The discordance was extreme, true, with whole ranks of Huilek swept aside in mid-ululation. Still, the blazing fireflowers brought ecstasy to the Point and Counterpoint, causing them to shift into their own frenzied syncopation.
Short-lived, though, much too short-lived. Another series of percussive fireflowers removed the Counterpoint's legs; then, another series ruptured the Counterpoint altogether and turned its remains into a blazing pyre.
For a moment, the Point tried to maintain the dance alone. But the Critic intervened.
End the dance. We are under attack. The leitmotif creatures must resume their normal posts.
The Point was confused, even more than it was outraged. Attack was impossible within a sun. But then, observing more ranks of Huilek destroyed by another percussive round, the Point was forced to shed that function-mode. The Melodist emerged and began shouting commands.
To your posts! To your posts!
Many of the Huilek had already broken ranks, fleeing toward the far gate of the choreochamber. The Melodist crushed several in the way of reprimand before giving up the enterprise. Futile in the face of such discordance. Best to begin a new melody altogether. It began striding toward the gate.
Two strides only.
The tanks that contained the aromatic compounds necessary for the olfactory component of the dance were located in sections of the outer hull. Several of the tanks had been damaged and now one of them burst open entirely, spilling its complex organic substances into the choreochamber. Exposed to the intense heat, the chemical compounds ignited in a flash explosion that sent the huge body of the Melodist flying across the choreochamber, shredding its limbs along the way and carbonizing its integument. When the Melodist landed atop a crowd of fleeing Huilek, crushing them in the process, it was already half-dead. Its last thoughts, blurred and confused, were simply wonder at the meaning of the extreme dissonance.
In the control chamber of the craft, the Critic stared at the image being relayed from the choreochamber into the holo tank before the Conductor. The Conductor voiced the Critic's own thoughts.
The work is not finished and cannot be. Many Huilek have been completed before their time. Without a Melodist, the remainder will be useless. The craft cannot be operated without its leitmotif components.
The Critic understood the thoughts, but still groped at their meaning. Everything had unfolded too quickly, too unexpectedly.
The Conductor, naturally more decisive, provided meaning also.
My function-mode ends.
That much, the Critic could comprehend. With a quick strike of its forelimb, using the genetically-modified forehand-blade specific to its own function-mode, the Critic completed the Conductor.
The Lead, after gazing at the corpse of the Conductor, lowered itself to expose the thoracic joint.
The craft will be swept down, to premature completion. There is no way to prevent it, with neither Conductor nor Melodist nor sufficient leitmotif components. My function-mode ends.
The Critic completed the Lead. Then, in quick succession, as they each reported the end of their own function-modes, the three remaining Ekhat in the control chamber.
Of course, it completed the eight leitmotif components also present. The Critic was forced to seal the gates to prevent the augment species from escaping. The squeals of the little Huilek added further disharmony to an already dismaying performance.
When it was alone, the Critic changed the view to display the craft's exterior. Already, it saw, the craft was plunging down one of the granular currents. Soon, with no Lead to guide the way, it would be swept into one of the supergranular cells; and, soon thereafter, would be completed long before it reached the radiation zone.
That was a pity. The Critic would have found solace, even ecstasy, in the music of death-in-creation. But there would be nothing, beyond the increasing discordance of a craft being shattered by crude convection.
The Critic completed itself. Not without difficulty; being forced to strike four times, very awkwardly, until the forehand-blade found the thoracic ganglion.
"Until this moment, I did not really believe," Yaut said softly, almost whispering. "That ship is out of control. Thrown out of control, by your guns. It is doomed. Truly, I did not believe it could be done, until now."
Aguilera glanced at him, startled by the fraghta's tone of voice. Yaut's mood usually ranged from unflappable to caustic. This was the first time Rafe had ever seen him shaken by anything.
He and Yaut were standing in the center of the sub's control room, just behind Aille in the pilot's seat. By the time he looked back at the holo tank, the Ekhat ship had vanished into the solar fog. Fighting a battle in the sun's photosphere was like a dog fight in heavy overcast, except these clouds were fiery bright. An ambient temperature of six thousand degrees—and more turbulent than any storm cells in Earth's atmosphere. Were it not for the forcefields, the submarine would have been ripped apart by the shear stresses even before it melted and vaporized. What made the experience even more disconcerting was that the sub's artificial gravity field kept those in it from feeling any of the vessel's sudden and sharp movements. There was a complete disconnect between someone's tactile perceptions and sense of balance and what they could see in the holo tank.
