by Perry Rhodan
Cokaze fell into a chair—which promptly broke under the impact.
“You...!” gasped the old Springer as he tried with some difficulty to collect himself. Next to the fear in his eyes burned irreconcilable hatred.
At that moment Pucky picked up the brainwave patterns of a half-dozen Springers running towards the cabin of their clan chieftain from the main hatch. The mouse-beaver did not care to be seen by them.
“Jump, Cardif!” he called to Rhodan’s son on the ceiling. He let Cardif float down the first third of the way, allowing him to swing his feet down, then let him go.
“Trained even in how to fall at the Solar Space Academy, Thomas Cardif landed easily, doing so as though he took no notice of Pucky. The mouse-beaver was reading his thoughts, however, and said: “There’s still a trace of Terran left in you, Cardif, and even some signs of decency. It’s too bad you think so little of your father...”
He had no time to say any more. The group of Springers on its way to get its patriarch down from the ceiling had almost arrived.
Closing the helmet of his spacesuit, Pucky concentrated and dematerialized in the moment that the first young man of the group stormed into the patriarch’s cabin and found Cokaze standing in the middle of the room.
“Sire, does this mean the other three were imagining things...?”
“No!” exclaimed Cokaze loudly. “Nobody was imagining a thing! I was hanging on the ceiling with Cardif and... oh, if I ever get my hands on that mouse-beaver...!”
Cokaze saw how the men who had come to free him from an unbelievable situation drew back from him in fear, wanting to leave the cabin. In the same moment, he understood why they feared him.
They believed he had gone crazy.
He had spoken of a mouse-beaver and they saw in that the first signs of madness.
Then Cokaze exercised his authority. He did not give any explanation. He was once more the highest official within this large clan. Gruffly he asked: “In what lifeboat is there still room for Cardif and me?”
“Boat six, sire,” stuttered one of the men.
“Then wait there for us and...”
He got no further.
Something clearly perceptible happened to the partly destroyed Cokaz 1. The antigrav absorbers broke down and at the same time the Cokaz 1 must have abruptly left orbit, accelerating as it went. The weight of each man doubled and movement became tortuous.
“What’s this?” gasped Cokaze with the last of his strength. “Can the ship still be steered at all?”
But a deafening roar from the bow of his cylindrical spacer let him know that there the mouse-beaver was at work again with his uncanny paranormal powers, carrying out his threat of turning the Cokaz 1 into a scrap pile.
Thomas Cardif recognized the danger of the situation they were all in. He also knew that Pucky was not to be trifled with and, while the mouse-beaver would certainly give them enough time to get to the lifeboats, he was not ready to allow them the slightest possibility of retaliation.
Cardif, closing the helmet of his spacesuit, energetically ordered Cokaze to leave the ship as quickly as possible... “Or do you want to wait until the force of acceleration is so much we won’t be able to take another step?”
But Cokaze, gradually recovering from the shock, did not overlook the chance to pay Thomas Cardif back for his earlier remarks. “Terran,” he said sarcastically, “You’re afraid. I thought I heard you telling us that anyone who went to your space academy had their fear knocked out of them.”
The Cokaz 1, formerly orbiting Venus about 15,000 kilometers high, broke at that second from its course one more time, again because of the telekinetic influence of the mouse-beaver who, floating in space just 10 kilometers away from the cylindrical ship, now finally sent the ship on a path that would end in its crash-landing and at the same time he destroyed the rest of the intact impulse engines.
From that moment on Pucky did not concern himself any longer with the ship which, beyond all hope of rescue, raced towards the planet at a steadily increasing speed. He teleported and met John Marshall five minutes later than they had previously agreed to meet Marshall had been waiting impatiently at the edge of a Venusian spaceport for him so that they could go on to work over other Springer ships.
6/ COKAZE... CARDIF... CLIMAX!
100,000 men, each a specialist in his own area of spaceflight, had boarded the super battleship Titan and five gigantic transporters within three hours under the cover of darkness.
