The missile struck, and in the instant of its striking the coldly
brilliant stars were blotted from sight in a vast globe of intolerable
flame. The pirate's shield had failed, and under the cataclysmic force
of that horrible detonation the entire nose section of the enemy vessel
had flashed into incandescent vapor and had added itself to the rapidly
expanding cloud of fire. As it expanded, the cloud cooled. Its fierce
glare subsided to a rosy glow, through which the stars again began to
shine. It faded, cooled, darkened, revealing the crippled hulk of the
pirate ship. She was still fighting; but ineffectually, now that all
her heavy forward batteries were gone.
"Needlers, fire at will!" barked Kinnison, and even that feeble
resistance was ended. Keen-eyed needle-ray men, working at spy-ray
visiplates, bored hole after hole into the captive, seeking out and
destroying the control-panels of the remaining beams and screens.
"Pull 'er up!" came the next order. The two ships of space flashed
together--the yawning, blasted-open fore end of the once cigar-shaped
raider solidly against the _Brittania's_ armored side. A great port
opened.
"Now, Bus, it's all yours. Classification to three places--A point A A.
They're human or approximately so. Board and storm!"
Back of that port there had been massed a hundred fighting men--dressed
in full panoply of space armor, armed with the deadliest weapons known
to the science of the age, and powered by the gigantic accumulators of
their ship. At their head was Sergeant VanBuskirk, six and a half feet
of Dutch-Valerian dynamite, who had fallen out of Valeria's cadet corps
only because of an innate inability to master the intricacies of higher
mathematics. Now the attackers swept forward in a black-and-silver wave.
Four squatly massive semiportable projectors crashed down upon their
magnetic clamps and in the fierce ardor of their beams the thick
bulkhead before them ran the gamut of the spectrum and puffed outward.
Some score of defenders were revealed, likewise clad in armor, and
battle again was joined. Explosive and solid bullets detonated against
and ricocheted from that highly efficient armor, the beams of DeLameter
hand projectors splashed in torrents of man-made lightning off its
protective fields of force.
But that skirmish was soon over. The semiportables, whose vast energies
no ordinary personal armor could withstand, were brought up and clamped
down; and in their holocaust of vibratory destruction all life vanished
from the pirates' compartment.
"One more bulkhead and we're in their control room!" VanBuskirk cried.
"Beam it down!"
But when the beams pressed their switches nothing happened. The pirates
had managed to jury rig a screen generator, and with it had cut the
power beams behind the invading forces. Also they had cut loopholes in
this bulkhead, through which, in frantic haste, they were trying to
bring heavy projectors of their own into alignment.
"Bring up the ferral paste," the sergeant commanded. "Get up as close
to that wall as you can, so they can't blast us!"
The paste--an ultra-modern development of thermite--was brought up and
the giant Dutchman himself troweled it on in furious swings, from floor
up and around in a huge arc and back down to floor. He fired it, and
simultaneously some of the enemy gunners managed to angle a projector
sharply enough to reach the farther ranks of the enforcement men. Then
mingled the flashing, scintillating, gassy glare of the thermite and
the raving energy of the pirates' beam to make of that confined space a
veritable inferno.
* * * * *
But the paste had done its work, and as the semicircle of wall fell out
the soldiers of the Lens leaped through the hole in the still-glowing
wall to struggle hand to hand against the pirates, now making a
desperate last stand. The semiportables and other heavy ordnance
powered from the _Brittania's_ accumulators were, of course, useless.
Pistols were ineffective against the pirates' armor of hard alloy; hand
rays were equally impotent against its defensive shields.
Now heavy hand grenades began to rain down among the combatants,
blowing enforcement men and no few pirates to bits. For the outlaw
chiefs cared nothing that they killed some of their own men, if in
so doing they could take a proportionately greater toll of the law.
And worse, a crew of gunners was swiveling a mighty projector around
upon its hastily improvised mount, to cover that sector of the great
compartment in which the policemen were most densely massed.
But the minions of the law had one remaining weapon, carried expressly
for this eventuality, and no mean weapon it proved to be. The space
ax--a combination and sublimation of battle ax, mace, and bludgeon--a
massively needle-pointed implement of potentialities limited only by
the physical strength and bodily agility of its wielder.
