The Greatest Works of E. E. Smith. E. E. Smith
Inert and free, under every possible degree of power he maneuvered her; attacking imaginary foes and actual meteorites with equal zeal. Maneuvered and attacked until he and his ship were one; until he reacted automatically to her slightest demand; until he and every man of his eager and highly trained crew knew to the final volt and to the ultimate ampere her gargantuan capacity both to give it and to take it.
Then and only then did he return to Base, unload the engineers, and set out upon the quest. Trail after trail he followed, but all were cold. Alarm after alarm he answered, but always he arrived too late: arrived to find gutted merchantman and riddled Patrol vessel, with no life in either and with nothing to indicate in which direction the marauders might have gone.
Finally, however:
“QBT! Calling QBT!” The Britannia’s code call blared from the sealed-band speaker, and a string of numbers followed—the spatial coordinates of the luckless vessel’s position.
Chief Pilot Henry Henderson punched the figures upon his locator, and in the “tank”—the enormous, minutely cubed model of the galaxy—there appeared a redly brilliant point of light. Kinnison rocketed out of his narrow bunk, digging sleep out of his eyes, and shot himself into place beside the pilot.
“Right in our laps!” he exulted. “Scarcely ten light-years away! Start scrambling the ether!” and as the vengeful cruiser darted toward the scene of depredation all space became filled with blast after blast of static interference through which, it was hoped, 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 richly-laden 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 him, 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 can’t 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 stop 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[3]—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 sub-etheral 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 beam. 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 refractory 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!
“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; bring 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 space 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