Chapter II

Barely a month after his graduation, even before he had entirely completed the postgraduate tours of duty mentioned by Von Hohendorff, Kinnison was summoned to Prime Base by no less a personage than Port Admiral Haynes himself. There, in the admiral's private aëro, whose flaring lights cleared a path as though by magic through the swarming traffic, the novice and the veteran flew slowly over the vast establishment of the base.

Shops and factories, citylike barracks, landing fields stretching beyond the far horizon; flying craft ranging from tiny, one-man helicopters through small and large scouts, patrol ships and cruisers up to the immense, globular superdreadnaughts of space--all these were observed and commented upon. Finally, the aëro landed beside a long, comparatively low building--a structure heavily guarded, inside the base although it was--within which Kinnison saw a thing that fairly snatched away his breath.

A space ship it was--but what a ship! In bulk it was vastly larger even than the superdreadnaughts of the patrol; but, unlike them, it was, in shape, a perfect teardrop, streamlined to the ultimate possible degree.[1]

[Footnote 1: In the "big teardrops"--cruisers and battleships--the driving force is always directed upward, along the geometrical axis of the ship, and the artificial gravity is always downward along that same line. Thus, throughout any possible maneuvering, free or inert, "down" and "up" have the same significance as within any Earthly structure.

These vessels are ordinarily landed only in special docks, but in emergencies can be landed almost anywhere, sharp stern down, as their immense weight drives them deep enough into even the hardest ground to keep them upright. They sink in water, but are readily maneuverable, even under water.]

"What do you think of her?" the port admiral asked.

"Think of her!" The young officer gulped twice before he attained coherence. "I can't put it in words, sir; but some day, if I live long enough and develop enough force, I hope to command a ship like that."

"Sooner than you think, Kinnison," Haynes told him, flatly. "You are in command of her beginning to-morrow morning."

"Huh? Me?" Kinnison exclaimed, but sobered quickly. "Oh, I see, sir. It takes ten years of proved accomplishment to rate command of a first-class enforcement vessel, and I have no rating at all. You have already intimated that this ship is experimental. There is, then, something about her that is new and untried, and so dangerous that you do not want to risk an experienced commander in her. I am to give her a work-out, and if I can bring her back in one piece I turn her over to her real captain. But that's all right with me, admiral--thanks a lot for picking me out. What a chance! _What_ a chance!" Kinnison's eye gleamed at the prospect of even a brief command of such a creation.

"Right--and wrong," the old admiral made surprising answer. "It is true that she is new, untried, and dangerous, so much so that we are unwilling to give her to any of our present captains. No, she is not really new, either. Rather, her basic idea is so old that it has been abandoned for centuries. She uses explosives, of a type that cannot be tried out fully except in actual combat. Her primary weapon is what we have called the 'Q-gun.' The propellent is heptadetonite; the shell carries a charge of twenty metric tons of duodecaplylatomate."

"But, sir----" Kinnison began.

* * * * *

"Just a minute, I'll go into that later. While your premises were correct, your conclusion is not. You graduated No. 1, and in every respect, save experience, you are as well qualified to command as is any captain of the fleet; and since the _Brittania_ is such a radical departure from any conventional type, battle experience is not a prerequisite. Therefore, if she holds together through one engagement she is yours for good. In other words, to make up for the possibility of having yourself scattered all over space, you have a chance to win that ten years' rating you mentioned a minute ago, all in one trip. Fair enough?"

"Fair? It's fine--wonderful! And thanks a----"

"Never mind the thanks until you get back. You were about to comment, I believe, upon the impossibility of using explosives against a free opponent?"

"It can't be impossible, of course, since the _Brittania_ has been built. I just don't quite see how it could have been made effective."

"You lock to the pirate with tractors, screen to screen--dex about ten kilometers. You blast a hole through his screens to his wall shield. The muzzle of the Q-gun mounts an annular multiplex projector which puts out a Q-type tube of force--Q47SM9, to be exact. As you can see from the type formula, this helix extends the gun barrel from ship to ship and confines the propellent gases behind the projectile, where they belong. When the shell strikes the wall shield of the pirate and detonates, _something_ will have to give way.

