Another spot, which had evidently been traveling parallel to their course and so had showed white, now glowed dull red and Barnham said in a flat voice, “Another Saturn vessel, sir.”
They were coming up now into action. They had perhaps thirty minutes of strain in store before the first searching blasts of flame came to them and their own guns began to seek the vitals of the enemy. The captain pushed a thumb down upon the battle-stations button and the clanging roar broke the tight lines which had invisibly stretched through the little destroyer.
It was a matter of seconds until Lieutenant Carter had his battle plan. Plainly, he wanted nothing to do with this first destroyer, for he could feel from across black space the eagerness of hope in it that he would attack it and disregard the second ship, while that vessel, with all the brutal efficiency of a thing which knows nothing but destruction, blasted the life from the remainder of the supply vessels.
Abruptly, Lieutenant Carter understood a thing which in his inevitable resentment at being detached from the great battle had escaped him, and he understood, too, that insufficient weight had been given to this mission. He should have been started early. He should have the rest of his flotilla in a comfortable V behind him. For now the detector gave out information in shape instead of light and disclosed that this supply train consisted of the majority of fuel vessels possessed by the Navy. Someone had blundered. Intelligence had failed to discover that an enemy raiding fleet had slipped away from Saturn; guard ships had blundered in letting it through; flag had erred by not suspecting the possibility. For in those big hulks was the blood of the fleet and without it victory or destruction were the only alternatives. The battle fleet, already far beyond its radius, had no reserve. And from the state of his own bunkers, Lieutenant Carter knew that no one had sufficient fuel to return to Earth!
Everywhere through the ship men were strapping themselves at their posts or donning the heavy padding which would protect them against the violent course changes which would throw the complement about like dice in a cup.
“Aloft ten, right rudder nineteen,” said the captain.
The Menace leaped as the steering jets slammed her into her new course, as though she was unwilling to even countenance a thing which sought to avoid battle.
The screens of the enemy showed the action without much lag, and an instant later, the Saturn vessel was killing her speed on her old course and blasting into a new one which would again intercept the Menace.
The Saturnian, grudged Ensign Wayton, was well handled. Getting by her to engage the second was not going to be simple.
Lieutenant Carter leaned back in his deep command seat and apparently lost interest in the whole thing, for there was a vague look in his eyes and a relaxed expression about his mouth. Seeing this, the quartermaster let out a small explosive sigh, for he knew that they would engage the first enemy.
Actually, the captain was examining the vast panel of meters which gave the small bridge the appearance of being set in diamonds and gold. When he saw that all guns were ready, that all tubes were firing, that the air pressure was even throughout the ship and the new tanks broached to give the men more energy and courage, he turned slightly to the blue-and-gold figure in the other wing and said quietly, “We will engage, Mr. Wayton.”
Ensign Wayton’s hands tensed over the panel above his knees and then fluttered for an instant as though he needed to test the buttons which would fire the batteries.
“Aye, aye, sir,” said Ensign Wayton. He was breathing quickly, as though to supercharge his body with oxygen and hurl himself rather than flame projectiles at the enemy.
On the after bridge, before a similar but less complete board, Ensign Gates stood a lonely watch. He could look down the hatch just behind him and see the tense crew around the base of the Burmingham jet of the starboard engine. Ensign Gates swept his eyes back to the control panel, checked the telltales there and then glanced at his own quartermaster. The man, a heavyset sailor from Iowa, who still bore, after twenty years in space, the stamp of his state upon him, looked impersonally into the sphere compass which mirrored the stars and planets. He felt the officer’s eyes on him and edged his appearance with a sharp professionalism, as though this might communicate a greeting to the placid little ensign, of whom the quartermaster was fond in a shy, defiant way.
Ensign Gates grinned to himself, for he knew the meaning of the change in his quartermaster. He said something to the man, but the remark was engulfed in the crashing shudder of the port twenty-nines. They were engaged.
Time stood still and two vicious dots of ferocity slashed at each other in an immense black cube of vacuum. Shells burst like tiny flowers when they missed, or flashed like yellow charges of electricity when they struck. The Menace became filled with acridity. Somewhere in her a man was screaming an insane battle cry, and elsewhere blue blots of profanity hung thickly around guns and tubes and stoke ports.
Compartment 21 was holed and sealed from the rest of the ship between the beats of a chronometer. Compartment 16 turned into a blazing furnace and was sealed alike.
In the exact center of the ship, which was the after bridge, Ensign Gates placidly kept track of the enemy in the event that his firing panel had to take over. His active duty here was the overseeing of the engineering force, aft and below, but two tough chiefs were cursing themselves into a comfortable berth in Hades around the molten breeches of the tubes and needed no help.
“Hulled her!” barked the annunciator. Forward, Ensign Wayton sounded like a man cheering a baseball game rather than the director of that deadly blast. And then an instant later, “Hulled her!”
There was a crash topside and a man, bellowing agony and rage, hurled himself down a ladder. He was a mass of flames. The emergency squad member there smothered him swiftly in a blanket. Compartment 6 was sealed and everyone in her.
