Second Stage Lensmen

by Edward E Smith

  “Good technique, perhaps, from a bull-headed, dictatorial standpoint, but it strikes me as being damned poor tactics,” grunted Malcolm Craig, the Dauntless’ grizzled captain, when Kinnison had relayed the information.

  “I’ll say it’s poor tactics,” the Lensman agreed. “If anybody of Helmuth’s caliber were down there one of those heaps would be out on guard, flitting all over space.”

  “But how could they be expecting trouble ’way out here, nine thousand parsecs from anywhere?” argued Chatway, the Chief Firing Officer.

  “They ought to be—that’s the point.” This from Henderson. “Where do we land, Kim, did you find out?”

  “Not exactly; they’re on the other side of the planet from here, now. Good thing we don’t have to get rid of a Tellurian intrinsic this time—it’ll be a near thing as it is.” And it was.

  Scarcely was the intrinsic velocity matched to that of the planet when the observers reported that the airport upon which the enemy lay was upon the horizon. Inertialess, the Dauntless flashed ahead, going inert and into action simultaneously when within range of the zwilnik ships. Within range of one of them, that is; for short as the time had been, the crew of one of the Boskonian vessels had been sufficiently alert to get her away. The other one did not move; then or ever.

  The Patrolmen acted with the flawless smoothness of long practice and perfect teamwork. At the first sign of zwilnik activity as revealed by his spy-rays, Nelson, the Chief Communications Officer, loosed a barrage of ethereal and sub-ethereal interference through which no communications beam or signal could be driven. Captain Craig barked a word into his microphone and every dreadful primary that could be brought to bear erupted as one weapon. Chief Pilot Henderson, after a casual glance below, cut in the Bergenholms, tramped in his blasts, and set the cruiser’s narrow nose into his tracer’s line. One glance was enough. He needed no orders as to what to do next. It would have been apparent to almost anyone, even to one of the persons of Lyrane, that that riddled, slashed, three-quarters fused mass of junk never again would be or could contain aught of menace. The Patrol ship had not stopped: had scarcely even paused. Now, having destroyed half of the opposition en passant, she legged it after the remaining half.

  “Now what, Kim?” asked Captain Craig. “We can’t englobe him and he no doubt mounts tractor shears. We’ll have to use the new tractor zone, won’t we?” Ordinarily the gray-haired four-striper would have made his own decisions, since he and he alone fought his ship; but these circumstances were far from ordinary. First, any Unattached Lensman, wherever he was, was the boss. Second, the tractor zone was new; so brand new that even the Dauntless had not as yet used it. Third, the ship was on detached duty, assigned directly to Kinnison to do with as he willed. Fourth, said Kinnison was high in the confidence of the Galactic Council and would know whether or not the present situation justified the use of the new mechanism.

  “If he can cut a tractor, yes,” the Lensman agreed. “Only one ship. He can’t get away and he can’t communicate—safe enough. Go to it.”

  The Tellurian ship was faster than the Boskonian; and, since she had been only seconds behind at the start, she came within striking distance of her quarry in short order. Tractor beams reached out and seized; but only momentarily did they hold. At the first pull they were cut cleanly away. No one was surprised; it had been taken for granted that all Boskonian ships would by this time have been equipped with tractor shears.

  These shears had been developed originally by the scientists of the Patrol. Immediately following that invention, looking forward to the time when Boskone would have acquired it, those same scientists set themselves to the task of working out something which would be just as good as a tractor beam for combat purposes, but which could not be cut. They got it finally—a globular shell of force, very much like a meteorite screen except double in phase. That is, it was completely impervious to matter moving in either direction, instead of only to that moving inwardly. Even if exact data as to generation, gauging, distance, and control of this weapon were available—which they very definitely are not—it would serve no good end to detail them here. Suffice it to say that the Dauntless mounted tractor zones, and had ample power to hold them.

