the pirate could not summon the help he was so soon to need.
But that howling static gave the pirate commander pause. Surely this was
something new? Before him lay a richlyladen freighter, its two convoying ships already
practically out of action. A few more minutes and the prize would be his. Nevertheless
he darted away, swept the ether with his detectors, saw the Britannia, and turned in
headlong flight. For if this streamlined fighter was sufficiently convinced of its prowess
to try to blanket the ether against hint, that information was something that Boskone
would value far above one shipload of material wealth.
But the pirate craft was now upon the visiplates of the Britannia, and, entirely
ignoring the crippled space-ships, Henderson flung his vessel after the other.
Manipulating his incredibly complex controls purely by touch, the while staring into his
plate not only with his eyes, but with every fiber of his being as well, he hurled his huge
mount hither
and thither in frantic leaps. After what seemed an age he snapped down a toggle
switch and relaxed long enough to grin at Kinnison.
“Holding ’em?” the young commander demanded.
“Got ’em, Skipper,” the pilot replied, positively. “It was touch and go for ninety
seconds, but I’ve got a CRX tracer on him now at full pull. He cant put out enough jets
to get away from that — I can hold him forever!”
“Fine work, Hen!” Kinnison strapped himself into his seat and donned his
headset. “General call! Attention! Battle stations! By stations, report!”
“Station One, tractor beams — hot!”
“Station Two, repellors — hot!”
“Station Three, projector One — hot!”
Thus station after station of the warship of the void reported, until.
“Station Fifty-Eight, the Q-gun — hot!” Kinnison himself reported, then gave to the
pilot the words which throughout the spaceways of the galaxy had come to mean
complete readiness to face any emergency.
“Hot and tight, Hen — let’s take ’em !”
The pilot shoved his blast-lever, already almost at maximum, clear out against its
atop and hunched himself even more intently over his instruments, varying by
infinitesimals the direction of the thrust that was driving the Britannia toward the enemy
at the unimaginable velocity of ninety parsecs an hour – a velocity possible only to
inertialess matter being urged through an almost perfect vacuum by a driving blast
capable of lifting the stupendous normal tonnage of the immense sky-rover against a
gravity ten times that of her native Earth.
Unimaginable? Completely so — the ship of the Galactic Patrol was hurling
herself through space at a pace in comparison with which any speed that the mind can
grasp would be the merest crawl, a pace to make light itself seem stationary.
Ordinary vision would have been useless, but the observers of that day used no
antiquated optical systems. Their detector beams, converted into light only at their
plates, were heterodyned upon and were carried by subetheral ultra-waves, vibrations
residing far below the level of the ether and thus possessing a velocity and a range
infinitely greater than those of any possible ether-borne wave.
Although stars moved across the visiplates in flaming, zig-zag lines of light as
pursued and pursuer passed solar system after solar system in fantastic, light-years-
long hops, yet Henderson kept his cruiser upon the pirate’s tail and steadily cut down
the distance between them. Soon a tractor beam licked out from the Patrol ship,
touched the fleeing marauder lightly, and the two space-ships flashed toward each
other.
Nor was the enemy unprepared for combat. One of the crack raiders of Boskone,
master pirate of the known Universe, she had never before found difficulty in
conquering any vessel fleet enough to catch her. Therefore, her commander made no
attempt to cut the beans. Or rather, since the two inertialess vessels flashed together to
repellor-zone contact in such a minute fraction of a second that any human action
within that time was impossible, it would be more correct to say that the pirate captain
changed his tactics instantly from those of flight to those of combat.
He thrust out tractor beams of his own, and from the already white-hot refractors
throats of his projectors there raved out horribly potent beams of annihilation, beams of
dreadful power which tore madly at the straining defensive screens of the Patrol ship.
Screens flared vividly, radiating all the colors of the spectrum. Space itself seemed a
rainbow gone mad, for there were being exerted there forces of a magnitude to stagger
the imagination, forces to be yielded only by the atomic might from which they sprang,
forces whose neutralization set up visible strains in the very fabric of the ether itself.
