Chapter VIII

Then Glayne leaped. With one flailing fist he caught the Delban guard on his bony jaw and with the other he snatched the cold-beam gun from his limp fingers. Whirling, he played it among the stupefied guards. Then old Graysen exploded into action, seizing Selzi-Narfid and hurling him bodily at Bro-Doral who was in the act of bringing up his Cardy gun. Three of the guards had collapsed and another was crumpling on his knees under Glayne's cold-beam. The other two had crouched back in the shadows of the entrance portal, trying to bring their weapons to bear upon Glayne.

Graysen whirled and lunged at them, smashing one down with a single blow. The last guard on his feet, surprised and dismayed by this attack from the rear, fled to the portal and tried to dilate it. But he was too late and sagged in a heap under Glayne's hand weapon.

Scooping up two of the Cardy guns which had fallen to the balcony floor, Glayne shouted: "Pick up an energy gun, Graysen. Cut down the power drain machinery."

Graysen reached for an energy gun in the holster of one of the paralyzed guards. He never even saw Gort Bro-Doral scramble to his feet and fire point blank. His head disappeared as the Delban's beam struck full force. Glayne fired back wildly but he was off balance and missed. Before he could collect himself to fire again, Bro-Doral had fled to another stage and darted through the dilation.

Glayne whirled toward the Delbans. Selzi-Narfid had a broken neck and was obviously dead. The guards were all unconscious and would remain so for a long time.

Glayne turned back to the Jewel which cast its chill, gold light steadily through the interstices of the surrounding girders. Calmly he leveled the Cardy gun and fired at it. As if it were so much water, the deadly little energy beam washed off the Tane Jewel and fused with the beralloy supports. It was as he had expected. Given several hours, the little hand weapon might have made an impression on the incredibly tough beralloy but Glayne had no time to lose.

As he had seen before, the power drain machinery which hung in clusters from the big beams and transmitted the energy through the heavy busbars looked to be the most fragile. Glayne wondered what would happen if he fired into them. There was only one way to find out. The muscles of his jaw hardened as he depressed the firing stud on the Cardy.

Nothing happened. He let the beam of his energy gun play up and down the clusters of power drains, fusing them into slag. Now the thin, invisible rays of power which the drains extracted from the Jewel no longer existed since they had no place to go. But nothing happened.

Then it occurred to him that nothing would happen in the Jewel Chamber itself. It needed no power for lights--the Jewel provided all the light needed. Heartened, Glayne blasted at every drain in reach, following the balcony around the Chamber.

But even this method, he realized, would take too long. Gort Bro-Doral would soon have squads of men hurrying into the Chamber after him. Grimly he wished he had an energy bomb. With one of those he could finish the job in a few seconds.

Suddenly he remembered an old Guardian trick. Hurriedly he began to tinker with one of the Cardy guns. By jamming a couple of the safety gadgets, it was possible to make the weapon fire out of phase. When the trigger stud was depressed, its tiny miatron coils would build up an unstable load in a couple of seconds, then explode. Quickly he fixed the weapon to his satisfaction, then hurried on around the balcony to find a suitable opening in the girders through which to hurl the ersatz bomb.

Halfway around, he met two panic-stricken Delban technicians. The instant they saw him they turned tail and ran back through the portal. Obviously _something_ must be happening, Glayne thought with grim satisfaction. Then he found a good spot, pressed the firing stud of the doctored Cardy gun, then flung it with all his strength into the remaining power drains. In an instant he had pivoted and lunged for the port of the entrance stage behind him, feeling in the shadow for its dilator stud.

It refused to open!

Obviously Glayne himself had sabotaged its power circuit. Now he was trapped in the Chamber and the ersatz bomb was about to explode. Tensely he crouched as far back in the recess of the port as he could and waited. With a terrific roar the bomb exploded in the confined Chamber, rupturing the membranes of his nose and crushing him violently against the port. Parts of the devastated power drains were hurled against the massive walls, then fell back to the Jewel. One of the heavy busbars had collapsed, ripping festoons of cables from the top of the Chamber which shorted violently against one another.

Dazed, Glayne pulled himself to his feet. Fortunately he had broken no bones. But one of his ear drums was ruptured and his nose bled unremittingly. He had lost his other Cardy. Hurriedly he felt about, found it, and thrust it into the fold of his tattered jumper.

He turned back to the port and found that the concussion had dilated it for him. Breathing heavily, he crawled through it into the inky blackness of the passages. On all sides he heard the sound of running footsteps. By touch he staggered into the blackness, realizing that he must keep going uphill, away from the Jewel's attraction.

The exertion cleared his head a bit. He knew he was lost, but he hoped to be able to find his way back to Selzi-Narfid's quarters. There he would find Niala and be oriented with the rest of the discoid.

Figures bumped into him in the blackness, hurrying to the scene of destruction. The Delbans were badly disorganized. Obviously they had not been prepared to cope with such devastation wreaked on their sacred Jewel. Not even to the extent of auxiliary power for lights, he thought as he panted up the black passages.

* * * * *

Even as he thought about it, the lights began to flicker weakly in their fluorescent tubes, growing stronger with each passing second. Startled, Glayne crouched back in the shadow of a recess in the wall. That was Luck in all her perversity, he thought grimly. His hand sought the butt of the blaster in his jumper. Fortunately the lights did not wax as brightly as they had when the Jewel was still functioning, but that did not offer much consolation. He would be recognized instantly by the outline of his thick-chested body if he was seen in the corridor.

