“Did you see that?” Artemis whispered.
Kris came out of her fog. With weak fingers, she tapped her board. Thirty-four raiders no longer existed. Twenty-eight did not accelerate, decelerate or fire their lasers. Those warships acted as if everyone on them was dead. Could the radiation of the passing ray have slain the crews?
Kris thought it more than possible.
Two-thirds of the surviving raiders continued to fire their heavy lasers. The last third broke off the attack, turning away and accelerating. Their commanders must believe it was futile to engage the alien vessel.
“What is that thing?” Artemis whispered.
“I think we’re about to find out.”
Artemis glanced at the commander.
“I don’t think that’s a warship,” Kris said.
“What else could it be?”
“A planet-killer,” Kris said, softly.
Artemis’ eyes became huge. “What makes you say that?”
“The figures I’m seeing regarding the beam,” Kris said. “There’s no reason to build a beam that powerful if one meant to attack other ships. But if one meant to kill a planet…”
“That’s monstrous,” Artemis said. “Who would need that kind of weapon?”
“I have no idea.”
“What did the magnetic storm earlier have to do with the ship?”
“This is the greatest enigma I’ve ever seen,” Kris declared. “Who made that thing?”
Another hour passed. The surviving Wahhabis exhausted themselves firing at the neutroium-hulled planet-killer. One-by-one, those ships pulled away.
Nine of the raiders had other ideas.
“Are they going to ram the enemy?” Artemis asked.
“I think so.”
Kris winced at the first two impacts. The Wahhabi ships smashed against the fantastic neutroium vessel. The raiders simply disintegrated because of the speed. Scimitar armor, hull, concentrates, laser mirrors, coils, engines, personnel and everything else aboard flattened against the alien vessel and dashed outward in a circumference. The fifty-kilometer ship only shivered a little with each impact.
“Can the personnel inside the alien ship withstand those shocks?” Artemis asked.
“How heavy are those impacts?” Kris asked. “It looks like it should do something, but it seems to make no impression against the ship. The conductor in the control room probably can’t even feel the impacts.”
As the two Patrol officers watched from the outer system Laumer-Point, the remnants of the Wahhabi Home Fleet fled from the alien vessel. From Al Salam’s orbit, merchant marine and private ships began hard acceleration away.
Al Salam was a red-sand desert world. It contained many important relics from Earth and new ones discovered throughout the decades. Many Wahhabi citizens went on pilgrimage to Al Salam, and most of the fauna and creatures from Saudi Arabia on Earth had taken to the red sands of the desert world.
Al Salam was the political and religious center. Riyadh, its sister planet, was the manufacturing and food-producing capital of the Wahhabi Caliphate. Together, the two worlds represented one twelfth of the Wahhabi population and a full quarter of the Muslim star empire’s industrial might.
“Could the beam you recorded earlier truly damage an entire planet?” Artemis asked.
Kris didn’t answer. Despite the neutroium hull armor, she was reading a vast build-up of power over there.
Then it happened. A hot beam a full five kilometers wide fired from the alien vessel’s orifice. The red ray speared at Al Salam. It reached the planetary orbit in ten seconds and burned down through the atmosphere. The wattage was beyond phenomenal. The thick beam bored against the surface, churning through sand, rock and finally against the planetary crust. After fifty-nine kilometers of crustal rock, the beam reached Al Salam’s mantle.
There the rocks changed texture, made up of iron and magnesium combined with silicon and oxygen. It was called olivine rock, with a thickness of 2900 kilometers.
With incredible speed and destructive power, the teardrop ship’s beam sliced into and annihilated olivine rock. Such a thing should have been impossible. Yet, the beam churned and burned, digging into Al Salam until finally it reached the planetary core.
Because of the melting properties of the iron alloy core, the outer core was molten while the inner core was solid.
At this point, the beam quit.
On Al Salam, molten iron from the planetary core shot up to the surface, spitting onto the red sands like a super volcano geyser. Behind the molten iron followed hot olivine rock. Surface sand burned, atmospheric air ignited and havoc raged in a widening, billowing circumference.
In space, the giant ship minutely changed its trajectory. Minutes passed. Then, the beam flashed from the orifice and began drilling into Al Salam once more, repeating the performance in a new location hundreds of kilometers from the first planetary drilling.
“Can you tell what’s happening on the planet?” Artemis asked weakly.
“Yes,” Kris said in a soft voice. “Death and destruction. I finally understand why Al Gaza is hot and radioactive.”
“The planet-killer beamed into its core?” Artemis asked.
“There’s no other reasonable explanation,” Kris said.
“How long will it take the alien vessel to destroy all life on Al Salam?” Artemis asked.
“At the rate it’s firing, I imagine it will be done in hours.”
“Do you think the alien craft will attack Riyadh next?”
“Don’t you?”
Artemis stared at her dull-faced. “The ship means to destroy the heart of the Wahhabi Caliphate.”
“I think that’s right.”
Artemis shook her head. “What if the vessel heads for the Commonwealth?” the pilot asked in a horrified whisper. “What if it journeys to Earth?”
Kris gave the pilot a stricken gaze. “We have a new objective. We must race to Earth and warn them about this. Go, Lieutenant. Take us through the Laumer-Point. We have to get out of here.”
Osprey engaged its engines as Artemis warned the crew. Soon, the Laumer-Point became visible in space. The frigate headed straight for it.
As they neared the jump point, Kris’s board gave a warning beep.
“What’s wrong now?” Artemis asked in a panic.
Frowning, Kris adjusted her panel. For just a moment, her sensors showed a ship even farther out in the New Arabia System than they were. What was the vessel doing, and why had it been hidden until now?
As Osprey plunged toward the Laumer-Point, Kris’s fingers played across her board. Even as she attempted to learn more about the mysterious ship, it faded from her screen, just disappeared.
Kris ran a fast analysis on the ship’s dimensions. She’d been recording those brief seconds it had been visible. “This can’t be right,” she muttered.
Artemis gave her a worried glance.
“According to the computer,” Kris said, “I just saw a cloaked star cruiser.”
“The New Men,” Artemis whispered. “The planet-killer must belong to them.”
“How could a star cruiser have gotten into New Arabia without anyone knowing about it?” Kris asked. “It couldn’t have used the same Laumer-Points Osprey did. The Wahhabis would have destroyed the star cruiser at a jump point long before it reached the home system.
“Is it coming after us?” Artemis asked fearfully.
Kris checked the sensors. The space out there looked empty now. The enemy must possess an advanced cloaking device. That was terrible news all by itself.
Would the New Men on the star cruiser know she had seen them? Would the star cruiser come after them?
Before Kris could worry too much, Osprey entered the Laumer-Point, heading to a new star system.
-7-
Maddox and Valerie were on the bridge breathing heavily as they waited for their Jump Lag to wear off.