by Perry Rhodan
A glance at the master chronometer. No later than 11 minutes from then the first of the Arkon ships would be over Topid.
A saucer-shaped body raced toward the Kublai Khan. An announcement came from hangar 18. "John Marshall returned with team from polar station." And three seconds later, "Kitai Ishibashi landed with his group from Din-Kop!"
Rhodan only looked at Bell, who got the message. The latter could only shrug. He didn't know either why Pucky and Ras Tschubai were not back yet.
"Com. Central..." Now Rhodan's voice sounded somewhat hoarse. "Try to pick up a contact with the historical archives at Kerh-Onf. Urgent!"
Then the mouse-beaver chirped up from behind Rhodan's back. "Perry, it's not urgent now. We can merk (scram) out of here in 30 seconds!"
Rhodan whirled about in his chair. "Lt. Puck! May I ask for a more rational report, please?!" His grey eyes glared sharply at the mouse-beaver.
Pucky's incisor tooth disappeared instantly. The mouse-beaver tried to assume a military bearing. His right paw flew up to the peak of his Arkonide headgear. "Lt. Puck, member of secret Mutant Corps, returned from mission. Rapped some Topide knuckles and slapped their wrists. Together with Ras, yanked commando group out of the mess they were in clear up to their necks. Real nice fun and games..."
Perry Rhodan had enough. Especially the last expression soured on him. He dismissed the whole subject with an irritable wave of the hand.
Atlan had been an Arkonide admiral 10,000 years ago and had flown one mission after another but he could not tolerate this display of Terranian negligence any longer. Sarcastically he cut in. "May I draw your attention to the fact that in 10 minutes there are going to be 2,000 fighter ships over our heads and..."
Rhodan calmly retorted: "But we will only take off when the last man is on board, Admiral. Wasn't that standard procedure for you and your Arkonide Fleet 10,000 years ago?"
"And if the Topides again use their latest sensor-beam device just after our takeoff and succeed in destroying our defense screens...?" countered Atlan.
"They can't do it," chirped Pucky. "The lizards only had this one piece of equipment ready. When they tried to cart away the disassembled pieces, I swiped them from them. I'll bet you the Topides will look everywhere except in the storage hole on the On-Tharu. After all, you know, I'm a pretty fair lad with the telekinesis, and..."
Hangar 18 reported again: "The group from the archives has just landed. Airlock doors have closed!"
It was a signal for takeoff!
8/ THE THUMB OF DOOM
In the great equatorial skirt-ring of the Kublai Khan, the impulse engines opened up at full power. Following in close sequence came the activation of the antigravs, the inertial absorbers and a few million relays and positronic functions.
From one second to the other, the antigravs rendered the Kublai Khan weightless. At first almost imperceptibly the colossal battleship rose upward from the Kerh-Onf spaceport but as the thrust power continued to build, the ship's acceleration indicators took an exponential jump. Beneath the great spacesphere the planet of the Topides appeared to drop away into the depths.
All of which invited the first attacks from the planetary defense positions of the reptiles.
Titanic bolts of energy discharged against the defense screens of the Terranian ship. A flaming cascade of lightning exploded in all directions, generating a loud thundering within the ship itself and causing the various compartments to vibrate slightly. But the automatically unleashed forces on board were even more powerful, louder than the crashing Inferno outside.
"Topide pursuit ships are following us!"
It was the beginning of an endless series of red alerts.
Rhodan called to the one station on board that differentiated the Kublai Khan from all Arkonide ships of the same size and class. "In case of an attack against us, you have permission to fire with the tele-transmitter!"
While in the same second the mouse-beaver was squeaking to Bell. "I'm turning on the heat in my boots now—can't stand cold feet...!"
Had Rhodan heard this completely superfluous remark or had he preferred to ignore it? His tone was sharp but controlled when he announced: "All hands into spacesuits!" This applied to himself, Bell, Atlan and Pucky—all except Harno, who was placed in Rhodan's pocket.
The Kublai Khan shot through the last of the upper atmospheric strata and the nerve-shattering scream of superheated air masses faded away. But from the power and machine rooms came the ever-increasing thunder of transformers, converters and engines running at their maximum capacity.