He noticed that fewer Delbans were passing. He decided to chance it. Tightly grasping the gun in his jumper, he crept from his hiding place and ran on the balls of his feet, dodging and ducking into shadows every time one of the enemy passed. Once he was seen and pursued by a squad of Delban guards. Breathlessly he ran at full tilt through a cross-corridor, up a flight of high steps, and twisted into another of the endless passages of the discoid.

The pull of the Jewel had become very slight. In fact it was much slighter than it had been in Selzi-Narfid's suite. Glayne pushed on, realizing that he was hopelessly lost. His only chance now was to find the mono-rail on which they had ridden from the landing dock to the Tjadlinn commander's suite. It occurred to him that even if he did find Niala, they might never escape Tjadlinn. And it was absolutely imperative that he make contact with Garstow at Scone III. The slightest delay on the part of the Stellar Guardian Admiral in attacking the Karkara Station might give the Delbans the precious time they needed to repair the damage he had effected.

There were two entrance stages, one on either side, in the corridor through which he was hurrying. He tried one and found it was locked. He was more fortunate with the other. It creaked open slowly when he flipped the dilator stud. Tensely, hand on the Cardy gun in his jumper, he crept through the port.

It was the landing dock!

Glayne's heart jumped with delight as he crouched back in a shadow and examined the place. Not a hundred meters away was the launch which had brought his party from the _Algol_. His eyes drank it in avidly and a plan for escape formed rapidly in his mind. A message craft of some sort was preparing to leave, he saw. As soon as the inner lock door closed behind it, he would smash the launch through it and the air pressure would fling him out of the discoid. How very simple!

Then the impact of the realization that he would have to leave Niala Chodred behind struck him. He was stunned by its very violence.

Leave Niala? Abandon her to Gort Bro-Doral and his sadistic vengeance for the sabotage Glayne himself had performed? No! That was out of the question. But what of the Terran Combine? What did the life of Citizen Niala Chodred mean against the lives of the trillions who made up that Combine to which she had sworn allegiance? Viewed in that light, it was obvious that the life of one person was a cheap price to pay for security of the Combine against the Tane Jewel.

Glayne crouched in the shadow and buried his face in his hands. In an agony of indecision he prodded his weary mind to discover an alternative to the horrible dilemma. But he could find none. He would have to decide between Niala, the laughing, green-eyed Niala, and the ideal of human progress which he had sworn the Guardian Oath to protect.

Dully he realized that the power of the abstract was too strong. He would forsake Niala. The pain redoubled itself as he made his decision but he set his face in a granite-mask against it. Unfortunately it was not so easy to quell the agony that burned within him.

Grimly he stood up. He saw that the time had come for action. The message craft was slowly jetting down the cinder blastway toward the lock door. Glayne tensed for an instant, then raced for the launch, covering ten meters at a stride in the light gravity. Three Delban mechanics caught sight of him as he rounded the stubby fins and leaped for the lock. In mid-stride he whipped out his Cardy gun and brought them down in charred heaps.

A guard squad saw him and fired. Their beams sang dangerously close, smashing into the beralloy side of the launch. They crunched down the blastway in pursuit as Glayne jumped through the open lock, slammed it shut, and darted to the controls. The atomic driver engine coughed and surged into life. He let it scream up beyond audibility, then fed power to the jets. The blast washed over the guards who were closest to the launch and the others fell back hastily before its searing heat.

The inner lock of the entrance port had slid shut behind the message craft. It was now or never, Glayne realized. He opened the atomic driver wide and the stubby launch shuddered for an instant, then lunged for the lock. The sudden thrust created constricting hands about Glayne's chest and he fought precariously on the edge of blacking out. For a brief instant Glayne was aware of the huge outer doors swinging shut before him--and then the air pressure struck them and flung the launch bodily through the narrow space left between them.

The launch tumbled crazily end-over-end until Glayne straightened it out and oriented himself with Tjadlinn and Jorger Sun. He had just sighted the tiny gleaming speck of the _Algol_ a dozen kilometers distant when something struck the launch a terrific blow. Almost instantly the tell-tales indicated air was escaping. Dismayed, Glayne shot a glance over his shoulder at the receding discoid. He discovered that they were firing at him with the secondary Kellander batteries, using auxiliaries to power the miatrons. Feverishly he changed course, zig-zagging wildly away from the discoid.

Due to over confidence, the Delbans had not destroyed the _Algol_ immediately. They preferred to play cat and mouse. And now, with the titanic energies of the Jewel no longer available to them, they could not destroy the _Algol_.

The Kellander energy beams slashed dangerously close to the fleeing launch. Not in salvos but by ones and twos. That meant that their fire control was badly disorganized--and it was that fact which saved Glayne. Harbin had raised the _Algol's_ anti-shield when the Delbans had commenced firing but he had not turned tail as Glayne had ordered, realizing that the launch was fleeing in his direction.

Glayne flipped the stud of the shield-nullifier that was matched to the frequency of the _Algol's_ anti-shield and darted the launch through it, braking with eye-searing blasts of the forward jets as the huge Reception Deck locks yawned open. With a heavy lurch, his battered craft came to rest inside the lip of the gaping outer doors.