anchoring the enemy in space. Then, while absorbing and dissipating everything that
the opposition could send, they would put out a peculiarly patterned interference, the
center of which could easily be located. The mobile fortresses would then come up, cut
off the Boskonians’ power intake, and finish up the job.
Not soon was that bolt forged, but in time civilization was ready to launch its
terrific and, it was generally hoped and believed, conclusive attack upon Boskonia.
Every sector base and sub-base was ready, the zero hour had been set.
At Prime Base Kimball Kinnison, the youngest Tellurian ever to wear the four
silver bars of captain, sat at the conning-plate of the heavy battle cruiser Britannia, so
named at his own request. He thrilled inwardly as he thought of her speed. Such was
her force of drive that, streamlined to the ultimate degree although she was, she had
special wall-shields, and special dissipators to radiate into space the heat of friction of
the medium through which she tore so madly. Otherwise she would have destroyed
herself in an hour of full blast, even in the hard vacuum of interstellar space!
And in his office Port Admiral Haynes watched a chronometer. Minutes to go-
then seconds.
“Clear ether!” His deep voice was gruff with unexpressed emotion. “Five
seconds-four-three-two-one — Lift!” and the Fleet shot into the sir.
The first objective of this Tellurian fleet was very close indeed to home, for the
Boskonians had established a base upon Neptune’s moon, right here in the Solarian
System. So close to Prime Base that only intensive screening and constant vigilance
had kept its spy-rays out, so powerful that the ordinary battleships of the Patrol had not
been sent against it. Now it was to be reduced.
Short as was the time necessary to traverse any Interplanetary distance, the
Solarians were detected and were met in force by the ships of Boskone. But scarcely
had battle been joined when the enemy began to realize that this was to be a battle the
like of which they had never before seen, and when they began to understand it, it was
too late. They could not run, and all space was so full of interference that they could not
even report to Helmuth what was going on. These first, peculiarly teardrop-shaped
vessels of the Patrol did not fight at all. They simply held on like bull-dogs, taking
without response everything that the white-hot projectors could throw at them. Their
defensive screens radiated fiercely, high into the violet, under the appalling punishment
being dealt out to them by the batteries of ship and shore, but they did not go down.
Nor did the grip of a single tractor loosen from its anchorage. And in minutes the squat
and monstrous maulers came up. Out went their cosmic-energy blocking screens, out
shot their tractor beams, and out from the refractory throats of their stupendous
projectors raved the most terrifically destructive forces ever generated by mobile
machinery.
Boskonian outer screens scarcely even flickered as they went down before the
immeasurable, the incredible violence of that thrust. The second course offered a briefly
brilliant burst of violet radiance as it gave way. The inner screen resisted stubbornly as
it ran the spectrum in a wildly coruscant display of pyrotechnic splendor, but it, too, went
through the ultra-violet and into the black. Now the wallshield itself-that inconceivably
rigid fabrication of pure force which only the detonation of twenty metric tons of duodec
had ever been known to rupture-was all that barred from the base metal of Boskonian
walls the utterly indescribable fury of the maulers’ beams. Now force was streaming
from that shield in veritable torrents. So terrible were the conflicting energies there at
grips that their neutralization was actually visible and tangible. In sheets and masses, in
terrific, ether-wracking vortices, and in miles-long, pillaring streamers and flashes, those
energies were being hurled away. Hurled to all the points of the sphere’s full compass,
filling and suffusing all nearby space.
The Boskonian commanders stared at their instruments, first in bewildered
amazement and then in sheer, stark, unbelieving horror. as their power-intake dropped
to zero and their wall-shields began to fail-and still the attack continued in never-
lessening power. Surely that beaming must slacken down soon-no conceivable mobile
plant could throw such a load for long!
But those mobile plants could-and did. The attack kept up, at the terrifically high
level upon which it had begun. No ordinary storage cells fed those mighty projectors,
along no ordinary bus-bars were their-Titanic amperages borne. Those maulers were
designed to do just one thing-to maul-and that one thing they did well, relentlessly and
thoroughly.
Higher and higher into the spectrum the defending wallshields began to radiate.
At the first blast they had leaped almost through the visible spectrum, in one unbearably
fierce succession of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and indigo, up to a sultry,
coruscating, blindingly hard violet. Now the doomed shields began leaping erratically
into the ultra-violet. To the eye they were already invisible, upon the recorders they
were showing momentary flashes of black.
Soon they went down, and in the instant of each failure one vessel of Boskonia
was no mote. For, that last defense gone, nothing save unresisting metal was left to
withstand the ardor of those ultra-powerful, ravening beams. As has already been said,
no substance, however refractory or resistant or inert, can endure even momentarily in
such a field of force. Therefore every atom, alike of vessel and of contents, went to
make up the searing, seething burst of brilliant, incandescently luminous vapor which
suffused all circumambient space.
Thus passed out of the Scheme of Things the vessels of the Solarian
Detachment of Boskonia. Not a single vessel escaped, the cruisers saw to that. And
then the attack thundered on to the base. Here the cruisers were useless, they merely
formed an observant fringe, the while continuing to so blanket all channels of
communication that the doomed pirates could send out no word of what was
happening. The maulers moved up and grimly, doggedly, methodically went to work.
Since a base is always much more powerfully armored than is a battleship, the
reduction of the fortresses took longer than had the destruction of the fleet. But their
receptors could no longer draw power from the sun or from any other heavenly body,
and their other sources of power were comparatively weak. Therefore their defenses
also failed under that incessant assault. Course after course their screens went down,
and with the last ones went every structure. The maulers’ beams went through metal
and masonry as effortlessly as steel-jacketed bullets go through butter, and bored on,
deep into the planet’s bed-rock, before their frightful force was spent.
Then around and around they spiraled until nothing whatever was left of the
Boskonian works, until only a seething, white-hot lake of molten lava in the midst of the
satellite’s frigid waste was all that remained to show that anything had ever been built
there.
Surrender had not been thought of. Quarter or clemency had not been asked or
offered. Victory of itself was not enough. This was, and of stern necessity had to be, a
war of utter, complete, and merciless extinction.
CHAPTER 14
Unattached
The enemy stronghold so insultingly close to Prime Base having been obliterated,
Regional Fleets, in loose formations, began to scour the various Galactic Regions. For
a few weeks game was plentiful enough. Hundreds of raiding vessels were overtaken
and held by the Patrol cruisers, then blasted to vapor by the maulers.
Many Boskonian bases were also reduced. The locations of most of these had
long been known to the Intelligence Service, others were detected or discovered by the
fast-flying cruisers themselves. Marauding vessels revealed the sites of others by
succeeding in reaching them before being overtaken by the cruisers. Others were found
by the tracers and loops of the Signal Corps.
Very few of these bases were hidden or in any way difficult of access, and most
of them fell before the blasts of a single mauler. But if one mauler was not enough,
others were summoned until it did fall. One fortress, a hitherto unknown and surprisingly
strong Sector Base, required the concentration of every mauler of Tellus, but they were
brought up and the fortress fell. As had been said, this was a war of extinction and
every pirate base that was found was wiped out.
But one day a cruiser found a base which had not even a spy-ray shield up, and
a cursory inspection showed it to be completely empty. Machinery, equipment, stores,
and personnel had all been evacuated. Suspicious, the Patrol vessels stood off and
beamed it from afar, but there were no untoward occurrences. The structures simply
slumped down into lava, and that was all.
Every base discovered thereafter was in the same condition, and at the same
time the ships of Boskone, formerly so plentiful, disappeared utterly from space. Day
after day the cruisers sped hither and thither throughout the vast reaches of the void, at