The scenes on the great panoramic gallery screens changed with a seeming abruptness, to be replaced by the velvet blackness of outer space. The two suns of the binary system looked like glowing eyes staring at them with painful sharpness.
Topid, principal world of the reptile people, had disappeared into the endless night of the universe.
"We have a tracking fix!"
In eight minutes the Arkon spaceships would be upon them! The sensing equipment of the Kublai Khan had detected the approaching fleet.
"Spacewarp sensor trace!"
This meant that an increasing number of ships continued to emerge from hyperspace, intent upon blocking the mysterious ship whose command had presented themselves to the Topides as emissaries of the Robot Regent.
"Radio surveillance...?" Rhodan wanted a follow-up analysis of all radio traffic to see if either the approaching Arkonide forces or the Topides had any idea of who had tricked them.
The operators in the Kublai Khan's Communications Central were veritable wizards. In practically five sentences Lt. Jouffre delivered to the Administrator a complete report on the subject. In all the intercepted and deciphered dispatches thus far, there had not been one mention of the name Perry Rhodan or Terra. On the contrary, the Arkon Regent believed that some rebellious colonial race of the Imperium had attempted to exploit a neglected or forgotten bit of Topide knowledge. But this had not been the main reason why the Great Coordinator had sent out a giant fleet formation. It was, rather, the fact that somebody had misused his own hyper-frequency channel.
For that reason alone, Arkon had to make its actions serve as a warning example to all miscreants. And just how thoroughly the soulless machine Gargantuan on Arkon 3 could strike had been demonstrated more than once.
"Chief..." This way of addressing Perry Rhodan had nothing to do with any regulation designation of rank but now it seemed to be the prelude to every announcement of disaster. "More than 20 super-class battleships approaching in Green, 156 degrees!"
The polar gun-turrets of the Kublai Khan opened fire. On the panob gallery screens the blackness of the void was rent asunder by needle-sharp beams in mixed colors of green, pale red and bright crimson. The Terranian battleship was firing with all classes of energy weapons.
A star was suddenly born in the night. One of the Arkon super ships had been struck by the concentrated volley of raybeams and had blazed into a glory of atomic chain-reaction.
But now a storm of counter-fire enveloped the Kublai Khan. In the Control Central the sirens began to howl. In relation to the size of the super battleship, the capacity of the protective field screens was astronomical in its magnitude—yet also limited. Struck just now by more than 10 raybeams, the defensive shielding threatened to collapse.
"What happened to the TTM?!" Bell called over the mike to the tele-transmitter station.
He did not receive a verbal reply but the abrupt cessation of the infernal sirens was answer enough. The defense screens became stable again. The attack of the super battleship flotilla had suddenly ceased.
"Half of them are gone!" cried out an officer from the sensor-tracking section.
Rhodan and Bell nodded curtly. Only the tele-transmitter could give them the chance to break through this powerful front of Arkon ships.
"But if those spacers are manned by robots," Bell whispered to Rhodan, "we can still say 'sayonara' to Operation Kamikaze!"
The velocit
y indicators of the Kublai Khan were approaching ½ speol. It would not take much longer before they would be able to go into transition.
Suddenly, gun positions 35 to 62 opened heavy fire. Transformers howled, power stations thundered. Under a new attack, the defense screens were bathed in a sea of flames and this time the Kublai Khan appeared to actually stagger under the direct hits. Of course this was incredible but even Atlan looked up and stared at the field screen capacity meter.
97%!
Then, just as suddenly, "Glord!" Another cry of uncontrolled astonishment from the sensor tracking station. Once more the detectors had shown that a portion of the approaching space flotilla had literally dissolved into nothingness.
The tele-transmitter, the most frightful weapon ever to come into human hands, had struck again. But human hands had not produced it. The TTM came from the artificial planet Wanderer, where the entity lived who was known as It, and the only tele-transmitter outside the one on the Kublai Khan was on Perry Rhodan's flagship Drusus.
