the foe.
Nor were his men in better case. Each knew that this was the climactic instant of
his existence, that life itself hung poised upon the issue of the next split second. Hurry it
up! Snap into it! Will that crawling, creeping thing never strike?
Some prayed briefly, some swore bitterly, but prayers and curses were alike
unconscious and had precisely the same meaning — each — each man, white of face
and grim of jaw, clenched his hands and waited, tense and straining, for the impact.
CHAPTER 3
In the Lifeboats
The missile struck, and in the instant of its striking the coldly brilliant stars were blotted
from sight in a vast globe of intolerable flame. The pirate’s shield had failed, and under
the cataclysmic force of that horrific detonation the entire nose-section of the enemy
vessel had flashed into incandescent vapor and had added itself to the rapidly
expanding cloud of fire. As it expanded the cloud cooled. Its fierce glare subsided to a
rosy glow, through which the stars again began to shine. It faded, cooled, darkened —
revealing the crippled hulk of the pirate ship. She was still fighting, but ineffectually, now
that all her heavy forward batteries were gone.
“Needlers, fire at will!” barked Kinnison, and even that feeble resistance was
ended. Keen-eyed needle-ray men, working at spy-ray visiplates, bored hole after hole
into the captive, seeking out and destroying the control-panels of the remaining beams
and screens.
“Pull ‘er up!” came the next order. The two ships of space flashed together, the
yawning, blasted-open fore-end of the raider solidly against the Brittania’s armored
side. A great port opened.
“Now, Bus, it’s all yours. Classification to six places, straight A’s -they’re human
or approximately so. Board and storm!”
Back of that port there had been massed a hundred fighting men, dressed in full
panoply of space armor, armed with the deadliest weapons known to the science of the
age, and powered by the gigantic accumulators of their ship. At their head was
Sergeant vanBuskirk, six and a half feet of Dutch Valerian dynamite, who had fallen out
of Valerian Cadet Corps only because of an innate inability to master the intricacies of
higher mathematics. Now the attackers swept forward in a black-and-silver wave.
Four squatly massive semi-portable projectors crashed down upon their
magnetic clamps and in the fierce ardor of their beams the thick bulkhead before them
ran the gamut of the spectrum and puffed outward. Some score of defenders were
revealed, likewise clad in armor, and battle again was joined. Explosive and solid bullets
detonated against and ricocheted from that highly efficient armor, the beams of
DeLameter hand-projectors splashed in torrents of man-made lightning off its protective
fields of force. But that skirmish was soon over. The semi-portables, whose vast
energies no ordinary personal armor could withstand, were brought up and clamped
down, and in their holocaust of vibratory destruction all life vanished from the pirates’
compartment.
“One more bulkhead and we’re in their control room!” vanBuskirk cried. Beam it
down!”
But when the beamers pressed their switches nothing happened. The pirates had
managed to jury-rig a screen generator, and with it had cut the power-beams behind the
invading forces. Also they had cut loop-holes in the bulkhead, through which in frantic
haste they were trying to bring heavy projectors of their own into alignment.
“Bring up the ferral paste,” the sergeant commanded. “Get up as close to that wall as
you can, so they can’t blast us !”
The paste — successor to thermite — was brought up and the giant Dutchman
troweled it on in furious swings, from floor up and around in a huge arc and back down
to floor. He fired it, and simultaneously some of the enemy gunners managed to angle a
projector sharply enough to reach the further ranks of the Patrolmen. Then mingled the
flashing, scintillating, gassy glare of the thermite and the raving energy of the pirates’
beam to make of that confined space a veritable inferno.
