“Then my ship will really go to Alsakan, and back, safely?” Matthews was almost dazed. Matters were entirely out of his hands, and things had moved so rapidly that he hardly knew what to think. “But if my own crews are pirates, some of them may…but I can of course get police protection if necessary.”
“Unless something entirely unforeseen happens, the Prometheus will make the round trip in safety, cargoes and all—under mauler escort all the way. You will of course have to take the other matter up with your local police.”
“When is the attack to take place, sir?” asked the base commander.
“That’s what the mauler skipper wanted to know when I told him what was ahead of him,” Kinnison grinned. “He wanted to sneak up a little closer about that time. I’d like to know, myself, but unfortunately that will have to be decided by the pirates after they get the signal. It will be on the way out, though, because the cargo she has aboard now is a lot more valuable to Boskone than a load of Alsakanite cigarettes would be.”
“But do you think you can take the pirate ship that way?” asked the commander, dubiously.
“No, but we will cut down his personnel to such an extent that he will have to head back for his base.”
“And that’s what you want—the base. I see.”
He did not see—quite—but the Lensman did not enlighten him further.
There was a brilliant double flare as freighter and mauler lifted into the air, and Kinnison showed the ship-owner out.
“Hadn’t I better be going, too?” asked the commander. “Those orders, you know.”
“A couple of minutes yet. I have another message for you—official. Matthews won’t need a police escort long—if any. When that ship is attacked it is to be the signal for cleaning out every pirate in Greater New York—the worst pirate hot-bed on Tellus. Neither you nor your force will be in on it directly, but you might pass the word around, so that our own men will be informed ahead of the Telenews outfits.”
“Good! That has needed doing for a long time.”
“Yes, but you know it takes a long time to line up every man in such a big organization. They want to get them all, without getting any innocent bystanders.”
“Who’s doing it—Prime Base?”
“Yes. Enough men will be thrown in here to do the whole job in an hour.”
“That is good news—clear ether, Lensman!” and the base commander went back to his post.
As the air-lock toggles rammed home, sealing the exit behind the departing visitor, Kinnison eased his speedster into the air and headed for Valeria. Since the two vessels ahead of him had left atmosphere inertialess as would he, and since several hundred seconds had elapsed since their take-off, he was of course some ten thousand miles off their line as well as being uncounted millions of miles behind them. But the larger distance meant no more than the smaller, and neither of them meant anything at all to the Patrol’s finest speedster. Kinnison, on easy touring blast, caught up with them in minutes. Closing up to less than one light-year, he slowed his pace to match theirs and held his distance.
Any ordinary ship would have been detected long since, but Kinnison rode no ordinary ship. His speedster was immune to all detection save electromagnetic or visual, and therefore, even at that close range—the travel of half a minute for even a slow space-ship in open space—he was safe. For electromagnetics are useless at that distance: and visual apparatus, even with subether converters, is reliable only up to a few mere thousands of miles, unless the observer knows exactly what to look for and where to look for it.
Kinnison, then, closed up and followed the Prometheus and her mauler escort; and as they approached the Valerian solar system the recall message came booming in. Also, as had been expected, the renegade captain of the freighter sent his defiant answer and his message to the pirate high command. The mauler turned back, the merchantman kept on. Suddenly, however, she stopped, inert, and from her ports were ejected discrete bits of matter—probably the bodies of the Boskonian members of her crew. Then the Prometheus, again inertialess, flashed directly toward the planet Valeria.
An inertialess landing is, of course, highly irregular, and is made only when the ship is to take off again immediately. It saves all the time ordinarily lost in spiraling and deceleration, and saves the computation of a landing orbit, which is no task for an amateur computer. It is, however, dangerous. It takes power, plenty of it, to maintain the force which neutralizes the inertia of mass, and if that force fails even for an instant while a ship is upon a planet’s surface, the consequences are usually highly disastrous. For in the neutralization of inertia there is no magic, no getting of something for nothing, no violation of Nature’s law of the conservation of matter and energy. The instant that force becomes inoperative the ship possesses exactly the same velocity, momentum, and inertia that it possessed at the instant the force took effect. Thus, if a space-ship takes off from Earth, with its orbital velocity of about eighteen and one-half miles per second relative to the sun, goes free, dashes to Mars, lands free, and then goes inert, its original velocity, both in speed and in direction, is instantly restored; with consequences better imagined than described. Such a velocity of course might take the ship harmlessly into the air; but it probably would not.
