FLEET AGAINST PLANETOID
One of the newest and fleetest of the patrol vessels of the Triplanetary
League, the heavy cruiser _Chicago_ of the North American Division of
the Tellurian Contingent, plunged stolidly through interplanetary
vacuum. For five long weeks she had patrolled her allotted volume of
space. In another week she would report back to the city whose name she
bore, where her space-weary crew, worn by their long "tour" in the
awesomely oppressive depths of the limitless void, would enjoy to the
full their fortnight of refreshing planetary leave.
She was performing certain routine tasks--charting meteorites, watching
for derelicts and other obstructions to navigation, checking in
constantly with all scheduled space-ships in case of need, and so
on--but primarily she was a warship. She was a mighty engine of
destruction, hunting for the unauthorized vessels of whatever power or
planet it was that had not only defied the Triplanetary League, but was
evidently attempting to overthrow it; attempting to plunge the Three
Planets back into the ghastly sink of bloodshed and destruction from
which they had so recently emerged. Every space-ship within range of her
powerful detectors was represented by two brilliant, slowly-moving
points of light; one upon a greater micrometer screen, the other in the
"tank," the immense, three-dimensional, minutely cubed model of the
entire Solar System.
A brilliantly intense red light flared upon a panel and a bell clanged
brazenly the furious signals of the sector alarm. Simultaneously a
speaker roared forth its message of a ship in dire peril.
"Sector alarm! N.A.T. _Hyperion_ gassed with Vee-Two. Nothing detectable
in space, but...."
The half-uttered message was drowned out in a crackling roar of
meaningless noise, the orderly signals of the bell became a hideous
clamor, and the two points of light which had marked the location of the
liner disappeared in widely spreading flashes of the same high-powered
interference. Observers, navigators, and control officers were alike
dumbfounded. Even the captain, in the shell-proof, shock-proof, and
doubly ray-proof retreat of his conning compartment, was equally at a
loss. No ship or thing could _possibly_ be close enough to be sending
out interfering waves of such tremendous power--yet there they were!
"Maximum acceleration, straight for the point where the _Hyperion_ was
when her tracers went out," the captain ordered, and through the fringe
of that widespread interference he drove a solid beam, reporting
concisely to GHQ. Almost instantly the emergency call-out came roaring
in--every vessel of the Sector, of whatever class or tonnage, was to
concentrate upon the point in space where the ill-fated liner had last
been known to be.
Hour after hour the great globe drove on at maximum acceleration,
captain and every control officer alert and at high tension. But in
Quartermasters' Department, deep down below the generator rooms, no
thought was given to such minor matters as the disappearance of a
_Hyperion_. The inventory did not balance, and two Q.M. privates were
trying, profanely and without success, to find the discrepancy.
"Charged calls for Mark Twelve Lewistons, none requisitioned, on hand
eighteen thous...." The droning voice broke off short in the middle of a
word and the private stood rigid, in the act of reaching for another
slip, every faculty concentrated upon something imperceptible to his
companion.
"Come on, Cleve--snap it up!" the second commanded, but was silenced by
a vicious wave of the listener's hand.
"What!" the rigid one exclaimed. "Reveal ourselves! Why, it's.... Oh,
all right.... Oh, that's it ... uh-huh ... I see ... yes, I've got it
solid. So long!"
The inventory sheets fell unheeded from his hand, and his fellow private
stared after him in amazement as he strode over to the desk of the
officer in charge. That officer also stared as the hitherto easy-going
and gold-bricking Cleve saluted crisply, showed him something flat in
the palm of his left hand, and spoke.
"I've just got some of the funniest orders ever put out, lieutenant, but
they came from 'way, 'way up. I'm to join the brass hats in the Center.
You'll know all about it directly, I imagine. Cover me up as much as you
can, will you?" and he was gone.
Unchallenged he made his way to the control room, and his curt "urgent
report for the Captain" admitted him there without question. But when he
approached the sacred precincts of the captain's own and inviolate room,
he was stopped in no uncertain fashion by no less a personage than the
Officer of the Day.
"... and report yourself under arrest immediately!" the O.D. concluded
his brief but pointed speech.
"You were right in stopping me, of course," the intruder conceded,
unmoved. "I wanted to get in there without giving everything away, if
possible, but it seems that I can't. Well, I've been ordered by Virgil
Samms to report to the Captain, at once. See this? Touch it!" He held
out a flat, insulated disk, cover thrown back to reveal a tiny golden
meteor, at the sight of which the officer's truculent manner altered
markedly.
