The third pilot snorted. "One Stellar class cruiser against two Terran
Galactics? He'd be out of his mind."
Just then the battle screen lit up and a babbling group of gunnery
officers crowded about, feeding firing data to waiting miatron crews.
Over their shoulders the third pilot could make out the Delban cruiser
as it lay there, slim and deadly against the vast, star-studded vault
of space.
"What I'd like to know is why the devil he doesn't run for it," the
older pilot said to no one in particular. "Something's up, I'm sure.
Delbans just don't act like this."
The third pilot grunted absently, his eyes fixed on the battle screen.
The two Galactics now lay on either side of the Delban. His sister ship
began to communicate with the new arrival, her yellow beam glowing
with baleful intensity. But the pilot wasn't watching. He had noticed
something odd about that cruiser. It seemed to bulge in the wrong
places. It was completely enclosed by a peculiar mesh antenna which
glinted ominously in the faint light.
Then the Delban fired.
For a moment there was stunned amazement in the huge plotting room.
It was the very absurdity of the situation rather than mere surprise.
To make the blasphemy worse, the Delban had licked out with the beam
of a secondary Kellander projector rather than with her main miatron
batteries. The damage was slight, the communicator bulb of the other
Galactic having been reduced to twisted slag. But this was the grossest
of all insults in space warfare and demanded immediate retaliation. The
third pilot held his breath in anticipation.
Then it came. The plotting room exploded into frantic activity.
Generators screamed into ear-splitting crescendoes as the main driver
engines were coupled into them to raise the anti-energy shield. The
Kellander miatron blasters hurled ravening bolts of energy at the
audacious Delban, reducing accumulator loads to zero in instants.
The remainder of the driver atomics were coupled into the Kellander
accumulators sending up loads that were fed through the continuously
thundering miatrons at the Delban cruiser. Literally _trillions_ of
megawatts lapped at the Delban shield, making it glow up the spectral
scale in a brilliant spider web of absorbing power foci. But it held.
* * * * *
The Delban shield held! The third pilot was unbelievably shocked as he
stared at the battle screen. It was simply not conceivable that the
two mightiest warships in space could not penetrate the shield of a
pipsqueak Stellar cruiser.
Where were they getting the power? The question blazed up in the third
pilot's consciousness as he stared at the slim, deadly Delban. Abruptly
he recalled where he had seen the Delban's peculiar external mesh
antenna.
"Broadcast power!" he blurted to his comrades. "Those devils are
receiving broadcast power!"
The other two pilots looked at him incredulously. "Hell!" snorted the
older one. "You can't transmit the stuff across interstellar distances."
The third pilot didn't reply. As he watched the screen he suddenly knew
they were in trouble. By rights this should have been the greatest
shock of all but his mind was so dulled with amazement that he could
only shake his head.
The Delban's firing had gradually increased in strength until now both
the Terran battleship's mighty shields were themselves glowing up the
spectral scale in its spidery force web. Despite the older pilot's
doubts, he realized that only broadcast power in unlimited quantities
could account for those overloaded shields. But where were they getting
it to broadcast? Only an infinite source of supply could do the job.
Paralyzed, he watched the battle screen. He was aware of the miatron
blasters falling silent, one after another, as the straining driver
atomics were diverted to hold the shield. Their sister Galactic's
blasters had all fallen silent as all the power of her own huge drivers
was shunted into the shield generators. Their own shield was trembling
and shuddering under the inconceivable impact of the energies that
surged at it from the Delban.
Suddenly the pilot saw their sister ship's shield coruscate in a
multi-hued spider web of shorting power foci. Then it buckled. The
third pilot instinctively averted his face from the indescribably
brilliant, eye-searing nova that followed.
His own ship screamed. The drivers, the generators, the converters and
accumulators--all of them screamed in ultra-sonic crescendoes in an
effort to maintain the crumbling shield. The force webs shorted one
after another in brilliant red fire. The third pilot saw it rupture but
he never felt it....
For days the twin novae burned in the endless night, then slowly faded
to blackened cinders.