by Perry Rhodan
I turned to Capt. Masal. "Message to Feltif, Fleet code A13-BQ, pulse transmission. The settlers are to be advised that in case of an attack an evacuation is no longer possible. In consideration of my vital responsibilities, which have recently come to include the task of protecting the entire world from annihilation, rescue assistance can no longer be guaranteed. The colonists are hereby at liberty to act at their own discretion. However, under these conditions I can no longer accept any responsibility for the results of coming events."
Minutes later, the pulse-modulated dispatch was transmitted. Its reception was confirmed by Capt. Feltif. Shortly thereafter, information was received to the effect that the Farmers' Mutual Trust Council had accepted my decision with the greatest satisfaction.
I handed the return dispatch to the First Officer of the battleship. The smile on my face must have been somewhat puzzling to the men. "File this and also have it registered in the positronic memory bank. It might come to pass that we'll be asked later to explain how 10,000 Zakreb settlers could perish."
Peasants!" snorted Tarth with all the scorn of which he was capable. "Impertinent and presumptuous louts who can't see any farther than the nearest nuclear-powered tractor, which they also expect to be furnished by the State."
With that the case was closed for the old war-horse. I was certain that in an emergency Tarth would not lift a finger to help the settlers now. For my part, I had neither the inclination nor the time to bother with any more internal problems.
In this respect, however, the native inhabitants of Larsaf 3 were wiser in their attitude. It may perhaps have been something in their primitive instincts which caused them to regard my instructions as an unavoidable decree. Which could of course save them, perhaps all of them. I was very fond of these tall, powerful people with their velvety skins and their peaceful, unrebellious conduct. I couldn't remember having gotten along so well with an underdeveloped colonial race as I had with the Atlanteans. One day they would rise to become a great and powerful nation. It was not within my responsibilities to encroach upon their natural development but it was within my province to defend this people's homeland.
I asked the First Officer to bring me the appropriate sections of the colonial laws. According to these I was even duty-bound to guarantee the protection of the Empire to any willingly subject race of people.
In the midst of this train of thought I also made a decision that I would go by the book and make the enemy officially and fully aware of my intentions.
Masal appeared in the giant Command Central. I dictated to him the Declaration of War according to Article 16, Volume 2, of the Emergency Powers Code for all commanding officers of the Fleet who were operating outside the boundaries of the Empire.
I had the open broadcast sent out at repeated intervals of 10 minutes. When the next outlet funnel appeared at a distance of only 3,000,000 I had the Tosoma's beam transmitter send the same message right into the gaping throat of the discharge zone. There was nothing more I could do. Besides, the attack on Kehene's auxiliary craft was unquestionably to be regarded as an act of war.
The discharge field disappeared within only 14 minutes. The phenomenon was one of those unstable or short time quantities whose duration we could not calculate in spite of ourselves.
I looked at my watch and wondered whether or not I should lift the full battle alert status for an hour or so. My men were strained to the breaking point and in some cases exhausted. Then something happened for which I was not prepared. A second discharge funnel became visible just about five minutes after the first one had disappeared. In spite of the latent danger involved, I was fascinated. The image took form in what appeared to be empty space and yet I knew the end of one continuum was there where the other universe was overlapping into ours.
The funnel was long and narrow; at least so it seemed. Our instantly operating instruments revealed that its maximum diameter was nevertheless about 3.6 million miles. It became ever more visible as it continued to load up with the energy charge from the other plane. Owing to its deep reddish glow the funnel mouth loomed up clearly against the darkness of interstellar space. Somehow it seemed to be composed of solid material, since it blotted out the distant stars and either absorbed or reflected their light.
The opening was turned toward us at an angle of 43.7°.
Silently we watched the darkish opening with its mottled bright red background. Seconds later the alarm whistles began to shrill, jolting me to new alertness.
The matter detectors were in sync with the screens of the main tracking center and now they were showing us seven green-shimmering points of light. At the same time a fluorescent diagrammatic curve gave us information concerning the material composition of the observed objects.
Ten seconds later we knew that we were dealing with the attackers' spaceships. Another 10 seconds after that our reconnaissance flight speed was increased by the full thrust of the engines.
I switched on a full alarm. When the sirens began to howl, the 3,000 men on board the Tosoma knew that the long-promised attack they had been drilling for so ceaselessly had at last arrived. If the aliens were sending seven ships this time into our space all at once, it was a guaranteed certainty that the discharge funnel was stable.
From that point on we were on automatic controls. I listened to the roar of the engines, observed the flickering control lamps of the weapons circuits and checked the power meters of the fully loaded inertial absorbers, which were protecting us from the g effects of high acceleration.
Since we were short three propulsion units I ordered that the remaining 15 units be held to maximum emergency output. The tanks for the nuclear fuel additive had been filled in Atlantis. We had made use of bismuth, which was abundant on Larsaf 3. So in spite of the low flight acceleration rate of 300 mps2 we began to get into the border areas of relativistic velocity.
