by Perry Rhodan
I had sent our settlers back home, for the most part. My cruiser squadron had been destroyed and now we were waiting for a decision.
I walked slowly over to the large windows of my workroom and looked down at the capital city of Atlantis. My former instructor, Tarth, had named the colonized continent after me.
I tried to get rid of the bitter taste in my mouth but I didn't succeed. The officers of my squadron who were present remained silent. They could guess what was going on inside me.
The courier considered it his duty to inform me further: "Your Eminence, the Empire is fighting for its existence. You wouldn't be able to imagine what's happening on all planets everywhere. The Fleet has taken an unmerciful beating. We have even been forced to take the colonial people on board the ships, which does not help the already deficient state of development. I was commissioned to inform you directly that it is impossible to spare the cruisers, heavy cruisers and battleships that you have requested. There is a pressing need for every fleet unit in the Nebula Sector. Under certain circumstances perhaps 10 light cruisers could be granted to you; however, you would have to furnish the crews yourself. The trained men of the transport command would have to be sent back to Arkon immediately."
I turned around slowly. Tarth's furrowed features seemed to be frozen. Inkar, the still young, hotheaded commander of the heavy cruiser Paito, had a sharp answer on the tip of his tongue but I waved him off.
I felt inwardly drained. "Am I supposed to fill our gun positions with a bunch of stone age barbarians from this world?" I inquired wearily. "I still have the squadron flagship Tosoma and the heavy cruiser Paito at my disposal. Both ships are only conditionally serviceable for combat because we were forced to make some engine modifications as a result of the incidents we experienced. We had to transform them into weapons because our enemy isn't vulnerable to normal guns. They should realize on Arkon that what's involved here is an intermeshing of two different time-planes. Over there on the other side there are alien intelligences. The threat posed by the Methans is concrete reality and comprehensible to the mind. But what's happening in the Larsaf Sector can affect the entire Milky Way sooner or later. The powers of Nature are on the side of the unknown opponent. In about four weeks, by local time, Planet 3 will be in opposition to Planet 2. At that time we will be in the region of the so-called overlapping zone. I have converted Atlantis into a fortress. We have every prospect of success if we receive support in time."
The cruiser captain lowered his gaze. Naturally he could not take any position in regard to these things. It was absolutely senseless to present my arguments to him: he could definitely do nothing to alter the facts.
I came to a decision. "Ursaf, you will take off immediately. My report to the Imperator is ready. You are hereby ordered to submit this information exclusively and personally to His Eminence. I do not wish to have this vital dispatch end up in some subordinate official's pigeonhole somewhere. If I have not personally received an answer from my revered uncle within 14 days, by standard time, I shall abandon the colony of Atlantis and return with both of my ships back into the Arkon System."
My rank was too high and fleet discipline was too severe for Ursaf to dare remind me of my obvious defiance of orders. But I could guess his thoughts.
Tarth's reddish eyes met my gaze sombrely. He had understood completely. Naturally I would never give up Atlantis but it seemed that the only thing that would help here was a massive threat. Ursaf lowered his head and placed his right hand on his chest.
From my work chamber I could look out over the broad sea. Capt. Feltif, our capable engineer for colonial developmental planning, had established my administrative headquarters on the slopes of the coastal mountains. Far below me some quite respectable sailing ships were entering the great harbor that we had constructed. The indigenous people of Planet 3 were in the process of developing their own civilization.
I beckoned the courier to me and waved a hand at the distant scene. "It must be made clear to the Imperator what a shame it would be to relinquish the fruits of our labors here. We had to make a hasty evacuation of Larsa, the second planet. Including my ship crews there are about 14000 Arkonides on this continent. I have done everything within my power to face the expected catastrophe. Send me the spaceships and weapons we have requested. In four weeks the situation will be taken care of. After that I shall place myself at the disposal of the Empire with a combat ready fleet formation.
Again Ursaf said nothing. In spite of his youth he appeared to be well aware of what was transpiring on the distant Crystal Planet.
"I am even willing to refrain from confiscating your bright new cruiser," I added ironically.
The courier smiled uncertainly while old Tarth let out a snort of surprise.
"A great ideal" he said enthusiastically. "The only question is, how would he get back?"
"Exactly," Inkar broke in gruffly. "It's a disgrace! We're lying here with outmoded machinery, inadequate port facilities and shipyards and a pile of junk from the stores of an evacuated colonial planet. When they furnished the supply depots there they weren't keeping the fleet units in mind. We are forced to make necessary repairs under the worst possible conditions. Tell that to His Eminence!"
Ursaf spread his hands in a gesture of surrender. It was purposeless to overload him with proposals and reproaches.
Tarth handed him the thin cylinder containing the dispatch for my worthy uncle. I suspected at the time that Ursaf would probably be the last military man that Arkon would send our way.
About one hour later I stood with my officers at the edge of the spaceport and observed the takeoff of the spanking new Matoni. She belonged to the 300-foot class and was equipped with a weapons complement which previously would have done credit to a battle cruiser.
