Space 1999 #9 - Rogue Planet
Page 15
‘But they are positive?’
Bergman granted as she nodded. To Koenig he said, ‘You realise what this means, John? The external layers of the Omphalos must be splitting. The result, perhaps, of the massive increase in its energy intake since we entered its space. It is obviously adapting to meet the new circumstances.’
‘Growing?’
‘In a sense, John, yes. As a crystal will grow when immersed in a super-saturated solution. It is a sponge absorbing energy, using it to build up its mass, adding to its reserves. Later, if all sources of energy should be denied to it, then the reverse process will apply. It will shrink as it consumes its own bulk. Men do the same, John. And stars. It seems to be a universal law.’
Eat or starve.
Grow or wither.
Kill or die!
Koenig glanced at the screens, the instruments facing Morrow where he sat, the tell-tales and monitors of the consol. The base was on Red Alert, ground defences standing by, engineers ready to wring the last erg of power from all generators and to maintain a maximum flow no matter what the cost.
‘Three minutes.’ Sandra’s voice betrayed her strain. ‘Two and a half. Two.’
Now only a hundred seconds to wait . . . ninety . . . eighty . . . seventy . . .
Koenig felt Helena at his side and turned his head to smile reassurance.
‘Soon now.’
‘John! If it doesn’t work!’
‘It will! It must!’
Their only chance and if it failed, death would be waiting. A gamble with their lives as the stake.
‘Ten!’ Sandra began to count the seconds. At the consol Morrow sent signals to the waiting men. Bergman, eyes narrowed, stared at the glowing mass of the Omphalos. Kano gently stroked a panel as if giving comfort to his beloved computer.
Koenig felt his face harden and grow wet with oozing sweat.
He had to be right.
Had to!
‘Three . . . Two . . . One . . . Now!’ A moment, then Sandra said bleakly, ‘It isn’t working. It isn’t going to work!’
‘Wait!’ Bergman turned from the screen. ‘We can’t see anything as yet and your instruments can’t pick up what lies behind the Omphalos. Paul?’
‘Booster signals sent, Professor, but the automatics should have fired by now.’
The time fuses planted with the massed nuclear materials in the body of the planetoid. Heaped in mathematical precision in the chamber of alien dead. A tremendous bomb which flashed to life in an eye-searing halo about the Omphalos.
A wide circle of savage, blue-white glare which dulled the green. Which spread to form a backdrop of sun-like fury.
‘It worked!’ Bergman shouted his relief. ‘John! It worked!’
The fuses, yes. The nuclear bomb itself, yes. But the rest?
A flood of raw radiation, by itself, wouldn’t have been enough. The Omphalos ate energy, it used it, lived on it, sucked it in. At the distance, savage though it was, the atomic explosion would have been of limited use. But there had been more.
The planetoid with its shafts and mass. The chamber which had held the bomb, the blasting explosion which had torn the remnants of what had once been an inhabited world apart, fragments which even now, if the calculations had been correct, were hurtling towards the green menace.
A blast of matter which would rip into the Omphalos with the impact of a shotgun blast against a bag of water.
Matter which would be converted into energy on contact, each grain of dust, every fragment in turn an atomic explosion.
‘Paul! Fire all missiles!’
Morrow nodded at Koenig’s command and relayed the order. From the launching tubes ringing the base, slender shapes lanced into space, torpedoes loaded with a treble charge of atomic destruction in their heads, their drive mechanisms rigged to gain maximum velocity at the expense of accuracy.
The target was too big to be missed.
Morrow said anxiously, ‘Commander! The shield?’
‘Wait!’
There was time yet and every second was precious. Koenig stood, mentally counting, visualising what was happening in space. The flight of the massed torpedoes, the paths taken by the masses torn from the disrupted planetoid. They would strike together, a double blow in opposed synchronisation and, when they did, the Omphalos would die.
The alien mass would be destroyed, disintegrated, bathed with a flood of energy so intense that it could not be stored or utilised.
‘Commander?’
‘Not yet.’
‘But, John!’ Bergman too was anxious. ‘If—’
‘Wait!’
A knife-edged calculation. Raise the defence shield to full strength too soon, and the energy would be drained to leave them defenceless against the moment of need. Wait too long, and they too would be blasted by the flood of raw destruction soon to fill the enclosed area of this miniature universe.
On the screen the Omphalos flickered, seemed to jerk, to swell, to expand with frightening speed.
‘Now, Paul! Now!’
The blaze of the defence shield matched the fury of the heavens, the dazzle of scintillating particles blasting the eyes with a mass of kaleidoscopic coruscations.
For a long moment there was silence, then Helena said, ‘John, is it holding?’
‘Sandra?’
‘Energy loss mounting towards total drain. Still climbing.’ Her voice quivered a little and the knuckles of her hands where they gripped the edge of the panel shone white. ‘Climbing. Climbing—no, steadying now. Steady and falling. Falling! Commander—we’re safe!’
Safe behind the protection of the shield as the naked fury of disrupted atoms streamed around them, filling all space with a maelstrom of tormented energies, stresses mounting, conflicting, tearing at the very fabric of the continuum until something had to yield.
When it did, it was like the snapping of an overstrained rubber band.
Koenig felt a jerk, a sudden movement of the floor beneath his feet, a shudder which ran through the base, then heard Bergman’s startled cry.
‘Look! The stars! The stars!’
The screen was full of them, bright, coldly remote but comforting in their familiarity. Space was normal again, the bubble which had held them prisoner broken and dissolved.
They were free. Of the Omphalos, nothing remained but a dying smear of fading emerald—the pyre of a destroyed world.
Table of Contents
CONTENTS
ROGUE PLANET
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN