by Eando Binder
In fact, the last place the authorities would look for him would be in the Space Navy, for which he had signed up on Earth only to vanish as a criminal. For him to calmly fulfill his enlistment would be a paradox immediately dismissed by the military police.
And the beauty of joining the Outer Planet Corps was that it would take him to battles out around the Asteroids and Ganymede, near Jupiter. His eventual goal.
* * * *
Bruce was even luckier than he knew, at first. With the swift strikes the Mars-Mercury Axis had made in the Asteroids and near Jupiter, the Outer Planet Navy was desperate for fighting ships. Raw recruits were being hastily trained and rushed to the battlefront.
Bruce had signed up just as another mothballed fleet of space warships had been refurbished for active duty at the soonest possible moment Reinforcements were badly needed at the borders of Earth’s far-flung space empire, out near the Asteroids.
Along with other enlistees, Bruce went through an intensive training course for one week only. Actually, they were all selected specialists and technicians who could readily be trained to the intricacies of running space war-craft.
As a class-A civilian pilot Bruce was rated for a Pilot Lieutenant classification once his training was completed, with an assignment to fly a giant 5000-jet battlewagon as chief pilot.
It was a hectic week for Bruce. The training ship Kennedy, manned by 750 crewmen recruits, rocketed through space and made high-g spurts and decelerations until every man was one big bruise. But these healed and they became skilled in rolling with the punches in their g-harnesses. Then came the target practice. Errant meteors in space, giant loners apart from flocks, had been painted to resemble Martian battlewagons. Zooming up at top maneuvering speed, their big guns blasted forth silently—angry red proton-beams, spitting LASER flashes, and the entire assortment of nuclear bombs and missiles—until the mountainous rock had been reduced to rubble. It became a miniature meteor flock of its own.
In the pilot room, the training officer let Bruce take over on the third day as chief pilot. Several copilots were under his command, each handling a special phase of the ship’s motions in space.
Their next assignment was to drop a regiment of Space Marines over a desolate portion of the Moon’s other side. As Bruce guided his ship over the target area, wave after wave of space-suited marines jumped out with rocket-belts which lowered them safely to the lunar surface. The attack troops then carried out a mock raid and captured a dummy enemy outpost on a mountaintop. These ground attacks might be needed to wrest the ill-fated Asteroid Republic from Martian domination before the war was over.
Their contingents strictly avoided the Copernicus area of the Moon where the Martians had established a base, making daily attacks against Earth. It was the job of the main Earth Navy to carry on those counterattacks. The Outer Space Navy units were only used for far-flung operations away from the Earth-Moon system.
By the end of the week, Bruce had fully qualified as a top-grade pilot, more than once bringing admiration to the training officer’s eyes.
“But now comes the culminating test,” he said to Bruce, looking a bit ominous. “You are to pilot your ship out of a trap. Three of our own war-tubs, representing enemy ships, will fire at you while you make your run.”
“Dummy ammunition, of course,” said Bruce.
“Live,” drawled the officer.
Bruce grunted as if he had been hit in the pit of his stomach. “You mean they’re going to try to hit us?”
“Just as if you were in battle,” nodded the officer. “We risk losing a valuable ship and many lives, but we can’t afford to send half-baked forces against the Ginzies. You’ve got to be prepared for the worst. It’s your own skin, so do your job right.”
Out in space a million miles from the Moon, this deadly maneuver was run. The three “enemy” ships were stationed at the points of a giant imaginary triangle, and Bruce’s ship had to plunge straight between them.
Bruce’s nerves tingled as he looked over to his piloting crew. They were good, dependable men. Jim Sanderson, tall and spare, was adept at initiating the proper firing sequences of their rockets and ion-jets. Barney Bligh had sharp black eyes that hawked his guidance screens with decimal precision. Big Kirk Lawson, last of all, was a master at keeping all the nuclear power systems at top performance.
Seated at the main control board, Bruce integrated all their functions that made the 1000-foot-long space warship behave like an unerring guided missile in whatever task it was called on to perform.
