The Star Kings

26: Battle Between the Stars

Throbbing, droning, quivering in every girder to the thrust of its mighty drive-jet, the Ethne and its two companion ships raced southward across the starry spaces of the galaxy.

For hour on hour, the three great battleships had rushed at their highest speed toward the fateful rendezvous near the distant spark of Deneb, toward which the Empire forces were retreating.

"The Barons are fighting!" Hull Burrel cried to Gordon from the telestereo into which he was peering with flaming eyes. "God, look at the battle off the Cluster!"

"They should be drawing back by now toward the Deneb region as Giron's forces are doing!" Gordon exclaimed.

He was stunned by the telestereo scene. Transmitted from one of the Cluster ships in the thick of that great battle, it presented an almost incomprehensible vista of mad conflict.

To the eye, there was little design or purpose in the struggle. The star-decked vault of space near the gigantic ball of suns of Hercules Cluster seemed pricked with tiny flares. Tiny flares, shining forth swiftly and as swiftly vanishing! And each of those flares was the bursting of an atomic broadside far in space!

Gordon could not completely visualize that awful battle. This warfare of the far future was too strange for him to supply from experience the whole meaning of that dance of brilliant death-flares between the stars. This warfare, in which ships far, far apart groped for each other with radar beams and fired their mighty atom-guns by instant mechanical computation, seemed alien and unearthly to him.

The pattern of the battle he witnessed began slowly to emerge. The will-o'-the-wisp dance of flares was moving slowly back toward the titanic sun-swarm of the Cluster. The battle-line was crackling and sparkling north and northwest of the great sun-cluster now.

"They're pulling back, as Giron ordered!" Hull Burrel exclaimed. "Good God, half the Barons' fleet must be destroyed by now."

Val Marlann, captain of the Ethne, was like a caged tiger as he paced back and forth between the stereos.

"Look at what's happening to Giron's main fleet retreating from Rigel!" he said hoarsely. "They're hammering it like mad now. Our losses must be tremendous!"

The stereo at which he glared showed Gordon the similar, bigger whirl of death-flares withdrawing westward from Rigel.

He thought numbly that it was as well he couldn't visualize this awful Armageddon of the galaxy as the others could. It might well shake his nerve disastrously, and he had to keep cool now.

"How long before we'll rendezvous with Giron's fleet and the Barons'?" he cried to Val Marlann.

"Twelve hours, at least," said the other tautly. "And God knows if there'll be any of the Barons' ships left to join up."

"Curse Shorr Kan and his fanatics!" swore Hull, his craggy face crimson with passion. "All these years, they've been building ships and devising new weapons for this war of conquest!"

Gordon went back across the room, to the control-board of the Disrupter apparatus. For the hundredth time since leaving Throon, he rehearsed the method of releasing the mysterious force.

"But what does that force do when I release it?" he wondered again, tensely. "Does it act as a giant beam of lethal waves, or a zone of annihilation for solid matter?"

Vain speculation! It could hardly be those things. Brenn Bir would not have left solemn warning that it could destroy the galaxy, if it were!

Hours of awful strain passed as the Ethne's little squadron drew nearer the scene of the titan struggle. Every hour had seen the position of the Empire's forces growing worse.

Giron, retreating southwestward to join the battered Hercules fleet still fighting off the Cluster, had been Joined finally by the Lyra, Polaris and Cygnus fleets near the Ursa Nebula.

The Empire commander had turned on the pursuing League armada and had fought savagely there for two hours, a staggering rearguard action that had involved both forces in the glowing Nebula.

Then Gordon heard Giron ordering the action broken off. The order, in secret scrambler-code like all naval messages, came from their own stereos.

"Captain Sandrell, Lyra Division-pull out of the Nebula! The enemy is forcing a column between you and the Cygnus Division!"

The Lyra commander's desperate answer flashed. "Their phantoms have piled up the head of our column. But I'll-"

The message was abruptly interrupted, the stereo going dark. Gordon heard Giron vainly calling Sandrell, with no response.

"It's what happens over and over!" raged Hull Burrel. "An Empire ship reports phantoms near, and then suddenly its report breaks off and the ship drifts silent and disabled!"

"Shorr Kan's new weapon!" gritted Val Marlann: "If we only had an idea what it is!"

Gordon suddenly remembered what Shorr Kan had told him, when he had boasted of that weapon in Thallarna.

"-it's a weapon that can strike down enemy warships from inside them!"

Gordon repeated that to the others and cried, "Maybe I'm crazy but it seems to me the only way they could strike down a ship from inside is by getting a force-beam of some kind in on the ship's own stereo beams! Every ship that has been stricken has been stereoing at the time!"

"Hull, it could be!" cried Val Marlann. "If they can tap onto our stereos and use them as carrier-beams right into our own ships-"

He sprang to the stereo and hastily called Giron and told him their suspicion.