Inertialess vessels do not ordinarily load freight. They do, however, take on passengers, especially military personnel accustomed to open-space maneuvers in powered space-suits. Men and ship must go inert—separately, of course—immediately after leaving the planet, so that the men can match their intrinsic velocity to the ship’s; but that takes only a very small fraction of the time required for an inert landing.
Hence the Prometheus landed free, and so did Kinnison. He stepped out, fully armored against Valeria’s extremely heavy atmosphere, and laboring a trifle under its terrific gravitation, to be greeted cordially by Lieutenant vanBuskirk, whose fighting men were already streaming aboard the freighter.
“Hi, Kim!” the Dutchman called, gaily. “Everything went off like clockwork. Won’t hold you up long—be blasting off in ten minutes.”
“Ho, Lefty!” the Lensman acknowledged, as cordially, but saluting the newly commissioned officer with an exaggerated formality. “Say, Bus, I’ve been doing some thinking. Why wouldn’t it be a good idea to…”
“Uh-uh, it would not,” denied the fighter, positively. “I know what you’re going to say—that you want in on this party—but don’t say it.”
“But I…” Kinnison began to argue.
“Nix,” the Valerian declared flatly. “You’ve got to stay with your speedster. No room for her inside, she’s clear full of cargo and my men. You can’t clamp on outside, because that would give the whole thing away. And besides, for the first and last time in my life I’ve got a chance to give a Gray Lensman orders. Those orders are to stay out of and away from this ship—and I’ll see to it that you do, too, you little Tellurian shrimp! Boy, what a kick I get out of that!”
“You would, you big, dumb Valerian ape—you always were a small-souled type!” Kinnison retorted. “Piggy-piggy… Haynes, huh?”
“Uh-huh.” VanBuskirk nodded. “How else could I talk so rough to you and get away with it? However, don’t feel too bad—you aren’t missing a thing, really. It’s in the cans already, and your fun is up ahead somewhere. And by the way, Kim, congratulations. You had it coming. We’re all behind you, from here to the Magellanic Clouds and back.”
“Thanks. The same to you, Bus, and many of ’em. Well, if you won’t let me stow away, I’ll tag along behind, I guess. Clear ether—or rather, I hope it’s full of pirates by tomorrow morning. Won’t be, though, probably; don’t imagine they’ll move until we’re almost there.”
And tag along Kinnison did, through thousands and thousands of parsecs of uneventful voyage.
Part of the time he spent in the speedster dashing hither and yon. Most of it, however, he spent in the vastly more comfortable mauler; to the armored side of which his tiny vessel clung with
its magnetic clamps while he slept and ate, gossiped and read, exercised and played with the mauler’s officers and crew, in deep-space comradery. It so happened, however, that when the long-awaited attack developed he was out in his speedster, and thus saw and heard everything from the beginning.
Space was filled with the old, familiar interference. The raider flashed up, locked on with magnets, and began to beam. Not heavily—scarcely enough to warm up the defensive screens—and Kinnison probed into the pirate with his spy-ray.
“Terrestrials—North Americans!” he exclaimed, half aloud, startled for an instant. “But naturally they would be, since this is a put-up job and over half the crew were New York gangsters.”
“The blighter’s got his spy-ray screens up,” the pilot was grumbling to his captain. The fact that he spoke in English was immaterial to the Lensman; he would have understood equally well any other possible form of communication or of thought exchange. “That wasn’t part of the plan, was it?”