With a dwindling roar, the spherical ship disappeared into the cloudless blue sky of the third planet. Throughout Atlantis the native inhabitants would again fall on their knees and raise their hands on high, chanting their songs of praise. To them we were gods; but it was very questionable whether these 'gods' would be capable of defending Atlantis.
I looked about me in the circle of my officers. When it became known that the courier was to arrive, I had called them in from all parts of the colony. I was too well aware of their boundless disappointment to ask them for their opinions. These were the old trusted faces, although many of my companions were missing by now.
Commodore Cerbus, leader of my cruiser wing, had fallen in a defensive battle at least a year ago. With him more than 40 other commanders and 10,000 top-rate specialists had lost their lives.
What sense did it make to defend a solar system, named after a discoverer called Larsaf—against an uncanny enemy? We didn't know who we were fighting.
Then there were still other things that had bewildered us. Shortly after the difficult battle on the second planet, a robot handed me a small device the size of an egg. According to instructions I was to carry it always against my chest, close to the heart.
Where the robot ship came from I wasn't able to learn. Ostensibly the mysterious stimuli from the so-called 'activator' were supposed to make me relatively immortal. I couldn't quite believe the communications of a complex machine whose builder-designer only made his presence known by loud laughter. Nevertheless, I continued to carry the hollow metallic container close to my chest as instructed. Whether it actually hindered my natural aging processes or suspended them completely I had not been able to determine over such a short time span. At any rate I felt as young, fresh and limber as ever.
My purely personal problem also didn't seem to be so important any more. Here was involved the existence of 14000 Arkonides, several million natives and a young but wonderful colony.
Atlantis was an island continent which was approximately 1,200 miles in length. The tropical climate and the clear air at higher altitudes were very pleasing to us. In the course of four years we had created a model colony here—and we had also imparted a few skills to
the brown-skinned peoples on the large continents to the West and East of Atlantis.
I had appointed Inkar to be Chief of the Western Land. In a mood of cheerful amusement he reported to me that the natives there had elevated him to a kind of god-king. They simply called him 'Inka'—and the sun symbol of my venerable family was chosen as a symbol of divinity.
More than 500 of my soldiers and settlers had asked for permission to marry during the past year. I had granted all such requests because I couldn't see why my people had to suffer more loneliness on this lost outpost than the situation otherwise required.
The married couples seemed to be quite happy although Tarth kept reminding me that I had actually violated colonial law. Intelligent beings of development stage B were not supposed to intermarry with Arkonides. I had invoked the Emergency Powers Act and drawn the attention of all native women to the separation clause. According to the decision of the Colonization Board, marriages between Arkonides and primitive colonists were to be considered ineffectual and void whenever the husband was required to leave the planet concerned.
This was why I hoped to be able to repel the sinister enemy from the depths of another time-plane so that I could preserve this new home for my colonists. In this particular case an intermingling of the Arkonide-like natives was permitted and even practiced. Unions between Arkonides and the female members of an alien race were tolerated, in any case. But our men were obligated to educate their wives and to raise their eventual offspring in accordance with our advanced culture and technology. This was how new peoples and cultures were developed. I didn't see why I shouldn't be magnanimous.
If a battle-tested fleet admiral is assigned responsibility for administering an entire planet, then he should be granted the greatest possible freedom of decision.
A loud howling sound brought me back into present reality. A 200-foot auxiliary flier from the battleship Tosoma was coming in for a landing.
"I think he's lost his mind!" shouted Tarth incredulously.
In the next moment I was on the ground with my staff officers, going for cover. I waited until the hot shockwave had blasted over us. When I raised my head I saw that the ship was reeling uncertainly. It finally crashed to the ground near the mighty hull of the Tosoma. I noticed that it was the TO-4, whose commander had been assigned by me to make a reconnaissance flight near the orbit of the second planet.
Three of the sturdy landing struts had been crumpled by the jolt, which indicated that the antigrav hadn't been functioning properly. The ship had made an old-fashioned landing on its radiation jets, if such a near crash could actually be called a landing. The TO-4 lay just about 1,000 yards from us.
As if coming out of a trance, I looked across at the scene of the accident. The whine of a ground-glider engine brought me back to a state of alertness. Tarth and Inkar were already seated in the open vehicle. I got up without a word and jumped over the door panel. Our driver got underway at once. Before we could say a word we were racing over the flat surface of the spaceport.
Tarth's face was grim. When we finally became aware of the giant, blistered shot hole in the solid hull of the ship, we knew why the crew had elected to make such a wild landing. From the lower cargo lock of the 2,500-foot Tosoma, the steel figures of salvage robots were already emerging. There appeared to be a fire inside the damaged spacecraft as evidenced by the thick, oily black clouds of smoke.
When we came to a stop, Inkar spoke in a flat tone of voice: "That's a thermal hit, no question about it. In the name of the Greater Empire, who could have done that to the ship?"
I was already running toward the canted hull. Swiftly moving robots were moving in through the open airlocks. In spite of this it took several minutes before they appeared with the first survivors. The TO-4 had a crew of 15 men.