Now, all the men of the _Brittania's_ storming party were Valerians,
and therefore were big, hard, fast, and agile; and of them all, their
sergeant leader was the biggest, hardest, fastest, and most agile. When
the space-tempered apex of that thirty-pound monstrosity, driven by the
four-hundred-odd pounds of rawhide and whalebone that was his body,
struck pirate armor, that armor gave way. Nor did it matter whether
or not that hellish beak of steel struck a vital part after crashing
through the armor. Head or body, leg or arm, the net result was the
same; a man does not fight effectively when he is breathing space in
lieu of atmosphere.
VanBuskirk perceived the danger to his men in the slowly turning ray
projector, and for the first time called his chief.
"Kim," he spoke in level tones into his microphone. "Blast that delta
ray, will you?... Or have they cut this beam, so you can't hear me?...
Guess they have."
"They've cut our communication," he informed his troopers then. "Keep
them off me as much as you can and I'll attend to that delta-ray outfit
myself."
Aided by the massed interference of his men, he plunged toward the
threatening mechanism, hewing to right and to left as he strode.
Beside the temporary projector mount at last, he aimed a tremendous
blow at the man at the delta-ray controls; only to feel the ax flash
instantaneously to its mark and strike it with a gentle push, and to
see his intended victim float effortlessly away from the blow. The
pirate commander had played his last card: VanBuskirk floundered, not
only weightless, but inertialess as well!
But the huge Dutchman's mind, while not mathematical, was even faster
than his lightninglike muscles, and not for nothing had he spent
arduous weeks in inertialess tests of strength and skill. Hooking feet
and legs around a convenient wheel, he seized the enemy operator and
jammed his helmeted head down between the base of the mount and the
long, heavy steel lever by means of which it was turned. Then, throwing
every ounce of his wonderful body into the effort, he braced both feet
against the projector's grim barrel and heaved. The helmet flew apart
like an eggshell; blood and brains gushed out in nauseous blobs. But
the delta-ray projector was so jammed that it would not soon again
become a threat.
Then VanBuskirk drew himself across the room toward the main control
panel of the warship. Officer after officer he pushed aside, then
reversed two double-throw switches, restoring gravity and inertia to
the riddled cruiser.
* * * * *
In the meantime the tide of battle had continued in favor of
enforcement. Few survivors though there were of the black-and-silver
force, of the pirates there were still fewer, fighting now a desperate
and hopeless defensive. But in this combat quarter was not, _could_
not be thought of, and Sergeant VanBuskirk again waded into the fray.
Four times more his horribly effective hybrid weapon descended like
the irresistible hammer of Thor, cleaving and crushing its way through
steel and flesh and bone. Then, striding to the control board, he
manipulated switches and dials, then again spoke evenly to Kinnison.
"You can hear me now, can't you?... All mopped up. Come and get the
dope!"
The specialists, headed by Chief Technician LaVerne Thorndyke, had been
waiting strainingly for that word for minutes. Now they literally flew
at their tasks, in furious haste, but following rigidly and in perfect
coördination a prearranged schedule. Every control and lead, every bus
bar and immaterial beam of force was traced and checked. Instruments
and machines were dismantled; sealed mechanisms were ruthlessly torn
apart by jacks or sliced open with cutting beams. And everywhere,
everything and every movement was being photographed, charted, and
diagramed.
"Getting the idea now, Kim," the chief technician said finally, during
a brief lull in his work. "A sweet system----"
"Look at this!" a mechanic interrupted. "Here's a machine that's all
shot to pieces!"
The shielding cover had been torn from a monstrous fabrication of
metal, apparently a motor or generator of an exceedingly complex type.
The insulation of its coils and windings had fallen away in charred
fragments; its copper had melted down in sluggish, viscous streams.
"That's what we've been looking for," Thorndyke declared. "Check those
leads! Alpha!"
"Seven-three-nine-four!" And the minutely careful study went on until:
"That's enough; we've got everything we need now. Have you draftsmen
and photographers got everything down solid?"
"On the boards!" and "In the cans!" rapped out the two reports as one.
"Then let's go!"
"And go _fast_!" Kinnison ordered, brusquely. "I'm afraid that we're
going to run out of time as it is!"