If Helmuth or one of the other able minds at Grand Base had been directing that attack it would have stopped right there. The pilot had shown a flash of feeling that, with a little encouragement, might have grown into a suspicion. But the captain was not an imaginative man. Therefore:
“Nothing was said about it, either way,” he replied. “Probably the mate’s on duty—he isn’t one of us, you know. The captain will open up. If he doesn’t do it pretty quick I’ll open her up myself…there, the port’s opening. Slide a little forward…hold it! Go get ’em, men!”
Men, hundreds of them, armed and armored, swarmed through the freighter’s locks. But as the last man of the boarding party passed the portal something happened that was most decidedly not on the program. The outer port slammed shut and its toggles drove home!
“Blast those screens! Knock them down—get in there with a spy-ray!” barked the pirate captain. He was not one of those hardy and valiant souls who, like Gildersleeve, led in person the attacks of his cut-throats. He emulated instead the higher Boskonian officials and directed his raids from the safety of his control-room; but, as has been intimated, he was not exactly like those officials. It was only after it was too late that he became suspicious. “I wonder if somebody could have double-crossed us?… High-jackers?”
“We’ll bally soon know,” the pilot growled, and even as he spoke the spy-ray got through, revealing a very shambles.
For vanBuskirk and his Valerians had not been caught napping, nor were they a crew—unarmored, partially armed, and rendered even more impotent by internal mutiny, strife, and slaughter—such as the pirates had expected to find.
Instead, the boarders met a force that was overwhelmingly superior to their own. Not only in the strength and agility of its units, but also in that at least one semi-portable projector commanded every corridor of the freighter. In the blasts of those projectors most of the pirates died instantly, not knowing what struck them.
They were the fortunate ones. The others knew what was coming and saw it as it came, for the Valerians did not even draw their DeLameters. They knew that the pirates’ armor could withstand for minutes any hand-weapon’s beams, and they disdained to remount the heavy semi-portables. They came in with their space-axes, and at the sight the pirates broke and ran screaming in panic fear. But they could not escape. The toggles of the exit port were socketed and locked.
Therefore the storming party died to the last man, and, as vanBuskirk had foretold, it was scarcely even a struggle. For ordinary armor is so much tin-plate against a Valerian swinging a space-axe.
The spy-ray of the pirate captain got through just in time to see the ghastly finale of the massacre, and his face turned first purple, then white.
“The Patrol!” he gasped. “Valerians—a whole company of them! I’ll say we’ve been double-crossed!”
“Righto—we’ve been jolly well had,” the pilot agreed. “You don’t know the half of it, either. Somebody’s coming, and it isn’t a boy scout. If a mauler should suck us in, we’d be very much a spent force, what?”
“Cut the gabble!” snapped the captain. “Is it a mauler, or not?”
“A bit too far away yet to say, but it probably is. They wouldn’t have sent those jaspers out without cover, old bean—they know we can burn that freighter’s screens down in an hour. Better get ready to run, what?”
The commander did so, wild thoughts racing through his mind. If a mauler got close enough to him to use magnets, he was done. His heaviest beams wouldn’t even warm up a mauler’s screens; his defenses wouldn’t stand up for a second against a mauler’s blasts…and he’d be ordered back to base…
“Tally ho, old fruit!” The pilot slammed on maximum blast. “It’s a mauler and we’ve been bloody well jobbed. Back to base?”
“Yes,” and the discomfited captain energized his communicator, to report to his immediate superior the humiliating outcome of the supposedly carefully-planned coup.
CHAPTER
16
Kinnison Meets the Wheelman
S THE PIRATE FLED INTO SPACE Kinnison followed, matching his quarry in course and speed. He then cut in the automatic controller on his drive, the automatic recorder on his plate, and began to tune in his beam-tracer; only to be brought up short by the realization that the spy-ray’s point would not stay in the pirate’s control room without constant attention and manual adjustment. He had known that, too. Even the most precise of automatic controllers, driven by the most carefully stabilized electronic currents, are prone to slip a little at even such close range as ten million miles, especially in the bumpy ether near solar systems, and there was nothing to correct the slip. He had not thought of that before; the pilot always made those minor corrections as a matter of course.
