Then Glayne leaped. With one flailing fist he caught the Delban guard
on his bony jaw and with the other he snatched the cold-beam gun from
his limp fingers. Whirling, he played it among the stupefied guards.
Then old Graysen exploded into action, seizing Selzi-Narfid and hurling
him bodily at Bro-Doral who was in the act of bringing up his Cardy
gun. Three of the guards had collapsed and another was crumpling on his
knees under Glayne's cold-beam. The other two had crouched back in the
shadows of the entrance portal, trying to bring their weapons to bear
upon Glayne.
Graysen whirled and lunged at them, smashing one down with a single
blow. The last guard on his feet, surprised and dismayed by this attack
from the rear, fled to the portal and tried to dilate it. But he was
too late and sagged in a heap under Glayne's hand weapon.
Scooping up two of the Cardy guns which had fallen to the balcony
floor, Glayne shouted: "Pick up an energy gun, Graysen. Cut down the
power drain machinery."
Graysen reached for an energy gun in the holster of one of the
paralyzed guards. He never even saw Gort Bro-Doral scramble to his feet
and fire point blank. His head disappeared as the Delban's beam struck
full force. Glayne fired back wildly but he was off balance and missed.
Before he could collect himself to fire again, Bro-Doral had fled to
another stage and darted through the dilation.
Glayne whirled toward the Delbans. Selzi-Narfid had a broken neck and
was obviously dead. The guards were all unconscious and would remain so
for a long time.
Glayne turned back to the Jewel which cast its chill, gold light
steadily through the interstices of the surrounding girders. Calmly
he leveled the Cardy gun and fired at it. As if it were so much water,
the deadly little energy beam washed off the Tane Jewel and fused with
the beralloy supports. It was as he had expected. Given several hours,
the little hand weapon might have made an impression on the incredibly
tough beralloy but Glayne had no time to lose.
As he had seen before, the power drain machinery which hung in clusters
from the big beams and transmitted the energy through the heavy busbars
looked to be the most fragile. Glayne wondered what would happen if he
fired into them. There was only one way to find out. The muscles of his
jaw hardened as he depressed the firing stud on the Cardy.
Nothing happened. He let the beam of his energy gun play up and down
the clusters of power drains, fusing them into slag. Now the thin,
invisible rays of power which the drains extracted from the Jewel no
longer existed since they had no place to go. But nothing happened.
Then it occurred to him that nothing would happen in the Jewel Chamber
itself. It needed no power for lights--the Jewel provided all the light
needed. Heartened, Glayne blasted at every drain in reach, following
the balcony around the Chamber.
But even this method, he realized, would take too long. Gort Bro-Doral
would soon have squads of men hurrying into the Chamber after him.
Grimly he wished he had an energy bomb. With one of those he could
finish the job in a few seconds.
Suddenly he remembered an old Guardian trick. Hurriedly he began to
tinker with one of the Cardy guns. By jamming a couple of the safety
gadgets, it was possible to make the weapon fire out of phase. When the
trigger stud was depressed, its tiny miatron coils would build up an
unstable load in a couple of seconds, then explode. Quickly he fixed
the weapon to his satisfaction, then hurried on around the balcony to
find a suitable opening in the girders through which to hurl the ersatz
bomb.
Halfway around, he met two panic-stricken Delban technicians. The
instant they saw him they turned tail and ran back through the portal.
Obviously _something_ must be happening, Glayne thought with grim
satisfaction. Then he found a good spot, pressed the firing stud of
the doctored Cardy gun, then flung it with all his strength into the
remaining power drains. In an instant he had pivoted and lunged for the
port of the entrance stage behind him, feeling in the shadow for its
dilator stud.
It refused to open!
Obviously Glayne himself had sabotaged its power circuit. Now he was
trapped in the Chamber and the ersatz bomb was about to explode.
Tensely he crouched as far back in the recess of the port as he could
and waited. With a terrific roar the bomb exploded in the confined
Chamber, rupturing the membranes of his nose and crushing him violently
against the port. Parts of the devastated power drains were hurled
against the massive walls, then fell back to the Jewel. One of the
heavy busbars had collapsed, ripping festoons of cables from the top of
the Chamber which shorted violently against one another.
Dazed, Glayne pulled himself to his feet. Fortunately he had broken
no bones. But one of his ear drums was ruptured and his nose bled
unremittingly. He had lost his other Cardy. Hurriedly he felt about,
found it, and thrust it into the fold of his tattered jumper.
He turned back to the port and found that the concussion had dilated
it for him. Breathing heavily, he crawled through it into the inky
blackness of the passages. On all sides he heard the sound of running
footsteps. By touch he staggered into the blackness, realizing that he
must keep going uphill, away from the Jewel's attraction.
The exertion cleared his head a bit. He knew he was lost, but he hoped
to be able to find his way back to Selzi-Narfid's quarters. There he
would find Niala and be oriented with the rest of the discoid.
Figures bumped into him in the blackness, hurrying to the scene of
destruction. The Delbans were badly disorganized. Obviously they had
not been prepared to cope with such devastation wreaked on their sacred
Jewel. Not even to the extent of auxiliary power for lights, he
thought as he panted up the black passages.
* * * * *
Even as he thought about it, the lights began to flicker weakly in
their fluorescent tubes, growing stronger with each passing second.
Startled, Glayne crouched back in the shadow of a recess in the wall.
