Starlady & Fast-Friend by George R. R. Martin Read Free Book Online

trapping this time.
    “Look,” Brand said.
    The viewscreen, suddenly, was empty again; just a scattering of stars and two or three lost blinkies winking a lonely message in blue and red. The swarm was gone. Then, with equal speed, it came into sight again. Far off, growing smaller; a fast-receding fog of light.
    Brand locked the viewer on it; Robi upped the scopes to max magnification. The fog expanded until it filled the screen.
    The blinkies were fleeing, running from their enemies, running faster than the
Chariot
or any man-built ship had ever gone or could ever hope to go, unaided. They were moving at something close to light-speed; after all, they were mostly light themselves, just a single cell and a microscopic aura of energy that gave off short, intense bursts of visible radiation.
    Despite the lock, despite the scopes, the viewscreen was deserted less than a second after the blinkies began to run. They’d gone too far, too fast.
    Robi started to say something, then stopped. Instead she reached out and touched Brand by the elbow, squeezing sharply. Up in the viewscreen, the stars had begun to dim.
    You can’t see a dark, not really, but Brand knew how they looked, and he’d seen them often enough in his imagination and his dreams. They were bigger than the blinkies, vastly bigger, almost as big as a man; pulsing globes of dark energy, seldom radiating into the visible spectrum, seen only by the drifting flakes of living matter trapped within their spheres.
    But they did things to the light passing through them: they made the stars waver and dim.
    As they were dimming now, up on the screen. Brand watched closely. Briefly, oh so briefly, he thought he saw a flash of silver as a flake of darkstuff caught the tired sunlight and lost it again. The old fear woke and clutched at his stomach. But the dark was keeping its distance; their safe-screens were up.
    Robi looked over at Brand. “It’s begging,” she said, “it’s practically begging. Let’s drop screens and trap it. What’s the harm?”
    Brand’s face was cold. Irrational terror swirled within him. “It knows,” he said, hardly thinking. “It didn’t go after the blinkies. It senses something different about us. I tell you, it knows.”
    She gave him a curious stare. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked. “It’s only a dark. Come on. Let me trap it.”
    Brand mastered himself, though the fear was alive and walking, the Hades fear, the trapper’s companion. Creatures of energy, the darks ate matter. Like the blinkies they swept clean the scattered dust and gas on the fringes of solar space. And they moved through blinkie swarms like scythes, carving tunnels of blackness in those living seas of light. And, when they found a lonely chunk of nickel-iron spinning through the void, that too was food. Matter to energy, converted in a blinding silent flash. An incandescent feast.
    A hundred times Brand had faced the fear, when he sat before his computer and prepared to drop his screens. When the ship was naked, when the screens were down, then only the mindless whim of the dark said if a trapper lived or died. If the dark came slow, moving in leisurely towards its sluggish steel meal, then the trapper won. Once the dark was in range, the safe-screens would blink on again, covering the ship like a second skin. And, further out, the trapping screens would form a globe. The dark would be a prisoner.
    But if the dark moved
quickly
….
    Well, the blinkies ran at light-speed. The darks fed on the blinkies. The darks ran faster.
    If the dark moved quickly, there was no way, no defense, no hope that man or woman or computer could raise the screens in time. A lot of trappers died that way. The First Hades Expedition, screenless, had been holed in a dozen places.
    “Let me trap it,” Robi said again. Brand just looked at her. Like him, she was a trapper. She’d beaten the fear as often as he had, and she had luck. Still, maybe this time that luck would