Aguilera winced. He had suddenly realized that one of the dangers they faced, which he simply hadn't thought about, was the very real possibility of two submarines colliding with each other. There was no way to maintain electronic communication in the photosphere. For all that Jao comm technology was more highly advanced than human, it still depended on electromagnetic signals. Here, trying to send or receive such signals would be like trying to talk in the middle of a waterfall.
About the only thing they could still do was detect other ships by their faint magnetic disturbances, until they drew close enough for visual spotting. But those magnetic signals were fuzzy. Just enough to give the sub pilots a sense of where another ship was located—which they then tried to zero in on as best as possible. Given that the solar turbulence made "steering" here more akin to white water rafting than what Aguilera normally thought of as piloting . . .
It was a grim thought. Two or more submarines, targeting the same Ekhat ship, might easily be thrown into each other by sudden shifts in the currents.
But, since there was nothing Aguilera could do about it, he pushed the worries aside. He had other concerns, anyway, and more predictable ones.
"What's the turret environmental status?" he asked the human tech monitoring those readings. Kenny Wong, that was.
"Pretty good," he replied, "except for Turret Six. Their environment's degrading faster than the others, and by a big margin. I think there's a leak somewhere. A material leak, I mean." Wong glanced at the screens in front of a woman seated next to him, which monitored the forcefields. "Jeri's the expert, but those readings look okay to me."
Jeri Swanson grunted sourly. "Okay to you, maybe. To me they look like my mother's wedding gown when they hauled it out of the trunk for me to wear the first time I got married. Can we say 'tattered and moth-eaten'?"
She glanced up at Aguilera. Seeing the look of alarm on his face, she grunted again, even more sourly. "What? You were expecting something else? We're in a fricking sun, Rafe." Jeri went back to studying her monitors. "Relax. We're still a ways off from a field collapse."
Aguilera swallowed. He'd been so busy and preoccupied getting the tanks converted to turrets that he had only a dim awareness of other aspects of what faced them. "Will you have any warning, if the fields are about to fail?"
Grunting was Swanson's stock in trade. "Some. Few seconds. Enough to tell you to bend over and kiss your ass goodbye. Stop pestering me, Rafe. There's nothing you or me or anyone can do about it, so why waste time worrying? It'll happen or it won't."
"What the hell happened to military protocol, anyway?" grumbled Aguilera.
"Excuse me? As I recall, you're technically still a civilian—and were never anything more than a sergeant when you were in the service. Whereas I happen to enjoy the exalted rank of major."
That acerbic response seemed to mollify Swanson, a bit. "Okay, sure, a staff weenie. Still a major. Relax, Rafe. I might mention that I did wind up wearing that stupid dress. It worked, well enough. Way better than the bum I married, that's for sure."
Aguilera decided to let the matter go. Swanson was right—there really wasn't anything anyone could do about the forcefields. They would withstand the stress, hopefully long enough to enable them to complete their mission, or they wouldn't. And he didn't want to get anywhere near the subject of Swanson's marital habits. The woman was in her mid-thirties and had been divorced four times. All bums, to hear her tell it. She seemed to have a built-in radar for detecting them, which, unfortunately, never sent off any signals until after the weddings.
So, he turned back to the other problem. "How long can they survive in Turret Six, the way their environment's degrading?"
"Hard to tell, exactly. Partly it depends on them, of course. We need to ride herd on those cowboys, Rafe. They'll try to stick it out as long as they can, but if they push it too far they'll start passing out from heat prostration before they can get themselves out."
Aguilera nodded. "Give me two minutes warning, as best you can figure it." It would take the crew in Turret Six about a minute to evacuate. That would give Rafe another minute to try to convince them to do it. He'd need it, too, with that crew. The tank commander in Six was a cowboy. He'd grown up on a ranch in Wyoming.
"And now again," Yaut said softly.
Aguilera brought his eyes back to the holo tank. Sure enough, another Ekhat ship was starting to take shape in the solar fog. No—two of them, close together. The second Ekhat vessel had been partially obscured because it was behind the first one.
Aille, as before, would try to bring them alongside rapidly and then slow their own sub's velocity as much as possible to allow the tank crews to fire off multiple rounds. The piloting skill involved was phenomenal, but Aguilera had already seen Aille do it. Maybe he could again.