The outer edge of the funnel was about 12,000,000 miles distant. Eleven minutes and three seconds after our first sighting the coordinate data of the lightning swift hypertransition computer were at hand, thus making us ready for a short jump. I activated the transition impulse control as we were finally picked up by the tracking beams of the alien ships. We registered the impact of their hyper-transmissions, which would return to their receivers as an echo.
Obviously the enemy used another, very inadequate tracking method or some relativistic-physical effect was present which caused a shift of time-rate. At any rate our own detection of them had happened immediately. The aliens were just now becoming aware that two heavy class fighting ships were in their immediate vicinity and that their defensive and offensive weapons were by no means to be compared to those of the small auxiliary flier.
"...and we thank the Imperator for what he has bestowed upon us!"
I had caught the final words of the battle ritual, spoken by Tarth. In the Fleet it was an ancient tradition for the commander to call out these words through the communicators, shortly before the battle. This required a solemn and high-sounding delivery. An element would have been missing from the moment if Tarth had remained silent.
When the hypertrans computer time-released the transition impulse I had sent it, we had reached 82% the speed of light. Owing to her higher acceleration, the Paito kept a formation distance of 12,000 miles from us.
Then followed the brief pain of dematerialization as we went into transition. We hardly noticed the accompanying phenomena but I could still hear the strange moaning sound of the space-warp generator. Then my senses dimmed.
6/ ARKON DOES NOT ANSWER
My Commander's chair was shaking violently. It lasted only a few moments until I had regained my senses. A contact release turned off the automatic vibrator equipment.
In the Tosoma's Command Central a hundred heavy thunderstorms seemed to have broken out all at once. The weapons forming the 'green' broadside fired in a breathtakingly swift, concerted rhythm. Naturally this was the integrated fire control positronic, which had picked up the targets muc
h faster than we could have and was firing at volley tempo.
When my vision cleared I saw that we had jumped right into the thick of it. The seven enemy units had been taken completely by surprise.
Before I could even give my instructions over the microphone, the U-battery of 'green' side had already opened up with effective fire. Because of the airlessness of space I could not actually see the yard-wide beams of solar-magnitude heat energy going out but I was well able to hear the signal bells from the translight-speed energy tracker, which announced a heavy explosion in the immediate vicinity. Seconds later the light reached us.
On the panoramic viewscreens, two nuclear sunballs blossomed simultaneously. Two light-points became hand-sized balls of livid heat, which then expanded into mammoth, blue-white spheres of incandescent fire.
"Target one out, target four out—destruction total," came the automatic tinny-voiced announcement from the fire control robot.
The indicator board's flickering lights told me that the gun turrets had swung about. We were firing with everything we had on board. Under the molecular-decohesion effect of the disintegrator guns, another enemy ship blew into a fluorescent cloud of atomized vapor. On the sweep radar screens, of course, this phenomenon was only discernible as a sort of electronic bas-relief.
In spite of everything happening so fast that it was almost beyond the human threshold of comprehension and response, Tarth had to switch to manual control because what was coming up was not programmable. We were racing directly through the enemy formation and before us gaped the maw of the funnel. There was no more time for the running battle, since our course was opposed to that of the enemy ships and the moment of effective range became negligible.
I noticed two other explosions which had apparently been generated by the Paito, following close on our heels. Thus in one single blitz attack the enemy had lost five ships out of a total of seven.
It became clear to me that the unknown foe was immeasurably outclassed by Arkonide battle experience. Naturally they would have to learn this fact, and more or less swiftly, as had been the case with all of our other enemies—except for the Methans.
The hit-counter babbled at us but the muffled detonation was almost drowned out by the thunder of our engines driving at full power. The indicators revealed that our three-ply defense screen had been hit by a thermobeam. The impact was markedly small, almost pitiable. With such weapons there could be no chance against a major battleship of the Tosoma's class.
Tarth roared with laughter. "Ho-ho! Their defense screens are miserable and their attack weapons are even more of a disgrace! I—!"
A frightful howling sound drowned out his words. We had shot down into what Kosol called a discharge field. Our magneto-hypergrav defense screen began to show a sphere of flames around our hull, which could be seen in the optical viewscreens. This meant that we were penetrating some sort of finely attenuated matter.
The howling sharpened to a sustained screaming as we neared the narrow end of the funnel. The individual power plants of the Tosoma were running at their highest capacity. The automatic power controls shut down all peripheral equipment operations that were not absolutely vital.
All I could still see in the viewscreens was a writhing, flaming field of red. It was an unheard of gamble to thrust forward into this uncanny pattern of forces at almost the speed of light. For some time now there had been nothing to indicate the presence of the remaining two enemy ships. They were probably going through a wild braking manoeuvre by now. Their commanders must still be feeling the chill of terror in their bones—that is, if they actually had any bones or limbs at all!
Reports from the different ship sections were avalanching. Tarth sat close beside me in his commander chair, his lips moving without my being able to understand a word. The howling screams of our passage continued blasting our ears. Titanic explosions of force racked our protective screens, shaking the Tosoma's hull in every joint and seam.
The auto-controls of our spacesuits clapped our helmets over our heads and covered our ears with cushioned noise dampers, at the same time turning on our suit communication systems.