"The tube and tractors, being pure force and computed for this particular combination of explosions, will hold; and our physicists have calculated that the ten-kilometer column of inert propellent gases will offer so much inertia and resistance that any possible wall shield will have to go down. That is the point that cannot be tried out experimentally. It is quite within the bounds of possibility that the pirates may have been able to develop wall screens as powerful as our Q-type helices.

"It should not be necessary to point out to you that if they _have_ been able to develop a wall shield that will stand up under detonating duodecaplylatomate, the back blast through the breech of the Q-gun will blow the _Brittania_ apart as though she were made of matchwood. That is only one of the chances--and perhaps not the greatest one--that you and your crew will have to take. They are all volunteers, by the way, and will get plenty of extra rating if they come through alive. Do you want the job?"

"You don't have to ask me that, chief--you _know_ I want it!"

"Of course, but I had to go through the formality of asking, sometime. But to get on with the discussion. This pirate situation is entirely out of control, as you already know. We don't even know whether Boskone is a reality, a figurehead, a symbol, or simply a figment of somebody's imagination. But whoever or whatever Boskone really is, some being or some group of beings has perfected a mighty efficient organization of outlaws; so efficient that we haven't been able to locate their main base.

* * * * *

"You may as well know now a fact that is not yet public property; that even convoyed vessels are no longer safe. The pirates have developed ships of a new and extraordinary type; ships that are much faster than our heavy battleships, and yet vastly more heavily armed than our fast cruisers. Thus, they can outfight any enforcement vessel that can catch them, and can outrun anything of ours armed heavily enough to stand up against their beams."

"That accounts for the recent heavy losses," Kinnison mused.

"Yes," Haynes went on, grimly. "Ship after ship of our best has been blasted out of the ether, doomed before it pointed a beam, and more will be. We cannot force an engagement on our terms; we must fight on theirs.

"That is the present intolerable situation. We _must_ learn what the pirates' new power system is. Our scientists say that it may be anything, from cosmic-energy receptors and converters down to a controlled space warp--whatever that may be. Anyway, they haven't been able to duplicate it, so it is up to us to find out what it is. The _Brittania_ is the tool our engineers have designed to get that information. She is the fastest thing in space, developing at full blast an inert acceleration of _ten gravities_. Figure out for yourself what velocity that means free in open space!"

"You have just said that we can't have everything in one ship," Kinnison said, thoughtfully. "What did they sacrifice to get that speed?"

"All the conventional offensive armament," Haynes replied frankly. "She has no long-range beams at all, and only enough short-range stuff to help drive the Q-helix through the enemy's screens. Practically her only offense is the Q-gun. But she has plenty of defensive screens; she has speed enough to catch anything afloat; and she has the Q-gun--which we hope will be enough.

"Now we'll go over the general plan of action. The engineers will go into all the technical details with you, during a test flight that will last as long as you like. When you and your crew are thoroughly familiar with every phase of her operation, bring the engineers back here to base and go out on patrol.

"Somewhere in the galaxy you will find a pirate vessel of the new type. You lock to him, as I said before. You attach the Q-gun well forward, being sure that the point of attachment is far enough away from the power rooms so that the essential mechanisms will not be destroyed. You board and storm--another revival of the technique of older times. Specialists in your crew, who will have done nothing much up to that time, will then find out what our scientists want to know. If at all possible, they will send it in instantly via tight-beam communicator. If, because of distance or for any other reason, it should be impossible for them to communicate, the whole thing is again up to you."

The port admiral paused, his eyes boring into those of the younger man, then went on impressively: "That information _must_ get back to base. If it does not, the _Brittania_ is a failure; we will be right back where we started from; the slaughter of our men and the destruction of our ships will continue unchecked. As to how you are to do it, we cannot give you even general instructions. All I can say is that you have the most important assignment in the universe to-day, and repeat--_that information must get back to base_. Now come aboard and meet your crew and the engineers."