All hands hurried back into the _Brittania_, paying no attention to
the bodies littering the decks. So desperate was the emergency, each
man knew, that nothing could be done about the dead, whether friend or
foe. Every resource of mechanism, of brain and of brawn, must needs
be strained to the utmost if they themselves were not soon to be in
similar case.
"Can you talk, Nels?" demanded Kinnison of his communications officer,
even before the air lock had closed.
"No, sir. They're blanketing us plenty," that worthy replied instantly.
"Space's so full of static that you couldn't drive a power beam through
it, let alone a communicator. Couldn't talk direct, anyway. Look where
we are." He pointed out in the tank their present location.
"Hm-m-m. We couldn't have got much farther away from Earth without
jumping the galaxy entirely. Boskone got a warning, either from
that ship back there or from the disturbance. They are undoubtedly
concentrating on us now. One of them will spear us with a tractor, just
as sure as hell's a man-trap----"
* * * * *
The fledgling commander rammed both hands into his pockets and thought
in black intensity. He _must_ get this data back to base. But how?
_HOW?_ Henderson was already driving the vessel back toward the solar
system with every iota of her inconceivable top speed, but it was out
of the question even to hope that she would ever get there. The life
of the _Brittania_ was now, he was coldly certain, to be measured
in hours--and all too scant measure, even of them. For there were
hundreds of pirate vessels tearing through the void, forming a gigantic
net to cut off her return to base. Fast though she was, one of that
barricading horde would certainly manage to clamp a tracer ray upon
her--and when that happened her flight was done.
Nor could she fight. She had conquered one first-class war vessel of
the public enemy, it was true; but at what awful cost her captain knew
only too well. The prodigious drain of power had almost emptied her
accumulators. Also, and worse, the refractories of her main projectors
were burned away practically to the shells. Without vastly heavier
bracing fields than the _Brittania_ carried, no substance, however
stable, could stand up long under such hellish loads as they had had to
handle.
The Q-gun was as useless as a fountain pen without full-driven
offensive beams. One fresh vessel, similar to the one they had just
left, could very easily blast his crippled mount out of space. Nor
would there be only one. Within a space of minutes after the attachment
of a tracer ray, the enforcement vessel would be surrounded by the
cream of Boskone's fighters. There was apparently only one way out
offering any chance at all of success; and slowly, thoughtfully, and
finally grimly, young Vice Commander Kinnison--now and briefly Captain
Kinnison--decided to take it.
"Everybody open your communicators and listen!" he ordered. "We
must get this information back to base, and we can't do it in the
_Brittania_. The pirates are bound to catch us, and our chance in
another fight is exactly zero. We'll have to abandon ship and take to
the lifeboats, in the hope that at least one of us will be able to get
through their lines.
"The technicians and specialists will take all the data they
got--information, descriptions, diagrams, pictures, everything--boil it
down, and put it on a spool of tape. They will make thirty-nine copies
of it, since there are just forty of us left, and one spool will be
given to each man.
"There will be twenty boats, two men to a boat. We will start launching
them after we have gone as far toward base as it is safe to go in this
ship. Once away, use very little detectable power, or, better yet,
no power at all, until you are sure that the pirates have chased the
_Brittania_ a good many parsecs away from where you are. From then on
you'll be strictly on your own. Do it any way you can; but some way,
_any_ way, get your spool back to base. There's no use in me trying to
impress you with the importance of this stuff; you know what it means
as well as I do.
"Boat mates will be drawn by lot. The quartermaster will write all our
names on slips of paper and draw them out of a helmet two at a time.
The only exception to this is that if two navigators, such as Henderson
and I, are drawn together, both names go back into the helmet. Get to
work!"
* * * * *
Twice the name of Kinnison came out together with that of another
skilled in astronautics and was replaced. The third time, however,
it came out paired with VanBuskirk, to the manifest joy of the giant
policeman and to the approval of the crowd as well.
"That was a break for me, chief!" the sergeant called over the cheers
of his fellows. "I'm dead sure of getting back now!"
"Pretty strong talk, I'm afraid, but I don't know of any one I'd rather
have at my back than you," Kinnison replied, with a boyish grin.
The pairings were made; DeLameters, spare batteries, and other
equipment were checked and tested; the spools of tape were sealed in
their corrosionproof containers and distributed; and Kinnison sat
talking with the chief technician.
