Triplanetary Part 18

"You told me so yourself, indirectly. Who else in the three worlds could possibly call him 'Sammy?' You are hard, of course, but you must be so-and I never did like soft men, anyway. And you brawl in a good cause. You are very much a man, my Conway; a real, real man, and I love you! Now, if they catch us, all right-we'll die together, at least!" she finished, intensely.

"You're right, sweetheart, of course," he admitted. "I don't believe that I could really let you let me go, even though I know you ought to," and their hands locked together even more firmly than before. "If we ever get out of this jam I'm going to kiss you, but this is no time to be taking off your helmet. In fact, I'm taking too many chances with you in keeping your shields off. Snap 'em on again-they ought to be getting fairly close by this time."

Hands released and armor again tight, Costigan went over to join Bradley at the control board.

"How are they coming, Captain?" he asked.

"Not so good. Quite a ways off yet. At least an hour, I'd say, before a cruiser can get within range."

"I'll see if I can locate any of the pirates chasing us. If I do it'll be by accident; this little spy-ray isn't good for much except close work. I'm afraid the first warning we'll have will be when they take hold of us with a tractor or spear us with a needle. Probably a beam, though; this is one of their emergency lifeboats and they wouldn't want to destroy it unless they have to. Also, I imagine that Roger wants us alive pretty badly. He has unfinished business with all three of us, and I can well believe that his 'not particularly pleasant extinction' will be even less so after the way we rooked him."

"I want you to do me a favor, Conway." Clio's face was white with horror at the thought of facing again that unspeakable creature of gray. "Give me a gun or something, please. I don't want him ever to look at me that way again, to say nothing of what else he might do, while I'm alive."

"He won't," Costigan a.s.sured her, narrow of eye and grim of jaw. He was, as she had said, hard. "But you don't want a gun. You might get nervous and use it too soon. I'll take care of you at the last possible moment, because if he gets hold of us we won't stand a chance of getting away again."

For minutes there was silence, Costigan surveying the ether in all directions with his ultra-wave device. Suddenly he laughed, and the others stared at him in surprise.

"No, I'm not crazy," he told them. "This is really funny; it had never occurred to me that the ether-walls of all these ships make them invisible. I can see them, of course, with this sub-ether spy, but they can't see us! I knew that they should have overtaken us before this. I've finally found them. They've pa.s.sed us, and are now tacking around, waiting for us to do something so that they can see us! They're heading right into the Fleet-they think they're safe, of course, but what a surprise they've got coming to them!"

But it was not only the pirates who were to be surprised. Long before the pirate ship had come within extreme visibility range of the Triplanetary Fleet it lost its invisibility and was starkly outlined upon the lookout plates of the three fugitives. For a few seconds the pirate craft seemed unchanged, then it began to glow redly, with a red that seemed to become darker as it grew stronger. Then the sharp outlines blurred, puffs of air burst outward, and the metal of the hull became a viscous, fluid-like something, flowing away in a long, red streamer into seemingly empty s.p.a.ce. Costigan turned his ultra-gaze into that s.p.a.ce and saw that it was actually far from empty. There lay a vast something, formless and indefinite even to his sub-etheral vision; a something into which the viscid stream of transformed metal plunged. Plunged and vanished.

Powerful interference blanketed his ultra-wave and howled throughout his body; but in the hope that some parts of his message might get through he called Samms, and calmly and clearly he narrated everything that had just happened. He continued his crisp report, neglecting not the smallest detail, while their tiny craft was drawn inexorably toward a redly impermeable veil; continued it until their lifeboat, still intact, shot through that veil and he found himself unable to move. He was conscious, he was breathing normally, his heart was beating; but not a voluntary muscle would obey his will!

CHAPTER 9

FLEET AGAINST PLANETOID

One of the newest and fleetest of the patrol vessels of the Triplanetary League, the heavy cruiser Chicago of the North American Division of the Tellurian Contingent, plunged stolidly through interplanetary vacuum. For five long weeks she had patrolled her allotted volume of s.p.a.ce. In another week she would report back to the city whose name she bore, where her s.p.a.ce-weary crew, worn by their long "tour" in the awesomely oppressive depths of the limitless void, would enjoy to the full their fortnight of refreshing planetary leave.

She was performing certain routine tasks-charting meteorites, watching for derelicts and other obstructions to navigation, checking in constantly with all scheduled s.p.a.ce-ships in case of need, and so on-but primarily she was a warship. She was a mighty engine of destruction, hunting for the unauthorized vessels of whatever power or planet it was that had not only defied the Triplanetary League, but was evidently attempting to overthrow it; attempting to plunge the Three Planets back into the ghastly sink of bloodshed and destruction from which they had so recently emerged. Every s.p.a.ce-ship within range of her powerful detectors was represented by two brilliant, slowly-moving points of light; one upon a greater micrometer screen, the other in the "tank," the immense, three-dimensional, minutely cubed model of the entire Solar System.

