Spacehounds of IPC by E. E. Smith (e books for reading .TXT) 📖

But the hexans, with all their twisting and turning, could not present to that prodigious beam of force any angle sufficiently obtuse to rob it of half its power, and the driving projectors of the pentagon again burst into activity as the backward-pushing mass of the Sirius made itself felt. In a short time, however, the wall-screens were again cut off—apparently more power was required to drive them than they were able to deflect.

Although even the enormous tonnage of the Terrestrial cruiser was insignificant in comparison with the veritable mountain of metal to which she was opposed, so that the fiercest thrust of her driving projectors did not greatly affect the monster's progress; yet Brandon and his cohorts were well content.

"It's a long trip back to where they came from, and since they wanted to drift all the way, I think they'll be out of power before they get there," Brandon summed up the situation. "We aren't losing any power, either, since we are using only a part of our cosmic intake."

In a few hours the struggle had settled down to a routine matter—the Sirius being pushed backward steadily against the full drive of her every projector, contesting stubbornly every mile of space traversed. Assured that the regular pilots and lookouts were fully capable of handling the vessel, the scientists were about to resume their interrupted tasks when one of the photographers called them over to look at something he had discovered in one of the lowermost and smallest compartments of the heptagon. All crowded around the screens, and saw pictured there the winged, snake-like form of one of the original crew of the Vorkulian vessel!

"Dead?" Brandon asked.

"Not yet," replied the photographer. "He is twitching a little once in a while, but you see, he's pretty badly cut up."

"I see he is ... he must have a lot of vitality to have lasted this long—may be he'll live through it yet. Hold him on the plate, and get his exact measurements." He turned to the communicator. "Doctor von Steiffel? Can you come down to the control room a minute? We may want you to operate upon one of these South Jovians after a while."

"Himmel! Es ... ist ... der...." The great surgeon, bearded and massive, stared into the plate, and in his surprise started to speak in his native German. He paused, his long, powerful fingers tracing the likeness of the Vorkul upon the plate, then went on: "I would like very much to operate, but, not understanding our intentions, he would, of course, struggle. And when that body struggles—schrecklichkeit!" and he waved his arms in a pantomime of wholesale destruction.

"I thought of that—that's why I am talking to you now instead of when we get to him, two or three days from now. We'll give you his exact measurements, and a crew of mechanics will, under your direction, sink holes in the steel floor and install steel bands heavy enough to hold him rigid, from tailfins to wing-tips. We'll hold him there until we can make him understand that we're friends. It is of the utmost importance to save that creature's life if possible; because we do not want one of their fortresses launched against us—and in any event, it will not do us any harm to have a friend in the City of the South."

"Right. I will also have prepared some kind of a space-suit in which he can be brought from his vessel to ours," and the surgeon took the measurements and went to see that the "operating table" and suit were made ready for Kromodeor, the sorely wounded Vorkul.

It was not long until the projectors of the heptagon went out and she lay inert in space, power completely exhausted. Knowing that the screens of the enemy would absorb any ordinary ray, the scientists had calculated the most condensed beam they could possibly project, a beam which, their figures showed, should be able to puncture those screens by sheer mass action—puncture them practically instantaneously, before the absorbers could react. To that end they had arranged their circuits to hurl seven hundred sixty-five thousand kilofranks—the entire power of their massed accumulators and their highest possible cosmic intake—in one tiny bar of superlative density, less than one meter in diameter! Everything ready, Brandon shot in prodigious switches that launched that bolt—a bolt so vehement, so inconceivably intense, that it seemed fairly to blast the very ether out of existence as it tore its way along its carefully predetermined line. The intention was to destroy all the control panels of the absorber screens; parts so vital that without them the great vessel would be helpless, and yet items which the Terrestrials could reconstruct quite readily from their photographs and drawings.

As that irresistible bolt touched the Vorkulian wall-screen, the spot of contact flared instantaneously through the spectrum and into the black beyond the violet as that screen overloaded locally. Fast as it responded and highly conductive though it was, it could not handle that frightfully concentrated load. In the same fleeting instant of time every molecule of substance in that beam's path flashed into tenuous vapor—no conceivable material could resist or impede that stabbing stiletto of energy—and the main control panel of the Vorkulian wall-screen system vanished. Time after time, as rapidly as he could sight his beam and operate his switches, Brandon drove his needle of annihilation through the fortress, destroying the secondary controls. Then, the walls unresisting, he cut in the vastly larger, but infinitely less powerful, I-P ray, and with it systematically riddled the immense heptagon. Out through the gaping holes in the outer walls rushed the dense atmosphere of Jupiter, and the hexans in their massed hundreds died.

The Sirius was brought up beside the heptagon, so that her main air-lock was against one of the yawning holes in the green metal wall of the enemy. There she was anchored by tractor beams, and the two hundred picked men of the I-P police, in full space equipment, prepared to board the gigantic fortress of the void. Brandon sat tense at his controls, ready to send his beam ahead of the troopers against any hexans that might survive in some as yet unpunctured compartment. General Crowninshield sat beside the physicist at an auxiliary board, phones at ears and four infra-red visiray plates ranged in front of him; ready through light or darkness to direct and oversee the attack, no matter where it might lead or how widely separated the platoons might become before the citadel was taken.

