The Last Spaceship

by Murray Leinster

  A second had been on the way to its aid when the Starshine reeled away with the last morsel of energy in its equalizing-batteries. With fifty small ships, swift as gadflies though without a single weapon, Kim hoped to try out the tactics planned for his fleet, and perhaps to capture one or both of the giants.

  He picked up a third member of his force on the way to the planet and the three drove on in company. Detectors indicated two others at extreme range. But as the three hovered over the polar cap of Khiv Five, others came from every direction.

  Then a wheezing voice bellowed out of the newly-installed space-radio in the Starlight's control-room. It was the voice of the Mayor of Steadheim, grandly captaining a tiny ship with his four tall sons for crew.

  “Kim Rendell!” he bellowed. “Kim Rendell! Enemy ships in sight! We're closing with them and be da—"

  His voice stopped—utterly.

  Kim snapped orders and his squadron came swarming after him. The direction of the message was clear. It had come from a point a bare two thousand miles above the surface of Khiv Five and with coordinates which made its location easy.

  It was too close for the use of transmitter-drive, of course. Even overdrive at two hundred light-speeds was out of the question. On normal drive the little ships—bare specks in space—spread out and out. Their battle tactics had been agreed upon. They wove and darted erratically.

  They had projectors of the Disciplinary Circuit field, which would paralyze any man they struck with sufficient intensity. But that was all—for the good and sufficient reason that such fields could be tested upon grimly resolute volunteers and adjusted to the utmost of efficiency.

  On the prison world of Ades, to which criminals were sent from all over the Galaxy, there was no legal murder. Killing fighting beams could not be calibrated. There were no available victims.

  The detectors picked up a single considerable mass. Electron-telescopes focused upon it. Kim's lips tensed. He saw a giant war-craft, squat and ungainly—with no air-resistance in space there is no point in streamlining a spaceship—and with the look of a mass of crammed generators of deadly beams.

  It turned slowly in its flight. It was not one spaceship, but two—two giant ships grappled together. It turned further and there was a shimmering, unsubstantial tiny ship clutched to one....

  “The dickens!” said Kim bitterly. He called into the space-phones; “Kim Rendell speaking! Don't attack! Those ships aren't driving, they're falling! They'll smash on Khiv Five and we can't do anything about it. Keep at least fifty miles away!"

  A wheezing voice said furiously from the communicator.

  “They tricked me! I went for ‘em, and the transmitter drive went on. I'll get ‘em this time!"

  Kim barked at the Mayor of Steadheim, even as in the field of the electron-telescope he saw a tiny mote of a spaceship charge valorously at the monsters. It plunged toward them—and vanished.

  Dona spoke breathlessly.

  “But what happened Kim?"

  “This,” said Kim bitterly, “is the end of the battle we fought with one of those ships a week ago. We put out a decoy and that ship grappled it. A Disciplinary Circuit generator went on and paralyzed the crew.

  “You remember that we went up to it and you went on board. I turned off its generator from a distance and held the crew paralyzed with beams from the Starshine. There was another ship coming when you got off and we got away to the other side of beyond."

  “Yes, but—"

  “We vanished,” said Kim. “The other enemy ship came up. Its skipper must have decided to go on board the first for a conference, or perhaps to inspect the decoy. It grappled to the first—and the magnetic surge turned on the disciplinary field again in the gadget in the decoy!

  “Every man in both ships was paralyzed all over again! Both ships were drifting with power off! They've been falling toward Khiv Five! Every man of both crews must be dead by now, but the field's still on and it will stay on! They'll crash!"

  “But can't we do anything?” demanded Dona anxiously. “I know you want a ship."

  “It would be handy to have those beams modified so we could paralyze a planet from a distance,” said Kim grimly, “but these ships are gone."

  “I could go on board again,” said Dona.

  “No! They'll hit atmosphere in minutes now. And even if we could cut off the paralyzing field to get to the control-room nobody could pull an unfamiliar ship out of that fall. I wouldn't let you try it anyhow. They're falling fast. Miles a second. They'll hit with the speed of a meteor!"

  “But try, Kim!"

  For answer he pulled her away from the electron-telescope and pointed through the forward vision-port. The falling ships had seemed almost within reach on the electron-telescope screen. But through the vision-port one could see the whole vast bulk of Khiv Five.

  Two thirds of it glowed brightly in sunlight, but night had fallen directly below. The falling ships were the barest specks the eye could possibly detect—too far from hope of overhauling on planetary-drive, too close to risk any other. Any speed that would overtake the derelicts would mean a crash against the planet's disk.

  “I think,” said Kim, “they'll cross the sunset line and fall in the night area."

  They did. They vanished as specks against the sunlit disk. Then, minutes later, a little red spark appeared when the bulk of the banded planet faded into absolute black. The spark held and grew in brightness.

  “They've hit atmosphere,” Kim told her. “They're compressing the air before them until it's incandescent. They're a meteoric fall."

  The spark flared terribly, minute through it was from this distance. It curved downward as the air slowed its forward speed. It was an infinitesimal comet, trailing a long tail of fire behind it. It swooped downward in a gracefully downward-curving arc. It crashed.

