“Holding ’em?” the young commander demanded.
“Got ’em, Skipper,” the pilot replied, positively. “It was touch and go for ninety seconds, but I’ve got a CRX tracer on him now at full pull. He can’t put out enough jets to get away from that—I can hold him forever!”
“Fine work, Hen!” Kinnison strapped himself into his seat and donned his headset. “General call! Attention! Battle stations! By stations, report!”
“Station One, tractor beams—hot!”
“Station Two, repellors—hot!”
“Station Three, projector One—hot!”
Thus station after station of the warship of the void reported, until:
“Station Fifty-Eight, the Q-gun—hot!” Kinnison himself reported, then gave to the pilot the words which throughout the spaceways of the galaxy had come to mean complete readiness to face any emergency.
“Hot and tight, Hen—let’s take ’em!”
The pilot shoved his blast-lever, already almost at maximum, clear out against its stop and hunched himself even more intently over his instruments, varying by infinitesimals the direction of the thrust that was driving the Brittania toward the enemy at the unimaginable velocity of ninety parsecs an hour3—a velocity possible only to inertialess matter being urged through an almost perfect vacuum by a driving blast capable of lifting the stupendous normal tonnage of the immense sky-rover against a gravity ten times that of her native Earth.
Unimaginable? Completely so—the ship of the Galactic Patrol was hurling herself through space at a pace in comparison with which any speed that the mind can grasp would be the merest crawl, a pace to make light itself seem stationary.
Ordinary vision would have been useless, but the observers of that day used no antiquated optical systems. Their detector beams, converted into light only at their plates, were heterodyned upon and were carried by sub-ethereal ultra-waves; vibrations residing far below the level of the ether and thus possessing a velocity and a range infinitely greater than those of any possible ether-borne wave.
Although stars moved across the visiplates in flaming, zig-zag lines of light as pursued and pursuer passed solar system after solar system in fantastic, light-years-long hops, yet Henderson kept his cruiser upon the pirate’s tail and steadily cut down the distance between them. Soon a tractor beam licked out from the Patrol ship, touched the fleeing marauder lightly, and the two space-ships flashed toward each other.
Nor was the enemy unprepared for combat. One of the crack raiders of Boskone, master pirate of the known Universe, she had never before found difficulty in conquering any vessel fleet enough to catch her. Therefore, her commander made no attempt to cut the beam. Or rather, since the two inertialess vessels flashed together to repellor-zone contact in such a minute fraction of a second that any human action within that time was impossible, it would be more correct to say that the pirate captain changed his tactics instantly from those of flight to those of combat.
He thrust out tractor beams of his own, and from the already white-hot refractors throats of his projectors there raved out horribly potent beams of annihilation; beams of dreadful power which tore madly at the straining defensive screens of the Patrol ship. Screens flared vividly, radiating all the colors of the spectrum. Space itself seemed a rainbow gone mad, for there were being exerted there forces of a magnitude to stagger the imagination; forces to be yielded only by the atomic might from which they sprang; forces whose neutralization set up visible strains in the very fabric of the ether itself.
The young commander clenched his fists and swore a startled deep-space oath as red lights flashed and alarm bells clanged. His screens were leaking like sieves—practically down—needle after needle of force incredible stabbing at and through his wall-shield—four stations gone already and more going!
“Scrap the plan!” he yelled into his microphone. “Open everything to absolute top—short out all resistors—give ’em everything you can put through the bare bus-bars. Dalhousie, cut all your repellors; bring us right up to their zone. All you beamers, concentrate on Area Five. Break down those screens!” Kinnison was hunched rigidly over his panel, his voice came grittily through locked teeth. “Get through to that wall-shield so I can use this Q-gun!”