"I've heard of them, of course, but I never saw one before," and the
officer touched the shining symbol lightly with his finger, jerking
backward as there shot through his whole body a thrilling surge of
power, shouting into his very bones an unpronounceable syllable--the
password of the Triplanetary Service. "Genuine or not, it gets you to
the Captain. He'll know, and if it's a fake you'll be breathing space in
five minutes."
Projector at the ready, the Officer of the Day followed Cleve into the
Holy of Holies. There the grizzled four-striper touched the golden
meteor lightly, then drove his piercing gaze deep into the unflinching
eyes of the younger man. But that captain had won his high rank neither
by accident nor by "pull"--he understood at once.
"It _must_ be an emergency," he growled, half-audibly, still staring at
his lowly Q-M clerk, "to make Samms uncover this way." He turned and
curtly dismissed the wondering O.D. Then: "All right! Out with it!"
"Serious enough so that every one of us afloat has just received orders
to reveal himself to his commanding officer and to anyone else, if
necessary to reach that officer at once--orders never before issued. The
enemy have been located. They have built a base, and have ships better
than our best. Base and ships cannot be seen or detected by any ether
wave. However, the Service has been experimenting for years with a new
type of communicator beam; and, while pretty crude yet, it was given to
us when the _Dione_ went out without leaving a trace. One of our men was
in the _Hyperion_, managed to stay alive, and has been sending data. I
am instructed to attach my new phone set to one of the universal plates
in your conning room, and to see what I can find."
"Go to it!" The captain waved his hand and the operative bent to his
task.
"Commanders of all vessels of the Fleet!" The Headquarters speaker,
receiver sealed upon the wave-length of the Admiral of the Fleet, broke
the long silence. "All vessels in sectors L to R, inclusive, will
interlock location signals. Some of you have received, or will receive
shortly, certain communications from sources which need not be
mentioned. Those commanders will at once send out red K4 screens.
Vessels so marked will act as temporary flagships. Unmarked vessels will
proceed at maximum to the nearest flagship, grouping about it in the
regulation squadron cone in order of arrival. Squadrons most distant
from objective point designated by flagship observers will proceed
toward it at maximum; squadrons nearest it will decelerate or reverse
velocity--that point must not be approached until full Fleet formation
has been accomplished. Heavy and light cruisers of all other sectors
inside the orbit of Mars...." The orders went on, directing the
mobilization of the stupendous forces of the League, so that they would
be in readiness in the highly improbable event of the failure of the
massed power of seven sectors to reduce the pirate base.
In those seven sectors perhaps a dozen vessels threw out enormous
spherical screens of intense red light, and as they did so their tracer
points upon all the interlocked lookout plates also became ringed about
with red. Toward those crimson markers the pilots of the unmarked
vessels directed their courses at their utmost power; and while the
white lights upon the lookout plates moved slowly toward and clustered
about the red ones the ultra-instruments of the Service operatives were
probing into space, sweeping the neighborhood of the computed position
of the pirate's stronghold.
But the object sought was so far away that the small spy-ray sets of the
Service men, intended as they were for close range work, were unable to
make contact with the invisible planetoid for which they were seeking.
In the captain's sanctum of the _Chicago_, the operative studied his
plate for only a minute or two, then shut off his power and fell into a
brown study, from which he was rudely aroused.
"Aren't you even going to _try_ to find them?" demanded the captain.
"No," Cleve returned shortly. "No use--not half enough power or control.
I'm trying to think ... maybe ... say, Captain, will you please have the
Chief Electrician and a couple of radio men come in here?"
They came, and for hours, while the other ultra-wave men searched the
apparently empty ether with their ineffective beams, the three technical
experts and the erstwhile Quartermaster's clerk labored upon a huge and
complex ultra-wave projector--the three blindly and with doubtful
questions; the one with sure knowledge at least of what he was trying to
do. Finally the thing was done, the crude, but efficient graduated
circles were set, and the tubes glowed redly as their massed output
drove into a tight beam of ultra-vibration.
"There it is, sir," Cleve reported, after some ten minutes of
manipulation, and the vast structure of the miniature world flashed into
being upon his plate. "You may notify the fleet--coordinates H 11.62, RA
124-31-16, and Dx about 173.2."
The report made and the assistants out of the room, the captain turned
to the observer and saluted gravely.
"We have always known, sir, that the Service had _men_; but I had no
idea that any one man could possibly do, on the spur of the moment,
what you have just done--unless that man happened to be Lyman
Cleveland."
"Oh, it doesn't...." the observer began, but broke off, muttering
unintelligibly at intervals; then swung the visiray beam toward the
Earth. Soon a face appeared upon the plate; the keen, but careworn face
of Virgil Samms!