* * * * *

Under the expert tutelage of the designers and builders of the _Brittania_ Vice Commander Kinnison drove her hither and thither through the trackless wastes of the galaxy[2]. Inert and "free," under every possible degree of power he maneuvered her; attacking imaginary foes and actual meteorites with equal zeal. Maneuvered and attacked until he and his ship were one; until he reacted automatically to her slightest demand; until he and every man of his eager and highly trained crew knew to the final volt and to the ultimate ampere her Gargantuan capacity both to give it and to take it.

[Footnote 2: Navigation. Each ship has a reference sphere held rigidly by gyroscopes so that its great circle of galactic longitude is always parallel to the galactic equator. Its line of zeros is always parallel to the line joining Centralia, the central solar system of the galaxy, with the system of Vandemar, which is on its very rim. Thus, courses are expressed in galactic longitude and latitude, from 0 to 360 degrees in each circle.

Position is expressed in galactic coördinates of "x," "y," and "z." The origin is at Centralia, and the line of positive "x" is the above-mentioned Centralia-Vandemar line.

The position of the ship in the galaxy is known at all times by that of a moving dot in the tank. This dot is shifted automatically by calculating machines coupled inductively to the leads of the drives. When the ship is inert this device is inoperative, as any distance traversed in inert flight is entirely negligible in galactic computations. Due to various perturbations and other slight errors, cumulative discrepancies occur, for which the pilot must from time to time correct manually the position of the dot in the tank representing his ship.]

Then and only then did he return to base, unload the engineers, and set out upon the quest. Trail after trail he followed, but all were cold. Alarm after alarm he answered, but always he arrived too late; arrived to find gutted merchantmen and riddled enforcement vessel, with no life in either and with nothing to indicate in which direction the marauders might have gone.

Finally, however: "QBT! Calling QBT!" The _Brittania's_ code call blared from the sealed-band speaker, and a string of numbers followed--the spatial coördinates of the luckless vessel's position.

Chief Pilot Henry Henderson punched the figures upon his locator, and in the "tank"--the enormous, minutely cubed model of the galaxy--there appeared a redly brilliant point of light. Kinnison rocketed out of his narrow bunk, digging the sleep out of his eyes, and shot himself into his place beside the pilot.

"Right in our laps!" he exulted. "Scarcely ten light years away! Start scrambling the ether!" And as the vengeful cruiser darted toward the scene of depredation all space became filled with blast after blast of static interference through which, it was hoped, the pirate could not summon the help he was so soon to need.

But that howling static gave the pirate commander pause. Surely this was something new? Before him lay a richly laden freighter, its two convoying enforcement ships already practically _hors de combat_. A few more minutes and the prize would be his. Nevertheless, he darted away, swept the ether with his detectors, saw the _Brittania_, and turned in headlong flight. For if this streamlined freighter was sufficiently convinced of its prowess to try to blanket the ether against _him_, that information was something that Boskone would value far above one shipload of material wealth.

* * * * *

But the pirate craft was now upon the visiplates of the _Brittania_, and, entirely ignoring the crippled space ships, Henderson flung his vessel after the other. Manipulating his incredibly complex controls purely by touch, the while staring into his plate not only with his eyes, but with every fiber of his being as well, he hurled his huge mount hither and thither in frantic leaps. After what seemed an age he snapped down a toggle switch and relaxed long enough to grin at Kinnison.

"Holding 'em?" the young commander demanded.

"Got 'em, skipper," the pilot replied, positively. "It was touch and go for ninety seconds, but I've got a CRX tracer on him now at full pull. He can't put out enough jets to get away from _that_. I can hold him forever!"

"Fine work, Hen!" Kinnison strapped himself into his seat and donned his headset. "General call! Attention! Battle stations! By stations, report!"