Bruce ran a dry tongue over his lips as the countdown clock ran down to zero. He barked orders to the waiting three:
“Half-g forward!” Sanderson’s fingers tapped his keyboard expertly and the great ship leaped forward like an angry bull.
“Zig-zag pattern at 10-degree turns, pitch and yaw!” And Bligh was already feeding that code into his guidance tapes before the last word was said.
“Prime engines for maximum power!” Big Lawson flung his arms with tigerish speed, flipping over switches that brought a low growl of pyramiding mega-horsepower from the nuclear power plant underneath.
Like a metallic greyhound, the Kennedy leaped into its zig-zagging roll, straight for the three dots spanning space ahead of them. From the three ambushing craft came the belching proton-blasts that scorched silently through space. They missed by a comfortable margin.
But the going got rougher as they neared the three ships and the range became shorter. Now sharklike missiles whooshed at them and infra-beams stabbed at their hull momentarily.
Out of several standard plans, Bruce had chosen the most difficult—but the most effective. After the twisting roll within 500 miles of the triangle, he switched to a random trajectory that involved a combined parabolic-hyperbolic approach. The opposing gunners would have to be sharpshooters indeed to get their computer predictors to reveal any single point along that looping flight pattern and get in a shot. It was like trying to pinpoint a shot along the writhing body of a sidewinder snake.
Bruce had reflected earlier that the spacecraft of his day were a far cry from the primitive rockets of early space pioneering days some 500 years ago in the 20th century. Equipped with enormously powerful nuclear ion-drives and superb computerized guidance systems, spaceships as big as ocean liners could be manipulated with the ease of jetcars on Earth’s roads. Bruce thrilled to the instant responses of the behemoth in which he sat, evading the gunnery aimed at them.
At closer range, within 100 miles, Bruce flipped the toggle for all-wave chaff to be thrown out on both sides of his ship in bunches flying at various angles. Now all radarscopes, infrascopes, and quantumscopes—the eyes of the gunners—were given a bewildering variety of false targets among which the real one was hidden.
The “enemy’s” fire became erratic and confused. But it would only be momentary, until the master computers sorted out the bogus images and fastened on the prime target. But now Bruce snapped out commands to his three copilots:
“Sanderson, max-g velocity… Bligh, dead ahead… Lawson, 1000 megadynes per second sustained… MARK!”
As all three worked their controls on the split second, the Kennedy became a cannon shell bulling its way directly within the triangular formation of the three firing ships. Their guns and splitting ray antennas swung much too late.
The target ship barreled through the triangle and beyond, swiftly losing itself in black space. A few belated proton-charges puffed at their heels aimlessly.
“Power down and prepare for return,” said Bruce, swinging around to exchange broad grins with his three men. “Ho hum. Rather a dull day in space, eh?”
“Bet those gunners thought they were firing at a ghost,” chuckled Sanderson.
“You sure know how to handle a battlewagon, chief,” said Bligh admiringly.
“Put a rocket on an Asteroid,” drawled Lawson, “and he’d pilot it around the solar system. Skill? He’s got megawatts of it. And look how calm he is.”
>
“Calm?” echoed Bruce doubtfully. He took a plastocup of coffee from its wall receptacle—and dropped it. His fingers were trembling. “I’m about as calm as a dish of Jell-O in an earthquake,” he admitted frankly, as the reaction hit him.
“Aren’t we all,” grunted Sanderson, looking a bit green. “Well, we’ll get over the shakes by the time we report to base.”
At the base, the commandant was waiting. “Great, Captain Bruce,” he said with a salute. “You’ve won a promotion with that fantastic exhibition of evasive action. Nearest shot was a dozen feet according to our observers.” An unmilitary grin creased his face. “And I hear the opposing gunners are taking turns kicking each other for not even knocking a patch of paint off your ship.”