A small amount of Ensign Gates’ placidity left his face. They were being severely knocked about by a vessel which had a longer range and a faster steering system, which was landing four hits to their two.
“Hulled her!” cried Ensign Wayton, an invisible source of death forward and above. Evidently something had happened to the Saturnian, for an instant later, in a steady stream, Wayton began to chant the Menace’s hits.
Examining the panel before him, Ensign Gates believed that a lucky shot had penetrated the steering jets of the enemy, for he was now traveling in a straight line through the remaining three vessels of the convoy as if to help out the other Saturnian in the convoy’s destruction before this raging little wasp of space put an end to everyone. Just as the Menace flashed by a halted supply vessel, it bloomed into a sphere of scarlet death, the ammunition and highly explosive fuel igniting all at once.
Lieutenant Carter gazed calmly at the fleeing enemy, but the calmness was an official sort of thing, for there was sorrow for the supply ships and anger for the Saturnian snarled into a lump behind his gray eyes. Each time the Menace got a salvo home the captain twitched forward and a contraction of muscles above his mouth made him grin a split second at a time. His role was that of spectator so long as the ship was on her target, for then her steering was wholly between the gunnery officer and the helmsman.
With a blast close aboard, the Saturnian folded itself like a smashed tin can, and what had been an efficient fighting ship an instant before was now a scrap of volatilizing metal.
“Well done, Mr. Wayton,” said Lieutenant Carter.
Ensign Wayton turned glowing eyes and battle-reddened cheeks upon his captain and didn’t see him at all. He was already seeking the other Saturnian on his screen, was the gunnery officer, as though this first ship had merely served to calibrate his guns.
“Engage the second enemy, Mr. Wayton,” said Lieutenant Carter.
The Menace, bristling and sure of herself, shot a streak of power from her starboard bow and stabbed into a new course, three quick jets on the port bow and one below settling her into this.
Telepathically, Lieu
tenant Carter was aware of his enemy’s abrupt distaste for combat with him, now that the first Saturnian had been blasted from the action, but there was nothing in the action of the second vessel to indicate its dislike, for it turned now away from the supply vessel it had intended to spear, and streaked in a wide bank to bring her into a broadside parallel with the Menace.
Ensign Wayton adjusted his screen with the motor button and gave a swift check to the computator and then, because he was already ranged, sent all six guns of the port battery into a furious crescendo.
The Menace, dancing sideways from the recoils and being jabbed back by the adjusters, shivered with some vague premonition.
The Saturnian destroyer passed through the cone of concentration, sliding sideways to the Menace at a swift pace to throw off range and for some other purpose which was not to be fathomed for several seconds. The Saturnian’s guns were winking bright spots and her flame wake, as it turned to white powdery smoke, curved and feathered. She was a well-built little vessel, a few feet longer than the Menace and thicker through.
Lieutenant Carter scanned space with his detector but found no sign of reinforcement for the remaining destroyer.
The Menace shivered as she was knocked off course. The check board blinked and Compartment 26 vanished from it. Then, in terrifyingly swift order, the lights indicating Compartments 27, 28, 29 and 30 went black.
An annunciator above the captain’s post said in a calm voice, “Starboard magazine gone. Fire spreading.”
The quartermaster’s eyes flicked to the captain. Ensign Wayton hesitated for an instant over his firing buttons and then his gold stripe flashed as he located and aimed all three space torpedoes on the starboard. He launched them and said in a tightly casual voice to the quartermaster, “Roll a hundred and eighty.” Ensign Wayton, having no starboard batteries, was in action with the port.
Compartments 31, 25 and 36 went out in order. The air in the ship was unbreathable.
“Spacesuits,” said Lieutenant Carter into the annunciator. “All hands.”
The space torpedoes were sped, but only one had struck—this in the after section of the Saturnian, where it had caused a vast fan of bright fireworks. It had wiped out the stern balancing jets, but that vessel’s main propulsions were apparently without harm.
A new crash shook the Menace and the big light which marked the after bridge went black.
There was the smallest hint of concern in Lieutenant Carter’s voice. “Mr. Gates!”
Silence answered.
With steel bands on his nerves, his voice carefully steady, Lieutenant Carter said, “Mr. Gates. Please report.”
There was silence which hung for a heartbeat throughout the entire vessel.
Dead white, Ensign Wayton glanced at his captain. It was an appeal of dependence, shot without thought, an agonized hope that something could be done, a last belief in the impossibility that anything could ever happen to placid, easy Ensign Gates.
Lieutenant Carter did not look at his executive officer. In a flat, official voice he said, “Grapple the enemy.”
The heat was so intense in the dying Menace that men felt it through their spacesuits. They were unwilling to begin upon their private stores of oxygen until smoke was too thick in the hull to be breathed. Now they were in communication with helmet phones.
Space-garbed, a relief came to the quartermaster to allow him to climb into his suit. He had been standing there, strangling and sweating at the helm, and he would have stood there until he had melted if his relief had not come. The captain took the firing panel while Ensign Wayton slid into his suit. And then Lieutenant Carter dropped into his own ready covering. The captain gasped with relief as he sucked in air.
