He turned and ran down the corridor to the airlock. As soon as he was
outside, Arcot lifted the ship.
It had taken less than a minute to get into the air, but in that
minute, the Nansalian fleet had taken a terrific beating. Arcot noticed
that the few ships of Sator that had been hit smashed into the ground
with a terrible blaze of violet light that left nothing but a pile of
fused metal.
"They've got something, all right," Arcot thought to himself as he drove
the _Ancient Mariner_ into battle.
It would be impossible for the Nansalians to lower their magnetic
screen, even for a second, so Arcot simply aimed the ship toward it and
turned on the power.
"Hold on!" he called as they struck it. The ship reeled and sank
suddenly planetward, then it bounced up and outward. They were through
the wall.
The rooms were suddenly oppressively hot, and the molecular cooler was
struggling to lower it. "We made it," Morey said triumphantly, "but the
eddy currents sure heated up the hull!"
They were out of the city now, speeding toward the battle. Following a
prearranged system, the Nansalian ships retreated, leaving the Earthmen
a free hand. They needed no help!
Wade, Fuller, and Morey began to lash out with the molecular beams,
smashing the Satorian ships in on themselves, crushing them to the
ground, where they exploded in violet flame.
Wade and Fuller began to work together. Wade caught one ship in the
molecular ray, and Fuller hit with a heat beam. Like some titanic broom
they swept it around at dozens of miles a second, leaping, twisting,
smashing ship after ship. Like a snowball, the lump of glowing metal
grew with each crash, till a dozen ships had fallen into it. It was a
new broom, and it swept clean!
Then a magnetic beam caught the _Ancient Mariner_. With a shock, it
slowed down at a terrific rate. Then Arcot turned on more power, and
simply dragged the other ship along by its own magnetic beam! Wade tore
the ship loose with his molecular beam, but the mighty mass of metal
that had been his broom was gone, a glowing mass of metal on the ground.
"We haven't seen that new weapon yet," Morey called.
"Can't find us!" Arcot replied into the intercom. The sun was setting,
and the blazing red star was lighting the ship, making it seem like a
ball of fire when still and a flashing streak of red light when in
motion.
Ship after ship of the Satorians was going down before the three beams
of the Earth ship; the great fleet was dissolving like a lump of sugar
in boiling water.
Suddenly, just ahead of them, an enemy ship drove toward them with
obvious intent to ram; if his magnetic beam caught them, and drew them
towards him, there would be a head-on collision.
Wade caught it with a molecular beam, and it became a blazing wreck on
the ground.
"All rays off!" Arcot called. As soon as they were off, Arcot hit a
switch, and the _Ancient Mariner_ vanished.
Arcot drove the invisible ship high above the battle. Below, the
Satorians were searching wildly for the ship. They knew it must be
somewhere near, and feared that at any second it might materialize
before them with its deadly rays.
Arcot stayed above them for nearly a minute while the ships below
twisted and turned, wildly seeking him. Then they went into formation
again and started back for the city.
"That's what I wanted!" Arcot said grimly. "In formation, they're like
sitting ducks!" He dropped the ship like a plummet while the ray
operators prepared to sweep the formation with their beams.
Suddenly the _Ancient Mariner_ was visible again. Simultaneously, three
rays leaped down and bathed the formation in their pale radiance. The
front ranks vanished, and the line broke, attacking the ship that hung
above them now. Four magnetic beams hit the _Ancient Mariner_ at once!
Arcot couldn't pull away from all four, and his gunners couldn't tell
which ships were holding them.
All at once, the men felt a violent electrical shock! The air about them
was filled with the blue haze of the electric weapon they had seen!
Instantly, the magnetic beams left them, and they saw behind them a
single Satorian ship heading toward them, surrounded by that same bluish
halo of light. A suicide ship!
Arcot accelerated away from it as Fuller hit it with a molecular beam.
The ship reeled and stopped, and the _Ancient Mariner_ pulled away from
it rapidly. Then, the frost-covered ship of the dead came on, still
heading for them!
Arcot turned and went off to the right, but like a pursuing Nemesis, the
strange ship came after them in the shortest, most direct route!