He spoke softly into his throat mike. "General Kralik, we're coming up on another ship. It'll be on your side again."
"Roger. Any estimate on time and—Jesus Christ!"
Aguilera echoed Kralik's startled outburst. In his case, with a low Mary, Mother of God. Another sub had suddenly loomed in the holo tank—close enough that Kralik had seen it in his own more limited turret screen—and Aille had barely managed to avoid a collision.
Aguilera watched, paralyzed, as the other sub veered out of control. The pilot of that sub had also maneuvered sharply to evade the collision, but apparently didn't have Aille's consummate skill. The sub was now yawing, speeding toward the first Ekhat ship.
It all happened in seconds. The other sub's pilot managed to realign his vessel, but not in time to avoid colliding with the Ekhat ship. It was a glancing blow, yes, scraping the sub against one of the Ekhat ship's fragile-looking exterior lattice-beams. But, as fragile as the thing looked, it still massed more than the sub. All the turrets on one side were stripped away—those men dead in an instant—and a great tearing wound inflicted on the hull of the vessel.
Whether there was more extensive structural damage or not, Aguilera couldn't determine. But it made no difference. With that big a hole torn in the sub, it was doomed. In the cold vacuum of space, the crew might have been able to rig a forcefield to maintain the internal environment—much as Aille had done when the Interdict stripped away the airlock on his small vessel. But there would be no way to shield that large an opening, not with the heat and pressure inside the photosphere. Long before the sub could claw its way out of the sun, everyone aboard would be asphyxiated or cooked alive.
Aguilera couldn't think of a worse way to die. Apparently, the sub's pilot had reached the same conclusion. He might not have been as good a pilot as Aille, but he was damn good—and with all a Jao's stoicism in the face of death. A moment later, the pilot had the wounded sub straight on a course toward the second Ekhat vessel.
He's going to ram.
"Interesting," said Aille. "We will see if it works. Watch, fraghta—you too, Aguilera. I will be too busy."
Too busy, indeed. Aille was now trying to bring his own sub to as much of a dead halt as possible, in order to give his gunners maximum time on target. In their first encounter, Aguilera had been fascinated to watch the young Pluthrak's skill. But now, he was almost oblivious to it, his eyes riveted on the sub speeding toward its collision with the other Ekhat ship.
The collision came just seconds later. It was a perfect ram, too, the sub impacting bow-on against the side of the central pyramid. It was a former boomer, almost six hundred feet long and weighing in the vicinity of twenty thousand tons. Aguilera could only estimate the velocity. It wasn't high, by aerospace standards, since maneuvering inside the sun's photosphere was more akin to traveling in a fluid than empty space or even an atmosphere. Probably less than two hundred miles an hour, at a guess.
But it hardly mattered. The sub punched through the relatively thin hull of the Ekhat pyramid almost as easily as an awl penetrates thin leather. For a moment, Aguilera expected to see it punching out the other side.
But that was impossible, of course. At the last, the forcefields would probably have kept the crew from being killed by the sudden deceleration caused by the impact—most of them anyway, although certainly not the men in the surviving turrets. Still, the energies involved would have been enough to bring the sub to a stop somewhere inside that great central chamber.
Aguilera could envision it in his mind, from the nightmare scene Tully had described to him when he'd visited the Interdict ship. The dying submarine, nestled inside the huge enemy ship as if it had been swallowed.
But the relationship between predator and prey was reversed here. If the crew had survived, especially the men in the missile rooms . . .
They hadn't converted all the missile launchers to position tanks as jury-rigged gun turrets. They'd decided to leave four intact, just in case this very eventuality came to pass.
Rafe began softly reciting the Lord's Prayer. Yaut glanced at him, curiously, but said nothing.
Suddenly, a great bursting flare erupted from the wound in the side of the Ekhat ship caused by the sub's ramming. Within a second, the opening was torn wider still.
"That seems too mild for a nuclear explosion," said Yaut, his ears and whiskers indicating obvious puzzlement even to Aguilera's unpracticed eye.
"It's not one," Rafe replied. "That's the effects of the rocket fuel we're seeing. They must have fired at least one of the missiles. Those are three-stage rockets with graphite-epoxy hulls, loaded with propellant. The missiles probably would have impacted something even before the rockets ignited, just from the force of the compressed air launch. That would have been enough to rupture or shatter the hulls and spill burning fuel everywhere—and judging from the stink when I was aboard one, those ships are full of flammable compounds."
He added, sadly, "They did all they could, and that ship's probably dead anyway even if the warhead doesn't go off. Those warheads don't get armed immediately. They're on timed fuses for safety. If the fuses survived the impact, though—"
A sudden thought came to him. Even in the middle of the sun's photosphere, a thermonuclear explosion was nothing you wanted to be anywhere near. He started to turn toward Aille, to warn him, but saw that the young Pluthrak had already adjusted course. With another dazzling display of pilotry, he was positioning his sub to leave the one Ekhat ship as a shield against the other—and, Aguilera could now see, was going to be bringing them almost to a dead halt in the process. A slow walk, anyway.
Just as the rammed Ekhat ship had almost disappeared from view behind the first ship, the granular cells were roiled still further—not much, of course. But the blaze of light was nothing to sneer at, not even here. The fuses had survived—one of them, at least—and several hundred kilotons was enough to completely destroy even an Ekhat behemoth.
"Deliver us from evil," Rafe whispered. "Amen."
Standing at his side, Yaut's look of puzzlement vanished, replaced by a posture which Aguilera recognized. Gratified-respect, the same posture he had bestowed upon Kralik, when Kralik had predicted there would be more than enough volunteers for the ships. Honoring the courage of the men and Jao who had just destroyed an Ekhat vessel at the cost of their own lives—but not surprised that they had done so.
Aille was now bringing them alongside the surviving Ekhat ship. The enemy vessel had been set slowly spinning by the collision that had doomed the sub. So, Aille was staying perhaps half a mile outside the sweep of those outer lattice-beams, lest one of them smash into his sub. Instead of threading his way through the lattice as he'd done before, to bring them into point blank range, this engagement would have to take place at a considerably greater distance. On the other hand, he'd almost brought the sub to a standstill relative to the enemy—and, spinning the way it was, the guns would be able to riddle it on every side.
"It's all yours, General," Rafe said into the throat mike. "Tear that bastard apart for us, would you please?"
Kralik and his gunners did, even though the heat in the turrets was now so intense that they'd stripped to the waist and were trying to see and work through pouring sweat. The environmental conditions in the turrets were now so bad that they'd have to be evacuated after this engagement. Fortunately, Turret Six was on the opposite side and thus out of action, so Aguilera was able to persuade the crew to abandon it before they died. It took him exactly fifty-eight seconds to do so.
But, sweat aside, it was a turkey shoot. Even at three mile range, the DU penetrators didn't ablate enough to lose any significant impact. The turrets' auto-loaders were working at full speed now, since there was no need to track the target, slamming the rounds into the chamber and igniting the liquid propellant. Ten rounds a minute, from each of four turrets, and Aille was able to keep them on target for almost two minutes.
Rafe estimated that something over sixty rounds had hit the Ekhat ship, before the already collision-damaged enemy vessel simply began coming apart. The heat and shock of the DU penetrators was igniting everything flammable aboard it, and he was sure the intensifying heat was spreading on its own throughout the vessel. A chain reaction of explosions, in temperature ranges where almost anything would burn.
Suddenly, in at least a dozen places, the central pyramid ruptured. As it did, the outer lattice began separating and disintegrating. It was like watching a gigantic and grotesque flower slowly unfolding—until the structural damage finally caused the ship's forcefields to collapse. Thereafter, the photosphere's own heat and pressure and turbulence completed the destruction within seconds.
"And that's that," Rafe murmured. More forcefully, into the throat mike: "Ed, you've done all you can. Get yourself and all your men out of those turrets. Now."
Kralik didn't argue the point. Courage was meaningless, under these circumstances. The turret crews were willing enough to die fighting, but the environmental conditions were now so bad that they'd simply die pointlessly if they stayed much longer. As it was, Aguilera was sure that at least half of them would need immediate medical attention.
For that matter, the sub's own environment was now starting to degrade badly. Aguilera hadn't noticed before, he'd been so engrossed in watching the enemy's destruction, but he himself was drenched in sweat and having a hard time breathing.
Jeri Swanson was her usual charming self. "Hey, Rafe, if we're going to parboil can I start peeling yams to go with the long pig? Too bad we don't have any pineapple."
I'd 've divorced her in two weeks, myself. But he kept the thought to himself, turning instead to address the back of Aille's head. Even the two Jao in the control center seemed to be wilting a little.