The space-line men—the engineers of weightless combat—led the van, protected by the projectors of their fellows. Theirs the task to set up ways of rope, along which the others could advance. Power drills bit savagely into metal, making holes to receive the expanding eyebolts; grappling hooks seized fast every protuberance and corner; points of little stress were supported by powerful suction cups; and at intervals were strung beam-fed lanterns, illuminating brilliantly the line of march. Through compartments and down corridors they went, bridging the many gaps in the metal through which Brandon's beams had blasted their way; guided by Crowninshield along the shortest feasible path toward the little projector room in which Kromodeor, the wounded Vorkul, lay. There were so many chambers and compartments in the heptagon that it had, of course, been impossible to puncture them all, and in some of the tight rooms were groups of hexans, anxious to do battle. But the general's eye led his men, and if such a room lay before them, Brandon's frightful beam entered it first—and where that beam entered, life departed.

But the hexans were really intelligent, as has been said. They had had time to prepare for what they knew awaited them, and they were rendered utterly desperate by the knowledge that, no matter what might happen, their course was run. Their power was gone, and even if the present enemy should be driven off, they would float idly in space until they died of cold; or, more probably, hurtling toward Jupiter as they were, they would plunge to certain death upon its surface as soon as they came within its powerful gravitational field. Therefore some fifty of the creatures, who had had space experience in their spherical vessels, had spent the preceding days in manufacturing space equipment. Let the weight-fiends plan upon detonating magazines of explosives, upon laying mines calculated to destroy the invaders, even the vessel itself and all within it. Let them plan upon any other such idle schemes, which were certain to be foreseen and guarded against by the space-hardened veterans who undoubtedly moaned that all-powerful and vengeful football of scarred gray metal. Space-fighters were they, and as space-fighters would they die; taking with them to their own inevitable death a full quota of the enemy.

Thus it came about that the head of the column of police had scarcely passed a certain door, when in the room behind it there began to assemble the half-hundred spacehounds of the hexans. When the vanguard had approached that room, Crowninshield had inspected it thoroughly with his infra-red beams. He had found it punctured and airless, devoid of life or of lethal devices, and had passed on. But now the space-suited warriors of the horde, guided in their hiding by their own visirays, were massing there. When the center of the I-P column reached that door, it burst open. There boiled out into the corridor, into the very midst of the police, fifty demoniacal hexans, fighting with Berserk fury, ruled by but one impulse—to kill.

Hand-weapons flashed viciously, tearing at steel armor and at bulging space-suits. Space-hooks bit and tore. Pikes and lances were driven with the full power of brawny arms. Here and there could be seen trooper and hexan, locked together in fierce embrace far from any hand-line—six limbs against four, all ten plied with abandon in mortal, hand-to-hand, foot-to-foot combat.

"Give way!" yelled Crowninshield into the ears of his men. "Epstein, back! LeFevre, advance! Get out of block ten—give us a chance to use a beam!"

As the police fell back out of the designated section of the corridor, Brandon's beam tore through it, filling it from floor to ceiling with a volume of intolerable energy. In that energy walls, doorway, and space-lines, as well as most of the hexans, vanished utterly. But the beam could not be used again. Every surviving enemy had hurled himself frantically into the thickest ranks of the police and the battle raged fiercer than ever. It did not last long. The ends of the column had already closed in. The police filled the corridor and overflowed into the yawning chasm cut by the annihilating ray. Outnumbered, surrounded upon all sides, above, and below by the Terrestrials, the hexans fought with mad desperation to the last man—and to the last man died. And even though in lieu of their own highly efficient space-armor they had fought in weak, crude, and hastily improvised space-suits, which were pitifully inferior to the ray resistant, heavy steel armor of the I-P forces, nevertheless the enormous strength and utter savagery of the hexans had taken toll; and when the advance was resumed, it was with extra lookouts scanning the entire neighborhood of the line of march.

Since the troops had entered the fortress as close to their goal as possible, it was not long until the leading platoon reached the door behind which Kromodeor lay. Tools and cylinders of air were brought up, and the engineers quickly fitted pressure bulkheads across the corridor. There was a screaming hiss from the valves, the atmosphere in that walled-off space became dense, and mechanics attacked with their power drills the door of the projector room. It opened, and four husky orderlies rapidly but gently encased the long body of the Vorkul in the space-suit built especially to receive it. As that monstrous form in its weirdly bulging envelope was guided through the air-locks into the Sirius, Crowninshield barked orders into his transmitter and the police reformed. They would now systematically scour the fortress, to wipe out any hexans that might still be in hiding; to discover and destroy any possible traps or infernal machines which the enemy might have planted for their undoing.

Assured that the real danger to the Sirius was over and that his presence was no longer necessary, Brandon turned his controls over to an assistant and went up to the Venerian rooms, where von Steiffel and his staff were to operate upon the Vorkul. There, in the dense, hot air, but little different now from the atmosphere of Jupiter, Kromodeor lay; bolted down to the solid steel of the floor by means of padded steel straps. So heavy were the bands that he could not possibly break even one of them; so closely were they spaced that he could scarcely have moved a muscle had he tried. But he did not try—so near death was he that his mighty muscles did not even quiver at the trenchant bite of the surgeon's tools. Von Steiffel