Under the redoubled force of the Brittania’s attack the defenses of the enemy began to fail. Kinnison’s hands flew over his controls. A port opened in the Patrol-ship’s armored side and an ugly snout protruded—the projector-ringed muzzle of a squat and monstrous cannon. From its projector bands there leaped out with the velocity of light a tube of quasi-solid force which was in effect a continuation of the gun’s grim barrel; a tube which crashed through the weakened third screen of the enemy with a space-wracking shock and struck savagely, with writhing, twisting thrusts, at the second. Aided by the massed concentration of the Brittania’s every battery of short-range beams, it went through. And through the first. Now it struck the very wall-shield of the outlaw—that impregnable screen which, designed to bear the brunt of any possible inert collision, had never been pierced or ruptured by any material substance, however applied.
To this inner defense the immaterial gun-barrel clung. Simultaneously the tractor beams, hitherto exerting only a few dynes of force, stiffened into unbreakable, inflexible rods of energy, binding the two ships of space into one rigid system; each, relative to the other, immovable.
Then Kinnison’s flying finger tip touched a button and the Q-gun spoke. From its sullen throat there erupted a huge torpedo. Slowly the giant projectile crept along, watched in awe and amazement by the officers of both vessels. For to those space-hardened veterans the velocity of light was a veritable crawl, and here was a thing that would require four or five whole seconds to cover a mere ten kilometers of distance!
But, although slow, this bomb might prove dangerous, therefore the pirate commander threw his every resource into attempts to cut the tube of force, to blast away from the tractor beams, to explode the sluggish missile before it could reach his wall-shield. In vain; for the Brittania’s every beam was set to protect the torpedo and the mighty rods of energy without whose grip the inertialess mass of the enemy vessel would offer no resistance whatever to the force of the proposed explosion.
Slowly, so slowly, as the age-long seconds crawled into eternity, there extended from Patrol ship almost to pirate wall a raging, white-hot pillar—the gases of combustion of the propellant heptadetonite—ahead of which there rushed the Q-gun’s tremendous shell with its horridly destructive freight. What would happen? Could even the almost immeasurable force of that frightful charge of atomic explosive break down a wall-shield designed to withstand the cosmic assaults of meteoric missiles? And what would happen if that wall-screen held?
In spite of himself Kinnison’s mind insisted upon painting the ghastly picture: the awful explosion; the pirate’s screen still intact; the forward-rushing gases driven backward along the tube of force. The bare metal of the Q-gun’s breech, he knew, was not and could not be reenforced by the infinitely stronger, although immaterial shields of pure energy which protected the hull; and no conceivable substance, however resistant, could impede save momentarily the unimaginable forces about to be unleashed.
Nor would there be time to release the Q-tube after the explosion but before the Brittania’s own destruction; for if the enemy’s shield stayed up for even a fraction of a second the unthinkable pressure of the blast would propagate backward through the already densely compressed gases in the tube, would sweep away as though it were nothing the immensely thick metallic barrier of the gun-breech, and would wreak within the bowels of the Patrol vessel a destruction even more complete than that intended for the foe.
Nor were his men in better case. Each knew that this was the climactic instant of his existence; that life itself hung poised upon the issue of the next split second. Hurry it up! Snap into it! Will that crawling, creeping thing never strike?
Some prayed briefly, some swore bitterly; but prayers and curses were
alike unconscious and had precisely the same meaning—each man, white of face and grim of jaw, clenched his hands and waited, tense and straining, for the impact.
CHAPTER
3
In the Lifeboats
HE MISSILE STRUCK, AND IN the instant of its striking the coldly brilliant stars were blotted from sight in a vast globe of intolerable flame. The pirate’s shield had failed, and under the cataclysmic force of that horrific detonation the entire nose-section of the enemy vessel had flashed into incandescent vapor and had added itself to the rapidly expanding cloud of fire. As it expanded the cloud cooled. Its fierce glare subsided to a rosy glow, through which the stars again began to shine. It faded, cooled, darkened—revealing the crippled hulk of the pirate ship. She was still fighting, but ineffectually, now that all her heavy forward batteries were gone.