"Starting transition countdown!"
"We're going to make it!" exclaimed Bell, half aloud.
Beside him was Pucky, who only looked at him questioningly with his great mouse-beaver eyes. He had long since ceased to grin with his incisor tooth but he did not appear to have 'cold feet'.
However, by now the main Arkon fleet had grouped itself for a concentrated attack. The sensor-trackers could not keep up with the count, there were so many oncoming squadrons.
It not only looked like doom—it was!
More than 2,000 ships shot from all directions into the flight path of the Kublai Khan. In the Control Central of the Terranian super battleship a few brief outcries were heard. 300 beams... 400... 500 beams... all around and making destructive impact on the screen of the Kublai Khan—yet Perry Rhodan's ship still endured.
However, it was spinning around its own axis! It had taken more than two dozen direct hits. The TTM station had fallen silent. The upper polar gun-turrets were no more. In Green sector 0 impulse cannon batters must have gone out. The disintegrator positions reported a 20% loss of firepower. Inside the ship, both sirens and klaxons plus signal lights combined into what was known as the "Disaster Alarm". Robots were running everywhere to close up giant holes caused by raybeams.
"G-shock inertials are dropping..."
This was only one of hundreds of disaster signals running through the ship.
Velocity... Now even Perry Rhodan paled... Speed was still only 0.48!
"Losses, Chief... Dead and wounded count, Chief..."
Another speaker rattling: "Chief, one-third of the ring-skirt has been destroyed...
Then the Kublai Khan received more direct hits. The machinery sections were 80% destroyed by an impulse beam that measured almost 100 feet in diameter.
The Kublai Khan was a reeling shell!
"Abandon ship!"
Perry Rhodan kept on repeating this order. But would any man escape at all from the doomed ship? Would the Kublai Khan blast into a cloud of vapor under the next direct hit?
"Abandon ship! Man the guppies!... Abandon ship! Man the guppies!" Rhodan sat like a machine in the pilot's seat, like a robot that was only programmed to say: 'Abandon ship Man the guppies!'
Now even the great panob gallery of viewscreens failed, just when eight titanically powerful beams vaporized the lower fifth of the Kublai Khan in the fraction of a second. The super battleship was wobbling like a dying top around its central axis yet the effects of centrifugal force were becoming stronger by the second. This meant that the g-shock inertial absorbers were just about out of commission.
Bell was still sitting beside Rhodan. Next to Bell stood Pucky and in the last chair sat Atlan. They were the last ones remaining in the Control Central.
By now they were only, able to communicate by means of their helmet radios. It was in their headphones that they heard the final disaster report. "Sir, there's only one single guppy left that can be used! We can't get the others out of the hangars because the airlocks are jammed and can't be opened!"
Bell groaned inside his helmet. The guppies were slightly less than 200 feet in diameter and the Kublai Khan carried a 2,000-man crew. Not even half of the survivors could crowd into the available space of a single guppy!
But Bell, Atlan and Pucky were startled when Rhodan shouted louder than before into his helmet mike. "We will all find room in the guppy!"
This was drowned out by sudden piercing outcries. They emerged from somewhere inside the half-destroyed super battleship, which the Earth had required 16 years to construct. Finally the shouts became understandable.
The Kublai Khan was on fire! But this was no normal conflagration that had broken out through a combination of misfortunes, an atomic reaction was in progress down in the energy banks.
"Out of here!" Rhodan ordered his two friends and Pucky. "Don't talk now! Let me have the radio channels free...!"
None of the antigrav lifts worked. They struggled from deck to deck through emergency ramps while Rhodan kept repeating instructions over the helmet com system.
"Let the ship burn! That's our last cover, actually, because otherwise by this time we'd be a gas cloud! In the guppy you're going to pack in like sardines, layer by layer. How? By use of the antigrav fields, so that the lower man-stacks won't be crushed! But give the wounded more room...!"
Pucky could have teleported ahead. Although he took a very dim view of normal means of locomotion, just now he stayed with his friends. It hadn't even occurred to him to do otherwise, and Rhodan, Bell and even Atlan considered it a matter of course for Pucky to be with them.
