This, then, was the bolt which civilization was preparing to hurl against Boskonia. In theory the thing was simplicity itself. The ultra-fast cruisers would catch the enemy, lock on with tractors so hard that they could not be sheared, and go inert, thus 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 Brittania, 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 tear-drop-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 wall-shield 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 wall-shields 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 more. 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
HE 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 wa
s 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 the peak of their unimaginably high pace, without finding a trace of any Boskonian vessel. More remarkable still, and for the first time in years, the ether was absolutely free from Boskonian interference.
Following an impulse, Kinnison asked and received permission to take his ship on scouting duty. At maximum blast he drove toward the Velantian system, to the point at which he had picked up Helmuth’s communication line. Along that line he drove for days, halting only when well outside the galaxy. Ahead of him there was nothing reachable except a few star-clusters. Behind him there extended the immensity of the galactic lens in all its splendor, but Captain Kinnison had no eye for astronomical beauty that day.
He held the Brittania there for an hour, while he mulled over in his mind what the apparent facts could mean. He knew that he had covered the line, from its point of determination out beyond the galaxy’s edge. He knew that his detectors, operating as they had been in clear and undistorted ether, could not possibly have missed a thing as large as Helmuth’s base must be, if it had been anywhere near that line; that their effective range was immensely greater than the largest possible error in the determination or the following of the line. There were, he concluded, four possible explanations, and only four.
First, Helmuth’s base might also have been evacuated. This was unthinkable. From what he himself knew of Helmuth that base would be as nearly impregnable as anything could be made, and it was no more apt to be vacated than was Prime Base of the Patrol. Second, it might be subterranean, buried under enough metal-bearing rock to ground out all radiation. This possibility was just as unlikely as the first. Third, Helmuth might already have the device he himself wanted so badly, and upon which Hotchkiss and the other experts had been at work so long, a detector nullifier. This was possible, distinctly so. Possible enough, at least, to warrant filing the idea for future consideration. Fourth, that base might not be in the galaxy at all, but in that star-cluster out there straight ahead of him, or possibly in one even farther away. That idea seemed the best of the four. It would necessitate ultra-powerful communicators, of course, but Helmuth could very well have them. It squared up in other ways—its pattern fitted into the matrix very nicely.
But if that base were out there…it could stay there—for a while…a battle cruiser just wasn’t enough ship for that job. Too much opposition out there, and not—enough ship… Or too much ship? But he wasn’t ready, yet, anyway. He needed, and would get, another line on Helmuth’s base. Therefore, shrugging his shoulders, he whirled his vessel about and set out to rejoin the fleet.
While a full day short of junction, Kinnison was called to his plate to see upon its lambent surface the visage of Port Admiral Haynes.
“Did you find out anything on your trip?” he asked.
“Nothing definite, sir. Just a couple of things to think about, is all. But I can say that I don’t like this at all—I don’t like anything about it or any part of it.”
“No more do I,” agreed the admiral. “It looks very much as though your forecast of a stalemate might be about to eventuate. Where are you headed for now?”
“Back to the Fleet.”
“Don’t do it. Stay on scouting duty for a while longer. And, unless something more interesting turns up, report back here to me—we have something that may interest you. The boys have been…”
The admiral’s picture was broken up into flashes of blinding light and his words became a meaningless, jumbled roar of noise. A distress call had begun to come in, only to be blotted out by a flood of Boskonian static interference, of which the ether had for so long been clear. The young Lensman used his Lens.
“Excuse me, sir, while I see what this is all about?”
“Certainly, son.”
“Got its center located?” Kinnison yelped at his communications officer. “They’re close—right in our laps!”
“Yes, sir!” and the radio man snapped out numbers.
“Blast!” the captain commanded, unnecessarily; for the alert pilot had already set the course and was kicking in full-blast drive. “If that baby is what I think it is, all hell’s out for noon.”
Toward the center of disturbance the Brittania flashed, emitting now a scream of peculiarly patterned interference which was not only a scrambler of all un-Lensed communication throughout that whole part of the galaxy, but also an imperative call for any mauler within range. So close had the cruiser been to the scene of depredation that for her to reach it required only minutes.
