Per Stratagem
By Robert Chilson
Illustrated by Leo Summers
To the true barbarians,
Truth and Justice mean supporting
a strong, victorious leader.
It’s not that they lack loyalty—
they are loyal
to Truth and Justice.
* * * *
The sound burst on Rahjikah at the speed of light, swelling from an infinitesimal whisper he had not consciously heard, to an ear-strain ing, wide-ranging yell in mere sec onds—as if the others were hurtling toward him at appalling speeds. Which might, he thought grimly, be the case. However, once the sound reached that incredible volume, it grew no louder. It was coming from somewhere above him—ahead of him on his line of flight—and from south of the eclip tic. About thirty degrees off, in both directions, he thought, scan ning space swiftly. The sound was not as loud as it seemed; much of the volume was illusion: it had to be very loud to be heard at this dis tance. There were no ships near.
For it had to be a ship. It had to be more than that—it had to be one of the ships from Outside. The output from it was all amplitude-modulated, sounding like an ago nized cry, or a roar of anger, or a bellowing mating call—some in tense emotion of some titanic beast. There was no intelligence in it, and though it varied second by second, it remained curiously the same.
Rahjikah cut his exhaust, then his acceleration. His cone-shaped head eased in its circular collar, but he held it rigid, not to lose his bearings. His body elongated from the spherical high-acceleration shape into its normal egg shape. At his posterior end, his exhaust jet, a conical bone and horn organ, turned sideways at right angles to his line of flight. A short, sharp spurt of exhaust caused him to tumble slowly, anterior and post erior tentacles extending, their re ceptors listening to space.
Another spurt of exhaust stopped his rotation, a cloud of steam expanding, instantly shot through with crystals of ice and carbon dioxide, which latter as quickly evaporated. He applied a tiny fraction of his normal cruising acceleration, just enough to keep him from tumbling; it would take hours to brake down to zero from his velocity, even at full. The Out sider ship was now somewhere be low him. He raised his head on its long neck and tilted it to look aft over the swelling horny curve of his body.
His posterior tentacles picked up the astonishing vocal range of the ship; much of it was of too long a wavelength to be detected by the ears in his head.
He took time out for thought. If this was indeed an Outsider ship, it was important that it be captured for the Sidilikah Swarm. It was known that two other such ships had been captured—by none other than the Swarm’s worse enemy, the Dahjilahdim Swarm. It was only a matter of time until the larger of the two be brought against the Sikah. This could not be it; the Dahdim were still fighting among themselves. The smaller one was known to have been destroyed accidentally, along with a number of the Dahdim Swarmheads. These ships obviously had great powers, but how much of what they’d learned was truth, exaggeration, or outright lie could not be known.
He made up his mind, fully aware of the consequences of error; he would attempt to seize this ship alone. True, his very igno rance might kill him. But he was familiar with the language of the Outsiders; he, of all the Sikah’s In telligence Officers, had penetrated closest to the Dahdim’s Outsider ship—though he had never seen it. And lastly, he was Rahjikah, the Sikah’s youngest, ablest, and most ambitious Captain of Intelligence.
His hearts began to race, sending energy-rich blood swirling through his vocal organs. Straining every nerve, he forced his voice up to the incredibly high frequency of pulses the Outsiders used, a shrill scream, one word repeated: “Help! Help! Help!” Pulse-modulated; unmistakably intelligent. Its volume was as nothing to the output of the ship, but it should be detectable through it. Sending out that shrill call, he had time for a few moments of uneasy wonder as to what kind of animals could be making such fan tastic noise.
He suppressed the incipient fear. He had reached his present high position partly because, early in life, he had developed the ability to push all doubts and fears into the lower part of his mind, allowing him to deal with the situation on a rational basis. Once the situation had been resolved the doubts rarely recurred.
It was obvious, he told himself, that the Outsiders had bred up some very special draft animals to propel their ships. He had heard that, unlike the ships of the didahdin, they could actually accelerate faster than a lone individual.
Pounding back through the bel lowing of the ship’s draft animals came a cold, hard, precise voice; a voice so utterly emotionless that even Rahjikah of Sidilikah In telligence all but quailed. Even as his tentacles extended, their nerves picking up and triangulating on the beam, another quaver of uneasiness uncoiled in him. This was the an tithesis of that mindless bawling. Those knife-edged signals might have been impressed on the ether by cold steel and crystal rather than blood, nerve, and horn. He literally could detect no rounding of the pulses; they were as abso lutely square as it was possible for pulses to be. Had the Outsiders also bred animals for communicating? Surely it must be, he thought, shak en.