"Ah, sir, if I might recommend—"
"No need," interrupted Aille. "I am taking us out of the photosphere. We have done what we can."
Done plenty, Rafe thought, with considerable pride and satisfaction. Two dead 'uns, and . . . we'll call it one assist. No, two—we riddled that second ship some too, even if we don't know what happened to it afterward. If the rest of the subs did as well as we did, this Ekhat task force is toast.
The others hadn't done as well, they discovered once they emerged far enough from the chromosphere to regain communication. Several of the subs, in fact, had never managed to get close enough to the Ekhat to fire off a single shot.
Aguilera was not really surprised. Now that he had experienced it, he understood the kind of superlative skill it took to maneuver a converted submarine in those hellish conditions. Only Aille and one other pilot had really been good enough—one of the old retirees that Wrot had dug up, by the name of Udra krinnu Ptok vau Binnat. Between the two of them, they'd accounted for four of the six Ekhat ships destroyed.
Six destroyed—out of eight. In the holo tank, Aguilera could see the two surviving Ekhat ships hurtling toward Terra like comets.
Damn. I was hoping we could get them all.
Still . . . He leaned closer, peering at one of the images in the tank.
"There is something wrong with one of those ships," Yaut stated firmly. "Look. The plasma ball is fluctuating and uneven."
The fraghta had put into words Aguilera's own half-formed thoughts. "We must have damaged it some. Do you think?"
Some part of him was amused to see Yaut shrug. Yet another piece of crude human body language which the fraghta had unconsciously acquired.
At least, he thought it was unconscious. But, maybe not. Rafe now understood enough about the role of a fraghta to realize that anyone who occupied that position for one of the great kochan would be expert at many things. One of them being what the Jao called "association." Was this part of it?
Suddenly, the fluctuating plasma ball in the holo tank began unraveling completely. It reminded Aguilera, a bit, of the sight of the Interdict ship shedding its plasma. But this was a much bigger ball, and it was obviously not being shed in a controlled manner.
This time, it was Aille who verbalized his thoughts. "Yes, they must have been badly damaged in the battle. But still, with typical Ekhat mania, attempted to carry out their mission. Now they are losing control—and their own plasma ball will destroy them for it."
Within seconds, it was obvious that he was right. The Ekhat had tried to control a literal piece of a star—and now the star took its revenge. There was more than enough energy in that plasma ball to rip the Ekhat ship to pieces as it came apart.
One left, then. There was no way to stop it until it had unleashed its plasma ball in the Earth's atmosphere. After that, it would be up to Oppuk and his flotilla to destroy the Ekhat ship before it could return to the sun to gather up another.
Would he do so? Rafe wondered. Or would the Governor's now obvious hatred for Terra lead him to simply stand aside and let the Ekhat ship return again and again?
There would be little the subs could do to stop it. Only eight of the subs had survived, and they'd all suffered so much damage that to attempt another return would be sure destruction to no purpose. And, outside the sun, they would be no match even for a single Ekhat warship. Not with the huge lasers that ship would carry. In the photosphere, the advantage had been all with the subs. But in the vacuum of open space, it would be suicidal for them to attack the gigantic enemy ship. Only specially designed warships could manage that feat—and, even for them, it was risky.
He must have muttered his thoughts aloud, because Yaut spoke in response.
"Oppuk will not fail. True, he is not sane. But he is a not-sane Jao. He will retain enough vithrik. And, did he not, his own crews would demand his life."
He was probably right, Rafe suspected. He'd listened, a couple of times, to Dr. Kinsey's ruminations about the parallels between the Jao and the ancient Romans—as well as the ancient Mongols. And while Aguilera was not sure how closely those parallels held, of one thing he was quite certain. The Jao could be brutal, but they were not brutes. If they had the vices of conquerors, they also had the virtues. They would no more tolerate cowardice in the face of the enemy from one of their own that would any ancient Roman centurion or Mongol cavalryman.
He felt a moment of sheer camaraderie toward Yaut, then. Fortunately, he remembered in time to restrain himself from clapping the fraghta on the back. He'd also chatted with Tully once, and, like Tully, Rafe had seen a number of Toshirô Mifune movies.
The intelligent man does not take personal liberties with Yojimbo. Even in a good mood, on a good day.
Zzzt. Plop goes the offending hand.