I was just thinking that I had taken too great a risk in plunging thus precipitately into this unknown nothingness, when suddenly the storm of raging forces ceased. The sea of flames covering the defense screens disappeared almost simultaneously and before us in empty space we saw a great, deep-red sun.
It was as if we had popped out of a transition and entered an alien solar system but the impression was deceiving. Instantly I missed the deep blackness of our own universe. Here everything appeared to be shrouded in a sort of dark red twilight haze. The constellations were entirely alien and in this time-plane our lightspeed flight took on the aspect of something monstrous and frighteningly unreal. We were hurtling toward the red sun faster than we actually should be.
I heard Tarth giving out orders. It was his responsibility to bring the ship out of the danger zone as fast as possible. Our matter detectors showed three planets at a fairly close distance from us. The coordinate readouts were produced more swiftly than even our excellent positronic computer had ever been able to before. The roaring of our engines increased beyond measurement. I knew that Tarth had thrown in the last reserves. We made our escape manoeuvre using the plasma afterburners, which added another 80,000 pounds of thrust.
Behind us the hurtling Paito held easily to our course, also driving out of the danger area at emergency full thrust. As we passed the giant red star, our widely-extended outer screens were again besieged by ravening forces. Then we were through and beyond it.
Our hypercom connection with the Paito happened so abruptly that I suddenly realized the theory of alternate timeplanes was demonstrating itself. As a result of our daring manoeuvre, what we had brought along with us was something that could only be called a relativistic quantity: namely, our own stable time reference.
Based on the empirical evidence of our observations, what was happening was that we were moving twice as fast as any equivalent time-rated event in this universe.
Far ahead of us appeared a planet that also glimmered with the same reddish light. Our flight was so swift that it seemed we were suddenly going 1000 times faster than light. So the time had come for action. The analytical instrumentation buzzed and hummed. The world ahead had a thick atmosphere, classed as an oxygen type. By a strange coincidence it was also Planet 3 of this particular system. It was as though it was a parallel to our own frame of reference back in the system we had come from.
Once again I sent out the official declaration of war on the hyperbeam. Then we swept past the second planet so closely that we were forced to make an evasive curve around it.
The Paito, commanded by Capt. Inkar, now came into closer formation with us. I could see him clearly on the regular TV hookup. Tarth gazed at me searchingly. His lips were compressed and his jaw was set in his hard-lined face.
I switched to general fleet com and picked up the microphone. "Squadron leader to all hands: the energy readouts on Planet 3 ahead show that spaceship bases, major-class power plants and energy-beam projector installations have to be present. What we have to assume is that this world represents a carefully developed main base, so positioned that the enemy can launch an attack every time he figures out when a discharge field is going to form. We will attack in accordance with the Nebula Sector Plan, using all available weapons. We will make a double target pass, the Paito on polar course, the Tosoma taking north and south belts of the equatorial line. Following the attack run we assemble at our entry point and fly non-formation back through the funnel. Neither ship waits for the other one. Once in normal space, suspend space battle operations and fly directly to Larsaf 3, where you will prepare to make a defensive stand against any enemy units that might break through. You will operate on the assumption that there will be pursuit. That is all—confirm!"
All commanders had understood. There were no further questions. The Nebula Sector Plan covered all conting
encies in the type of blitz attack we were contemplating and which we had carried out on many other occasions. At best, of course, the plan was based largely on our experiences with the methane breathers. It had not yet been applied to an unknown enemy who could easily depopulate entire planets and blast a reconnaissance ship without any warning.
Neither in the legislation nor mental makeup of my venerable race was there any provision or inclination to hesitate or hold back in such a case as this. Our 5,000 years of galactic politics had led us to believe that attack was the best form of defense. I was determined to either be master of the present dangerous situation or at least to show the aliens our teeth.
Three minutes later we switched to retro-thrust, braking our forward motion. It had been impossible to get any direct bearings on specific targets.
As Fleet Commander, I was provided with numerous internal surveillance devices which were designed to supply me with direct, personal information concerning the crew activity—all operating without intervention by the various section leaders. So I was able to see and hear my weapons fire control officer, Eseka, as he extended the grav-launcher in preparation for using our most dangerous attack weapon. Arkon bombs were carried to their targets by self-guided missiles capable of the speed of light. Their high-energy firing velocity was in the neighborhood of 6,200 miles per second.
The warheads had the characteristic of generating an inextinguishable atomic holocaust which affected all elements having an atomic number higher than 10. We ourselves knew of no method to stop such a fire, once ignited.
I did not dare to employ the newly developed gravitation bombs in this unstable-seeming universe, since the 'GRBs' were normally considered to be 5th dimensional energy weapons.
As we drew near to the planet on our prescribed course, we detected more than 100 fair-sized ships that were quite obviously preparing to make an emergency thrust out into space.
Once more I picked up the general fleet com mike. "Squadron leader to all hands: Enemy units commencing intercept manoeuvres. Disregard them and prepare for atmospheric entry. Concentrate all available energy into the forward collision screens for air-molecular repulsion. Sustained attack fire, robot-controlled, fan-out attenuation within saturation factor of five kilotons TNT per square mile. Ready...? Then let them have it!"