Kane, in an emergency command post set up at the edge of the field, roared commands to Draconian officers who jumped to obey, sending enlisted personnel scurrying off in all directions.
Inside the spaceship, Ardala said, “They’ve found us out, Buck. There’s no more time to study. If you think you can fly this ship, get us out of here right now. Otherwise they’ve got us stopped.”
Buck swung toward her, the boxlike Theopolis still nestled against his chest. “What then?” Buck asked. “If they get us now, what happens?”
“I don’t know what happens to you,” Ardala said. “But as for me. I tell Draco and Kane that you kidnapped me at laser-point and forced me onto this ship at the risk of my life!”
“Okay,” Buck acknowledged, “that’s just what I wanted to know. Hang on, Ardala, ’cause—as we used to say back when I was a kid—here goes nothing!”
He set the control levers by the time-honored method of Kentucky windage, leaned his full weight into the main firing stud, and prayed.
Slowly, majestically, the heavy ship lifted away from the tarmac. Her exhaust flames spread like a sheet of fire, turning squads of Draconian troops and vehicles into smoking, charred black cinder.
Then, with a sudden rush of acceleration, the ship seemed to leap away from the inverted wedge of Villus Beta. She balanced there in the planetoid’s sky, a shining bird with a glowing, wavering, fiery tail. Then there was another burst of acceleration, and the ship disappeared into the night of deep space.
The emergency command post that Kane had set up at the edge of the Villus Beta spaceport had become, in effect, a War Room. The chancellor, Professor Von Norbert, the commander of the Villus Beta detachment of the Draconian Guards, all huddled. Kane was clearly in charge—Von Norbert served to answer questions of a scientific nature, the guard commander took orders from Kane and passed them on to the weapons squads under his control.
“Use the beams,” Kane gritted. “Quickly, before that ship goes into star-warp, before it’s out of our range.”
“Are you sure he has the princess aboard with him?” Von Norbert asked uncertainly.
“Yes.” Kane didn’t equivocate.
“But we didn’t actually see her climb into the ship. Maybe . . .”
“She’s with him, you old fool. Stop dithering!” Kane commanded.
“But—but you can’t shoot their ship down if she’s aboard,” the guard commander protested.
“Why not?”
“The princess! She’s . . . she’ll be . . .”
Kane roared with laughter. He turned to the guard commander. “Do as I told you, man, or I’ll throw you out and get someone who will! Turn loose all batteries against that ship before it gets away from us.”
“Wait a minute, Kane.” It was the professor pleading now. “We can’t destroy that ship. We need Buck Rogers. The whole Betan project . . . the whole Gregorian campaign . . .”
“I don’t care,” Kane shouted him down. “That man Rogers has defied me, he’s thwarted me, he’s taken the princess from me for the last time. And for the last time, commander—fire those batteries and do it now!!!”
“We made it, Buck!” Ardala leaned over the pilot seat of the stolen cruiser, put her arms around Buck Rogers’ neck and squeezed affectionately. His hands were occupied on the controls of the ship as Ardala planted a big, juicy kiss on his cheek.
“I thought you were ready to turn me in, Ardala,” Buck said in annoyance.
“But that was only if they caught us,” Ardala explained. “If we got caught anyhow, why should I get in trouble? You’re a very strange man, Captain Rogers.
“And we didn’t get caught!” She stood up again and danced gaily around the cabin. “We made it! We’re free! We’re—”
Her ecstatic exclamations were interrupted by the flash and crackle of a full battery of laser bolts as they zapped past the cruiser and disappeared into the void.
“Whoa!” Buck Rogers exclaimed. “Looks as if we aren’t so clean away from Villus Beta after all!” He’d tossed aside his stolen wig, wiped off the feminine makeup that he’d worn. In place of the filmy Draconian harem-clothes he’d used to escape, he now wore a proper space-pilot’s attire looted from the ship’s stores in the past few minutes.
“They must be crazy!” Ardala exclaimed. “Or—maybe they don’t know that I’m aboard!”
