The young commander clenched his fists and swore a startled deep–space oath as red lights flashed and alarmbells clanged. His screens were leaking like sieves—practically down—needle after needle of force incredible stabbing at and through his wall–shield—four stations gone already and more going l
"Scrap the plan!" he yelled into his microphone. "Open everything to absolute top—short out all resistors—give 'em everything you can put through the bare bus–bars. Dalhousie, cut all your repellors, bung us right up to their zone. All you beamers, concentrate on Area Five. Break down those screens!' Kinnison was hunched rigidly over his panel, his voice came grittily through locked teeth. "Get through to that wallshield so I can use this Q–gun!"
Under the redoubled force of the Britannia's attack the defenses of the enemy began to fail. Kinnison's hands flew over his controls. A port opened in the Patrol–ship's armored side and an ugly snout protruded—the projector–ringed muzzle of a squat and monstrous cannon. From its projector bands there leaped out with the velocity of light a tube of quasi–solid force which was in effect a continuation of the gun's grim barrel, a tube which crashed through the weakened third screen of the enemy with a spacewracking shock and struck savagely, with writhing, twisting thrusts, at the second. Aided by the massed concentration of the Britannia's every battery of short–range beams, it went through. And through the first. Now it struck the very wall–shield of the outlaw—that impregnable screen which, designed to bear the brunt of any possible inert collision, had never been pierced or ruptured by any material substance, however applied.
To this inner defense the immaterial gun–barrel clung. Simultaneously the tractor beams, hitherto exerting only a few dynes of force, stiffened into unbreakable, inflexible rods of energy, binding the two ships of apace into one rigid system, each, relative to the other, immovable.
Then Kinnison's flying finger tip touched a button and the Q–gun spoke. From its sullen throat there erupted a huge torpedo. Slowly the giant projectile crept along, watched in awe and amazement by the officers of both vessels. For to those spacehardened veterans the velocity of light was a veritable crawl, and here was a thing that would require four or five whole seconds to cover a mere ten kilometers of distance.
But, although slow, this bomb weight prove dangerous, therefore the pirate commander threw his every resource into attempts to cut the tube of force, to blast away from the tractor beams, to explode the sluggish missile before it could reach his wall–shield. In vain, for the Britannia's every beam was set to protect the torpedo and the mighty rods of energy without whose grip the inertialess mass of the enemy vessel would offer no resistance whatever to the force of the proposed explosion.
Slowly, so slowly, as the age–long seconds crawled into eternity, there extended from Patrol ship almost to pirate wall a raging, white–hot pillar— the gases of combustion of the propellant heptadetonite—ahead of which there rushed the Q–gun's tremendous shell with its horridly destructive freight. What would happen? Could even the almost immeasurable force of that frightful charge of atomic explosive break down a wall–shield designed to withstand the cosmic assaults of meteoric missiles? And what would happen if that wall–screen held?
In spite of himself Kinnison's mind insisted upon painting the ghastly picture, the awful explosion, the pirate's screen still intact, the forward– rushing gases driven backward along the tube of force. The bare metal of the Q– gun's breech, he knew, was not and could not be reenforced by the infinitely stronger, although immaterial shields of pure energy which protected the hull, and no conceivable substance, however resistant, could impede save momentarily the unimaginable forces about to be unleashed.
Nor would there be time to release the Q–tube after the explosion but before the Brittania's own destruction, for if the enemy's shield stayed up for even a fraction of a second the unthinkable pressure of the blast would propagate backward through the already densely compressed gases in the tube, would sweep away as though it were nothing the immensely thick metallic barrier of the gun– breech, and would wreak within the bowels of the Patrol vessel a destruction even more complete than that intended for the foe.
Nor were his men in better case. Each knew that this was the climactic instant of his existence, that life itself hung poised upon the issue of the next split second. Hurry it up! Snap into it! Will that crawling, creeping thing never strike?
Some prayed briefly, some swore bitterly, but prayers and curses were alike unconscious and had precisely the same meaning—each—each man, white of face and grim of jaw, clenched his hands and waited, tense and straining, for the impact.
3: In the Lifeboats
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 horrific 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 raider solidly against the Brittania's armored side. A great port opened.
"Now, Bus, it's all yours. Classification to six places, straight A's— 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 Valerian 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 semi–portable 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 semi–portables, 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 beamers 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 loop–holes in the 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!"