"Hello, Lyman," his voice came clearly from the speaker, and the Captain
gasped--his ultra-wave observer and sometime clerk was Lyman Cleveland
himself, probably the greatest living expert in beam transmission! "I
knew that you'd do something, if it could be done. How about it--can the
others install similar sets on their ships? I'm betting that they
can't."
"Probably not," Cleveland frowned in thought. "This is a patchwork
affair, made of gunny sacks and hay-wire. I'm holding it together by
main strength and awkwardness, and even at that, it's apt to go to
pieces any minute."
"Can you rig it up for photography?"
"I think so. Just a minute--yes, I can. Why?"
"Because there's something going on out there that neither we nor
apparently the pirates know anything about. The Admiralty seems to think
that it's the Jovians again, but we don't see how it can be--if it is,
they have developed a lot of stuff that none of our agents has even
suspected," and he recounted briefly what Costigan had reported to him,
concluding: "Then there was a burst of interference--on the
_ultra-band_, mind you--and I've heard nothing from him since. Therefore
I want you to stay out of the battle entirely. Stay as far away from it
as you can and still get good pictures of everything that happens. I
will see that orders are issued to the _Chicago_ to that effect."
"But listen...."
"Those are orders!" snapped Samms. "It is of the utmost importance that
we know every detail of what is going to happen. The answer is pictures.
The only possibility of obtaining pictures is that machine you have just
developed. If the fleet wins, nothing will be lost. If the fleet
loses--and I am not half as confident of success as the Admiral is--the
_Chicago_ doesn't carry enough power to decide the issue, and we will
have the pictures to study, which is all-important. Besides, we have
probably lost Conway Costigan today, and we don't want to lose _you_,
too."
Cleveland remained silent, pondering this startling news, but the
grizzled Captain, veteran of the Fourth Jovian War that he was, was not
convinced.
"We'll blow them out of space, Mr. Samms!" he declared.
"You just think you will, Captain. I have suggested, as forcibly as
possible, that the general attack be withheld until after a thorough
investigation is made, but the Admiralty will not listen. They see the
advisability of withdrawing a camera ship, but that is as far as they
will go."
"And that's plenty far enough!" growled the _Chicago's_ commander, as
the beam snapped off. "Mr. Cleveland, I don't like the idea of running
away under fire, and I won't do it without direct orders from the
Admiral."
"Of course you won't--that's why you are going...."
He was interrupted by a voice from the Headquarters speaker. The captain
stepped up to the plate and, upon being recognized, he received the
exact orders which had been requested by the Chief of the Triplanetary
Service.
Thus it was that the _Chicago_ reversed her acceleration, cut off her
red screen, and fell rapidly behind, while the vessels following her
shot away toward another crimson-flaring loader. Farther and farther
back she dropped, back to the limiting range of the mechanism upon which
Cleveland and his highly-trained assistants were hard at work. And
during all this time the forces of the seven sectors had been
concentrating. The pilot vessels, with their flaming red screens, each
followed by a cone of space-ships, drew closer and closer together,
approaching the _Fearless_--the British super-dreadnought which was to
be the flagship of the Fleet--the mightiest and heaviest space-ship
which had yet lifted her stupendous mass into the ether.
Now, systematically and precisely, the great Cone of Battle was coming
into being; a formation developed during the Jovian Wars while the
forces of the Three Planets were fighting in space for their very
civilizations' existence, and one never used since the last space-fleets
of Jupiter's murderous hordes had been wiped out.
The mouth of that enormous hollow cone was a ring of scout patrols, the
smallest and most agile vessels of the fleet. Behind them came a
somewhat smaller ring of light cruisers, then rings of heavy cruisers
and of light battleships, and finally of heavy battleships. At the apex
of the cone, protected by all the other vessels of the formation and in
best position to direct the battle, was the flagship. In this formation
every vessel was free to use her every weapon, with a minimum of danger
to her sister ships; and yet, when the gigantic main projectors were
operated along the axis of the formation, from the entire vast circle of
the cone's mouth there flamed a cylindrical field of force of such
intolerable intensity that in it no conceivable substance could endure
for a moment!