The signal, in Outsider code, was: “Identify yourself. Identify yourself.”
He hesitated for several seconds, then sent back, “Rahjikah of Sidili kah Swarm.” On every repetition he used a different synonym for “Swarm.” There were a number of these in the book he had stolen from the Dahdim, but as none had been translated satisfactorily, he had no idea which was nearest. He guessed that the Outsiders’ social organization was quite different from that of the more advanced didahdin. Aside from that, only the operator “of” would be meaningful to them, but the structure would suggest a name. They would un doubtedly be suspicious—they’d lost two ships in the Inner Sphere within a Sikah year—but this en counter should also suggest an op portunity to learn of them.
“What are you? What are you? What are you?”
Rahjikah listened to it, shaken. Triangulating again on the beam, he calculated that the other ship was making somewhere between ten and a hundred times his present velocity. At his top acceleration— both of them—it would take a week of maneuvering for them to match velocities. He couldn’t begin to survive a week of high acceleration without food.
He was taking a desperate enough chance as it was, though he was not given to worrying much about such things, in taking this hop across the system. He was taking a chord across the Inner Sphere, foregoing the possibility of stopping and eating on the way. Even drifting for days between cutoff and reverse would still leave him exhausted and ravenous when he braked down to zero in Dahdim territory. Only his superlative phys ical development made it possible.
His only hope must be that the Outsiders really could maneuver at very high accelerations—high enough to offset the difference in their velocities.
Again he answered. Their ques tion had two possible meanings; he gave the answer least damaging to himself. It was also the one they’d be most interested in hearing, he thought; it was a question how much the Outsiders knew of the people of the Inner Sphere. It was important that he stay near to the truth until he knew how much they knew. “A member of the didahdin—the Fifth Race,” he said.
A comparatively long time passed, and he thought of the captain and staff officers discussing the encounter. The conference would be exhaustive, in view of the strangeness of the situation to them, but it could have only one conclusion. Another signal came long before the conference could have ended. Naturally they would attempt to learn as much as pos sible before taking action.
“Are you in danger?”
“Negative. Alert only.” Rahjikah repeated that several times while he considered his next words. “I have information of great value to Out siders,” he added.
“We wish to learn of other Out siders in this System,” came that cold voice.
“Have you any infor mation on them?”
“Affirmative. General knowledge only. Can you match velocities with me?”
“Affirmative. Matching veloc ities; contact, twenty-five minutes. You know our code,” came that chill voice, “yet you have only gen eral knowledge of other Outsiders.”
“I learned it from a book,” he told them absently. He had trans lated the Outsiders’ time measurements into didahdin units and was aghast. It was not possible; flesh and blood could not stand it. It meant accelerating at hundreds of times his absolute top. Perhaps his original estimates of distance and direction were off. In that case it must be a very loud, small ship close to him. He could not yet pick up an echo from it, but surely its exhaust would be visible. The draft animals would have considerable exhaust, and they were close enough to the sun for it to be clearly visible.
He had been hearing pulses from the Outsider’s echo-sounding organ for some time—it must be another specially-bred animal. Like the voice, the pulses had absolute pre cision. To the limit of his detection, the pulses were exactly as long as one wavelength of the continuous wave. It would be marvelous for doppler.
Presumably the ship had better detection than he did, but as he was quite small and it large, he ex pected to detect it before it did him.
The bellowing of the draft ani mals had been growing louder and louder, seemingly, astonishingly, to be coming from half the sky, as if the ship was hundreds of miles in diameter, but then it abruptly faded to half its former strength, contin uing to fade to a mere murmur. The weak pulses from the ship grew noticeably stronger, but were still as weak as if it were at an enormous distance—but his own pulses began to be echoed back to him from quite close by, seeming very strong and very fuzzy beside the ship’s. Rahjikah had a moment of pure astonishment as he realized that the ship had had him in detection probably from the moment he first heard its sounding pulses. On such low volume!
Then he was overwhelmed by his own echoes, proclaiming the ship to be huge beyond compre...
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