: Weapon by Bone Jesse F Jesse Franklin Bernklau Illustrator - Science fiction; Space warfare Fiction; Human-alien encounters Fiction

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Illustrator: BERNKLAU

Release date: January 25, 2024

Original publication: New York, NY: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, 1961

WEAPON

Illustrated by BERNKLAU

The Dauntless was one of the most powerful ships in the Confederation space navy. Yet, in the showdown with the Eglani, victory was not necessarily to the mighty.

Bright chatter flowed around her, filling the clean conditioned air of the room with inconsequential noise that hid the tension in a froth of words. It was what wasn't being said that was important, Ellen Fiske thought as she listened to the high-pitched voices. Of course, one never paraded feelings. It was indecent,--something like undressing in public. But this matter of keeping a stiff upper lip could be carried to extremes. You went to these get-togethers, played cards and talked about dresses and children and grocery bills just as though there was no war, as though the Eglani never existed, as though the men in the Navy would come back as regularly and predictably as they did from commercial runs in the old days. But try as you did, you couldn't keep the undercurrents hidden. Fear clung to the sharp shards of sound. There was longing, grief, resignation, and hope, all mixed with a firm unreasoning conviction that if one buried her feelings deep enough everything would solve itself and wind up with a happy ending.

Her hands tightened convulsively and cards squirted from her fingers to the floor as the high-pitched keening shriek of a spaceship's jets came to her ears. The talk stopped suddenly as every woman in the room paused to listen and every eye turned involuntarily toward the ceiling. A big one was coming in. The entire house shivered, quivering in resonant sympathy to the throbbing pulse of the spaceship's drives. The sound swelled to a crescendo--to stop abruptly with a sharp finality that left an aching silence in its wake.

"I'm sorry, Anne," Ellen said as she bent to retrieve the cards scattered on the floor. "For a moment I couldn't help thinking that--" she stopped and blushed.

"Don't apologize," Anne Albertson said. "I know how you feel. Fact is I've felt that way myself--more than once." Her eyes were gray and wise in the frame of her pointed elfin face.

Ellen felt a rush of gratitude. Anne was understanding beyond her years, little Anne with her piercing giggle and gay smile. Anne with a husband already a week overdue. She didn't allow herself the luxury of worry, Ellen thought enviously, but then she had been married nearly four years now. She was a veteran of a thousand nights of waiting, not a bride of four months who had only seen her husband twice since that utterly mad and beautiful honeymoon, that precious two weeks torn from a reluctant Navy.

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