Though he had been informed by his agents of the 100,000 men stationed on the Earth. Cokaze had never been able to find out why Perry Rhodan had allowed the enormous number of trained men to waste their time in hermetically sealed bases.
Only Rhodan’s closest confidantes knew what mission the men had before them, and as the six spacespheres took off under the strongest measures of secrecy and against detection, and made course out of the Sol system, only the commanders knew the destination of the flight. Receiving the captains in his cabin aboard the Titan, Solar Marshal Freyt had reminded them once more that they were to announce only after they had landed where they had gone.
Three hours after take-off, the five sphere-transporters had also reached the necessary speed for transition. Frequency-dampers in operation, the small fleet disappeared between the stars, emerging from hyperspace in Globular Cluster M-13. An encoded hypercom message compressed to 1/5000th of a second and containing three important pieces of information let Perry Rhodan know that Solar Marshal Freyt stood with his 100,000 trained men on the verge of landing on Arkon 3. He received the message an hour after the conclusion of the debate in Parliament which had ended with a vote. Against all speculations, Rhodan had been reconfirmed as Administrator by a vote of 365 to 198, although there were a number of invalid votes and abstentions as well.
* * * *
Allan D. Mercant and John Marshall worked hand in hand.
The Solar Defense and the Mutant Corps did not leave the Springers, most of them settled in on Mars and Venus, a moment of rest. There had not been any large actions undertaken against the fleet of patriarch Cokaze but what was done was enough to give the Galactic Traders a sense of chronic insecurity. For the first time in the history of a Springer clan the power of the patriarch was no longer sufficient to keep order among his men.
Here and there and everywhere, cylindrical spacers were continuously being destroyed by mysterious means, although neither the Traders nor the members of their family came to grief. Again and again entire ships’ crews were put under strong suggestive influences and often acted like harmless madmen.
Only when it was necessary to protect the huge robot brain on Venus from discovery by the Galactic Traders did Marshall’s mutants and Mercant’s men employ truly drastic measures. It was all in all a wonder that this colossal piece of machinery had not been immediately discovered by the Springers during the surprising occupation of Venus, and at the end of some nerve-wracking hours Rhodan had then quickly made arrangements to continue to protect the positronic installation from discovery.
After the destruction of the Cokaz 1, Cokaze and his men had landed on Venus in seven lifeboats. Meanwhile, his flagship burned up in the thick atmosphere of the planet. An hour after the landing, he had moved into the Cokaz 2. Now he was sitting for the third day in an almost uninterrupted conference with his closest relatives to work out a new battle plan for the conquest of the Earth.
This time he had followed Cardif’s every suggestion and thus the Cokaz 2 was resting on the bottom of the Venusian ocean, 3460 meters deep, in that manner rather well protected from an attack by mutants.
The results of the voting in the Solar Parliament had disappointed both Cokaze and Thomas Cardif. Both had been convinced that Rhodan would encounter so many difficulties as a result of the spreading rumor that he would be ready to make a treaty with Cokaze’s clan. They hardly even considered Reginald Bell’s countermove of having the film of Thora’s funeral broadcast over all the government s
tations. So they had been all the more surprised by the results of the vote and the fact Rhodan had gotten passage of the expanded Emergency Powers Act left them completely confused.
“Springer, you’ve got to occupy the Earth!” again and again Thomas Cardif had brought up that counsel, his voice fairly trembling with hatred.
Thomas Cardif had become a devil’s advocate, a constant goad and, at the same time, the patriarch’s most important adviser. Cokaze was continually astounded at the young man’s wide-reaching knowledge, his forceful logic and power of persuasion.
The plan they had devised together called for occupying the Earth in a sudden attack and leaving the capital, Terrania, a blazing ruin. And now they set to workout the last details of their attack plan.
Cokaze was ready to lose a fifth of his fleet in the attack.
Two hundred cylindrical spacers were not only to engage the Solar Warfleet in pitched battle but also to draw it far away from the Earth, keeping the fleet tied down in a long conflict.