Another volley of bolts zipped past the ship. This time the ship was grazed by the edge of the volley. It shuddered, its hull glowing briefly with the raw, raging energy of the bolts.
Buck was knocked sideways by the charge that reached his hands through the controls of the ship.
Ardala ran to the pilots’ seats, jumped into the co-pilot’s chair and swiftly righted the spaceship before it could go into a helpless—and possibly fatal—tumble through space.
With a gasp Buck recovered himself. “Maybe they’re firing at us because they do know you’re aboard, Ardala!”
“Never mind that. Quick, which control gets us into warp?”
Buck reached, set a dial, flicked a toggle and leaned on an activator stud.
Nothing happened!
“What’s the matter?” Ardala demanded. “Hurry—before they really get hold of us with a bolt!”
Buck broke out into a sweat. He reached, reset all the ship’s warp controls to neutral, took a test reading, reset them again to plunge the ship into that strange region between normal space and null-existence, leaned hard on the activator, grunting with effort as if he could nudge the ship into warp-space by sheer expenditure of will power.
Still nothing happened.
“Sorry, Princess,” Buck told Ardala, “I’m afraid that near-miss was much too near and not enough of a miss. They got our warp-generator with the power-surge. We can still fly this thing like an old-fashioned chemical rocket ship, but warp is out for us.”
“No!” Ardala screeched. “No! Oh, that Kane! I’ll have him and his cronies killed forty times over for this!”
“How?” Buck asked. “From your sanctuary on Earth? With me?”
There was the crackle and flash of another volley of laser bolts. This time they passed even closer to the ship. The glow of the power-surge lighted up the whole cabin, turning Buck and Ardala nearly into glowing neon statues of themselves. When the surge passed, Buck and Ardala crumpled to the floor of the ship. The lights dimmed within the cabin as the ship’s power systems began to fail.
On Villus Beta, Kane and his cronies—as Ardala would have called them—followed the wild effects of their one-sided war through electronic telescopes. When the second blast grazed the speeding ship Professor Von Norbert exclaimed in anguish.
“You’ll have to answer to Draco himself for this, Kane! Don’t you see—you’re as crazy as Draco’s crazy daughter! You’re both so caught up in your dreams of vengeance that you can’t see the facts.
“Please, Kane—call off this attack. You’re going to be responsible for killing the emperor’s daughter—and for losing the whole Gregorian campaign! Think of having to face Draco after all that!”
Kane held his head in his hands. His hatred and rage were no less than ever, but the hysterical violence of the moment had gradually faded away, and he was able to exercise his wily powers of deduction once again.
“All right, Professor. Guard Commander—call off the laser attack. Prepare to launch a fleet of Draconian fighter rockets. I’ll lead the flight myself, and we’ll bring back those malefactors alive—to face the wrath of Draco the emperor, and of Chancellor Kane!”
Princess Ardala moaned and moved her arm slowly. She lifted her head and looked around the bridge of the cruiser. The ship’s power system was off but the cabin was lighted faintly by the clear radiation of distant stars. She could see Buck Rogers lying a few feet away from her.
She reached out to Buck and shook him by the shoulder, at first gently, then, when he failed to respond, more vigorously. “Buck,” Ardala demanded, “Buck, are you alive?”
A
low moan escaped the lips of the earthman. He stirred and looked at Ardala blearily. He shook his head and sat up.
“Buck,” Ardala throbbed, “were going to die. This is it, I know it. But at least we’re together for the end!”
Buck set his jaw resolutely. “Don’t be so sure, Ardala. This may not be the end.” He dragged himself forward, crawled under the ship’s main instrument panel, opened a door and reached inside. He worked for a few minutes, then closed up the panel again.
One by one the ship’s lights were flickering back to life. In a few minutes the wildly tumbling craft had regained its steadiness. “You see?” he asked. “Good design, this ship. Proper replication of all systems. Redundancy features. We’re off and running again. But—why haven’t they fired another bolt? They had us reeling . . .”
“I don’t know,” Ardala whimpered.
“Maybe they’ve called off their attack,” Buck mused. “Maybe they decided to let us go.”