But the paste had done its work, and as the semi-circle of wall fell out the
soldiers of the Lens leaped through the hole in the still-glowing wall to struggle hand-to-
hand against the pirates, now making a desperate last stand. The semi-portables and
other heavy ordnance powered from the Brittania were of course useless. Pistols were
ineffective against the pirates’ armor of hard alloy, hand-rays were equally impotent
against its defensive shields. Now heavy hand-grenades began to rain down among the
combatants, blowing Patrolmen and pirates alike to bits — for the outlaw chiefs cared
nothing that they killed many of their own men if in so doing they could take toll of the
Law. And worse, a crew of gunners was swiveling a mighty projector around upon its
hastily-improvised mount to cover that sector of the compartment in which the
policemen were most densely massed.
But the minions of the Law had one remaining weapon, carried expressly for this
eventuality. The space-axe — a combination and sublimation of battle-axe, mace,
bludgeon, and lumberman’s picaroon, a massively needle-pointed implement of
potentialities limited only by the physical strength and bodily agility of its wielder.
Now all the men of the Britannia’s storming party were Valerians, and therefore were
big, hard, fast, and agile, and of them all their sergeant leader was the biggest, hardest,
fastest, and most agile. When the space-tempered apex of that thirty-pound
monstrosity, driven by the four-hundred-odd pounds of rawhide and whalebone that
was his body, struck pirate armor that armor gave way. Nor did it matter whether or not
that hellish beak of steel struck a vital part after crashing through the armor. Head or
body, leg or arm, the net result was the same, a man does not fight effectively when he
is breathing space in lieu of atmosphere.
VanBuskirk perceived the danger to his men in the slowly turning projector and
for the first time called his chief.
“Kim,” he spoke in level tones into his microphone. “Blast that delta-ray, will you?
. . . . . Or have they cut this beam, so you can’t hear me? . . . . . Guess they have.”
“They’ve cut our communication,” he informed his troopers then. “Keep them off
me as much as you can and I’ll attend to that delta-ray outfit myself.”
Aided by the massed interference of his men he plunged toward the threatening
mechanism, hewing to right and to left as he strode. Beside the temporary projector-
mount at last, he aimed a tremendous blow at the man at the deltaray controls, only to
feel the axe flash instantaneously to its mark and strike it with a gentle push, and to see
his Intended victim- float effortless away from the blow. The pirate commander had
played his last card, vanBuskirk floundered, not only weightless, but inertialess as well!
But the huge Dutchman’s mind, while not mathematical, was even faster than his
muscles, and not for nothing had he spent arduous weeks in inertialess tests of
strength and skill. Hooking feet and legs around a convenient wheel he seized the
enemy operator and jammed his helmeted head down between the base of the mount
and the long, heavy steel lever by means of which it was turned. Then, throwing every
ounce of his wonderful body into the effort, he braced both feet against the projector’s
grim barrel and heaved. The helmet flew apart like an eggshell, blood and brains
gushed out in nauseous blobs, but the delta-ray projector was so jammed that it would
not soon again become a threat.
Then vanBuskirk drew himself across the room toward the main control panel of
the warship. Officer after officer he pushed aside, then reversed two double-throw
switches, restoring gravity and inertia to the riddled cruiser.
In the meantime the tide of battle had continued in favor of the Patrol. Few
survivors though there were of the black-and-silver force, of the pirates there were still
fewer, fighting now a desperate and hopeless defensive. But in this combat quarter was
not, could not be thought of, and Sergeant vanBuskirk again waded into the fray. Four
times more his horribly effective hybrid weapon descended like the hammer of Thor,
cleaving and crushing its way through steel and flesh and bone. Then, striding to the
control board, he manipulated switches and dials, then again spoke evenly to Kinnison.
“You can hear me now, can’t you? . . . . . All mopped up — come and get the
dope!”
The specialists, headed by Master Technician LaVerne Thorndyke, had been
waiting strainingly for that word for minutes. Now they literally flew at their tasks, in
furious haste, but following rigidly and in perfect coordination a prearranged schedule.
Every control and lead, every busbar and immaterial beam of force was traced and
checked. Instruments and machines were dismantled, sealed mechanisms were
ruthlessly torn apart by jacks or sliced open with cutting beams. And everywhere, every
thing and every movement was being photographed, charted, and diagramed.