There were no responsibilities here, except the basic one of keeping yourself alive. But it had come down to just that.

If Mantell wanted to stay alive any longer, he'd have to move fast. Right now. And to do it, he'd have to add one more criminal mark to his new record. He'd have to steal a spaceship. He knew where to go for sanctuary.

Starhaven.

Mike Bryson, one of the other beachcombers on Mulciber, had told Mantell about Starhaven. That had been years ago, back before the time the mudshark had sliced Bryson in half while he was wading for pearl oysters. Bryson had said, “Some day, when I get up the incentive, I'm going to steal a ship and light out for Starhaven, Johnny.”

“Starhaven? What's that?”

Bryson smiled, screwing up his face and showing his yellowed teeth. “Starhaven's a planet of a red super-giant sun called Nestor. It's an artificial sort of planet, built twenty or twenty-five years ago by a fellow, name of Ben Thurdan.” Bryson lowered his voice. “It's a sanctuary for people like us, Johnny. People who couldn't make the grade or fit in with organized society. Drifters and crooks and has-beens can go to Starhaven, and get decent jobs and live in peace. It's the place for me, and one day I'm going to get there.”

But Mike Bryson never did make it, Mantell recalled. He tried to remember how long ago it had been that they had brought Bryson's bleeding body back from the beach. Three years? Four?

Mantell cradled his head in his hands and tried to think. It was hard to sort out the years. There were times when he could hardly remember the day before yesterday, and all his memories seemed like dreams. There were other times when it was all crystal-clear, when he could see all the way back across the years to the time when he had lived on Earth. He had been making the grade in society then.

As a twenty-four-year-old technician at Klingsan Defense Screens, for a while everything seemed to roll along well. Then he really got on the beam—or so he thought. Enthusiasm, energy seemed to exude from his pores. A latent inventive streak suddenly emerged in him. He knew his stuff all right; maybe too well.

Trouble was that his abounding faith in himself and in his innovations made him appear cocky, and his inventions, while basically sound, needed refinements to be practical. At the time the Klingsan plants were not geared to machine them. It would take special heavy presses of a new amalgam of metals; specially made dies as well as new electronic devices. All that represented an impressive outlay of capital. So, perhaps, if Johnny would work over his designs for a couple of years, then they could be presented to the board of directors, and …

Johnny, furious, told off his employers. He got another job in a similar plant, but became quarrelsome and edgy when they, too, decided not to produce his inventions. And then he thought he found the answer to his frustrations. If a drink or two would relax him in the evening, then four or six would do the job better. They did, all right. Soon he was working on a quart a day.

He drank himself right out of a job. Drank himself right off Earth, too, across the galaxy to Mulciber, where Mulciber's twin suns shone twenty hours a day and the temperature the year round was a flat seventy-seven, F. Yes, it was a tourists' paradise, right enough, and a fine place for a man like Johnny Mantell to lose what little backbone he had left, and live a dreamy, day-to-day existence, sustaining himself with neither effort nor responsibility.

And he'd been here for seven years. A blankness in time.…

It was early morning. The two lemon-yellow suns were up there in the chocolate sky, and little heat-devils danced over the roasting sand. Across the few yards of white sandy beach, the calm sea stretched out to the blank horizon. The tourists from Earth and the other rich worlds of the galaxy were splashing around in the wonderful water, down in the bathing area where the mud-sharks and bloater-toads and other native life forms had all been wiped out. They were diving and swimming and splashing each other with cascades of sparkling water. Some of them had nullgravs to help them float, and some paddled little boats.

Mantell had wandered into the casino bearing his stock in trade: sea shells, pearls, other little gewgaws and gimcracks that he peddled to the wealthy tourists who frequented Mulciber's fashionable North Coast. He hadn't been in the casino more than two minutes when someone pointed at him and bellowed, “There's the man! Come here, you! Right away!”

Mantell stared blankly. The rule on Mulciber was that you didn't raise your voice much if you were a beachcomber; you minded your business and peddled your wares, and you were tolerated. You couldn't hang around the tourists if you made a nuisance of yourself, and Mantell had tried not to do that.

So all he could do was say, in a soft voice, “You want me, mister?”

The tourist was half as tall as Mantell and twice as wide—a little potbellied walrus of a man, deeply tanned and blistering in a couple of places. He was wearing a costly yangskin wrap about his bulky middle, and he was clutching a flask of some local brew in one pudgy hand. The other one was pointing accusingly at Mantell, and the little man was shouting excitedly, “There's the man who stole my wife's brooch! Fifty thousand I paid for it on Turimon, and he stole it!”