“Needlers, fire at will!” barked Kinnison, and even that feeble resistance was ended. Keen-eyed needle-ray men, working at spy-ray visiplates, bored hole after hole into the captive, seeking out and destroying the control-panels of the remaining beams and screens.
“Pull ’er up!” came the next order. The two ships of space flashed together, the yawning, blasted-open fore-end of the raider solidly against the Brittania’s armored side. A great port opened.
“Now, Bus, it’s all yours. Classification to six places, straight A’s—they’re human or approximately so. Board and storm!”
Back of that port there had been massed a hundred fighting men; dressed in full panoply of space armor, armed with the deadliest weapons known to the science of the age, and powered by the gigantic accumulators of their ship. At their head was Sergeant vanBuskirk, six and a half feet of Dutch Valerian dynamite, who had fallen out of Valerian Cadet Corps only because of an innate inability to master the intricacies of higher mathematics. Now the attackers swept forward in a black-and-silver wave.
Four squatly massive semi-portable projectors crashed down upon their magnetic clamps and in the fierce ardor of their beams the thick bulkhead before them ran the gamut of the spectrum and puffed outward. Some score of defenders were revealed, likewise clad in armor, and battle again was joined. Explosive and solid bullets detonated against and ricocheted from that highly efficient armor, the beams of DeLameter hand-projectors splashed in torrents of man-made lightning off its protective fields of force. But that skirmish was soon over. The semi-portables, whose vast energies no ordinary personal armor could withstand, were brought up and clamped down; and in their holocaust of vibratory destruction all life vanished from the pirates’ compartment.
“One more bulkhead and we’re in their control room!” vanBuskirk cried. “Beam it down!”
But when the beamers pressed their switches nothing happened. The pirates had managed to jury-rig a screen generator, and with it had cut the power-beams behind the invading forces. Also they had cut loop-holes in the bulkhead, through which in frantic haste they were trying to bring heavy projectors of their own into alignment.
“Bring up the ferral paste,” the sergeant commanded. “Get up as close to that wall as you can, so they can’t blast us!”
The paste—successor to thermite—was brought up and the giant Dutchman troweled it on in furious swings, from floor up and around in a huge arc and back down to floor. He fired it, and simultaneously some of the enemy gunners managed to angle a projector sharply enough to reach the further ranks of the Patrolmen. Then mingled the flashing, scintillating, gassy glare of the thermite and the raving energy of the pirates’ beam to make of that confined space a veritable inferno.
But the paste had done its work, and as the semi-circle of wall fell out the soldiers of the Lens leaped through the hole in the still-glowing wall to struggle hand-to-hand against the pirates, now making a desperate last stand. The semi-portables and other heavy ordnance powered from the Brittania were of course useless. Pistols were ineffective against the pirates’ armor of hard alloy; hand-rays were equally impotent against its defensive shields. Now heavy hand-grenades began to rain down among the combatants, blowing Patrolmen and pirates alike to bits—for the outlaw chiefs cared nothing that they killed many of their own men if in so doing they could take toll of the Law. And worse, a crew of gunners was swiveling a mighty projector around upon its hastily-improvised mount to cover that sector of the compartment in which the policemen were most densely massed.
But the minions of the Law had one remaining weapon, carried expressly for this eventuality. The space-axe—a combination and sublimation of battle-axe, mace, bludgeon, and lumberman’s picaroon, a massively needle-pointed implement of potentialities limited only by the physical strength and bodily agility of its wielder.
Now all the men of the Brittania’s storming party were Valerians, and therefore were big, hard, fast, and agile; and of them all their sergeant leader was the biggest, hardest, fastest, and most agile. When the space-tempered apex of that thirty-pound monstrosity, driven by the four-hundred-odd pounds of rawhide and whalebone that was his body, struck pirate armor that armor gave way. Nor did it matter whether or not that hellish beak of steel struck a vital part after crashing through the armor. Head or body, leg or arm, the net result was the same, a man does not fight effectively when he is breathing space in lieu of atmosphere.