The molecular beams were useless now; there was no molecular energy left
in the frozen hulk that accelerated toward them. Suddenly, the two
envelopes of blue light touched and coalesced! A great, blinding arc
leaped between the two ships as the speeding Satorian hull smashed
violently against the side of the _Ancient Mariner_! The men ducked
automatically, and were hurled against their seat-straps with tremendous
force. There was a rending, crashing roar, a sea of flame--and darkness.
They could only have been unconscious a few seconds, for when the fog
went away, they could see the glowing mass of the enemy ship still
falling far beneath them. The lux wall where it had hit was still
glowing red.
"Morey!" Arcot called. "You all right? Wade? Fuller?"
"Okay!" Morey answered.
So were Wade and Fuller.
"It was the lux hull that saved us," Arcot said. "It wouldn't break, and
the temperature of the arc didn't bother it. And since it wouldn't carry
a current, we didn't get the full electrical effect.
"I'm going to convince those birds that this ship is made of something
they can't touch! We'll give them a real show!"
He dived downward, back into the battle.
It was a show, all right! It was impossible to fight the Earth ship. The
enemy had to concentrate four magnetic rays on it to use their electric
weapon, and they could only do that by sheer luck!
And even that was of little use, for they simply lost one of their own
ships without harming the _Ancient Mariner_ in the least.
Ship after ship crumpled in on itself like crushed tinfoil or hurled
itself violently to the ground as the molecular beams touched them. The
Satorian fleet was a fleet no longer; it was a small collection of
disorganized ships whose commanders had only one thought--to flee!
The few ships that were left spearheaded out into space, using every bit
of acceleration that the tough bodies of the Satorians could stand. With
a good head start, they were rapidly escaping.
"We can't equal that acceleration," said Wade. "We'll lose them!"
"Nope!" Arcot said grimly. "I want a couple of those ships, and I'm
going to get them!"
At four gravities of acceleration, the _Ancient Mariner_ drove after the
fleeing ships of Sator, but the enemy ships soon dropped rapidly from
sight.
Twenty five thousand miles out in space, Arcot cut the acceleration.
"We'll catch them now, I think," he said softly. He pushed the little
red switch for an instant, then opened it. A moment before, the planet
Nansal had been a huge disc behind them. Now it was a tiny thing, a full
million miles away.
It took the Satorian fleet over an hour to reach them. They appeared as
dim lights in the telectroscope. They rapidly became larger. Arcot had
extinguished the lights, and since they were on the sunward side of the
approaching ships, the _Ancient Mariner_ was effectively invisible.
"They're going to pass us at a pretty good clip," Morey said quietly.
"They've been accelerating all this time."
Arcot nodded in agreement. "We'll have to hit them as they come toward
us. We'd never get one in passing."
As the ships grew rapidly in the plate, Arcot gave the order to fire!
The molecular rays slashed out toward the onrushing ships, picking them
off as fast as the beams could be directed. The rays were invisible in
space, so they managed to get several before the Satorians realized what
was happening.
Then, in panic, they scattered all over space, fleeing madly from the
impossible ship that was firing on them. They knew they had left it
behind, yet here it was, waiting for them!
"Let them go," Arcot said. "We've got our specimens, and the rest can
carry the word back to Sator that the war is over for them."
It was several hours later that the _Ancient Mariner_ approached Nansal
again, bringing with it two Satorian ships. By careful use of the heat
beam and the molecular beam, the Earthmen had managed to jockey the two
battle cruisers back to Nansal.
It was nighttime when they landed. The whole area around the city was
illuminated by giant searchlights. Men were working recovering the
bodies of the dead, aiding those who had survived, and examining the
wreckage.
Arcot settled the two Satorian ships to the ground, and landed the
_Ancient Mariner_.
Torlos sprinted over the ground toward them as he saw the great silver
ship land. He had been helping in the examination of the wrecked enemy
ships.
"Have they attacked anywhere else on the planet?" Arcot asked as he
opened the airlock.
Torlos nodded. "They hit five other cities, but they didn't use as big a
fleet as they did here. The plan of battle seems to have been for the
ships with the new weapons to hit here first and then hit each of the
other cities in turn. They didn't have enough to make a full-scale
attack; evidently, your presence here made them desperate.
"At any rate, the other cities were able to beat off the magnetic beam
ships with the projectors of molecular beams."
"Good," Arcot thought. "Then the Nansal-Sator war is practically over!"