"So they've solved the problem of the really efficient reception and
conversion of cosmic radiation!" Kinnison whistled softly through his
teeth. "And a sun--even a small one--radiates the energy given off by
the annihilation of one-to-several million tons of matter per second!
_Some_ power!"
"That's the story, skip, and it explains completely why their ships
have been so much superior to ours. They could have installed faster
drives even than the _Brittania's_. They probably will, now that it has
become necessary. Also, if the bus bars in that receptor-converter had
been a few square centimeters larger in cross section, they could have
held their wall shield, even against our duodec bomb. Then what? They
had plenty of intake, but not quite enough distribution."
"They have atomic motors, the same as ours, just as big and just as
efficient," Kinnison cogitated. "But those motors are all we _have_
got, while they use them, and at full power, too, simply as first-stage
exciters for the cosmic-energy screens. Blinding blue blazes, what
power! Some of us _have_ to get back, Verne. If we don't, Boskone's got
the whole galaxy by the tail, and civilization is sunk without a trace."
"I'll say so; but also I'll say this for those of us who don't get
back--it won't be for lack of trying. Well, I'd better go check up on
my boat. If I don't see you again, Kim old man, clear ether!"
They shook hands briefly and Thorndyke strode away. En route, however,
he paused beside the quartermaster and signaled to him to disconnect
his communicator.
"Clever lad, Allerdyce!" Thorndyke whispered, with a grin. "Kinda
loaded the dice a trifle once or twice, didn't you? I don't think
anybody but me smelled a rat, though. Certainly neither the skipper nor
Henderson did, or you'd 've had it to do over again."
"At least one team has got to get through," the quartermaster replied,
quietly and obliquely, "and the strongest teams we can muster will find
the going none too easy. Any team made up of strength and weakness is
a weak team. Captain Kinnison, our only Lensman, is, of course, the
best man aboard this buzz buggy. Who would you pick for No. 2?"
"VanBuskirk, of course, the same as you did. I wasn't criticizing you,
man, I was complimenting you; and thanking you, in a roundabout way,
for giving me Henderson. He's got plenty of what it takes, too."
"It wasn't 'VanBuskirk, of course,' by any means," the quartermaster
rejoined. "It's mighty hard to figure either you or Henderson third, to
say nothing of fourth, in any kind of company, however fast--mentally
or physically. However, it seemed to me that you fitted in better with
the pilot. I could hand pick only two teams without getting caught
at it--you spotted me as it was--but I think that I picked the two
strongest teams possible. At least one of you will get through, for
all the tea there is in China. If none of you four can make it, nobody
could."
"Well, here's hoping, anyway. Thanks again. See you again sometime,
maybe. Clear ether!"
Chief Pilot Henderson had, a few minutes since, changed the course of
the cruiser from right-line flight to fantastic, zigzag leaps through
space, and now he turned frowningly to Kinnison.
"We'd better begin dumping them out pretty soon now, I think," he
suggested. "We haven't detected anything yet, but according to the
figures it won't be long now; and after they get their traps set we'll
run out of time mighty quick."
"Right."
And then, one after another, but even so several light years apart in
space, eighteen of the small boats were launched into the void. In
the control room there were left only Henderson and Thorndyke with
VanBuskirk and Kinnison, who were to be the last to leave.
"All right, Hen, now we'll try out your roulette-wheel director by
chance," Kinnison said, then went on, in answer to Thorndyke's
questioning glance. "A bouncing ball on an oscillating table. Every
time the ball caroms off a pin it shifts the course through a fairly
large, but entirely unpredictable angle. Pure chance--we thought it
might cross them up a little."
Hair-line beams were connected from panels to pins, and soon four
interested spectators looked on while, with no human guidance, the
_Brittania_ lurched and leaped even more erratically than she had done
under Henderson's direction. Now, however, the ever-changing vectors of
her course were as unexpected and surprising to her passengers as to
any possible external observer.
* * * * *
One more lifeboat left the enforcement vessel, and only the Lensman
and his giant aide remained. While they were waiting the required few
minutes before their own departure, Kinnison spoke.
"Bus, there's one more thing we ought to do, and I've just figured out
how to do it. We don't want this ship to fall into the pirates' hands
intact, as there's a lot of stuff in her that would probably be as new
to them as it was to us. They know that we got the best of that ship of
theirs, but they don't know what we did or how we did it. On the other
hand, we want her to drive on as long as possible after we leave her.