  Closer up the Patrol ship blasted. The zone snapped on, well beyond the Boskonian, and tightened. Henderson cut the Bergenholms. Captain Craig snapped out orders and Chief Firing Officer Chatway and his boys did their stuff.

  Defensive screens full out, the pirate stayed free and tried to run. No soap. She merely slid around upon the frictionless inner surface of the zone. She rolled and she spun. Then she went inert and rammed. Still no soap. She struck the zone and bounced; bounced with all of her mass and against all the power of her driving thrust. The impact jarred the Dauntless to her very skin; but the zone’s anchorages had been computed and installed by top-flight engineers and they held. And the zone itself held. It yielded a bit, but it did not fail and the shear-planes of the pirates could not cut it.

  Then, no other course being possible, the Boskonians fought. Of course, theoretically, surrender was possible, but it simply was not done. No pirate ship ever had surrendered to a Patrol force, however large; none ever would. No Patrol ship had ever surrendered to Boskone—or would. That was the unwritten, but grimly understood code of this internecine conflict between two galaxy-wide and diametrically-opposed cultures; it was and had to be a war of utter and complete extermination. Individuals or small groups might be captured bodily, but no ship, no individual, even, ever, under any conditions, surrendered. The fight was—always and everywhere—to the death.

  So this one was. The enemy was well-armed of her type, but her type simply did not carry projectors of sufficient power to crush the Dauntless’ hard-held screens. Nor did she mount screens heavy enough to withstand for long the furious assault of the Patrol ship’s terrific primaries.

  As soon as the pirate’s screens went down the firing stopped; that order had been given long since. Kinnison wanted information, he wanted charts, he wanted a few living Boskonians. He got nothing. Not a man remained alive aboard the riddled hulk, the chart-room contained only heaps of fused ash. Everything which might have been of use to the Patrol had been destroyed, either by the Patrol’s own beams or by the pirates themselves after they saw they must lose.

  “Beam it out,” Craig ordered, and the remains of the Boskonian warship disappeared.

  Back toward Lyrane II, then, the Dauntless went, and Kinnison again made contact with Helen, the Elder Sister. She had emerged from her crypt and was directing affairs from her—“office” is perhaps the word—upon the top floor of the city’s largest building. The search for the Lyranian leaders, the torture and murder of the citizens, and the destruction of the city had stopped, all at once, when the grounded Boskonian cruiser had been blasted out of commission. The directing intelligences of the raiders had remained, it developed, within the “safe” confines of their vessel’s walls; and when they ceased directing, their minions in the actual theater of operations ceased operating. They had been grouped uncertainly in an open square, but at the first glimpse of the returning Dauntless they had dashed into the nearest large building, each man seizing one, or sometimes two persons as he went. They were now inside, erecting defenses and very evidently intending to use the Lyranians both as hostages and as shields.

  Motionless now, directly over the city, Kinnison and his officers studied through their spy-rays the number, armament, and disposition of the enemy force. There were one hundred and thirty of them, human to about six places. They were armed with the usual portable weapons carried by such parties. Originally they had had several semi-portable projectors, but since all heavy stuff must be powered from the mother-ship, it had been abandoned long since. Surprisingly, though, they wore full armor. Kinnison had expected only thought-screens, since the Lyranians had no offensive weapons save those of the mind; but apparently either the pirates did not know that or else were guarding against surprise.

&
nbsp; Armor was—and is—heavy, cumbersome, a handicap to fast action, and a nuisance generally; hence for the Boskonians to have dispensed with it would not have been poor tactics. True, the Patrol did attack, but that could not have been what was expected. In fact, had such an attack been in the cards, that Boskonian punitive party would not have been on the ground at all. It was equally true that canny old Helmuth, who took nothing whatever for granted, would have had his men in armor. However, he would have guarded much more completely against surprise…but few commanders indeed went to such lengths of precaution as Helmuth did. Thus Kinnison pondered.

  “This ought to be as easy as shooting fish down a well—but you’d better put out space-scouts just the same,” he decided, as he Lensed a thought to Lieutenant Peter vanBuskirk. “Bus? Do you see what we see?”

