The Greatest Works of E. E. Smith. E. E. Smith

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СКАЧАТЬ a week to neutralize."

      "I see. Thanks. Off." Samms turned to Kinnison. "Well?"

      "Nice. A mighty smart operator." Kinnison gave credit ungrudgingly. "Now I'll buy your picture—what a man! But now—and I've got my ears pinned back—what was it you started to say about pirates?"

      "Just that we have very little to go on, except for the kind of stuff they seem to like best, and the fact that even armed escorts have not been able to protect certain types of shipments of late. The escorts, too, have disappeared. But with these facts as bases, it seems to me that we could arrange something, perhaps like this...."

      * * * * *

      A fast, sleek freighter and a heavy battle-cruiser bored steadily through the inter-stellar void. The merchantman carried a fabulously valuable cargo: not bullion or jewels or plate of price, but things literally above price—machine tools of highest precision, delicate optical and electrical instruments, fine watches and chronometers. She also carried First Lensman Virgil Samms.

      And aboard the war-ship there was Roderick Kinnison; for the first time in history a mere battle-cruiser bore a Port Admiral's flag.

      As far as the detectors of those two ships could reach, space was empty of man-made craft; but the two Lensmen knew that they were not alone. One and one-half detets away, loafing along at the freighter's speed and paralleling her course, in a hemispherical formation open to the front, there flew six tremendous tear-drops; super-dreadnaughts of whose existence no Tellurian or Colonial government had even an inkling. They were the fastest and deadliest craft yet built by man—the first fruits of Operation Bennett. And they, too, carried Lensmen—Costigan, Jack Kinnison, Northrop, Dronvire of Rigel Four, Rodebush, and Cleveland. Nor was there need of detectors: the eight Lensmen were in as close communication as though they had been standing in the same room.

      "On your toes, men," came Samms' quiet thought. "We are about to pass within a few light-minutes of an uninhabited solar system. No Tellurian-type planets at all. This may be it. Tune to Kinnison on one side and to your captains on the other. Take over, Rod."

      At one instant the ether, for one full detet in every direction, was empty. In the next, three intensely brilliant spots of detection flashed into being, in line with the dead planet so invitingly close at hand.

      This development came as a surprise, since only two raiders had been expected: a battleship to take care of the escort, a cruiser to take the merchantman. The fact that the pirates had become cautious or suspicious and had sent three super-dreadnaughts on the mission, however, did not operate to change the Patrol's strategy; for Samms had concluded, and Dronvire and Bergenholm and Rularion of Jupiter had agreed, that the real commander of the expedition would be aboard the vessel that attacked the freighter.

      In the next instant, then—each Lensman saw what Roderick Kinnison saw, in the very instant of his seeing it—six more points of hard, white light sprang into being upon the plates of guileful freighter and decoying cruiser.

      "Jack and Mase, take the leader!" Kinnison snapped out the thought. "Dronvire and Costigan, right wing—he's the one that's going after the freighter. Fred and Lyman, left wing. Hipe!"

      The pirate ships flashed up, filling ether and sub-ether alike with a solid mush of interference through which no call for help could be driven; two super-dreadnaughts against the cruiser, one against the freighter. The former, of course, had been expected to offer more than a token resistance. Battle cruisers of the Patrol were powerful vessels, both on offense and defense, and it was a known and recognized fact that the men of the Patrol were men. The pirate commander who attacked the freighter, however, was a surprised pirate indeed. His first beam, directed well forward, well ahead of the precious cargo, should have wrought the same havoc against screens and wall-shields and structure as a white-hot poker would against a pat of luke-warm butter. Practically the whole nose-section, including the control room, should have whiffed outward into space in gobbets and streamers of molten and gaseous metal. But nothing of the sort happened—this merchantman was no push-over!

      No ordinary screens protected that particular freighter and the person of First Lensman Samms—Roderick Kinnison had very thoroughly seen to that. In sheer mass her screen generators out-weighed her entire cargo, heavy as that cargo was, by more than two to one. Thus the pirate's beams stormed and struck and clawed and clung—uselessly. They did not penetrate. And as the surprised attacker shoved his power up and up, to his absolute ceiling of effort, the only result was to increase the already tremendous pyrotechnic display of energies cascading in all directions from the fiercely radiant defenses of the Tellurian freighter.

      And in a few seconds the commanding officers of the other two attacking battleships were also surprised. The battle-cruiser's screens did not go down, even under the combined top effort of two super-dreadnaughts! And she did not have a beam hot enough to light a match—she must be all screen! But before the startled outlaws could do anything about the realization that they, instead of being the trappers, were in cold fact the trapped, all three of them were surprised again—the last surprise that any of them was ever to receive. Six mighty tear-drops—vastly bigger, faster, more powerful than their own—were rushing upon them, blanketing all channels of communication as efficiently and as enthusiastically as they themselves had been doing an instant before.

      Being out simply and ruthlessly to kill, and not to capture, four of the newcomers from Bennett polished off the cruiser's two attackers in very short order. They simply flashed in, went inert at the four corners of an imaginary tetrahedron, and threw everything they had—and they had plenty. Possibly—just barely possibly—there may have been, somewhere, a space-battle shorter than that one; but there certainly was never one more violent.

      Then the four set out after their two sister-ships and the one remaining pirate, who was frantically devoting his every effort to the avoidance of engagement. But with six ships, each one of which was of vastly greater individual power than his own, at the six corners of an octahedron of which he was the geometrical center, his ability to cut tractor beams and to "squirt out" from between two opposed pressors did him no good whatever. He was englobed; or, rather, to apply the correct terminology to an operation involving so few units, he was "boxed".

      To blow the one remaining raider out of the ether would have been easy enough, but that was exactly what the Patrolmen did not want to do. They wanted information. Wherefore each of the Patrol ships directed a dozen or so beams upon the scintillating protective screens of the enemy; enough so that every square yard of defensive web was under direct attack. As rapidly as it could be done without losing equilibrium or synchronization, the power of each beam was stepped up until the wildly violet incandescence of the pirate screen showed that it was hovering on the very edge of failure. Then, in the instant, needle-beamers went furiously to work. The screen was already loaded to its limit; no transfer of defensive energy was possible. Thus, tremendously overloaded locally, locally it flared through the ultra-violet into the black and went down; and the fiercely penetrant daggers of pure force stabbed and stabbed and stabbed.

      The engine room went first, even though the needlers had to gnaw a hundred-foot hole straight through the pirate craft in order to find the vital installations. Then, enough damage done so that spy-rays could get in, the rest of the work was done with precision and dispatch. In a matter of seconds the pirate hulk lay helpless, and the Patrolmen peeled her like an orange—or, rather, more like an amateur cook very wastefully peeling a potato. Resistless knives of energy sheared off tail-section and nose-section, top and bottom, port and starboard sides; then slabbed off the corners of what was left, until the control room was almost bared to space.

      Then, as soon as the intrinsic velocities could possibly be matched, board and storm! With Dronvire of Rigel Four in the lead, closely followed by Costigan, Northrop, Kinnison the Younger, and a platoon СКАЧАТЬ