“QX. I said that you’re the brains of the outfit You are!”
“Thanks, lad. At the first sign of detection, we stop. They may be able to detect us, but I doubt it, since we’re looking for them with special instruments. But that’s immaterial.
What I want to know is, can you and your crew split Grand Fleet, making two big, hollow hemispheres of it? Let this group of ambers represent the enemy. Since they know well have to carry the battle to them, they’ll probably be in fairly close formation. Set your two hemispheres—the reds— there, and there. Close them in, thus englobing their whole fleet. Can you do it?”
Kinnison whistled through his teeth, a long, low, unmelodious whistle. “Yes—but Klono’s carballoy claws, chief, suppose they catch you at it?”
“How can they? If you were using detectors, instead of double-end, tight-beam binders, how many of our own vessels could you locate?”
“That’s right, too—about two percent of them. They couldn’t tell that they were being englobed until long after it was done. They could, however, globe up inside us. . .”
“Yes—and that would give them the tactical advantage of position,” the admiral admitted. “We probably have, however, enough superiority in fire-power, if not in actual tonnage, to make up the difference. Also, we have speed enough, I think, so that we could retire in good order. But you’re assuming that they can maneuver as rapidly and as surely as we can, a condition which I do not consider at all probable. If, as I believe much more likely, they have no better Grand Fleet Operations than we had in Helmuth’s star-cluster—if they haven’t the equivalent of you and Worse! and this super-tank here—than what?”
“In that case it’d be just too bad. Just like pushing baby chicks into a pond.” Kinnison saw the possibilities very clearly after they had been explained to him.
“How long will it take you?”
“With Worsel and me and both full crews of Rigellians I would guess it at about ten hours—eight to compute and assign positions and two to get there.”
“Fast enough—faster than I would have thought possible. Oil up your Simplexes and calculating machines and get ready.”
In due time the enemy fleet was detected and the “cease blasting” signal was given.
Civilization’s prodigious fleet stopped dead; hanging motionless in space at the tantalizing limit of detectability from the warships awaiting them. For eight hours two hundred Rigellians stood at whining calculators, each solving course-and-distance problems at the rate of ten per minute.
Two hours or less of free flight and Haynes rejoiced audibly in the perfection of the two red hemispheres shown in his reducer. The two huge bowls flashed together, rim.to rim. The sphere began inexorably to contract. Each ship put out a red K6T screen as a combined battle flag and identification, and the greatest naval engagement of the age was on.
It soon became evident that the Boskonians could not maneuver their forces efficiently.
The fleet was too huge, too unwieldy for their Operations officers to handle. Against an equally uncontrollable mob of battle craft it would have made a showing, but against the carefully- planned, chronometer-timed attack of the Patrol individual action, however courageous or however desperate, was useless.
Each red-sheathed destroyer hurtled along a definite course at a definite force of drive for a definite length of time. Orders were strict; no ship was to be lured from course, pace, or time.
They could, however fight en passant with their every weapon if occasion arose; and occasion did arise, some thousands of times. The units of Grand Fleet flashed inward, lashing out with their terrible primaries at everything in space not wearing the crimson robe of Civilization. And whatever those beams struck did not need striking again.
The warships of Boskone fought back. Many of the Patrol’s defensive screens blazed hot enough almost to mask the scarlet beacons; some of them went down. A few Patrol ships were englobed by the concerted action of two or three sub-fleet commanders more cooperative or more far-sighted than the rest, and were blasted out of existence by an overwhelming concentration of power. But even those vessels took toll with their primaries as they went out: few indeed were the Boskonians who escaped through holes thus made.
At a predetermined instant each dreadnought stopped: to find herself one unit of an immense, red-flaming hollow sphere of ships packed almost screen to screen. And upon signal every primary projector that could be brought to bear hurled bolt after bolt, as fast as the burned- out shells could be replaced, into the ragingly incandescent inferno which that sphere’s interior instantly became. For two hundred million discharges such as those will convert a very large volume of space into something utterly impossible to describe.