There lay the merchantman and her Boskonian assailant. Emboldened by the cessation of piratical activities, some shipping concern had sent out a freighter, loaded probably with highly “urgent” cargo; and this was the result. The marauder, inert now, had gripped her with his tractors and was beaming her into submission. She was resisting, but feebly now, it was apparent that her screens were failing. Her crew must soon open ports in token of surrender or roast to a man, and they would probably prefer to roast.
Thus the situation obtaining in one instant. The next instant it was changed; the Boskonian discovering suddenly that his beams, instead of boring through the weak defenses of the freighter, were not even exciting to a glow the mighty protective envelopes of a battle-cruiser of the Patrol. He switched from the diffused heat-beam he had been using upon the merchantman to the hardest, hottest, most penetrating beam of annihilation he mounted—with but little more to show for it and with no better results. For the Brittania’s screens had been designed to stand up almost indefinitely against the most potent beams of any ordinary war-ship, and they stood up.
Kinnison had tremendously powerful beams of his own, but he did not use them. It would take the super-powerful offense of a mauler to produce a definite answer to the question seething in his mind.
Increase power as the pirate would, to whatever ruinous overload, he could not break down Kinnison’s screens; nor, dodge as he would, could he again get in position to attack his former prey. And eventually the mauler arrived; fortunately it, too, had been fairly close by. Out reached its mighty tractors. Out raved one of its tremendous beams, striking the Boskonian’s defenses squarely amidships.
That beam struck and the pirate ship disappeared—but not in a hazily incandescent flare of volatilized metal. The raider disappeared bodily, and still all in one piece. He had put out super-shears of his own, snapping the mauler’s supposedly unbreakable tractors like threads; and the velocity of his departure was due almost as much to the pressor effect of the Patrol beam as it was to the thrust of his own drivers.
It was the beginning of the stalemate Kinnison had foreseen.
“I was afraid of that,” the young captain muttered, and, paying no attention whatever to the merchantman, he called the commander of the mauler. At this close range, of course, no ether scrambler could interfere with visual apparatus, and there on his plate he saw the face of Clifford Maitland, the man who had graduated number two in his own class.
“Hi, Kim, you old space-flea!” Maitland exclaimed in delight. “Oh, pardon me, sir,” he went on in mock deference, with an exaggerated salute. “To a guy with four jets, I should say…”
“Seal that, Cliff, or I’ll climb up you like a squirrel, first chance I get!” Kinnison retorted. “So they’ve got you skippering an El Ponderoso, huh? Think of a mere infant like you being let play with so much high-power! What’ll we do about this heap here?”
“Damfino. It isn’t covered, so you’ll have to tell me, Captain.”
“Who’m I to be passing out orders? As you say, it isn’t covered in the book—it’s against GI regs for them to be cutting our tractors. But he’s all yours, not mine—I’ve got to flit. You might find out what he’s carrying, from where, to where, and why. Then, if you want to, you can escort him either back where he came from or on to where he’s going; whichever you think best. If this interference doesn’t let up, maybe you’d better Lens Prime Base for orders. Or use your own judgment, if any. Clear ether, Cliff, I’ve got to buzz along.”
“Clear ether, spacehound!”
“Now, Hank,” Kinnison turned to his pilot, “we’ve got urgent business at Prime Base—and when I say ‘urgent’ I don’t mean perchance. Let’s see you burn a hole in the ether.”
The Brittania streaked Earthward, and scarcely had she touched ground when Kinnison was summoned to the office of the Port Admiral. As soon as he was announced, Haynes bruskly cleared his office and sealed it against any possible form of intrusion or eavesdropping. He had aged noticeably since these two had had that memorable conference in this same room. His face was lined and careworn, his eyes and his entire mien bore witness to days and nights of sleeplessly continuous work.
“You were right, Kinnison,” he began, Lens to Lens. “A stalemate it is, a hopeless deadlock. I called you in to tell you that Hotchkiss has your nullifier done, and that it works perfectly against all long-range stuff. Against electromagnetics, however, it is not very effective. About all that can be done, it seems, is to shorten the range; and it doesn’t interfere with vision at all.”
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