There was a second slug-creature behind the first. It crawled or writhed close to the leader. This first pair moved eagerly toward the space-yacht. Three others came behind the first two. Two more came behind them. That seemed to be the entire group. They came squirming and crawling through the jungle-growths. They made no sounds. But men in space-suits make no sounds in air, either. They probably spoke freely enough to each other and to the ship by suit-radio—but they wouldn’t speak, at that. They’d grunt and hoot and moo and bellow. They made their way, squirming, to the Marintha’s entrance-port. The first of them up-ended itself against the yacht’s metal sides. It fumbled to solve the problem of the fastening.
Howell fired. At the same instant, Breen and Ketch fired also. Then Karen’s light little rifle let go its bolt. The thing up-ended against the yacht’s hull seemed almost to fly to pieces. Horrible greenish-yellow flesh ripped open.
Howell fired again at another target. He scored a hit, but the things reacted swiftly. Instantly one of them fired back. A blaster-bolt flashed past Howell’s shoulder. He shot again. The rasping crackle of Karen’s rifle sounded in his ears. He knew that Breen and Ketch were shooting ruthlessly into the squirming confusion where the slug-creatures had been bunched. But they didn’t stay bunched. Individuals slithered with astonishing speed into the jungle. Then incandescent blaster-bolts came back, searching for the humans they’d believed murdered beforehand. It took them only instants to change their roles from eager investigators—looters—to targets for four rifles, and then to definitely competent jungle-fighters.
There was one dead Thing, blown almost apart but still writhing, and another whose suit-helmet was shattered. It made high-pitched screaming noises, squirming blindly. It fired its weapon without aim and without ceasing. But then the others had vanished, and almost immediately the four humans were under fire from places not between them and the slug-ship.
The reason was instantly apparent. Intolerable brightness flamed. The flexible things at the slug-ship’s forward part, the things that looked like eye-stalks, twisted upon themselves. They pointed. From one of them a blue-white ball of flame rushed out. It struck a jungle tree and the tree exploded where it hit. A lightning-ball of flame darted from the other tube. It also hit a jungle tree, which exploded like the first.
The slug-ship, obviously, was not abandoning its landing party. It was fighting in defence of its crew-creatures on the ground. In open country it would have been pure, raw, naked destruction. Here, in jungle, a single bolt destroyed only the object it struck, which broke the bolt and released its electric flame. But the bolts came out in unending twin streams.
The seeming eye-stalks poured them out almost as if they were hoses spouting star-temperature flames. It was basic to their deadliness that anything broke them—and that where they broke there was nothing left but steam or vapour. If one struck a thick and heavy tree trunk, all its energy was released exactly there. If one happened to encounter a sapling, it detonated no less violently. If this steady, intolerable sequence of lightning-bolts continued, it would incinerate all the jungle between twin, blasted-out lanes of smoking, steaming, wildly flaming wreckage to which the ship’s artillery-sized blasters added every instant.
It was a highly efficient system for handling combat problems aground. It was perfectly designed for the destruction of Howell and Karen and Ketch and Breen. There seemed to be no possible chance that it could fail.
CHAPTER FIVE
It was a very nasty sort of fighting. The slug-ship creatures had formed a sort of perimeter, though a thin one, within which the Marinthas folk were enclosed. The goggled, writhing monsters shot furiously at, spots where the humans lay hidden, to point out their position to the ship. The rubbery, squirming, seeming eye-stalks of the slug-ship flung giant-sized bolts toward the indicated targets—but every time a ball-lightning bolt struck anything, it exploded. Anything! And that was the one favourable item in the current situation, so far as the humans were concerned.
The ball-lightning bolts did not crash through the jungle as artillery shells would have done, to explode near the humans. They didn’t snap through foliage and boughs and tree-trunks on the way. The lightning-bolts were not projectiles; they were energy-weapons. If even the biggest of blaster-bolts struck a half-inch tree branch, it burst and all its monstrous destructiveness was wasted.
There was fire, of course. There was the incineration of the object struck. But the trees had to be cleared away for the weapons to have range. They had to do the clearing. To destroy something a hundred yards away, in jungle, the giant blaster-bolt launcher had to destroy everything in between it and its final target. To make an open space, every growing thing had separately to be destroyed.
But there could be no shield against the lightning-bolts. A single one, striking the Marintha far from squarely, had crippled her. That was in space. Aground here, no standing growth could survive a hit. But it was necessary to make it hit on every standing growth. The incandescent balls poured out, second after second and minute after minute. Two lanes of smoking devastation began and grew away into the jungle from the two ship-weapons. Steam and flying fragments flew from the detonated jungle trees. The four humans were caught between the two lanes of death, whose inner edges exploded violently and grew wider, always toward each other. When they met, there would be nothing alive anywhere near the meeting-place. Certainly no humans.
Breen and Ketch seemed to have gone primitive, back to the days of savage wars. They used their weapons ferociously. They exposed themselves recklessly to fire at the armoured slug-things. They could be blasted, and any wound must be a fatal one as their suits lost whatever weird atmosphere the creatures required. Breen, particularly, had the air of a baresark made fearless and mad by the zest of battle. He killed a slug-thing, and howled in triumph. Ketch fired more sanely. Karen, deadly pale, used her light rifle steadily making sure of her aim at every shot.
Howell seemed to be the one who had lost his head. He crawled a little distance apart to where he could fire between still-standing trees at the slug-ship. Nothing, of course, could pave been more futile than to fire at a ship with a mere sporting weapon. But he was firing at the muzzles of the twin, squirming weapons on the ship. He aimed at the round openings out of which the flaming bolts emerged. The point was that the bolts were not missiles but energy-weapons—ball-lightning. Anything which broke a blaster-bolt pattern would detonate it. They had been burst by little boughs as well as by tree trunks. It might be possible to burst one even by the tiny bolt of a hunting rifle. In fact, it was bound to be possible.
One of Howell’s rifle-bolts did detonate a lightning-bolt ball of thousands of times its volume. It was then barely out of the tube which ejected it. He fired again and again and again, wholly absorbed and with his rifle braced for the utmost of steadiness.
Then a second bolt from Howell’s rifle hit a blast-ball. It happened to hit it just right. It went into the yawning mouth of the left-hand tube that spat destruction. It struck a giant lightning-ball just formed and not yet flung out. It hit far, far back in the generator of lightning-bolts. It hit inside the slug-ship.