  “Uh-huh, we’ve been peeking a bit,” the huge Dutch-Valerian responded, happily.

  “QX. Get your gang wrapped up in their tinware. I’ll see you at the main lower starboard lock in ten minutes.” He cut off and turned to an orderly. “Break out my G-P cage for me, will you, Spike? And I’ll want the ’copters—tell them to get hot.”

  “But listen, Kim!” and

  “You can’t do that, Kinnison!” came simultaneously from Chief Pilot and Captain, neither of whom could leave the ship in such circumstances as these. They, the vessel’s two top officers, were bound to her; while the Lensman, although ranking both of them, even aboard the ship, was not and could not be bound by anything.

  “Sure I can—you fellows are just jealous, that’s all,” Kinnison retorted, cheerfully. “I not only can, I’ve got to go with the Valerians. I need a lot of information, and I can’t read a dead man’s brain—yet.”

  While the storming party was assembling the Dauntless settled downward, coming to rest in the already devastated section of the town, as close as possible to the building in which the Boskonians had taken refuge.

  One hundred and two men disembarked: Kinnison, vanBuskirk, and the full company of one hundred Valerians. Each of those space-fighting wild-cats measured seventy eight inches or more from sole to crown; each was composed of four hundred or more pounds of the fantastically powerful, rigid, and reactive brawn, bone, and sinew necessary for survival upon a planet having a surface gravity almost three times that of small, feeble Terra.

  Because of the women held captive by the pirates, the Valerians carried no machine rifles, no semi-portables, no heavy stuff at all; only their DeLameters and of course their space-axes. A Valerian trooper without his space-axe? Unthinkable! A dire weapon indeed, the space-axe. A combination and sublimation of battle-axe, mace, bludgeon, and lumberman’s picaroon; thirty pounds of hard, tough, space-tempered alloy; a weapon of potentialities limited only by the physical strength and bodily agility of its wielder. And vanBuskirk’s Valerians had both—plenty of both. One-handed, with simple flicks of his incredible wrist, the smallest Valerian of the Dauntless’ boarding party could manipulate his atrocious weapon as effortlessly as, and almost unbelievably faster than, a fencing master handles his rapier or an orchestra conductor waves his baton.

  With machine-like precision the Valerians fell in and strode away; vanBuskirk in the lead, the helicopters hovering overhead, the Gray Lensman bringing up the rear. Tall and heavy, strong and agile as he was—for a Tellurian—he had no business in that front line, and no one knew that fact better than he did. The puniest Valerian of the company could do in full armor a standing high jump of over fourteen feet against one Tellurian gravity; and could dodge, feint, parry, and swing with a blinding speed starkly impossible to any member of any of the physically lesser breeds of man.

  Approaching the building they spread out, surrounded it; and at a signal from a helicopter that the ring was complete the assault began. Doors and windows were locked, barred, and barricaded, of course; but what of that? A few taps of the axes and a few blasts of the DeLameters took care of things very nicely; and through the openings thus made there leaped, dove, rolled, or strode the space-black-and-silver warriors of the Galactic Patrol. Valerians, than whom no fiercer race of hand to hand fighters has ever been known—no bifurcate race, and but very few others, however built or shaped, have ever willingly come to grips with the armored axe-men of Valeria!

  Not by choice, then, but of necessity and in sheer desperation the pirates fought. In the vicious beams of their portables the stone walls of the room glared a baleful red; in spots even were pierced through. Old-fashioned pistols barked, spitting steel-jacketed lead. But the G-P suits were screened against lethal beams by generators capable of withstanding anything of lesser power than a semi-portable projector; G-P armor was proof against any projectile possessing less energy than that hurled by the high-caliber machine rifle. Thus the Boskonian beams splashed off the Valerians’ screens in torrents of man-made lightning and in pyrotechnic displays of multi-colored splendor, their bullets ricocheted harmlessly as spent, mis-shapen blobs of metal.