We waited in silence until the machines had completed their work. The fire-fighting equipment of the Tosoma was also brought into action. The fire in power room #2 of the flier was finally quenched. Only 11 crewmen were brought out. Three of them were dead and almost all of the others were wounded.
I waited until the chief medical officer of the Tosoma called me. Lt. Kehene, commander of the TO-4, had suffered severe burns but was no longer in pain. A plasma bath would soon heal his wounds. I would soon be able to question him without too much risk.
I kneeled down next to the stretcher and slipped off my bothersome shoulder cape. I had a long experience in having to face men in such a condition as this. In an age of energy weapons, burns of every type by far outweighed all other kinds of injuries.
Kehene was breathing hard but could speak. "TO-4, Your Eminence, returned from patrol flight. There was a relative-energy front over the second planet. I took up the prescribed picket point, to keep the required security distance, and all I did was observe. This time the relative velocity in the other time-plane checked out at almost 30 miles per second, which was considerably faster than usual. I was measuring the interzonal points when suddenly this hole appeared in empty space."
A medico interrupted us long enough to give him another pain-relieving injection. The synthetic material of Kehene's uniform was sticking in places to his burned flesh. But my mind held to his amazing information. A hole in empty space?
The young commander reaffirmed it. "That's what it was, Eminence. It looked like a giant funnel, opening wider and wider. It opened at about 10% of the real-time speed of light, and behind it the stars disappeared. Instead, the space it covered had a deep reddish glow with darker spots here and there inside it. The spaceshock, instruments were just starting to show some short-burst hyper-warps when all of a sudden they were on top of us."
Tarth was beside me and now he grunted fiercely: "Who was on top of you?"
"There were four unidentified spaceships—cylinder shaped. Our energy detectors indicated radiant propulsion. We were getting true hyper-blips on the registers so I knew we weren't dealing with any disembodied phantoms this time. The four ships were coming out of the funnel. I pulled back right away at full retro-power but they had the speed advantage over us. I mean we were still like sitting ducks at the picket point while they were already at about half light speed. They opened fire with thermo-cannons, which have about the same effect as our impulse-projectors. My evasion course was locked to the hit—probability logic of the energy-detection positronicon. I was able to dodge their combined salvos three times but they finally got in an angle shot on one of my pullout curves. The TO-4 was heavily hit near the ring-skirt zone. My antigravs went out along with the radio and engines one and three. I wouldn't have made it out of there if the three remaining ships hadn't suddenly gone back into their funnel. As I flew away the whole apparition disappeared. The return flight and the landing were a tough go, Your Eminence. Half the crew is knocked out."
Kehene closed his eyes. Shortly thereafter he was taken away to the ship's sickbay on board the Tosoma. We watched the robot medicos until they and the wounded patient had disappeared into the ground entrance lock.
The technical crew from the flagship was already inside the wreck, which was all we could call our priceless auxiliary flier now. The Tosoma had only had four of them on board and the TO-4 had been the only one of them that was still intact.
I remembered the physical and mathematical genius, Grun, whom I had sent back to Arkon about a year ago with tremendously important plans for a new weapon. Even at that time he had been of the opinion that sooner or later an inter-planar stabilization would have to take place. That is, there would have to be at least a temporarily constant overlap of the two time-planes. I didn't have to wait any longer for the technicians' report because I could very well imagine what they would find in the instrument records of the smaller spaceship. What Grun had expected had come into being. Precisely for this reason I had requested reinforcements.
If it was possible, from now on, for the enemy to penetrate our universe without any special technical difficulties, the whole affair could boil down to a standard battle situation. My
Tosoma was among the older units of her class. During engagements in the Nebula Sector she had suffered more hits than a battleship really ought to have to endure and still remain in service. Inkar's battle cruiser was a newer model in the fleet. Its massive 1500-foot diameter placed it in a class with the Fusuf series. With the two ships I might have been able to conquer entire races of people—that is, if such people were not at a higher development than intelligence stage G.
But now here I was with the pitiful remains of a once-proud squadron, facing an enemy whose space-flight technology was phenomenal. I was a high-energy engineer and I could evaluate the significance of Lt. Kehene's observations. If alien spaceships could emerge from a paradimensional hyperspace I without appreciable space-warp phenomena, this meant that their designers had mastered a considerably simpler method of trans-light travel than our own. But a lot still depended on the evaluation of the TO-4 data.
Tarth loomed before me. Not a muscle moved in his aged and furrowed features. "Any special instructions, Eminence?"
"To you, my friend, I am Atlan, the same as always," I told him somewhat absently. But finally I looked at my staff officers. They were all there, with a knowing gleam in their eyes.
Behind and to their left the mighty Paito towered on its great landing struts. It was a miracle that precisely my two strongest ships had remained to me from my attack squadron. There was no help to be expected from Arkon so it behooved us to act on our own in a timely manner. My veteran combat officers awaited my orders.
My gaze fell upon Kosol, the new chief of the mathematics department. Next to him I saw Capt. Feltif, our colonial planner. He had set up our eight defense bases on Atlantis. The propulsion engines salvaged from the cruisers Titsina and Volop had been installed as stationary 5th-dimension impulse-beam projectors.