His face sobered. “Another hundred warships are going through the live-fire test, hopefully as well as yours. Then you will all embark for the battlefront tomorrow. Your orders have come in to join the Earth Asteroid Fleet which is fighting the Imperial Martian Planetoid Fleet to keep the space lanes open for Earth ships to reach Jupiter.” Jupiter! If the Martians won, the routes there would be closed, shutting off Bruce’s last chance to reach the Red Spot, where Dr. Kent and Dora were still imprisoned. And where the Martians at their secret base were probably planning some devastating war blow against the Earth-Venus Coalition. Dr. Kent, Dora, the fate of Earth—they must not be blocked off.
“Ready for duty, sir,” Bruce said fervently, snapping a salute. More ready than the commandant could possibly know.
* * * *
At emergency speed all the way, the Fourth Fleet of 100 Outer Planet Earth Navy ships reached the Asteroids in three days. Aboard Bruce’s macroship, the Avenger, was the fleet chief, Commander Jason Baird, a tight-lipped veteran with space wiseness in his squinted eyes.
“You are second in command, Captain Bruce,” he said formally as they neared the battlefront. “If I go,” he continued bluntly, “carry on.”
“Aye, sir,” returned Bruce.
The commander’s eyes were grave. “I say that because we’re heading into a series of all-out battles. It’s no secret that the Mars-Mercury Axis was well prepared for war, while the Earth-Venus Coalition was not. High Lord Kilku of Mars obviously planned a lightning war that would be over in a few months, with the Coalition’s power broken throughout the solar system.”
He paused to stare bleakly out of the port-window, as if seeing a black future. “After the Ginzies took over the Asteroid Republic without firing a shot”—he almost spat the words in disgust—“they immediately set about creating a complete blockade to cut off access to Jupiter and Saturn. Wherever Jupiter is in its orbit in relation to Earth, at any given time, it is always behind the Asteroids. Hence, our shipping can’t take any roundabout route to Jupiter without running into Martian forces.”
His voice shook a little. “If the blockade is completed, there go Ganymede, Io, Callisto and Europa. And all the outposts on Saturn’s moons and beyond.”
And there goes, thought Bruce, my last chance of bringing Dr. Kent and Dora back from the Red Spot.
“So our job,” said the commander, clenching his fist, “is to help break the blockade. Smash it. Blast it wide open.” His voice took on an edge of bulldog determination. “Luckily, in terms of military power at hand, the Martians don’t have us three to one—only two to one.” He waved a hand. “That’s all the fighting odds we ask for in the Space Navy.”
His words were more certain than his tone. Out there lay the crossroads of the future. One turn led to victory snatched out of defeat. The other turn was unthinkable—Martian domination of the solar system with Earth’s hard-won space empire stripped away.
Chapter 11
Approaching the Asteroids, the Fourth Earth Fleet proceeded with caution. Ahead lay part of the 50,000 planetoids, large and small, scattered all the way around as a belt at an average distance of 275 million miles from the sun.
The former Asteroid Republic had not occupied or even attempted to hold sway over every last rock and lump. They had only knit together a government over the larger bodies that exceeded 5 miles in diameter. Even so, that included several thousand Asteroids, as far apart as a half-million miles on the average.
As the largest Asteroid 480 miles in diameter, Ceres was the natural capital of the fragmented republic, holding the seat of government. It was now firmly in Martian hands under a puppet regime. The former government heads had been duly executed, imprisoned, or exiled.
This allowed the Martians to take over every fortified base on a hundred lonely Asteroids spaced throughout the sun-circling belt. And it was from these bases that small Martian fleets patrolled the Asteroidal region, slowly building up strength to create a blockade to the outer planets.
The main Martian forces were of course concentrated opposite Jupiter, to cut off that major space route. Other and lesser forces patrolled at the points which extended out to Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.
It was a slow, relentless strangulation of the lifelines to Earth-held moons beyond the Asteroids. It was the job of the Fourth Fleet of the Outer Space Navy—to which Jay Bruce belonged—to join with the Second Fleet, already there, in an attempt to harass the Imperial Martian Blockade Fleet based at Juno, one of the larger Asteroids.
As the Fourth Fleet approached, Commander Baird cautiously made radio contact with the Second via low-power scrambled code. The commander then briefed Bruce on their plans.