"Station 1, tractor beams--hot!"

"Station 2, repellers--hot!"

"Station 3, projector 1--hot!"

Thus station after station of the warship of the void reported, until: "Station 58, the Q-gun--hot!" Kinnison himself reported; then gave to the pilot the words which throughout the space-ways of the galaxy had come to mean complete readiness to face any emergency.

"Hot and tight, Hen--let's take 'em!"

The pilot shoved his blast lever, already almost at maximum, clear out against its stop and hunched himself even more intently over his instruments. As moved his pointers, so varied the direction of the thrust that was driving the _Brittania_ toward the enemy at the unimaginable velocity of ninety parsecs an hour[3]--a velocity possible only to inertialess matter being urged through an almost perfect vacuum by a driving blast capable of lifting the stupendous normal tonnage of the immense sky rover against a gravity ten times that of her native Earth.

[Footnote 3: With the neutralization of inertia it was discovered that while inert mass is limited to the velocity of light, there is no limit whatever to the velocity of inertialess matter. A "free" ship takes on instantly the velocity at which the force of her drive is exactly equalled by the friction of the medium. This velocity is determined by many factors; but, assuming an ultra-fast shape, a standard mass-to-volume ratio, a power to develop an inert acceleration of ten Earth gravities, and a density of matter in space of one atom per ten cubic centimeters, such speeds are not at all unusual.

It may be of interest to note here that Mays and Cornell recently made the transgalactic run along the line of zeros, from Alsakan past Centralia to Vandemar, a distance of 100,309.46 parsecs, in 1253.486 hours (Galactic Standard); thus establishing a new galactic record of 812.44 parsecs per hour for the entire distance.]

Unimaginable? Completely so--the ship of the Galactic Patrol was hurling herself through space at a pace in comparison with which any speed that the mind can grasp would be the merest crawl: a pace to make light itself seem stationary.

Ordinary vision would have been useless, but the observers of that day used no antiquated optical system. Their detector beams, converted into light only at their plates, were heterodyned upon and were carried by subethereal ultra-waves; vibrations residing far below the level of the ether and thus possessing a velocity and a range infinitely greater than those of any possible ether-borne wave.

Although stars moved across the visiplates in flaming, zigzag lines of light, as pursued and pursuer passed system after solar system in fantastic, light-years long hops, yet Henderson kept his cruiser upon the pirate's tail and steadily cut down the distance between them. Soon a tractor beam licked out from the patrol ship, touched the fleeing marauder lightly, and the two space ships flashed toward each other.

* * * * *

Nor was the enemy unprepared for combat. One of the crack raiders of Boskone, master pirate of the known universe, she had never before found difficulty in conquering any vessel fleet enough to catch her. Therefore, her commander made no attempt to cut the beam. Or rather, since the two inertialess vessels flashed together to repeller-zone contact in such a minute fraction of a second that any human action within that time was impossible, it would be more correct to say that the pirate captain changed his tactics instantly from those of flight to those of combat.

He thrust out tractor beams of his own, and from the already white-hot refractory throats of his projectors there raved out horribly potent beams of annihilation, beams of dreadful power which tore madly at the straining defensive screens of the patrol ship. Screens flared vividly, radiating all the colors of the spectrum. Space itself seemed a rainbow gone mad, for there were being exerted there forces of a magnitude to stagger the imagination--forces to be yielded only by the atomic might from which they sprang--forces whose neutralization set up visible strains in the very fabric of the ether itself.

The young commander, seated at his conning plate, clenched his fists and swore a startled, deep-space oath as his eyes swept over the delicately accurate meters and gauges before him; for under the frightful impact of that instantaneously launched attack his outer screen was already down and his second was beginning to crack!

