The vessel shook with a major jolt that nearly knocked Pias from his acceleration couch,
and it began tumbling uncontrollably on its course outward from the battle station. Pias
grabbed at the controls and frantically tried to stabilize the craft once more, but that took
his attention away from the very necessary task of dodging the blaster beams.
One of those blasters finally caught up with him. Because of the ship’s wild spinning, the
beam did not catch it dead center, but sliced through a portion of the tail. As the
high-energy ray hit the motor and drive components already overcharged themselves
through their rigorous action-the back end of the craft exploded, leaving Le Lapin a dead
lump of twisted metal careening madly in an eccentric orbit around the battle station that
had destroyed it.
Jules and Yvette did not see the fate of their ship, so busy were they with their own
assault. At Pias’s command, they leaped out of the hatch, pushing off just as Le Lapin
veered away from its headlong flight into the side of the station. They were now being
flung at high speed directly at the wall. The spacing of this stunt was critical.
As it was, Pias had undershot the distance just a bit. The instant they left the ship’s hatch
they began firing their airjets to decelerate, and still the station was coming up at them
much too fast. They had to wait until the last possible second to get the most advantage
out of their jets; then, in one fluid motion, they twisted their bodies around so that their
legs were under them, ready to absorb the impact like coiled springs.
As superbly trained acrobats from a high-gravity world, they were used to hard impacts,
and the collision with the hull of the battle station seemed little worse than the leap to the
ground that had been the climax of their trapeze act. Tucking their heads down as well as
they could in the cumbersome armor, they rolled their bodies forward in somersaults
upon landing to absorb the rest of their forward momentum. Their move was almost too
good, bouncing them off into space again, but a small correctional blast from their jets
brought them back to their desired location. They’d ended up on the battle station’s hull
less than fifty meters from the maintenance hatch they’d been aiming for.
Using their jets once more, they skimmed quickly over the smooth surface, safely within
the minimum range of the station’s big guns, to the hatchway. The hatch itself was closed
and locked, but Jules’s high-powered blaster cut a way through the locking mechanism in
under a minute. He and Yvette forced open the doorway, knowing there was a chance
they might unseal the entire ship if the inner hatch was open. At this point, they didn’t
really care. They had plenty of air inside their armor, and they knew Tanya Boros would
make sure she was safe no matter what. Everything else was irrelevant.
The inner airlock door was sealed as well, however, so the ship’s interior remained
intact. They resealed the outer hatch and equalized the air pressure within the airlock and
the rest of the station. As the green light came on, indicating the airlock procedure was
complete, the two agents stood back from the doorway, expecting trouble.
And trouble came in abundance. As one of the few points of entry into the battle station,
that doorway had automatic defenses trained on it. The instant the airlock pressure was
equalized, the hatch door sprang open and a series of blaster beams sprayed the airlock
from the corridor outside. The total energy pouring into that tiny chamber lit it like a
minature sun.
If they hadn’t been in the heaviest possible battle armor, Jules and Yvette would have
been instantly fried. As it was, the high intensity of the blaster beams nearly blinded
them, and would have cut through their armor in half a minute. The agents did not give it
a chance.
Yvette was in the best position to act. Quickly picking a grenade from the side of her
armor, she lobbed it forward through the open hatch. The explosion rocked the walls,
and the influx of deadly beams ceased immediately. The DesPlainians peered out of the
hatchway at a twisted pile of rubble that had been a stack of high-powered blasters
aimed into the airlock doorway.
The interior of the battle station was an enormous latticework, like a building still under
construction. Beams and girders crisscrossed everywhere, bracing the interior walls in
every direction against possible shocks from outside bombardment. In the center of the
sphere, the metal beams clustered more tightly together, forming a fortress within a
fortress. The central sphere was obviously where the living quarters and control areas of
this battle station were located, and it was there the two SOTS agents would have to
make their way.
There was no gravity within the station; everything was left in the eerie freefall of space.
Jules and Yvette did not simply push off and go flying inward towards the center,
however; if an ultragrav system were turned on while they were floating in midair, they
would suddenly go crashing in whatever direction was “down.”
Instead, they activated the electromagnetic soles of their armored boots and provided
their own clinging force. The magnetic attraction to the bulkhead was enough to keep
them from drifting aimlessly, but not too much to rivet them to the spot. Cautiously,
holding on carefully to the girders, they began climbing their way through the tangled web
of steel beams and cables toward the heart of the battle station.
The air suddenly erupted with sizzling heat as more blasters, mounted in hidden locations
all around them, began firing. The DesPlainians fired back quickly. Their armor gave them
some protection; they could afford to take their time to locate the source of the different
beams and put each one out of commission. But even their plating was being severely
tested by the repeated high-energy barrages.
The interior defense of this battle station seemed no less thorough than the exterior. It
had been designed to withstand assaults, and Jules and Yvette were still fighting an uphill
struggle. Only their DesPlainian strength and reflexes, which enabled them to move
faster in space armor than ordinary people, had kept them from tragedy, and it was by
no means certain that this state of affairs could continue.
As yet they had not seen another living creature within this station. All its mechanisms, all
its defenses, were operating automatically with the speed of a computer. The computer
could not be frightened, could not panic, could not overreact or make a tactical blunder
that wasn’t programmed into it. The battle station was a masterpiece of engineering, and
the SOTS team was beginning to realize they might have underestimated it. They would
have preferred to fight an army of living opponents rather than the cold, mechanical
precision of this automated destructive device.
Just as Yvette blasted back at the final attacking beam, a new threat appeared. From an
unseen launcher on the far side of the battle station, a small but deadly heat grenade
came lofting through the air toward their position. Jules’s sharp eyes spotted the
projectile coming, and he shouted an immediate warning cry of “Rube!” to his sister.
To someone trained in the Circus as they both were, that traditional warning of
danger-shortened over the centuries from “Hey, Rube!”-brought an instantaneous re-
sponse. Yvette looked around immediately and spotted the projectile. If the two of them
waited here, the concussion from the grenade’s explosion would at least knock them
unconscious if the blast didn’t kill them outright. And they would not be able to run fast
enough along the girders in their magnetic boots to escape the effects of the grenade.
There was only one alternative. Jules and Yvette leaped off the support of the steel
beams into the freefall of midair, hoping to propel themselves far enough away from the
target area before the grenade could go off.
While they were in midair, disaster struck. Their fear that ultragrav would be used as a
weapon against them proved justified. If the battle station had been defended by a live
army, the tactic could not have been used because it would have incapaciated the
defenders as well as the attackers. But the machinery aboard the station didn’t much
care whether there was a gravity field or not.
The instant the SOTE agents were unsupported in midair, the ultragrav snapped on.
Instantly there was a “down” direction, and their free-floating bodies began hurtling to-
ward the “floor” fifteen meters below them. The field strength was five gees, more even
than they were comfortably used to, and the armor made them that much more
awkward. Jules and Yvette grabbed frantically for handholds on the girders as they went
plummeting down, but they could get no grip. The pull of the ultragrav was too strong,