  The Patrolmen did not even draw their DeLameters during their inexorable advance. They knew that the pirates’ armor was as capable as theirs, and the women were not to die if death for them could possibly be avoided. As they advanced the enemy fell back toward the center of the great room; holding there with the Lyranians forming the outer ring of their roughly-circular formation; firing over the women’s heads and between their naked bodies.

  Kinnison did not want those women to die. It seemed, however, that die they must, from the sheer, tremendous reflection from the Valerians’ fiercely radiant screens, if the Patrolmen persisted in their advance. He studied the enemy formation briefly, then flashed an order.

  There ensued a startling and entirely unorthodox maneuver, one possible only to the troopers here at work, as at Kinnison’s command every Valerian left the floor in a prodigious leap. Over the women’s heads, over the heads of the enemy; but in mid-leap, as he passed over, each Patrolman swung his axe at a Boskonian helmet with all the speed and all the power he could muster. Most of the enemy died then and there, for the helmet has never been forged which is able to fend the beak of a space-axe driven as each of those was driven. The fact that the Valerians were nine or ten feet off the floor at the time made no difference whatever. They were space-fighters, trained to handle themselves and their weapons in any position or situation; with or without gravity, with or without even inertia.

  “You persons—run! Get out of here! SCRAM!” Kinnison fairly shouted the thought as the Valerians left the floor, and the matriarchs obeyed—frantically. Through doors and windows they fled, in all directions and at the highest possible speed.

  But in their enthusiasm to strike down the foe, not one of the Valerians had paid any attention to the exact spot upon which he was to land; or, if he did, some one else got there either first or just barely second. Besides, there was not room for them all in the center of the ring, For seconds, therefore, confusion reigned and a boiler-works clangor resounded for a mile around as a hundred and one extra-big and extra-heavy men, a writhing, kicking, pulling tangle of armor, axes, and equipment, jammed into a space which half their number would have filled over-full. Sulphurous Valerian profanity and sizzling deep-space oaths blistered the very air as each warrior struggled madly to right himself, to get one more crack at a pirate before somebody else beat him to it.

  During this terrific melee some of the pirates released their screens and committed suicide. A few got out of the room, but not many. Nor far; the men in the helicopters saw to that. They had needle-beams, powered from the Dauntless, which went through the screens of personal armor as a knife goes through ripe cheese.

  “Save it, guys—hold everything!” Kinnison yelled as the tangled mass of Valerians resolved itself into erect and warlike units. “No more axe-work—don’t let them kill themselves—catch them ALIVE!”

  They did so, quickly and easily. With the women out of the way, there was nothing to prevent the Valerians from darting right up to the muzzles of the foes’ DeLameters. Nor could t
he enemy dodge, or run, half fast enough to get away. Armored, shielded hands batted the weapons away—if an arm or leg broke in the process, what the hell?—and the victim was held motionless until his turn came to face the mind-reading Kinnison.

  Nothing. Nothing, flat, A string of zeros. And, bitterly silent, Kinnison led the way back to the Dauntless. The men he wanted, the ones who knew anything, were the ones who killed themselves, of course. Well, why not? In like case, officers of the Patrol had undoubtedly done the same. The live ones didn’t know where their planet was, could give no picture even of where it lay in the galaxy, did not know where they were going, nor why. Well, so what? Wasn’t ignorance the prime characteristic of the bottom layers of dictatorships everywhere? If they had known anything, they would have been under compulsion to kill themselves, too, and would have done it.

  In his own room in the Dauntless his black mood lightened somewhat and he called the Elder Person.

  “Helen of Troy? I suppose that the best thing we can. do now, for your peace of mind, prosperity, well-being, et cetera, is to drill out of here as fast as Klono and Noshabkeming will let us. Right?”

  “Why, I…you…um…that is…” The matriarch was badly flustered at the Lensman’s bald summation of her attitude. She did not want to agree, but she certainly did not want these males around a second longer than was necessary.