"Radar contact, sir! The screen is crazy with blips!"
"Could it be window?"
"No, sir. The density index indicates spacecraft. High value in the
chlorine lines...."
"Eridans!" cried Ivy.
"What's the range, Celia?" demanded Strike. "And how many of them are
there?"
The sound of the calculator came through the grill. Then Celia replied:
"Range 170,000 miles, and there are more than fifty and less than two
hundred. That's the best I can do from this far away. They seem to
have some sort of radiation net out and they are moving into spread
formation."
Strike cursed. "They've spotted us and they want to scoop us in with
that force net! Damn that group-mind of theirs ... it makes for uncanny
co-ordination!" He turned back to the communicator. "Cob! Are you on?"
"Right here, Captain," came Cob Whitley's voice from the bridge.
"Shift into second-order! We'll have to try and run their net!"
"Yes, sir," Whitley snapped.
"Communications!" called Strike.
"Communications here."
"Notify Luna Base we have made contact. Give their numbers, course, and
speed!"
Ivy could feel her heart pounding under her blouse. Her face was
deadly pale, mouth pinched and drawn. This was the first time in battle
for any of them ... and she dug her fingernails into her palms trying
not to be afraid.
Strykalski was rapping out his orders with machine-gun rapidity, making
ready to fight his ship if need be ... and against lop-sided odds. But
years of training were guiding him now.
"Gun deck!"
A feminine voice replied.
"Check your accumulators. We may have to fight. Have the gun-pointers
get the plots from Radar. And load fish into all tubes."
"Yes, sir!" the woman rapped out.
"Radar!"
"Right here, Skipper!"
"We're going into second-order, Celia. Use UV Radar and keep tabs on
them."
"Yes, Captain."
Strike turned to Ivy Hendricks. "Let's get back to the bridge, Ivy.
It's going to be a hell of a rough half hour!"
As they turned to go, all the pin-points of light that were the stars
vanished, only to reappear in distorted groups ahead and behind the
ship. They were in second-order flight again, and traveling above light
speed. Within seconds, contact would be made with the advance units of
the alien fleet.
Old Aphrodisiac readied herself for war.
* * * * *
Like a maddened bull terrier, the old monitor charged at the Eridan
horde. Within the black hulls strange, tentacled creatures watched
her in scanners that were activated by infrared light. The chlorine
atmosphere grew tense as the Tellurian warship drove full at the
pulsating net of interlocked force lines. Parsecs away, on a frozen
world were a dull red shrunken sun shone dimly through fetid air,
the thing that was the group-mind of the Eridans guided the thousand
leathery tentacles that controlled the hundred and fifty black
spaceships. The soft quivering bulk of it throbbed with excitement as
it prepared to kill the tiny Tellurian thing that dared to threaten its
right to conquest.
Old Lover-Girl tried gallantly to pierce the strange trap. She failed.
The alien weapons were too strange, too different from anything her
builders could have imagined or prepared her to face. The net sucked
the life from her second-order generators, and she slowed, like the
victim of a nightmare. Now rays of heat reached out for her, grazing
her flanks as she turned and twisted. One touched her atmospheric fins
and melted them into slowly congealing globes of steel glowing with a
white heat. She fought back with whorls of atomic fire that sped from
her rifles to wreak havoc among her attackers.
Being non-entities in themselves, and only limbs of the single
mentality that rested secure on its home world, the Eridans lacked the
vicious will to live that drove the Tellurian warship and her crew. But
their numbers wore her down, cutting her strength with each blow that
chanced to connect.
Torpedoes from the tubes that circled her beam found marks out in
space and leathery aliens died, their black ships burst asunder by the
violence of new atoms being created from old.
But there were too many. They hemmed her in, heat rays ever slashing,
wounding her. Strykalski fought her controls, cursing her, coaxing
her. Damage reports were flowing into the flying bridge from every
point in the monitor's body. Lover-Girl was being hurt ... hurt badly.
The second-order drive was damaged, not beyond repair, but out of
commission for at least six hours. And they couldn't last six hours.
They couldn't last another ten minutes. It was only the practiced hands
of her Captain and crew that kept the _Cleopatra_ alive....
"We're caught, Ivy!" Strike shouted to the girl over the noises of
battle. "She can't stand much more of this!"
Cob was screaming at the gun-pointers through the open communicator
circuit, his blood heated by the turbulent cacophony of crackling rays
and exploding torpedoes. "Hit 'em! Damn it! Damn it, hit 'em now! Dead
ahead! Hit 'em again!..."
Ivy stumbled across the throbbing deck to stand at Strykalski's side.
"The hyper drive!" she yelled, "The hyper drive!"
It was a chance. It was the _only_ chance ... for Lover-Girl and Ivy
and Cob and Celia ... for all of them. He had to chance it. "Ivy!" he
called over his shoulder, "Check with Engineering! See if the thing's
hooked into the surge circuit!"
She struggled out of the flying bridge and down the ramp toward the
engine deck. Strike and Cob stayed and sweated and cursed and fought.
It seemed that she would never report.
At last the communicator began to flash red. Strike opened the circuit
with his free hand. "All right?" he demanded with his heart in his
throat.
"_Try it!_" Ivy shouted back.
Strykalski lurched from his chair as another ray caught the ship for an
instant and heated a spot on the wall to a cherry red. Gods! he prayed
fervently. Let it work!
A movement of the ship threw him to the deck. He struggled to his
feet and across to the jerry-rigged switchboard that controlled the
hyper drive's warp field. With a prayer on his lips, he slapped at the
switches with wild abandon....
* * * * *
The sudden silence was like a physical blow. Strike staggered to the
port and looked out. No alien ships filled the void with crisscrossing
rays. No torpedoes flashed. The _Cleopatra_ was alone, floating in
star-flecked emptiness.
There were no familiar constellations. The stars were spread evenly
across the ebony bowl of the sky, and they looked back at him with an
alien, icy disdain.
The realization that he stood with a tiny shell, an infinitesimal human
island lost in the vastness of a completely foreign cosmos broke with
an almost mind-shattering intensity over his brain!
He was conscious of Cob standing beside him, looking out into this
unknown universe and whispering in awe: "_We're_ the aliens here...."
Ivy Hendricks came into the bridge then, a haggard look around her
eyes. "I came up through the ventral blister," she said, "Bayne is down
there and he's having fits. There isn't a star in sight he recognizes
and the whole hull of the ship is _glowing_!"
Cob and Strykalski rushed back to the port, straining to see the
back-curving plates of the hull. Ivy was right. The metal, and to a
lesser extent, even the leaded glassteel of the port was covered with a
dim, dancing witchfire. It was as though the ship were being bombarded
by a continuous shower of microscopic fire bombs.
Whitley found refuge in his favorite expression. "Ye gods and little
catfish!"