In working out that part of the plan, tactician Thomas Cardif showed that he was Perry Rhodan’s son. Rhodan himself could not have devised a better plan and the old and experienced Galactic Trader gave silent thanks that he had this deserted lieutenant as an adviser.
However Perry Rhodan suspected what the patriarch had in mind and 10 hours before he had issued an order to the spacefleet that they were not to be frightened by a false attack nor by an attack of a small Springer fleet. Under no circumstances should they leave the Earth without a solid defense by heavy spacers.
Meanwhile the conversion of the Earth’s moon into a weapon shop of planetary proportions continued with unabated urgency. The debate in Parliament was another problem and its solution had become urgent: what had become of the 3,000 Druuf spacers? For them a return into their own space was no longer possible with 100% certainty.
Without consideration of his own interests, Rhodan had ordered with the greatest of initiative that a solution to this most difficult and complicated problem be found. Himself, he suspected that the Druufs were still within the Einstein Universe, and a number of experts in space-time affairs had identical opinions.
As before, those Druuf ships were a latent danger, not only for the small solar system but also for Arkon, which with its gigantic fleet still fought in murderous battles with terrific losses of men and material against the breakthrough of Druuf units at the overlapping front.
Not even the Great Imperium could tolerate an enemy warfleet of 3,000 ships which struck like lightning here and there and then disappeared as quickly as it had come. And Atlan, Admiral and leader of the enormous empire, had not in the slightest reinforced his position, despite the unconditional support of the Robot Brain; he ruled anonymously while the entire galaxy continued to believe that Arkon was guided by a gigantic positronicon.
And in order to support and relieve of some of his burden his friend Atlan in this difficult task, it was from Rhodan’s point of view a job of first priority to search for the location of the 3,000 Druuf spacers.
* * * *
Tanaka Seiko, the Japanese radiopath, was enabled by his para-abilities to pick up radio transmissions, had been set down on Mars in order to monitor the Galactic Traders’ hypercom traffic, which was all being beamed to Venus.
Before both of the large, still-intact tracking stations of the Solar Imperium had noticed, it occurred to him that since 1445 hours hypercom traffic with Venus had suddenly increased tenfold. But Tanaka Seiko was not able to decipher even a single message. The Galactic Traders were all of a sudden working with complicated codes so only a large selection of all kinds of specialized equipment would be able to handle the problem of decoding.
For 10 minutes Tanaka Seiko listened to the encoded hypercom messages while an uneasy feeling crept over him. Finally he switched on his small hypercom unit.
Mutant Corps headquarters in Terrania on the Earth answered at once. Tanaka recognized the face of Maj. Shenk on the tiny vidscreen of his device.
Shenk must have seen the face of the mutant as somewhat oblong on his own screen.
Tanaka Seiko reported neither with his name nor with a code name. “165 45Lb-876/56!” he announced in Arkonese.
Whoever might have now picked the message up and recognized the sort of figure it was would have found under the same number the description of a gigantic star which the Arkonides had been expecting to go nova any day now for the last 6,000 years.
For the Earth that number and letter combination meant the highest alarm level.
Almost simultaneously, John Marshall, who was leading the mutant operation on Venus, also received alarming information. A poorly disguised activity could be observed among the Springers. The mutants had determined several times that the Galactic Traders were suddenly no longer concerning themselves about the mysterious happenings involving neighboring ships. It was evident that they had received an order from the patriarch not to bother themselves about them and that could only mean that something very meaningful was developing.
John Marshall, who with two men from Solar Defense had set up his headquarters at the edge of the jungle, transmitted his observations via encoded hypercom message to Earth. His report arrived just seconds alter Tanaka Seiko’s.
But the Earthly spacefleet had also made unusual observations.
All the cylindrical spacers had dropped out of orbit over the space of half an hour and were landing on Venus and Mars.
Perry Rhodan and Reginald Bell sat in conference, studying the reports that had just come in.
“These are the final signs of an imminent attack,” Bell declared, sticking out his right thumb and looking at the tip, which he had cut on a broken piece of guaranteed unbreakable glass.
