First Lensman (14 page)

All of the really heavy stuff was of Earth, the Mother Planet, and was already in place; as , were the less numerous and much lighter contingents of Mars, of Venus, and of Jove. And the fleets of the outlying solar systems—cutters, scouts, and a few light cruisers—were neither maintaining fleet formation nor laying course for Sol. Instead, each individual vessel was blasting at maximum for the position in space in which it would form one unit of a formation englobing at a distance of light-years the entire Solarian System, and each of those hurtling hundreds of ships was literally combing all circumambient space with its furiously-driven detector beams.

"Nice." Kinnison turned to Samms, now beside him at the master plate. "Couldn't have done any better myself."

"After you get it made, what are you going to do with it in case nothing happens?" Samms was still somewhat skeptical. "How long can you make a drill last?"

"Until all the ensigns have long gray whiskers if I have to, but don't worry—if we have time to get the preliminary globe made I'll be the surprisedest man in the system."

And Kinnison was not surprised; before full englobement was accomplished, a loud-speaker gave tongue.

"Flagship
Chicago
to Grand Fleet Headquarters!" it blatted, sharply. "The Black Fleet has been detected. RA twelve hours, declination plus twenty degrees, distance about thirty light-years…"

Kinnison started to say something; then, by main force, shut himself up. He wanted intensely to take over, to tell the boys out there exactly what to do, but he couldn't. He was now a Big Shot—damn the luck! He could be and must be responsible for broad policy and for general strategy, but, once those vitally important decisions had been made, the actual work would have to be done by others. He didn't like it—but there it was. Those flashing thoughts took only an instant of time.

" … which is such extreme range that no estimate of strength or composition can be made at present. We will keep you informed."

"Acknowledge," be ordered Randolph; who, wearing now the five silver bars of major, was his Chief Communications Officer. "No instructions."

He turned to his plate. Clayton hadn't had to be told to pull in his light stuff; it was all pelting hell-for-leather for Sol and Tellus. Three general plans of battle had been mapped out by Staff. Each had its advantages-and its disadvantages. Operation Acorn—long distances—would be fought at, say, twelve light-years. It would keep everything, particularly the big stuff, away from the Hill, and would make automatics useless … unless some got past, or unless the automatics were coming in on a sneak course, or unless several other things—in any one of which cases what a Godawful shellacking the Hill would take!

He grinned wryly at Samms, who had been following his thought, and quoted: "A vast hemisphere of lambent violet flame, through which neither material substance nor destructive ray can pass."

"Well, that dedicatory statement, while perhaps a bit florid, was strictly true at the time—before the days of allotropic iron and of polycyclic drills. Now I'll quote one: 'Nothing is permanent except change'."

"Uh-huh," and Kinnison returned to his thinking. Operation Adack. Middle distance. Uh-uh. He didn't like it any better now than he had before, even though some of the Big Brains of Staff thought it the ideal solution. A compromise. All of the disadvantages of both of the others, and none of the advantages of either. It still stunk, and unless the Black fleet had an utterly fantastic composition Operation Adack was out.

And Virgil Samms, quietly smoking a cigarette, smiled inwardly. Rod the Rock could scarcely be expected to be in favor of any sort of compromise.

That left Operation Affick. Close up. It had three tremendous advantages. First, the Hill's own offensive weapons—as long as they lasted. Second, the new Rodebush-Bergenholm fields. Third, no sneak attack could be made without detection and interception. It had one tremendous disadvantage; some stuff, and probably a lot of it, would get through. Automatics, robots, guided missiles equipped with superspeed drives, with polycyclic drills, and with atomic warheads strong enough to shake the whole world.

But with those new fields, shaking the world wouldn't be enough; in order to get deep enough to reach Virgil Samms they would damn near have to destroy the world. Could anybody build a bomb that powerful? He didn't think so. Earth technology was supreme throughout all known space; of Earth technologists the North Americans were, and always had been, tops. Grant that the Black Fleet was, basically, North American. Grant further that they had a man as good as Adlington—or that they could spy-ray Adlington's brain and laboratories and shops—a tall order. Adlington himself was several months away from a world-wrecker, unless he could put one a hundred miles down before detonation, which simply was not feasible. He turned to Samms.