A brilliantly intense red light flared upon a panel and a bell clanged brazenly the furious signals of the sector alarm. Simultaneously a speaker roared forth its message of a ship in dire peril.

"Sector alarm! N.A.T. Hyperion ga.s.sed with Vee-Two. Nothing detectable in s.p.a.ce, but...."

The half-uttered message was drowned out in a crackling roar of meaningless noise, the orderly signals of the bell became a hideous clamor, and the two points of light which had marked the location of the liner disappeared in widely spreading flashes of the same high-powered interference. Observers, navigators, and control officers were alike dumbfounded. Even the captain, in the sh.e.l.l-proof, shock-proof, and doubly ray-proof retreat of his conning compartment, was equally at a loss. No ship or thing could possibly be close enough to be sending out interfering waves of such tremendous power-yet there they were!

"Maximum acceleration, straight for the point where the Hyperion was when her tracers went out," the captain ordered, and through the fringe of that widespread interference he drove a solid beam, reporting concisely to GHQ. Almost instantly the emergency call-out came roaring in-every vessel of the Sector, of whatever cla.s.s or tonnage, was to concentrate upon the point in s.p.a.ce where the ill-fated liner had last been known to be.

Hour after hour the great globe drove on at maximum acceleration, captain and every control officer alert and at high tension. But in Quartermasters' Department, deep down below the generator rooms, no thought was given to such minor matters as the disappearance of a Hyperion. The inventory did not balance, and two Q.M. privates were trying, profanely and without success, to find the discrepancy.

"Charged calls for Mark Twelve Lewistons, none requisitioned, on hand eighteen thous...." The droning voice broke off short in the middle of a word and the private stood rigid, in the act of reaching for another slip, every faculty concentrated upon something imperceptible to his companion.

"Come on, Cleve-snap it up!" the second commanded, but was silenced by a vicious wave of the listener's hand.

"What!" the rigid one exclaimed. "Reveal ourselves! Why, it's.... Oh, all right.... Oh, that's it ... uh-huh ... I see ... yes, I've got it solid. So long!"

The inventory sheets fell unheeded from his hand, and his fellow private stared after him in amazement as he strode over to the desk of the officer in charge. That officer also stared as the hitherto easy-going and gold-bricking Cleve saluted crisply, showed him something flat in the palm of his left hand, and spoke.

"I've just got some of the funniest orders ever put out, lieutenant, but they came from 'way, 'way up. I'm to join the bra.s.s hats in the Center. You'll know all about it directly, I imagine. Cover me up as much as you can, will you?" and he was gone.

Unchallenged he made his way to the control room, and his curt "urgent report for the Captain" admitted him there without question. But when he approached the sacred precincts of the captain's own and inviolate room, he was stopped in no uncertain fashion by no less a personage than the Officer of the Day.

"... and report yourself under arrest immediately!" the O.D. concluded his brief but pointed speech.

"You were right in stopping me, of course," the intruder conceded, unmoved. "I wanted to get in there without giving everything away, if possible, but it seems that I can't. Well, I've been ordered by Virgil Samms to report to the Captain, at once. See this? Touch it!" He held out a flat, insulated disk, cover thrown back to reveal a tiny golden meteor, at the sight of which the officer's truculent manner altered markedly.

"I've heard of them, of course, but I never saw one before," and the officer touched the shining symbol lightly with his finger, jerking backward as there shot through his whole body a thrilling surge of power, shouting into his very bones an unp.r.o.nounceable syllable-the pa.s.sword of the Triplanetary Service. "Genuine or not, it gets you to the Captain. He'll know, and if it's a fake you'll be breathing s.p.a.ce in five minutes."

Projector at the ready, the Officer of the Day followed Cleve into the Holy of Holies. There the grizzled four-striper touched the golden meteor lightly, then drove his piercing gaze deep into the unflinching eyes of the younger man. But that captain had won his high rank neither by accident nor by "pull"-he understood at once.

"It must be an emergency," he growled, half-audibly, still staring at his lowly Q-M clerk, "to make Samms uncover this way." He turned and curtly dismissed the wondering O.D. Then: "All right! Out with it!"