"We'll have to scrap the regulation battle plan!" he barked into his microphone. "Open all motors to absolute top; cut all resistance out of No. 3 Circuit. Dalhousie, cut all repellers, bring us right up to their zone. All you beamers, concentrate on area K. _Break down those screens!_" Kinnison was hunched rigidly over his panel; his voice came grittily through locked teeth. "Cut _all_ your resistors if you have to, the motors and accumulators will hold long enough. There, that's better. Our third is up again and theirs is going down. Come on, boys, burn 'em down! Give 'em everything you can put through the bare bus bars! No matter what it takes, get through to that wall shield, so that I can use this Q-gun!"

Little by little, under the stupendous force of the _Brittania's_ attack the defenses of the enemy began to fail, and Kinnison's hands flew over his controls. A port opened in the patrol ship's armored side and an ugly snout protruded--the projector-ringed muzzle of a squat and monstrous cannon. From its projector bands there leaped out, with the velocity of light, a tube of quasi-solid force which was, in effect, a continuation of the rifle's grim barrel; a tube which crashed through the weakened third screen of the enemy with a space-racking shock and struck savagely, with writhing, twisting thrusts, at the second.

Aided by the massed concentration of the _Brittania's_ every battery of short-range beams, it went through--and through the first. Now it struck the very wall shield of the outlaw--that impregnable screen which, designed to bear the brunt of any possible inert collision, had never been pierced or ruptured by any material substance, however applied.

To this inner defense the immaterial gun barrel clung. Simultaneously, the tractor beams, hitherto exerting only a few dynes of force, stiffened into unbreakable, inflexible rods of energy, binding the two ships of space into one rigid system; each, relative to the other, immovable.

* * * * *

Then Kinnison's flying finger tip touched a button and the Q-gun spoke. From its sullen throat there erupted a huge torpedo. Slowly the giant projectile crept along, watched in awe and amazement by the officers of both vessels. For to those space-hardened veterans the velocity of light was a veritable crawl; and here was a thing that would require four or five whole seconds to cover a mere ten kilometers of distance!

But, although slow, this bomb _might_ prove dangerous, therefore the pirate commander threw his every resource into attempts to cut the tube of force, to blast away from the tractor beams, to explode the sluggish missile before it could reach his wall shields. In vain; for the _Brittania's_ every beam was set to protect the torpedo and the mighty rods of energy without whose grip the inertialess mass of the enemy vessel would offer no resistance whatever to the force of the proposed explosion.

Slowly, _so_ slowly, as the age-long seconds crawled into eternity, there extended from enforcement vessel almost to pirate wall a raging, white-hot-pillar--the gases of combustion of the propellent heptadetonite--ahead of which there rushed the Q-gun's tremendous shell with its horribly destructive freight. What would happen? Could even the almost immeasurable force of that frightful charge of duodecaplylatomate break down a wall shield designed to withstand the cosmic assaults of meteoric missiles? And what would happen if that wall screen held?

In spite of himself Kinnison's mind insisted upon painting the ghastly picture: the awful explosion; the pirate's screen still intact; the raving gases driven backward along the tube of force. The bare metal of the Q-gun's breech, he knew, was not and could not be reënforced by the infinitely stronger, although immaterial shields of pure energy which protected the hull; and no conceivable substance, however resistant, could impede, save momentarily, the unimaginable forces about to be unleashed.

Nor would there be time to release the Q-tube after the explosion but before the _Brittania's_ own destruction; for if the enemy's shield stayed up for even a fraction of a second, the unthinkable pressure of the blast would propagate backward through the already densely compressed gases in the tube, would sweep away as though it were nothing the immensely thick metallic barrier of the gun breech, and would wreak within the bowels of the patrol ship a destruction even more complete than that intended for the foe.

Nor were his men in better case. Each knew that this was the climactic instant of his whole existence; that life itself hung poised upon the issue of the next split second. Hurry it up! Snap into it! Will that crawling, creeping thing _never_ strike? Some prayed briefly; some swore bitterly; but prayers and curses were alike unconscious and had precisely the same meaning--each man, white of face and grim of jaw, clenched his hands and waited, tense and straining, for the impact.