"It'll be Affick, Virge, unless they've got a composition that is radically different from anything I ever saw put into space."

"So? I can't say that I am very much surprised."

The calm statement and the equally calm reply were beautifully characteristic of the two men. Kinnison had not asked, nor had Samms offered, advice. Kinnison, after weighing the facts, made his decision. Samms, calmly certain that the decision was the best that could be made upon the data available, accepted it without question or criticism.

"We've still got a minute or two," Kinnison remarked. "Don't quite know what to make of their line of approach. Coma Berenices: I don't know of anything at all out that way, do you? They could have detoured, though."

"No, I don't." Samms frowned in thought. "Probably a detour."

"Check." Kinnison turned to Randolph. "Tell them 'to report whatever they know; we can't wait any ..."

As he was speaking the report came in.

The Black Fleet was of more or less normal make-up; considerably larger than the North American contingent, but decidedly inferior to the Patrol's present Grand Fleet. Either three or four capital ships…

"And we've got six!" Kinnison said, exultantly. "Our own two, Asia's
Himalaya
, Africa's
Johannesburg
, South America's
Bolivar
, and Europe's
Europa
."

… Battle cruisers and heavy cruisers, about in the usual proportions; but an unusually high ratio of scouts and light cruisers. There were either two or three large ships which could not be classified definitely at that distance; longrange observers were going out to study them.

"Tell Clayton," Kinnison instructed Randolph, "that it is to be Operation Affick, and for him to fly at it."

"Report continued," the speaker came to life again. "There are three capital ships, apparently of approximately the
Chicago
class, but tear-drop-shaped instead of spherical…"

"Ouch!" Kinnison flashed a thought at Samms. "I don't like that. They can both fight and run."

" … The battle cruisers are also tear-drops. The small vessels are torpedo-shaped. There are three of the large ships, which we are still not able to classify definitely. They are spherical in shape, and very large, but do not seem to be either armed or screened, and are apparently carrierspossibly of automatics. We are now making contact-off!"

Instead of looking at the plates before them, the two Lensmen went en rapport with Clayton, so that they could see everything be saw. The stupendous Cone of Battle had long since been formed; the word to fire was given in a measured two-second call. Every firing officer in every Patrol ship touched his stud in the same split second. And from the gargantuan mouth of the Cone there spewed a milesthick column of energy so raw, so stark, so incomprehensibly violent that it must have been seen to be even dimly appreciated. It simply cannot be described.

Its prototype, Triplanetary's Cylinder of Annihilation, had been a highly effective weapon indeed. The offensive beams of the fish-shaped Nevian cruisers of the void were even more powerful. The Cleveland-Rodebush projectors, developed aboard the original
Boise
on the long Nevian way, were stronger still. The composite beam projected by this fleet of the Galactic Patrol, however, was the sublimation and quintessence of each of these, redesigned and redesigned by scientists and engineers of ever-increasing knowledge, rebuilt and rebuilt by technologists of ever-increasing skill.

Capital ships and a few of the heaviest cruisers could mount screen generators able to carry that frightful load; but every smaller ship caught in that semi-solid rod of indescribably incandescent fury simply flared into nothingness.

But in the instant before the firing order was given—as though precisely timed, which in all probability was the case—the ever-watchful observers picked up two items of fact which made the new Admiral of the First Galactic Region cut his almost irresistible weapon and break up his Cone of Battle after only a few seconds of action: One: those three enigmatic cargo scows bad fallen apart
before
the beam reached them, and hundreds—yes, thousands—of small objects had hurtled radially outward, out well beyond the field of action of the Patrol's beam, at a speed many times that of light. Two: Kinnison's forebodings had been prophetic. A swarm of Blacks, all small—must have been hidden right on Earth somewhere!—were already darting at the Hill from the south.