“Fat chance!” Ardala complained. “Besides, even if they’re through with us—I’m not through with them!”
E I G H T E E N
A useful maxim in time of war is: Never underestimate your enemy.
Another is: Never confuse moral judgments with estimates of military capabilities.
What all of this means is that good guys sometimes beat bad guys, but they don’t do so just because they’re good guys. They win out because they’re stronger, or smarter, or braver; bigger, tougher, more committed, more ruthless, quicker, more numerous . . . sometimes, just because they’re luckier.
But moral superiority seldom has anything to do with victory—if only because there’s seldom been a war in history where both sides didn’t think they were on the side of the angels and their opponents on the side of the wicked.
Kane sprinted across the tarmac of the Villus Beta spaceport and vaulted through the hatch of the command ship of the Draconian squadron waiting on standby. He reached back and dogged the hatch shut, strapped himself into the pilot’s command seat and checked out the launch-readiness of the craft. As he’d expected—Kane was a tough and demanding military commander—the ship was in prime condition, ready to launch at the pressing of a firing stud.
Kane flicked on his commo set, cleared with launch control by the simple device of ordering the controllers to scrub all other priorities, and commanded his squadron to follow him into space.
The entire inverted wedge of the city of Villus Beta, and in fact the entire miniature world, trembled in response to the titanic forces unleashed by an entire squadron of space-fighters launching in rapid-fire succession.
Almost instantaneously the Draconian ships streaked for their positions in pursuit formation, Kane’s ship in the lead spot, the rest of the squadron spiraling out behind him into a formation that could have made a giant ice-cream cone, headed narrow-tip-first away from the tiny world.
The visual sighting of Rogers’ and Ardala’s ship as it sped away from Villus Beta had set a target for the Draconian squadron. Once spaceborne the squadron locked onto the remote quarry via a full range of automatic devices: electron telescopes, tightbeam radar sweeps, mass detectors. The D-III was far larger than any of the Draconian fighters—they were designed, after all, as high-speed mobile weapons-platforms, with minimum space or weight allowances set aside for creature comforts, while Ardala’s ship was an armored space cruiser replete with living quarters and large-capacity life-support systems designed to sustain passengers and servants as well as flight crews.
Aboard the cruiser, Buck Rogers was manipulating the control levers that managed the ship’s main exterior visiscreen. He had made the takeoff from Villus Beta via a combination of direct optical sighting and the proverbial seat-of-the-pants that born pilots could always rely on in a pinch and others could never hope to develop.
But now, Buck was struggling to get the visiscreen working so he could work out long-range navigational plots. The screen was not of a model that Buck had used before, its controls were not familiar to him. “How do you get this thing tuned up?” he asked Ardala.
From her position beside Buck, in the co-pilot’s command chair, Ardala simply shrugged her shapely royal shoulders. Buck continued to wait for a more expressive answer. Finally Ardala said, “I imagine you just ask the communications officer of the ship’s crew.”
Buck snorted angrily. “I’m afraid we forgot to bring the commo officer along with us.”
“Well, you’re the one who bragged about being able to fly anything in space,” Ardala sneered. “Try living up to your boasts.”
Buck fumed but returned to the control levers. He finally hit the right combination, got an image on the screen, continued to work at the job until he was able to control it as he wished. The picture that he finally settled on was a long view of deep space, with remote stars and even more remote galaxies picked out against the black background of nothingness.
“There,” he said with satisfaction. “That’s what lies ahead of us. We can plot a detailed orbit later. Right now, at least we’re not going to smash into any chunk of space debris or otherwise get ourselves in trouble.”
“Well, goody-good for us,” Ardala said sweetly.
Buck flicked a control lever and the image on the screen flipped to another picture of deep space—this time, the region from which they had emerged. The tiny shape of Villus Beta was still visible in the center of the screen, shrinking visibly as the royal cruiser sped away from it.
Buck leaned forward, peered closer into the screen, turned the field-of-vision control to zoom in on the center of the previous image. “Uh-oh,” he breathed, “that’s either the most unusual event in the history of astronomy—a bunch of tiny little stars have left their orbits and are chasing us—or else Kane has launched a pursuit squadron of his own and they’ve followed us from Villus Beta!”