There was a clatter in the phones as arms were being issued out. Though the batteries were firing still, the helmet cut down their roaring to a tremble, which one felt with his body. There was something ominous and horrible in this silence for every man on the ship, for each was affected alike in the connection of the silence to a sudden surge of loneliness. For perhaps three minutes there was irregularity in the smoothness of the execution of duties, and then the first shock of quiet wore away and men began to talk to each other on the individual battery frequencies, began to swear anew, began to revile and damn this enemy who was destroying the sleek little Menace.
Still firing, Ensign Wayton was adjusting his ranges so as to sweep them in closer and closer to the attacking ship. The Saturnian was suffused with superiority and satisfaction, for the burning wake of the Menace was plainly visible as were the gaping holes in her skin, and this feeling, knowing it existed, Lieutenant Carter utilized by ordering unsteady leaps and veering as though the vessel were not quite under complete control.
Confident and disdainful, the Saturnian welcomed the closing. She even swept to starboard, little by little, to aid the action. It was her belief that gunnery was the only concern of the Menace and this, from a blasted vessel with only two guns still going, she could amply risk.
Further punishment awaited the Navy ship, for she could not come so close without being struck repeatedly. Her bow vanished to within twenty feet of the bridge and she was steering now with her guns alone, having two amidships port and one forward starboard, as well as her one-inch batteries on the bridge itself. She was rolling, tortured, nearly out of control, darting up and back and even tumbling when she came within a quarter of a mile of the Saturnian. And then what happened was swiftly done. The grapnels were still in action as they had been designed to be, and the one last ace of the gallant little vessel was played.
With a shuddering stab which tightened and held, the invisible claws of the Menace fastened upon the Saturnian and sucked them together with a swiftness which could only end in a numbing crash.
The shock of collision further crumpled the nose and drove a deep bulge into the side of the Saturnian. The latter had been panicked upon the instant of realization that something was amiss and had sought to charge away into space and get free, momentarily forgetful that she still possessed a superior force of men. But now that the adhesion was achieved, she ceased blasting and prepared for the fury which would come—which was already on its way.
Disintegrators in the hands of a burly CPO and his gang ate a hole into the Saturnian at the point of contact as though that hull consisted of cheese.
Disintegrators in the hands of a burly CPO and his gang ate a hole into the Saturnian at the point of contact as though that hull consisted of cheese.
There was no more on the bridge for Lieutenant Carter. Here his responsibility was done. Ensign Wayton was already gone from the panel and the quartermaster, a huge machete he favored in close quarters gripped competently in his hand, was just vanishing through the hatch.
“Boarders away!” the captain barked at the annunciator in his helmet. He was through the hatch before the yell had ceased to beat against his own ears.
Ahead he saw a knot of men launching itself against another knot which barred the ragged circle of emptiness that led into the Saturnian. Flame was spitting back into the boarders from viciously wielded jets and here and there a spacesuit was giving way to the heat. And then Carter threw himself through the group, jet pistol in hand, and torpedoed himself into the mob just within the Saturnian. With a howl of approval, the sailors followed their captain.
The mass in which he found himself cut at him, shot at him, grabbed at him, and Carter, spinning around and around and firing a space clear, yelled defiantly but incoherently at them.
For several seconds the captain did not realize that the Saturnians had been too contemptuous to don spacesuits—if they had them—for, at best, it was difficult to use them at the guns. It had never occurred to the enemy destroyer that a thing as mad as a boarding would be attempted by such a mauled ship, particularly since the odds in men against such a ship would be three to one.
The curiously pointed heads of the repelling sailors ducked back from the fury of the pistol and then the mass swept dee
per into the ship, evidently in receipt of an order which was calculated to draw the invaders into passageways where fast-firing small arms could be brought into play upon them.
Swirling about their captain, the seamen of the Menace cut down the stragglers and slipped in their blood. Few guns were here, for the sailors uniformly preferred steel when close quarters were to be had.
Suddenly the front rank of the invaders was swept back, driving their followers to cover. Two of the bodies were dead and projectiled toward the Menace by the fury of the fire they had met.
Ensign Wayton, a furiously moving monster in his spacesuit, shot to their fore, insane for an instant in the belief that his captain had been killed. When he saw Lieutenant Carter, he stopped screaming into his helmet. He halted.
“Spread into cover,” said Carter quickly. “Try to filter up into the ship through those hatches. But don’t press them closely and don’t risk your men.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” said Ensign Wayton. He spent no time in wondering why his captain went back through the crowd, for he had received his orders and he would carry them out to the last word and with his last breath. He looked around him at the shining walls of the gun room in which they had arrived and crisply told off a chief petty officer to burn out a section of its wall. If the passages were covered, there would be other ways of getting through the ship. He had an instant’s wonder about their fate, for he knew very well that this handful, less than twenty—less than fifteen, he saw with a shock—were pitted against at least fifty well armed in their own ship.
The Scifi & Fantasy Collection Page 23