  “Which,” said Kim coldly in the Starshine's control-room, “means that two Sinabian warships are destroyed without cost to us. It's a victory. But it's very, very bad luck for us. With those two ships and transmitter-drive we could end the war in one day."

  * * *

  7

  READY FOR ACTION

  Indignantly the Mayor of Steadheim bellowed from the space-phone speaker and Kim answered him patiently.

  “The decoy still had a Disciplinary Circuit field on,” he explained for the tenth time. “You know about it! When you tried to go galumphing in, the field grabbed you and paralyzed you. When your muscles went iron hard, the relay on your wrist—you wear it to protect you from the fighting-beams—threw your ship into transmitter-speed travel.

  “So you were somewhere else. When you came back you charged in again and the same thing happened. The relay protected you against our field as well as the enemy fighting-beams. That's all."

  The mayor wheezed and sputtered furiously. It was plain that he had meant to distinguish himself and his four sons by magnificent bravery.

  “There's something that needs to be done,” said Kim. “Those two ships are smashed but they hadn't time to melt. There'll be hafnium in the wreckage, anyhow—and metal is scarce on Ades. See what you can salvage and get it to Ades. It's important war work. Ask for other ships to volunteer to help you."

  The Mayor of Steadheim roared indignantly—and then consented like a lamb. In the space-navy of Ades there would not yet be anything like iron discipline. Kim led his forces as a feudal baron might have led a motley assemblage of knights and men-at-arms in ancient days. He led by virtue of prestige and experience. He could not command.

  The fleet grew minute by minute as lost ships came in. And Kim worked out a new plan of battle to meet the fact that he could not hope to appear over Sinab with gigantic generators able to pour out Disciplinary Circuit beams over the whole planet.

  He explained the plan painstakingly to his followers and presently set a course for Sinab. A surprising number of ships volunteered to go to ground on Khiv Five with the Mayor of Steadheim to save what would be retrieved of the shattered t
wo warships.

  No more than thirty little craft of Ades pointed their noses toward Sinab. They went speeding toward it in a close-knit group, matching courses to almost microscopic accuracy and keeping their speed identical to a hair in hopes of arriving nearly in one group.

  “So we'll try it again,” said Kim into the space-phone. “Here we go!"

  He pressed the transmitter-drive button and all the universe danced a momentary saraband—and far off to the left the giant sun Sinab glowed fiercely.

  Five of the little ships from Ades were within detector-range. But there were four monstrous moving masses which by their motion and velocity were spaceships rising from the planet and setting out upon some errand of the murder-empire. The same thought must have come instantly to those upon each of the little ships. They charged.

  There had been no war in space for five thousand years. The last space-battle was that of Canis Major, when forty thousand warships plunged toward each other with their fighting-beams stabbing out savagely, aimed and controlled by every device that human ingenuity could contrive.

  That battle had ended war for all time, the Galaxy believed, because there was no survivor on either side. In seconds every combatant ship was merely a mass of insensate metal, which fought on in a blind futility.

  The fighting-beams killed in thousandths of seconds. The robot gunners aimed with absolute precision. The two fleets joined battle and the robots fixed their targets and every ship became a coffin in which all the living things were living no longer, which yet fought on with beams which could do no further harm.

  With every man in both fleets dead the warships raged through emptiness, pouring out destruction from their unmanned projectors. It was a hundred years before the last war-craft, its fuel gone and its crew mere dust, was captured and destroyed. But there had been no space-fight since—until now.

  And this one was strangeness itself. Four huge, squat ships of war rose steadily from the planet Sinab Two. They were doubtless bound on a mission of massacre. The Empire of Sinab gave no warning of its purpose. It did not permit the option of submission.

  Its ships headed heavily out into space, crammed with generators of the murder-frequency. They had no inkling of any ships other than those of their own empire as being in existence anywhere.

  Suddenly, out of nowhere, a slim and slender spacecraft winked into being—a member of Kim's squadron, just arrived. Within a fraction of an instant it was plunging furiously for the Sinabian monster.

  The Starshine also flung itself into headlong attack, though it was unarmed saved for projectors of a field that would not kill anyone. The other ships—and more, as they appeared—darted valorously for the giants.

  Meteor-repellers lashed out automatically. Scanners had detected the newcomers and instantly flung repeller-beams to thrust them aside. They had no effect. Meteor-repellers handle inert mass but, by the nature of its action, an interplanetary drive neutralizes their effect.

  The small ships flashed on.

  Kim found himself grinning sardonically. There would be alarms ringing frantically in the enemy ships and the officers would be paralyzed with astonishment at the sudden appearance and instant attack by the spacecraft which could not—to Sinabian knowledge—exist.

  Four ships plunged upon one monster. Three dashed at another. Eight little motes streaked for a third and the fourth seemed surrounded by deadly mites of spaceships, flashing toward it with every indication of vengeful resolution.

  The attacks were sudden, unexpected, and impossible. There was no time to put the murder-beams into operation. They took priceless seconds to warm up.