“We’ve worked out a hit-and-run tactic, coming at Juno from two sides. Most of the Martian Blockade Fleet is out on patrol. If we can damage their base sufficiently, it’ll hamper them for some time and keep a gap open in the blockade. Set the countdown clock for action in one hour and lead the fleet to the stated position on the coded tape.”
Bruce’s ship was the flagship and led the other hundred craft as they crept through space on low ion-powered propulsion. There was little danger of collision with an Asteroid, though they were now approaching the thickest of the swarm. Fifty thousand bodies distributed around a perimeter of a billion and a half miles left plenty of space in between. Martian patrol ships were more dangerous if any crossed their path. The twinkles of a few Asteroids in their path swung to the side and vanished behind, one by one.
Ahead lay a larger “star” that slowly became brighter than a star—Juno, 120 miles in diameter. Their target destination.
But a smaller body lay closer, about a mile in diameter. Suddenly, from around its edge, came a small rocketship with a two-moon emblem.
Bruce, constantly eyeing the viewscreen ahead, reacted instantaneously. “Martian scoutcraft ahead, a loner. Turn five degrees and use proton-blast.”
But a moment before the silent beam struck the craft and converted it into a shower of sparkles, their radio had picked up a frantic call from the Martian pilots: “Attention, Imperial blockage fleet! Earth forces near Juno—” The rest of the words died with the man.
“Rotten luck,” hissed Commander Baird, “to be spotted so near to our target. If the Martian blockade fleet picked up the message, they’ll be roaring here in full force. We know their position and how long it will take to get here.” He looked around at Bruce and his three copilots with somber eyes. “We’ve got one hour to raid the Juno base. But after that we’ll have to fight our way out.” He glanced at the countdown clock. “Time for Juno raid, three, two, one…ZERO!”
With all coordinates set, Bruce banged the power toggle. The Avenger shot forward, leading its one hundred eagles of space. As they drove near, Bruce could see the complex of domes and pyramidal fortifications of the Juno base. And now, from the apexes of the pyramids, there sprang forth dull-red proton-beams and all other anti-spacecraft fire. But it was sporadic and confused, due to the surprise attack.
In a weaving formation, the Fourth Fleet drove into the hellfire, losing one ship immediately. It was the first time Bruce had seen such a wartime scene, as the huge ship sagged in the middle and then blew apart, spewing forth debris, much of it
human. The ghastly part was no noise, no sound, no screams.
Bruce gulped and fought down a wave of nausea. Then he gave himself a mental slap in the face and turned his attention to the job at hand. He had to translate the commander’s battle orders into flight data. Flying orders streamed from him, transmitted to all the fleet as he sent ships in echelons of ten in various directions to bomb and strafe as much of the fortifications as possible.
Meanwhile, a radio call had come in that the Second Fleet had simultaneously attacked at the other side of Juno. Their overall plan was to gradually come together, wiping out all in between.
Below, under bombs and power-loaded rays, the fortified installations of the Martians—stolen from the Asteroid Republic—melted away into rubble.
“Die, you Ginzies,” bellowed Commander Baird. “Die by the thousands!” Baird had seen action before. Had seen Earth and Venus forces decimated during the lightning Martian strikes at the war’s start. Bruce could not blame him for his emotional outburst. Baird calmed down and looked at Bruce apologetically, once more resuming his role as the sharp-minded military strategist bent on inflicting maximum damage to an enemy stronghold.
Within an hour, slowly circling halfway around the tiny planetoid, the Second and Fourth Navy Fleets made rendezvous, leaving smoking ruin behind them both ways. Total losses had been 9 ships, an acceptable penalty for what had been accomplished.
“Good job,” came the voice of the Second’s leader over the radio. “Now for some mopping up to make it a thorough job…”
“No, we can’t, Commander Quincy,” barked back Baird. He related briefly the episode of the Martian scout-ship. “So we’d better scoot fast. Maybe there’s a chance to avoid the Martian Blockade Fleet rushing here…”