But now he was torn between two desires. He wanted to listen to the conversation that would ensue as soon as the pirate captain got into communication with his superior officers; and, especially should Helmuth put in his beam, he very much wanted to trace it and thus secure another line on the headquarters he was so anxious to locate. He now feared that be could not do both—a fear that soon was to prove well grounded—and wished fervently that for a few minutes he could be two men. Or at least a Velantian; they had eyes and hands and separate brain-compartments enough so that they could do half-a-dozen things at once and do each one well. He could not; but he could try. Maybe he should have brought one of the boys along, at that. No, that would wreck everything, later on; he would have to do the best he could.
Communication was established and the pirate captain began to make his report, and by using one hand on the ray and the other on the tracer, he managed to get a partial line and to record scraps of the conversation. He missed, however, the essential part of the entire episode, that part in which the base commander turned the unsuccessful captain over to Helmuth himself. Therefore Kinnison was surprised indeed at the disappearance of the beam he was so laboriously trying to trace, and to hear Helmuth conclude his castigation of the unlucky captain with:
“…not entirely your fault, I will not punish you at all severely this time. Report to our base on Aldebaran I, turn your vessel over to commander there, and do anything he tells you to for thirty of the days of that planet.”
Frantically Kinnison drew back his tracer and searched for Helmuth’s beam, but before he could synchronize with it the message of the pirates’ high chief was finished and his beam was gone. The Lensman sat back in thought.
Aldebaran! Practically next door to his own Solarian System, from which he had come so far. How had they possibly managed to keep concealed, or to re-establish, a base so close to Sol, through all the intensive searching that had been done? But they had—that was the important thing. Anyway, he knew where he was going, and that helped. One other thing he hadn’t thought of, and one that might have spoiled everything, was the fact that he couldn’t stay awake indefinitely to follow that ship! He had to sleep sometime, and while he was asleep his quarry was bound to escape. He of course had a C
RX tracer, which would hold a ship without attention as long as it was anywhere within even extreme range; and it would have been a simple enough matter to have had a photo-cell relay put in between the plate of the CRX and the automatic controls of the spacer and driver—but he had not asked for it. Well, luckily, he now knew where he was going, and the trip to Aldebaran would be long enough for him to build a dozen such controls. He had all the necessary parts and plenty of tools.
Therefore, following the pirate ship easily as it tore through space, Kinnison built his automatic “chaser,” as he called it. During each of the first four or five “nights” he lost the vessel he was pursuing, but found it without any great difficulty upon awakening. Thereafter he held it continuously; improving day by day the performance of his apparatus until it could do almost anything except talk. After that he devoted his time to an intensive study of the general problem before him. His results were highly unsatisfactory; for in order to solve any problem one must have enough data to set it up, either in actual equations or in logical sequences, and Kinnison did not have enough data. He had altogether too many unknowns and not enough knowns.
The first specific problem was that of getting into the pirate base. Since the searchers of the Patrol had not found it, that base must be very well hidden indeed. And hiding anything as large as a base on Aldebaran I, as he remembered it, would be quite a feat in itself. He had been in that system only once, but…
Alone in his ship, and in deep space although he was, he blushed painfully as he remembered what had happened to him during that visit. He had chased a couple of dope runners to Aldebaran II, and there he had encountered the most vividly, the most flawlessly, the most remarkably and intriguingly beautiful girl he had ever seen. He had seen beautiful women, of course, before and in plenty. He had seen beauties amateur and professional; social butterflies, dancers, actresses, models, and posturers; both in the flesh and in Telenews casts; but he bad never supposed that such an utterly ravishing creature as she was could exist outside of a thionite dream. As a timidly innocent damsel in distress she had been perfect, and if she had held that pose a little longer Kinnison shuddered to think of what might have happened.
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