"Serious enough so that every one of us afloat has just received orders to reveal himself to his commanding officer and to anyone else, if necessary to reach that officer at once-orders never before issued. The enemy have been located. They have built a base, and have ships better than our best. Base and ships cannot be seen or detected by any ether wave. However, the Service has been experimenting for years with a new type of communicator beam; and, while pretty crude yet, it was given to us when the Dione went out without leaving a trace. One of our men was in the Hyperion, managed to stay alive, and has been sending data. I am instructed to attach my new phone set to one of the universal plates in your conning room, and to see what I can find."

"Go to it!" The captain waved his hand and the operative bent to his task.

"Commanders of all vessels of the Fleet!" The Headquarters speaker, receiver sealed upon the wave-length of the Admiral of the Fleet, broke the long silence. "All vessels in sectors L to R, inclusive, will interlock location signals. Some of you have received, or will receive shortly, certain communications from sources which need not be mentioned. Those commanders will at once send out red K4 screens. Vessels so marked will act as temporary flagships. Unmarked vessels will proceed at maximum to the nearest flagship, grouping about it in the regulation squadron cone in order of arrival. Squadrons most distant from objective point designated by flagship observers will proceed toward it at maximum; squadrons nearest it will decelerate or reverse velocity-that point must not be approached until full Fleet formation has been accomplished. Heavy and light cruisers of all other sectors inside the orbit of Mars...." The orders went on, directing the mobilization of the stupendous forces of the League, so that they would be in readiness in the highly improbable event of the failure of the ma.s.sed power of seven sectors to reduce the pirate base.

In those seven sectors perhaps a dozen vessels threw out enormous spherical screens of intense red light, and as they did so their tracer points upon all the interlocked lookout plates also became ringed about with red. Toward those crimson markers the pilots of the unmarked vessels directed their courses at their utmost power; and while the white lights upon the lookout plates moved slowly toward and cl.u.s.tered about the red ones the ultra-instruments of the Service operatives were probing into s.p.a.ce, sweeping the neighborhood of the computed position of the pirate's stronghold.

But the object sought was so far away that the small spy-ray sets of the Service men, intended as they were for close range work, were unable to make contact with the invisible planetoid for which they were seeking. In the captain's sanctum of the Chicago, the operative studied his plate for only a minute or two, then shut off his power and fell into a brown study, from which he was rudely aroused.

"Aren't you even going to try to find them?" demanded the captain.

"No," Cleve returned shortly. "No use-not half enough power or control. I'm trying to think ... maybe ... say, Captain, will you please have the Chief Electrician and a couple of radio men come in here?"

They came, and for hours, while the other ultra-wave men searched the apparently empty ether with their ineffective beams, the three technical experts and the erstwhile Quartermaster's clerk labored upon a huge and complex ultra-wave projector-the three blindly and with doubtful questions; the one with sure knowledge at least of what he was trying to do. Finally the thing was done, the crude, but efficient graduated circles were set, and the tubes glowed redly as their ma.s.sed output drove into a tight beam of ultra-vibration.

"There it is, sir," Cleve reported, after some ten minutes of manipulation, and the vast structure of the miniature world flashed into being upon his plate. "You may notify the fleet-coordinates H 11.62, RA 124-31-16, and Dx about 173.2."

The report made and the a.s.sistants out of the room, the captain turned to the observer and saluted gravely.

"We have always known, sir, that the Service had men; but I had no idea that any one man could possibly do, on the spur of the moment, what you have just done-unless that man happened to be Lyman Cleveland."

"Oh, it doesn't...." the observer began, but broke off, muttering unintelligibly at intervals; then swung the visiray beam toward the Earth. Soon a face appeared upon the plate; the keen, but careworn face of Virgil Samms!

"h.e.l.lo, Lyman," his voice came clearly from the speaker, and the Captain gasped-his ultra-wave observer and sometime clerk was Lyman Cleveland himself, probably the greatest living expert in beam transmission! "I knew that you'd do something, if it could be done. How about it-can the others install similar sets on their ships? I'm betting that they can't."

"Probably not," Cleveland frowned in thought. "This is a patchwork affair, made of gunny sacks and hay-wire. I'm holding it together by main strength and awkwardness, and even at that, it's apt to go to pieces any minute."

"Can you rig it up for photography?"

"I think so. Just a minute-yes, I can. Why?"

"Because there's something going on out there that neither we nor apparently the pirates know anything about. The Admiralty seems to think that it's the Jovians again, but we don't see how it can be-if it is, they have developed a lot of stuff that none of our agents has even suspected," and he recounted briefly what Costigan had reported to him, concluding: "Then there was a burst of interference-on the ultra-band, mind you-and I've heard nothing from him since. Therefore I want you to stay out of the battle entirely. Stay as far away from it as you can and still get good pictures of everything that happens. I will see that orders are issued to the Chicago to that effect."

"But listen...."