  In stark panic the control-room officer of the ship at which the Starshine drove jammed his ship into overdrive travel. The Sinabian flashed into flight at two hundred times the speed of light. It fled into untraceable retreat, stressed space folded about it.

  Kim spoke comfortably into the space-phone:

  “Everything's fine! If the others do the same...."

  A second giant fled in the same fashion. The small ships of Ades were appearing on every hand and plunging toward their enemies. A third huge ship made a crazy, irresolute half-turn and also took the only possible course by darting away from its home planet on overdrive. Then the fourth!

  “They'd no time to give an alarm,” said Kim crisply. “Into atmosphere now and we do our stuff!"

  The tiny craft plunged toward the planet below them. It swelled in the Starshine's forward vision-port. It filled all the firmament. Kim changed course and aimed for the limb of the planet. The ship went down and down.

  A faint trembling went though all the fabric of the ship. It had touched atmosphere. There was a monstrous metropolis ahead and below. Kim touched a control. A little thing went tumbling down and down. He veered out into space again.

  He watched by electron-telescope. Like tiny insects, the fleet of Ades flashed over the surface of the planet. They seemed to have no purpose. They seemed to accomplish nothing. They darted here and there and fled for open space again, without ever touching more than the outermost reaches of the planet's atmosphere.

  But it took time. They were just beginning to stream up into emptiness again when the first of the giant warships flashed back into view. This time it was ready for action.

  Its beam-projectors flared thin streams of ions that were visible even in empty space. The ships of Ades plunged for it in masses. The fighting-beams flared terribly.

  And the little ships vanished. Diving for it, plunging for it, raging toward it with every appearance of deadly assault, they flicked into transmitter-drive when the deadly beams touched them. Because the crews of every one were fitted with wristlets and the relays which flung them into infinite speed when the fighting-beams struck.

  In seconds, when the second and third and fourth Sinabian warships came back from the void prepared for battle, they found all of space about their home planet empty. They ragingly reported their encounters to headquarters.

  Headquarters did not reply. The big ships went recklessly, alarmedly, down to ground to see what had happened. They feared annihilation had struck Sinab Two.

  But it hadn't. The fleet of Ades had bombed the empty planet, to be sure, but in a quite unprecedented fashion. They had simply dropped small round cases containing apparatus which was very easily made and to which not even the most conscientious of the exiles on Ades could object.

  They were tiny broadcasting units, very much like the one Kim had put in a decoy-ship, which gave off the neuronic frequencies of the Disciplinary Circuit, tuned to men. The cases were seamless spheres, made of an alloy that could only be formed by powder metallurgy, and could not be melted or pierced at all.

  It was the hardest substance developed in thirty thousand years of civilization. And at least one of those cases had been dropped on every large city of Sinab Two, and when they struck they began to broadcast.

  * * *

  8

  PITCHED BATTLE

  Every man in every city of the capital planet of the empire was instantly struck motionless. From the gross and corpulent emperor himself down to the least-considered scoundrel of each city's slums, every man felt his every muscle go terribly and impossibly rigid. Every man was helpless and convulsed. And the women were unaffected.

  On Sinab Two, which was the capital of a civilization which considered women inferior animals, the women had not been encouraged to be intelligent. For a long time they were merely bewildered. They were afraid to try to do anything to assist their men.

  Those with small boy-children doubtless were the first to dare to use their brains. It was unquestionably the mother of a small boy gone terribly motionless who desperately set out in search of help.

  She reasoned fearfully that, since her own city was full of agonized statues which were men, perhaps in another city there might be aid. She tremblingly took a land-car and desperately essayed to convey her son to where something might be done for him.

  And she found that
, in the open space beyond the city, he recovered from his immobility to a mere howling discomfort. As the city was left farther behind he became increasingly less unhappy and at last was perfectly normal.

  But it must have been hours before that discovery became fully known, so that mothers took their boy-children beyond the range of the small cases dropped from the skies. And then wives dutifully loaded their helpless husbands upon land-cars or into freight-conveyors and so got them out to where they could rage in unbridled fury.

  The emperor and his court were probably last of all to be released from the effects of the Disciplinary Circuit broadcasts by mere distance. The Empire was reduced to chaos. For fifty miles about every bomb it was impossible for any man to move a muscle.

  For seventy-five it was torment.

  No man could go within a hundred miles of any of the small objects dropped from the Starshine and her sister-ships without experiencing active discomfort.

  Obviously the cities housed the machinery of government and the matter-transmitters by which the Empire communicated with its subject worlds and the food-synthesizers and the shelters in which men were accustomed to live and the baths and lecture-halls and amusement-centers in which they diverted themselves.

  Men were barred from such places absolutely. They could not govern nor read nor have food or drink or bathe or even sleep upon comfortable soft couches. For the very means of living they were dependent upon the favor of women—because women were free to go anywhere and do anything, while men had to stay in the open fields like cattle.

  The foundation of the civilization of Greater Sinab was shattered because women abruptly ceased to be merely inferior animals. The defenses of that one planet were non-existent, and even the four ships just taken off went down recklessly to the seemingly unharmed cities—to land with monstrous crashes and every man in them helpless. The ships were out of action for as long as the broadcast should continue.