The raving torrents of energy subsided and keen-eyed observers swept the scene of action. Nothing was there except jumbled and tumbling white-hot wreckage. A few vessels had escaped during the closing in of the sphere, but none inside it had survived this climactic action—not one in five thousand of Boskone’s massed fleet made its way back to Jarnevon.
“Maneuver fifty-eight—hipe!” Haynes ordered, and again Grand Fleet shot away. There was no waiting, no hesitation. Every course and time had been calculated and assigned.
Into the Second Galaxy the scarcely diminished armada of the Patrol hurtled—to Jarnevon’s solar system—around it. Once again the crimson sheathing of Civilization’s messengers almost disappeared in blinding coruscance as the outlying fortresses unleashed their mighty weapons; once again a few ships, subjected to such concentrations of force as to overload their equipment, were lost; but this conflict, though savage in its intensity, was brief. Nothing mobile could withstand for long the utterly hellish energies of the primaries, and soon the armored planetoids, too, ceased to be.
“Maneuver fifty-nine—hipe!” and Grand Fleet closed in upon dark Jarnevon.
“Sixty!” It rolled in space, forming an immense cylinder; the doomed planet the mid- point of its axis.
“Sixty-one!” Tractors and pressors leaped out from ship to ship and from ship to shore.
The Patrolmen did not know whether or not the scientists of the Eich could render their planet inertialess, and now it made no difference. Planet and fleet were for the time being one rigid system.
“Sixty-two—Blast!” And against the world-girdling battlements of Jarnevon there flamed out in all their appalling might the dreadful beams against which the defensive screens of battleships and of mobile citadels alike had been so pitifully inadequate.
But these which they were attacking now were not the limited installations of a mobile structure. The Eich had at their command all the resources of a galaxy. Their generators and conductors could be of any desired number and size. Hence Eichmil, in view of prior happenings, had strengthened Jarnevon’s defenses to a point which certain of his fellows derided as being beyond the bounds of sanity or reason.
Now those unthinkably powerful screens were being tested to the utmost. Bolt after bolt of quasi-solid lightning struck against them, spitting mile-long sparks in baffled fury as they raged to ground. Plain and encased in Q-type helices they came: biting, tearing, gouging. Often and often, under the thrust of half a dozen at once, local failures appeared; but these were only momentary and even the newly devised shells of the Patrol’s projectors could not stand the load long enough to penetrate effectively Boskone’s indescribably capable defenses. Nor were Jarnevon’s offensive weapons less capable.
Rods, cones, planes, and shears of pure force bored, cut, stabbed, and slashed. Bombs and dirigible torpedoes charged to the skin with duodec sought out the red-cloaked ships. Beams, sheathed against atmosphere in Q-type helices, crashed against and through their armoring screens; beams of an intensity almost to rival that of the Patrol’s primary weapons and of a hundred times their effective aperture. And not singly did those beams come. Eight, ten, twelve at once they clung to and demolished dreadnought after dreadnought of the Expeditionary Force.
Eichmil was well content. “We can hold them and we are burning them down,” he gloated. “Let them loose their negative-matter bombs! Since they are burning out projectors they cannot keep this up indefinitely. We will blast them out of space!”
He was wrong. Grand Fleet did not stay there long enough to suffer serious losses. For even while the cylinder was forming Kinnison was in rapid but careful consultation with Thorndyke, checking intrinsic velocities, directons, and speeds. “QX, Verne, cut!” be yelled.
Two planets, one well within each end of the combat cylinder, went inert at the word; resuming instantaneously their diametrically opposed intrinsic velocities of some thirty miles per second. And it was these two very ordinary, but utterly irresistible planets, instead of the negative-matter bombs with which the Eich were prepared to cope, which hurtled then along the axis of the immense tube of warships toward Jarnevon. Whether or not the Eich could make their planet inertialess has never been found out Free or inert, the end would have been the same.