VanBuskirk perceived the danger to his men in the slowly turning projector and for the first time called his chief.
“Kim,” he spoke in level tones into his microphone. “Blast that delta-ray, will you?… Or have they cut this beam, so you can’t hear me?… Guess they have.”
“They’ve cut our communication,” he informed his troopers then. “Keep them off me as much as you can and I’ll attend to that delta-ray outfit myself.”
Aided by the massed interference of his men he plunged toward the threatening mechanism, hewing to right and to left as he strode. Beside the temporary projector-mount at last, he aimed a tremendous blow at the man at the delta-ray controls; only to feel the axe flash instantaneously to its mark and strike it with a gentle push, and to see his intended victim float effortless away from the blow. The pirate commander had played his last card: vanBuskirk floundered, not only weightless, but inertialess as well!
But the huge Dutchman’s mind, while not mathematical, was even faster than his muscles, and not for nothing had he spent arduous weeks in inertialess tests of strength and skill. Hooking feet and legs around a convenient wheel he seized the enemy operator and jammed his helmeted head down between the base of the mount and the long, heavy steel lever by means of which it was turned. Then, throwing every ounce of his wonderful body into the effort, he braced both feet against the projector’s grim barrel and heaved. The helmet flew apart like an eggshell, blood and brains gushed out in nauseous blobs, but the delta-ray projector was so jammed that it would not soon again become a threat.
Then vanBuskirk drew himself across the room toward the main control panel of the warship. Officer after officer he pushed aside, then reversed two double-throw switches, restoring gravity and inertia to the riddled cruiser.
In the meantime the tide of battle had continued in favor of the Patrol. Few survivors though there were of the black-and-silver force, of the pirates there were still fewer, fighting now a desperate and hopeless defensive. But in this combat quarter was not, could not be thought of, and Sergeant vanBuskirk again waded into the fray. Four times more his horribly effective hybrid weapon descended like the hammer of Thor, cleaving and crushing its way through steel and flesh and bone. Then, striding to the control board, he manipulated switches and dials, then again spoke evenly to Kinnison.
“You can hear me now, can’t you?… All mopped up—come and get the dope!”
The specialists, headed by Master Technician LaVerne Thorndyke, had been waiting strainingly for that word for minutes. Now they literally flew at their tasks; in furious haste, but following rigidly and in perfect coordination a prearranged schedule. Every control and lead, every bus-bar and immaterial beam of force was traced and che
cked. Instruments and machines were dismantled, sealed mechanisms were ruthlessly torn apart by jacks or sliced open with cutting beams. And everywhere, every thing and every movement was being photographed, charted, and diagrammed.
“Getting the idea now, Kim,” Thorndyke said finally, during a brief lull in his work. “A sweet system…”
“Look at this!” a mechanic interrupted. “Here’s a machine that’s all shot to hell!”
The shielding cover had been torn from a monstrous fabrication of metal, apparently a motor or generator of an exceedingly complex type. The insulation of its coils and windings had fallen away in charred fragments, its copper had melted down in sluggish, viscous streams.
“That’s what we’re looking for!” Thorndyke shouted. “Check those leads! Alpha!”
“Seven-three-nine-four!” and the minutely careful study went on until.
“That’s enough, we’ve got everything we need now. Have you draftsmen and photographers got everything down solid?”
“On the boards!” and “In the cans!” rapped out the two reports as one.
“Then let’s go!”
“And go fast!” Kinnison ordered, briskly. “I’m afraid we’re going to run out of time as it is!”
All hands hurried back into the Brittania, paying no attention to the bodies littering the decks. So desperate was the emergency, each man knew, that nothing could be done about the dead, whether friend or foe. Every resource of mechanism, of brain and of brawn, must needs be strained to the utmost if they themselves were not soon to be in similar case.
Galactic Patrol Page 3