The young commander clenched his fists and swore a startled deep-space oath
as red lights flashed and alarmbells clanged. His screens were leaking like sieves —
practically down — needle after needle of force incredible stabbing at and through his
wall-shield — four stations gone already and more going l
“Scrap the plan!” he yelled into his microphone. “Open everything to absolute top
— short out all resistors — give ’em everything you can put through the bare bus-bars.
Dalhousie, cut all your repellors, bung us right up to their zone. All you beamers,
concentrate on Area Five. Break down those screens!’ Kinnison was hunched rigidly
over
his panel, his voice came grittily through locked teeth. “Get through to that wall-
shield so I can use this Q-gun!”
Under the redoubled force of the Britannia’s attack the defenses of the enemy
began to fail. Kinnison’s hands flew over his controls. A port opened in the Patrol-ship’s
armored side and an ugly snout protruded — the projector-ringed muzzle of a squat and
monstrous cannon. From its projector bands there leaped out with the velocity of light a
tube of quasi-solid force which was in effect a continuation of the gun’s grim barrel, a
tube which crashed through the weakened third screen of the enemy with a space-
wracking shock and struck savagely, with writhing, twisting thrusts, at the second. Aided
by the massed concentration of the Britannia’s every battery of short-range beams, it
went through. And through the first. Now it struck the very-wall-shield of the outlaw —
that impregnable screen which, designed to bear the brunt of any possible inert
collision, had never been pierced or ruptured by any material substance, however
applied.
To this inner defense the immaterial gun-barrel clung. Simultaneously the tractor
beams, hitherto exerting only a few dynes of force, stiffened into unbreakable, inflexible
rods of energy, binding the two ships of apace into one rigid system, each, relative to
the other, immovable.
Then Kinnison’s flying finger tip touched a button and the Q-gun spoke. From its
sullen throat there erupted a huge torpedo. Slowly the giant projectile crept along,
watched in awe and amazement by the officers of both vessels. For to those space-
hardened veterans the velocity of light was a veritable crawl, and here was a thing that
would require four or five whole seconds to cover a mere ten kilometers of distance[
But, although slow, this bomb weight prove dangerous, therefore the pirate
commander threw his every resource into attempts to cut the tube of force, to blast
away from the tractor beams, to explode the sluggish missile before it could reach his
wall-shield. In vain, for the Britannia’s every beam was set to protect the torpedo and
the mighty rods of energy without whose grip the inertialess mass of the enemy vessel
would offer no resistance whatever to the force of the proposed explosion.
Slowly, so slowly, as the age-long seconds crawled into eternity, there extended
from Patrol ship almost to pirate wall a raging, white-hot pillar — the gases of
combustion of the propellant heptadetonite — ahead of which there rushed the Q-gun’s
tremendous shell with its horridly destructive freight. What would happen? Could even
the almost immeasurable force of that frightful charge of atomic explosive break down a
wall-shield designed to withstand the cosmic assaults of meteoric missiles? And what
would happen if that wall-screen held?
In spite of himself Kinnison’s mind insisted upon painting the ghastly picture, the
awful explosion, the pirate’s screen still intact, the forward-rushing gases driven
backward along the tube of force. The bare metal of the Q-gun’s breech, he knew, was
not and could not be reenforced by the infinitely stronger, although immaterial shields of
pure energy which protected the hull, and no conceivable substance, however resistant,
could impede save momentarily the unimaginable forces about to be unleashed.
Nor would there be time to release the Q-tube after the explosion but before the
Brittania’s own destruction, for if the enemy’s shield stayed up for even a fraction of a
second the unthinkable pressure of the blast would propagate backward through the
already densely compressed gases in the tube, would sweep away as though it were
nothing the immensely thick metallic barrier of the gun-breech, and would wreak within
the bowels of the Patrol vessel a destruction even more complete than that intended for