The farther away from us she gets, the better our chance of making our
get-away.
"We should have something that will touch off those duodec torpedoes
we have left--all seven of them at once--at the first touch of a spy
beam; both to keep them from studying her and to do a little damage
if possible. They'll go inert and pull her up close as soon as they
get a tracer on her. Of course, we can't do it by stopping the spy ray
altogether, with a spy screen, but I think I can establish an R7TX7M
field outside our regular screens that will interfere with a TX7 just
enough--say one tenth of one per cent--to actuate a relay in the
field-supporting beam."
"One tenth of one per cent of one milliwatt is one microwatt, isn't
it? Not much power, I'd say, but that's a little out of my line. You
can do it, and do it before we run out of time, or you wouldn't have
suggested it. Go ahead. I'll observe while you're busy."
Thus it came about that, a few minutes later, the immense sky rover
of the Galactic Patrol darted along entirely untenanted. And it was
her nonhuman helmsman, operating solely by chance, that prolonged the
chase far more than even the most optimistic member of her crew could
have hoped. For the pilots of the pirate pursuers were intelligent, and
assumed that their quarry also was directed by intelligence. Therefore,
they aimed their vessels for points toward which the _Brittania_ should
logically go; only and maddeningly to watch her go somewhere else.
Senselessly, she hurled herself directly toward enormous suns,
once grazing one so nearly that the harrying pirates gasped at the
foolhardiness of such exposure to lethal radiation. For no reason at
all she shot straight backward, almost into a cluster of pirate craft,
only to dash off on another unexpected tangent before the startled
outlaws could lay a beam against her.
But finally she did it once too often. Flying between two vessels, she
held her line the merest fraction of a second too long. Two tractors
lashed out and the three vessels flashed together, zone to zone to
zone. Then, instantly, the two pirate ships became inert, to anchor in
space their wildly fleeing prey. Then spy beams licked out, to explore
the _Brittania's_ interior.
* * * * *
At the touch of those beams, light and delicate as they were, the
relay clicked and the torpedoes let go. Those frightful shells were
so designed and so charged that one of them could demolish any inert
structure known to man. What of seven? There was an explosion to
stagger the imagination and which must be left to the imagination,
since no words in any language of the galaxy can describe it adequately.
The _Brittania_, literally blown to bits, partially fused and even
partially volatilized by the inconceivable fury of the outburst, was
hurled in all directions in streamers, droplets, chunks, and masses,
each component part urged away from the center of pressure by the
ragingly compressed gases of detonation. Furthermore, each component
was now, of course, inert and therefore capable of giving up its full
measure of kinetic energy to any inert object with which it should come
in contact.
One mass of wreckage, so fiercely sped that its victim had time neither
to dodge nor become inertialess, crashed full against the side of
the nearer attacker. Meteorite screens flared brilliantly violet and
went down. The full-driven wall shield held; but so terrific was the
concussion that what few of the crew were not killed outright would
take no interest in current events for many hours to come.
The other, slightly more distant attacker was more fortunate. Her
commander had had time to render her inertialess, and as she rode
lightly away, ahead of the outermost, most tenuous fringe of vapor, he
reported succinctly to his headquarters all that had transpired. There
was a brief interlude of silence.
Then a speaker gave tongue. "Helmuth, speaking for Boskone," snapped
from it. "Your report is neither complete nor conclusive. Find, study,
photograph, and bring in to headquarters every fragment and particle
pertaining to the wreckage, paying particular attention to all bodies
or portions thereof.
"Helmuth, speaking for Boskone!" roared from the general-wave
unscrambler. "Commanders of all vessels, of every class and tonnage,
upon whatever mission bound, attention! The vessel referred to in our
previous message has been destroyed, but it is feared that some or all
of her personnel were allowed to escape. Every unit of that personnel
must be killed before he has opportunity to communicate with any
patrol base. Therefore cancel your present orders, whatever they may
be, and proceed at maximum blast to the region previously designated.
Scour that entire volume of space. Beam out of existence every vessel
whose papers do not account unquestionably for every intelligent being
aboard. Investigate every possible avenue of escape. More detailed
orders will be given each of you upon your nearer approach to the
neighborhood under search."