“Put that thumb away, Reggie!” Rhodan told him, smiling. “Cokaze will have every reason in the coming hour to rack his brains. Now let me have the hypercom.”
“Be my guest, Perry, but what do you have in mind?”
“You’ll hear it. Ah, the screen’s lighting up. Thanks, Reggie.”
Perry Rhodan spoke into the microphone.
Bell’s eyes grew still larger.
Rhodan had spoken 10 sentences but each sentence carried weight. His telecom message was directed at Cokaze, patriarch of the Cokaze clan. Rhodan had issued an ultimatum. The Galactic Traders had five hours in which to evacuate Mars and Venus completely and disappear into space.
In the last sentence, Perry Rhodan threatened the relentless destruction of the Cokaze clan, “...because as of this minute all the ships of the Solar Imperium have been ordered to open fire with all weapons as soon as any Springer ship is detected.”
A switch clicked. The connection between Rhodan’s office and Terrania’s hypercom station had been broken. Bell laughed heartily, then shook his head in all earnestness. “Thomas is with Cokaze, Perry. Thomas knows your tricks.”
“So much the worse for Cokaze and his clan,” Rhodan answered laconically, not following up Bell’s well-founded warning. “If the patriarch dares attempt an attack, or if in five hours he is still...”
“Perry...” Bell interrupted excitedly, “you don’t need to practice your tricks and dodges on me first! And what happens if in the next half hour the Springers and their entire fleet attack? What then? Then Cokaze and his spacers will be over the Earth two hours later, making a torch out of this planet that’ll burn for thousands of years! Blast it all, we both know better than anybody that our fleet doesn’t have a chance against an attack by 4000 cylinder ships! You still want to tell me you weren’t bluffing with your ultimatum?”
Bell was quite angry. Several times he had emphasized his words by a hefty blow of his fist on Rhodan’s desk but not even that had any effect on the Administrator. He only looked at Bell thoughtfully, pushing some reports towards him.
Hell grabbed for them almost greedily and read them. His eyes began to beam. Excitedly he stroked his hair with both hands, then said, smirking: “Watch out, Cokaze—you may not b
elieve your own eyes! Oh, what I’d give to see your ugly face!”
Without warning, the alarm connection with the hypercom station suddenly clicked on.
“Sir, our fleet has had hostile contact with the Springers at five places over Mars and three over Venus. It’s certain we’ve lost a destroyer from the space pursuit squadron. Three of the attacking cylinder ships have suffered such heavy damage that they are no longer capable of movement. The rest have drawn back to the surface of Mars and Venus!”
“Thank you!” said Rhodan tersely.
Next to him was Bell, softly (and terribly) whistling. The overweight gentleman’s exuberance had disappeared. “Perry, your time-table isn’t quite right and I’ll bet that behind Cokaze’s answer to your ultimatum stands Thomas...”
“You don’t have to bet. I’m already convinced that Thomas Cardif influenced the patriarch into attacking at once!” His voice would have sounded the same had he said “The sun is shining outside.”
Bell gasped. “Perry, you often exhaust me. I’d like to believe we’ll come out of this smiling myself but when I think of my cut thumb and the bad luck that’s been dogging our tail ever since January 1st, 2044...”
“So why didn’t you become an astrologer, Reggie? You have the trustworthy appearance necessary to be one, don’t you?” It could have been a joke but Rhodan’s flashing grey eyes nullified all humor. He had been irritated by Bell’s doom and gloom. Ever since last New Year’s Eve, Bell had been making everyone jittery with his cut thumb and the bad luck it supposedly meant for the Solar Imperium. Bell was not at all superstitious but in this case he had been so impressed by what had happened that he could not be calmed down or reassured.
Like now.
He made nothing of Rhodan’s irritated response. “Perry, Thomas is ruining your time-table...”
Again the emergency circuits of the hypercom unit switched on.
John Marshall was calling from Venus. “Impulse engines of all cylinder ships are beginning to run. All hatches on Springer ships are closed. Takeoff of all spacers from Venus will most likely follow in 30 minutes at most. Over & out. Marshall.”