Ardala leaned toward the ship’s control console, bringing her dark eyes closer to the screen and at the same time accidentally—or perhaps not accidentally—pressing her soft curves against Buck Rogers’ muscular arm. She looked at the image of the Draconian pursuit ships and made a sound of contempt. “Pah! There’s no way they can catch us. This ship can outrun them easily.”
“I’m afraid not,” Buck said slowly. “Not without warp capacity, and those laser surges we took before seem to have wiped out our warp drive. We were lucky that the main drive of the ship was duped, but warp hardware is too bulky and heavy to carry a dupe set of, even on a cruiser!”
“But then—what can we do?”
Buck flicked the visiscreen control and restored the view of oncoming space he had used before looking back toward Villus Beta. “They have warp and we don’t, so there’s no way we can outrun them. But maybe we can outsmart them.”
From the Draconian pursuit squadron’s lead ship, Kane peered deeply into his own visiscreen. The D-III cruiser loomed large in the center of the screen, and under the constant, thunderous acceleration of Kane’s ship’s pulsating power plant, the cruiser was slowly but steadily growing larger and larger.
Suddenly the cruiser veered from its straight-line course. The ships were far beyond Villus Beta of course, and almost to the limits of the Villus system altogether, but small objects still circled in orbits of their own. One such—it might have been a small planet, an unusually large and dense comet, or even a planetoid drifting at the aphelion of an unusually eccentric orbit—appeared at the farther edge of Kane’s visiscreen.
Before Kane’s amazed eyes, the cruiser swerved toward the remote planetoid. It flashed toward the object, appeared for a moment as if it were going to crash head-on into the rocky object, and then—disappeared!
Kane rubbed his eyes. “What happened?” he demanded over the commo-net to the pilot of the pursuit rocket nearest his own.
“I—don’t know, Chancellor,” the pilot babbled. “Did they crash into that planetoid? But there was no flash, no flareup as their fuel supply went. They couldn’t have just . . .”
“
Maybe they disappeared into a black hole,” another pilot ventured his opinion.
“What do you think?” Kane demanded.
“Don’t know, Chancellor,” the pilots in Kane’s squadron chorused across the commo-net.
The chancellor was furious. “What kind of spacemen do you call yourselves? What kind of Draconians? You’ve got to do something! Quickly!”
“Yes, sir,” a particularly courageous rocket pilot answered. “Has the chancellor a suggestion as to what?”
Aboard the cruiser, Ardala and Buck watched the Draconian pursuit fleet flash by, headed away from the star Villus and toward the void of space. “How did you do that?” Ardala asked Buck admiringly.
“I guess they don’t give Draconian pilots much training in astronomy—just what they need for astrogation, which is part of the story but not all of it by a long shot. Every object, including that weird chunk of rock”—he pointed out the viewport at the nearby planetoid—“every object that orbits a star casts a cone of shadow in the direction away from the star. That’s what causes eclipses. When a planet, say, passes through its own moon’s shadow. Or vice versa.”
“Argh! Stop! I don’t want astronomy lessons,” Ardala shrieked at Buck. “I want to know what you did to save us from Kane just now!”
“Well, that’s what I was just telling you,” Buck smiled calmly. “I just ducked our ship into the shadow of that planetoid. To Kane and his men, it looked as if our ship just disappeared. We don’t even show up on their mass detectors—we blend right in with the planetoid and they get a single reading for us and for it!”
He laughed happily as the Draconian ships shrank to tiny, dwindling points in the remote distance.
“All right,” Ardala snarled, “however you did it, Captain Rogers, they’re gone. Now, we will return to Villus Beta. Kane and the rest will give up and return to Beta eventually, but we’ll be there waiting with a hot reception when they do!”
Buck stared at the princess. “But, Ardala,” he exclaimed. “I thought we were headed for Earth! It’ll be a long trip without warp drive, but we could still do it. What happened to your pledges of eternal love for me?”
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