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Alex did as he was instructed. More lights sprang to life around him. He was sitting inside an electronic
Christmas tree. It was quite pretty, so long as you didn't think about what it represented.
"Got it."
A small control panel slid into position beneath his right hand.
"At your fingers now are the ship's weapons systems."
Alex moved slightly to inspect the panel and was startled to see that he recognized it.
"Hey, fan lasers, photon bolts, particle beams . . . just like on the game back home."
"Nothing so primitive," Grig assured him. "Cen-tauri's test game would use terminology familiar to you.
The weapons you actually control are far more advanced and much more deadly than anything your
people have yet developed or even thought about."
"Oh," said Alex, impressed.
"However, you may refer to the weapons systems by familiar names if you wish. It doesn't matter what
you call them; only how you employ them. What did you call the first system?"
"Fan lasers."
Grig managed to sound amused. "Toys. Kid stuff."
Alex swallowed. "What exactly can this ship do?"
"You'll find out," Grig assured him.
"Well, at least the controls are familiar." He moved his thumb toward a large red button protected by a
flip-up bar set off to the far side of the panel. "Except for this ..."
"Careful, careful!" Grig shouted. Alex hastily withdrew the exploring thumb. "That is for the ..." The alien
hesitated. "How's your knowledge of the theory of high-energy physics?"
"Pretty shallow," Alex confessed.
"Let's just call it the blossom, though there's nothing so delicate about it. A defensive weapon of last
resort. Hopefully we won't have to use it."
"I'll go along with that." Alex studied the button warily. It looked like a big fat red spider now, hunkered
down on its legs, just waiting for a chance to jump out and bite him on the back of his hand.
Yet there was a morbid fascination to it. He tried to imagine what it might do. Grig had referred to it, at
least for Alex's benefit, as the "blossom." He conjured up an image of a burning flower, discarded it as
unsatisfactory. It did give him something to concentrate on, however, as Grig took the ship through final
checkout. A steady whine was now coming from the stern, audible even though Grig had closed both
hatches and sealed them in tight. Like bugs in a bottle.
That image wasn't very nice either. He turned his thoughts elsewhere. "How come you know so much
about this ship when it wasn't even included with the others?"
"I told you. I helped with some of the final refinements. In fact, I was working here with the design staff
when the main hangar went up."
When the main hangar went up, Alex echoed silently, trying and failing to imagine what that instant of
shock and destruction must have been like.
"You mean the whole hangar's gone? I know it looked bad back there, but I didn't think it was all gone."
He paused. "What about the other hangars, the other bases?"
"What other bases?" Grig asked him.
Alex's thoughts were moving fast now, one right on the heels of the other. They collided with some rising,
uncomfortable suppositions. "You mean all the gunstars were located in that one hangar?"
"Yes. We were overconfident and underexperienced. Remember, we relied on our long-range defensive
shields to protect us from assault for so long."
"Well then, what about the rest of the Starfighters? The ones I was with when Enduran spoke?"
"They were all in the hangar. That one hangar." Grig's tone was flat and unemotional, wholly professional.
"You mean they're all dead?"
"Death is a primitive concept. We still have little real knowledge of what lies on the other side of the line
of existence that we call life. It is like different states of matter. Nothing is destroyed, only changed. You
end up facing the universe in a different guise. Myself, I am something of a romantic. They were good
souls all, your fellow fighters. If they hadn't been, they wouldn't have been Starfighters. I rather like to
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think of them as battling evil in another dimension."
"'In another dimension.'" Alex swallowed before asking the inevitable next question. "How many are left?
Surely some of them got p ut? How many?" [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]