The lights went next, leaving them in an ominous darkness. They were still over 800 yards away from the hangar where almost 2,000 men were trying to stuff themselves into a 200-foot guppy.
The loss of lights made them realize that the ship was still under enemy fire. The Kublai Khan was struck again and again. It rocked back and forth like a derelict in a heavy storm swell, all the while whirling around its axis and losing portions of its massive hull in almost every location.
"No go—not going to make it any farther!" Bell gasped suddenly as he pressed to Perry's side and held his arm. He pointed downward to their left.
They stood before a lift shaft. Three men and a mouse-beaver stared into the fiery depths where a blazing atomic inferno expanded inexorably, intent upon converting the blasted remains of the Kublai Khan into a miniature sun.
"Keep going! If the Arkonides think we're an ocean of flames we might live through it yet...!"
Atlan growled his derision: "Barbarian, once you are dead, someone is going to have to deliver an extra blow to that optimism of yours so that it will not wander off by itself!"
Pucky was suddenly animated. "The last men are climbing on board the guppy, Perry. I'll teleport with Atlan and come back for you and Reg. OK, boss?" He explained that he'd been in touch with one of the telepaths on the guppy this whole time. Before Atlan could protest, the mouse-beaver gave him a tight hug and caused the two of them to disappear.
Three minutes later, Perry Rhodan was in the flight seat of the guppy, staring at the viewscreen and the wide-open airlock door of the hangar. The interstellar darkness beyond that portal was like a surrealistic cutout from some alien dimension, illumined by brilliant points of light which seemed to him for the first time to stare back with a menacing hatred.
The battle-torn hulk of the Kublai Khan had just been shredded further by another hit as the guppy thundered out of the hangar at top acceleration. Rhodan had one burning wish at the moment, that the Arkonide ships' tracking instruments would mistake the small space vehicle for a flying piece of debris from the main body of the once great battleship.
The propulsion engines in the small skirt-ring of the auxiliary craft thrust away at full power, yet it seemed to him that it was crawling sluggishly across the emptiness. Four energy beams split the darkness like lightning, sizzling past the lifeboat a thousand or so miles away and strik
ing the shattered remains of the Kublai Khan, which now began to blossom into a swiftly brightening ball of orange fire.
"You were right, Barbarian!" declared the Arkonide, shaking his head inside his helmet. "My countrymen seem to have spared us the coup de grace, since the Kublai Khan appears to them as the virtual fires of hell. But dammit, Perry, at the very crack of doom, how can you come up with such intuition and optimism?"
Rhodan found time to cast him a quick glance. He answered with careful deliberation. "The only time a human really gives up—is when he is dead.
But in that moment, Death appeared!
An Arkon spaceship had detected the guppy and fired a broadside. Rhodan cursed, which was rare. It made no difference where he flew—the enemy lay in wait in every direction.
"Chief!" John Marshall called to him from the communications console. "An interesting message just came through. The robot Brain has ordered his fleet to capture the unknown super battleship and bring it to Arkon. He wants to find out who's behind the action!"
Bell laughed bitterly. "One to nothing for our side, Regent! Look there...! You put in your order a mite too late...!"
Behind them the labors of 16 years dissolved in a torrent of flames, the last evidence that could have told the robot Regent who it was that had dared to use his hyper-frequency channel and play dark games with his borrowed power.
Pucky had never taken his eyes off the velocity meter and now he chirped. "We're at 0.9! We can still..."
A viciously wide disintegrator beam swept harmlessly past them into the depths of space.
"Chief, two light-cruisers appear to have us pinpointed now and they..."
Marshall's suspicions became reality. The lifeboat was suddenly gripped from both sides by tractor beams.
Rhodan flipped up the switch of the auto-positronics. "Out you go!" He had the guppy on manual override. As had been the case from the first minute of their mission, he played everything on one card. If they didn't succeed now, it would all be over with... The small ship's inertial absorbers groaned under the strain as he tore it from its course, turning sharply to Green 45. Then he slammed in the positronics again and started a transition countdown.