"Cease firing!" Clayton rapped into his microphone. The dreadful beam expired. "Break cone formation! Independent action—light cruisers and scouts, get those bombs! Heavy cruisers and battle cruisers, engage similar units of the Blacks, two to one if possible.
Chicago
and
Boise
, attack Black Number One.
Bolivar
and
Himalaya
, Number Two.
Europa
and
Johannesburg
, Number Three!"

Space was full of darting, flashing, madly warring ships. The three Black superdreadnaughts leaped forward as one. Their massed batteries of beams, precisely synchronized and aimed, lashed out as one at the nearest Patrol super heavy, the
Boise
. Under the vicious power of that beautifully-timed thrust that warship's first, second, and third screens, her very wall-shield, flared through the spectrum and into the black. Her Chief Pilot, however, was fast—
very
fast—and he had a fraction of a second in which to work. Thus, practically in the instant of her wall-shield's failure, she went free; and while she was holed badly and put out of action, she was not blown out of space. In fact, it was learned later that she lost only forty men.

The Blacks were not as fortunate. The
Chicago
, now without a partner, joined beams with the
Bolivar
and the
Himalaya
against Number Two; then, a short half-second later, with her other two sister-ships against Number Three. And in that very short space of time two Black super-dreadnaughts ceased utterly to be.

But also, in that scant second of time, Black Number One had all but disappeared! Her canny commander, with no stomach at all for odds of five to one against, had ordered flight at max; she was already one-sixtieth of a light-year—about one hundred thousand million miles—away from the Earth and was devoting her every energy to the accumulation of still more distance.

"
Bolivar
!
Himalaya
!" Clayton barked savagely. "Get him!" He wanted intensely to join the chase, but he couldn't. He had to stay here. And he didn't have time even to swear. Instead, without a break, the words tripping over each other against his teeth: "
Chicago
!
Johannesburg
!
Europa
! Act at will against heaviest craft left. Blast 'em down!"

He gritted his teeth. The scouts and light cruisers were doing their damndest, but they were outnumbered three to one—Christ, what a lot of stuff was getting through! The Blacks wouldn't last long, between the Hill and the heavies, but maybe long enough, at that-the Patrol globe was leaking like a sieve! He voiced a couple of bursts of deepspace profanity and, although he was almost afraid to look, sneaked a quick peek. to see bow much was left of the Hill. He looked—and stopped swearing in the middle of a fourletter Anglo-Saxon word.

What he saw simply did not make sense. Those Black bombs should have peeled the armor off of that mountain like the skin off of a nectarine and scattered it from the Pacific to the Mississippi. By now there should be a hole a mile deep where the Hill had been. But there wasn't. The Hill was still there! It might have shrunk a little—Clayton couldn't see very well because of the worse-than-incandescent radiance of the practically continuous, sense-battering, world-shaking atomic detonations—
but the Hill was still there!

And as he stared, chilled and shaken, at that indescribably terrific spectacle, a Black cruiser, holed and helpless, fell toward that armored mountain with an acceleration starkly impossible to credit. And when it struck it did not penetrate, and splash, and crater, as it should have done. Instead, it simply spread out,
in a thin layer
, over an acre or so of the fortress' steep and apparently still, armored surface!

"You saw that, Alex? Good. Otherwise you could scarcely believe it," came Kinnison's silent voice. "Tell all our ships to stay away. There's a force of over a hundred thousand G's acting in a direction normal to every point of our surface. The boys are giving it all the decrement they can—somewhere between distance cube and fourth power—but even so it's pretty fierce stuff. How about the
Bolivar
and .the
Himalaya
? Not having much luck catching Mr. Black, are they?"

"Why, I don't know. I'll check … No, sir, they aren't. They report that they are losing ground and will soon lose trace."

"I was afraid so, from that shape. Rodebush was about the only one who saw it coming … well, we'll have to redesign and rebuild … "

* * *

Port Admiral Kinnison, shortly after directing the foregoing thought, leaned back in his chair and smiled. The battle was practically over. The Hill had come through. The Rodebush-Bergenholm fields had held her together through the most God-awful session of saturation atomic bombing that any world had ever seen or that the mind of man had ever conceived. And the counter-forces had kept the interior rock from flowing like water. So far, so good.