The Greatest Works of E. E. Smith. E. E. Smith
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу The Greatest Works of E. E. Smith - E. E. Smith страница 180
Название: The Greatest Works of E. E. Smith
Автор: E. E. Smith
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Языкознание
isbn: 9788027248001
isbn:
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 spiralled 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
The 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 was not enough, others were summoned until it did fall. One fortress, a hitherto unknown and surprisingly strong Secor 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 СКАЧАТЬ