The artificial planet of metal was now close enough so that it was
visible to the ultra-vision of the Service men, so plainly visible that
the cigar-shaped warships of the pirates were seen issuing from the
enormous airlocks. As each vessel shot out into space it sped straight
for the approaching fleet without waiting to go into any formation--gray
Roger believed his structures invisible to Triplanetary eyes, thought
that the presence of the fleet was the result of mathematical
calculations, and was convinced that his mighty vessels of the void
would destroy even that vast fleet without themselves becoming known. He
was wrong. The foremost vessels were allowed actually to enter the mouth
of that conical trap before an offensive move was made. Then the
vice-admiral in command of the fleet touched a button, and
simultaneously every generator in every Triplanetary vessel burst into
furious activity. Instantly the hollow volume of the immense cone became
a coruscating hell of resistless energy, an inferno which with the
velocity of light extended itself into a far-reaching cylinder of
rapacious destruction. Ether-waves they were, it is true, but vibrations
driven with such fierce intensity that the screens of deflection
surrounding the pirate vessels could not handle even a fraction of their
awful power. Invisibility lost, their defensive screens flared briefly;
but even the enormous force backing Roger's inventions, far greater than
that of any single Triplanetary vessel, could not hold off the
incredible violence of the massed attack of the hundreds of mighty
vessels composing the Fleet. Their defensive screens flared briefly,
then went down; their great hulls first glowing red, then shining white,
then in a brief moment exploding into flying masses of red hot, molten,
and gaseous metal.
A full two-thirds of Roger's force was caught in that raging,
incandescent beam; caught and obliterated: but the remainder did not
retreat to the planetoid. Darting out around the edge of the cone at a
stupendous acceleration, they attacked its flanks and the engagement
became general. But now, since enough beams were kept upon each ship of
the enemy so that invisibility could not be restored, each Triplanetary
war vessel could attack with full efficiency. Magnesium flares and
star-shells illuminated space for a thousand miles, and from every unit
of both fleets was being hurled every item of solid, explosive and
vibratory destruction known to the warfare of that age. Offensive beams,
rods and daggers of frightful power struck and were neutralized by
defensive screens equally capable; the long range and furious dodging
made ordinary solid, or even atomic-explosive projectiles useless; and
both sides were filling all space with such a volume of blanketing
frequencies that such radio-dirigible atomics as were launched could not
be controlled, but darted madly and erratically hither and thither,
finally to be exploded or volatilized harmlessly in mid-space by the
touch of some fiercely insistant, probing beam of force.
Individually, however, the pirate vessels were far more powerful than
those of the fleet, and that superiority soon began to make itself felt.
The power of the smaller ships began to fail as their accumulators
became discharged under the awful drain of the battle, and vessel after
vessel of the Triplanetary fleet was hurled into nothingness by the
concentrated blasts of the pirates' rays. But the Triplanetary forces
had one great advantage. In furious haste the Service men had been
altering the controls of the dirigible atomic torpedoes, so that they
would respond to ultra-wave control; and, few in number though they
were, each was highly effective.
A hard-eyed observer, face almost against his plate and both hands and
both feet manipulating controls, hurled the first torpedo. Propelling
rockets viciously aflame, it twisted and looped around the incandescent
rods of destruction so thickly and starkly outlined, under perfect
control; unaffected by the hideous distortion of all ether-borne
signals. Through a pirate screen it went, and under the terrific blast
of its detonation the entire midsection of the stricken battleship
vanished. It should have been out, cold--but to the amazement of the
observers, both ends kept on fighting with scarcely lessened power! Two
more of the frightful bombs had to be launched--each remaining section
had to be blown to bits--before those terrible beams went out! Not a man
in that great fleet had even an inkling of the truth; that those great
vessels, those awful engines of destruction, did not contain a single
living creature: that they were manned and fought by automatons; robots
controlled by keen-eyed, space-hardened veterans inside the pirates'
planetoid!
But they were to receive an inkling of it. As ship after ship of the
pirate fleet was destroyed, Roger realized that his navy was beaten, and
forthwith all his surviving vessels darted toward the apex of the cone,
where the heaviest battleships were stationed. There each hurled itself
upon a Triplanetary warship, crashing to its own destruction, but in
that destruction insuring the loss of one of the heaviest vessels of the
enemy. Thus passed the _Fearless_, and twenty of the finest space-ships
of the fleet as well. But the ranking officer assumed command, the
war-cone was re-formed, and, yawning maw to the fore, the great
formation shot toward the pirate stronghold, now near at hand. It again
launched its stupendous cylinder of annihilation, but even as the mighty
defensive screens of the planetoid flared into incandescently furious
defense, the battle was interrupted and pirates and Triplanetarians
learned alike that they were not alone in the ether.
Space became suffused with a redly impenetrable opacity, and through
that indescribable pall there came reaching huge arms of force
incredible; writhing, coruscating beams of power which glowed a baleful,
although almost imperceptible, red. A vessel of unheard-of armament and
power, hailing from the then unknown solar system of Nevia, had come to
rest in that space. For months her commander had been searching for one
ultra-precious substance. Now his detectors had found it; and, feeling
neither fear of Triplanetarian weapons nor reluctance to sacrifice those
thousands of Triplanetarian lives, he was about to take it!