That was Luck in all her perversity, he thought grimly. His hand sought
the butt of the blaster in his jumper. Fortunately the lights did not
wax as brightly as they had when the Jewel was still functioning, but
that did not offer much consolation. He would be recognized instantly
by the outline of his thick-chested body if he was seen in the corridor.
He noticed that fewer Delbans were passing. He decided to chance it.
Tightly grasping the gun in his jumper, he crept from his hiding place
and ran on the balls of his feet, dodging and ducking into shadows
every time one of the enemy passed. Once he was seen and pursued by
a squad of Delban guards. Breathlessly he ran at full tilt through a
cross-corridor, up a flight of high steps, and twisted into another of
the endless passages of the discoid.
The pull of the Jewel had become very slight. In fact it was much
slighter than it had been in Selzi-Narfid's suite. Glayne pushed on,
realizing that he was hopelessly lost. His only chance now was to
find the mono-rail on which they had ridden from the landing dock
to the Tjadlinn commander's suite. It occurred to him that even if
he did find Niala, they might never escape Tjadlinn. And it was
absolutely imperative that he make contact with Garstow at Scone III.
The slightest delay on the part of the Stellar Guardian Admiral in
attacking the Karkara Station might give the Delbans the precious time
they needed to repair the damage he had effected.
There were two entrance stages, one on either side, in the corridor
through which he was hurrying. He tried one and found it was locked.
He was more fortunate with the other. It creaked open slowly when he
flipped the dilator stud. Tensely, hand on the Cardy gun in his jumper,
he crept through the port.
It was the landing dock!
Glayne's heart jumped with delight as he crouched back in a shadow and
examined the place. Not a hundred meters away was the launch which had
brought his party from the _Algol_. His eyes drank it in avidly and a
plan for escape formed rapidly in his mind. A message craft of some
sort was preparing to leave, he saw. As soon as the inner lock door
closed behind it, he would smash the launch through it and the air
pressure would fling him out of the discoid. How very simple!
Then the impact of the realization that he would have to leave Niala
Chodred behind struck him. He was stunned by its very violence.
Leave Niala? Abandon her to Gort Bro-Doral and his sadistic vengeance
for the sabotage Glayne himself had performed? No! That was out of the
question. But what of the Terran Combine? What did the life of Citizen
Niala Chodred mean against the lives of the trillions who made up that
Combine to which she had sworn allegiance? Viewed in that light, it
was obvious that the life of one person was a cheap price to pay for
security of the Combine against the Tane Jewel.
Glayne crouched in the shadow and buried his face in his hands. In
an agony of indecision he prodded his weary mind to discover an
alternative to the horrible dilemma. But he could find none. He would
have to decide between Niala, the laughing, green-eyed Niala, and the
ideal of human progress which he had sworn the Guardian Oath to protect.
Dully he realized that the power of the abstract was too strong. He
would forsake Niala. The pain redoubled itself as he made his decision
but he set his face in a granite-mask against it. Unfortunately it was
not so easy to quell the agony that burned within him.
Grimly he stood up. He saw that the time had come for action. The
message craft was slowly jetting down the cinder blastway toward the
lock door. Glayne tensed for an instant, then raced for the launch,
covering ten meters at a stride in the light gravity. Three Delban
mechanics caught sight of him as he rounded the stubby fins and leaped
for the lock. In mid-stride he whipped out his Cardy gun and brought
them down in charred heaps.
A guard squad saw him and fired. Their beams sang dangerously close,
smashing into the beralloy side of the launch. They crunched down the
blastway in pursuit as Glayne jumped through the open lock, slammed it
shut, and darted to the controls. The atomic driver engine coughed and
surged into life. He let it scream up beyond audibility, then fed power
to the jets. The blast washed over the guards who were closest to the
launch and the others fell back hastily before its searing heat.
The inner lock of the entrance port had slid shut behind the message
craft. It was now or never, Glayne realized. He opened the atomic
driver wide and the stubby launch shuddered for an instant, then lunged
for the lock. The sudden thrust created constricting hands about
Glayne's chest and he fought precariously on the edge of blacking out.
For a brief instant Glayne was aware of the huge outer doors swinging
shut before him--and then the air pressure struck them and flung the
launch bodily through the narrow space left between them.
The launch tumbled crazily end-over-end until Glayne straightened it
out and oriented himself with Tjadlinn and Jorger Sun. He had just
sighted the tiny gleaming speck of the _Algol_ a dozen kilometers
distant when something struck the launch a terrific blow. Almost
instantly the tell-tales indicated air was escaping. Dismayed, Glayne
shot a glance over his shoulder at the receding discoid. He discovered
that they were firing at him with the secondary Kellander batteries,
using auxiliaries to power the miatrons. Feverishly he changed course,
zig-zagging wildly away from the discoid.
Due to over confidence, the Delbans had not destroyed the _Algol_
immediately. They preferred to play cat and mouse. And now, with the
titanic energies of the Jewel no longer available to them, they could
not destroy the _Algol_.
The Kellander energy beams slashed dangerously close to the fleeing
launch. Not in salvos but by ones and twos. That meant that their
fire control was badly disorganized--and it was that fact which saved
Glayne. Harbin had raised the _Algol's_ anti-shield when the Delbans
had commenced firing but he had not turned tail as Glayne had ordered,
realizing that the launch was fleeing in his direction.
Glayne flipped the stud of the shield-nullifier that was matched to the
frequency of the _Algol's_ anti-shield and darted the launch through
it, braking with eye-searing blasts of the forward jets as the huge
Reception Deck locks yawned open. With a heavy lurch, his battered
craft came to rest inside the lip of the gaping outer doors.