"If you use squirt transmission on our scrambler code it may baffle their new weapon!" Val Marlann concluded. "They won't be able to get a tap on our beams in time. And keep damper-equipment in your stereo-rooms in case they do get through."

Giron nodded understandingly. "We'll try it. I'll order all our ships to use only momentary transmission, and assemble messages from the squirts on recorders."

Val Marlann ordered men with "dampers," the generators of blanketing electric fields that could smother dangerous radiation, to stand by near their own stereos.

Already, the Empire ships were obeying the order and were "squirting" their messages in bursts of a few seconds each.

"It's helping-far fewer of our ships are being disabled now!" Giron reported. "But we've been badly battered and the Baron's fleet is just a remnant. Shall we fall back south into the Cluster?"

"No!" Gordon cried. "We daren't use the Disrupter inside the Cluster. You must hold them near Deneb."

"We'll try," Giron said grimly. "But unless you get here in the next four hours, there'll not be many of us left to hold."

"Four hours?" sweated Val Marlann. "I don't know if we can! The Ethne's turbines are running on overload now!"

As the Ethne's small squadron rushed on southward toward the white beacon of Deneb, the great battle east of the star was reeling back toward it.

Death-dance of flaring, falling star-ships moved steadily westward through the galaxy spaces! Up from the south, the battered remnants of the Barons' valiant fleet was coming to join with the Empire and Kingdoms' fleets for the final struggle.

Armageddon of the galaxy, in truth! For now the triumphant two main forces of the Cloud were joining together in the east and rushing forward in their final overwhelming attack.

Gordon saw in the telestereo and radar screens this climactic struggle which the Ethne had almost reached.

"A half hour more-we might make it, we might!" muttered Val Marlann through stiff lips.

The watch officer at the main radar screen suddenly yelled. "Phantoms on our port side!"

Things happened then with rapidity that bewildered John Gordon. Even as he glimpsed the Cloud phantom-cruisers suddenly unmasking in the radar screen, there was a titan flare in space to their left.

"One of our escort gone!" cried Hull Burrel. "Ah!"

The guns of the Ethne, triggered by mechanical computers swifter than any human mind could be, were going off thunderously.

Space around them flashed blinding bright with the explosion of heavy atom-shells which barely missed them. Two distant flares burgeoned up and died, an instant later.

"We got two of them!" Hull cried. "The rest have darked out and they won't dare come out of dark-out again."

Giron's voice came from the stereo, the "squirt" transmission being pieced together by recorders to make a normal message.

"Prince Zarth, the League armada is flanking us and within the hour they'll cut us to pieces!"

Gordon cried answer. "You've got to hold on a little longer, until-"

At that instant, in the stereo-image, Giron vanished and was replaced by pallid, black-uniformed men who raised heavy rod-shaped weapons in quick aim.

"Cloud-men! Those League phantoms have tapped our beam and are using Shorr Kan's new weapon!" screeched Burrel.

A bolt of ragged blue lightning shot from the rod-like weapon of the foremost Cloud-man in the stereo. That flash of force shot over Gordon's head and tore through the metal wall.

Invasion of the ship by stereo-images! Images that could destroy them, by that blue bolt that used the stereo-beam as carrier!

It lasted but a few seconds, then the "squirt" switch functioned and the Cloud-men images and their weapons disappeared.

"So that's how they do it!" cried Burrel. "No wonder they got half our ships with it before we found out about it!"

"Turn on those dampers, quick!" ordered Val Marlann. "We're likely to get another burst from the stereo any moment!"

Gordon felt the hair on his neck bristling as the Ethne rushed now into the zone of battle itself. An awful moment was approaching.

Giron had the Empire and Kingdom ships massed in a short defensive line with its left flank pinned on Deneb's great, glaring white mass. The heavier columns of the League fleets were pressing it in a crackling fire of flaring ships, seeking to roll up the right flank.

Space seemed an inferno of dying ships, of flames dancing between the stars, as the Ethne fought forward to the front of the battle. Its own guns were thundering at the Cloud phantoms that were hanging to it steadily, repeatedly emerging from dark-out to attack.

"Giron, we're here!" Gordon called. "Now spread your line out thinner and withdraw at full speed."

"If we do that, the League fleets will bunch together and tear through our thinner line like paper!" protested Giron.

"That's just what I want, to bunch the League ships as much as possible!" Gordon replied. "Quick, we'll-"

Again, the stereo-image of Giron suddenly was replaced by a Cloud-man with the rod-shaped weapon.

The weapon loosed a blue bolt-but the bolt died, smothered by the fields of the "dampers." Then the "squirt" switch functioned again to cut the stereo.

"The way they've cut our communications would be enough alone to decide the battle!" groaned Hull Burrel.

In the radar screen, Gordon tensely watched the maneuver that was now rapidly taking place in space before them.

Giron's columns were falling back westward swiftly, turning to run and spreading out thinly as they did so.

"Here comes the League fleet!" cried Val Marlann. Gordon too saw them in the screen, the massed specks that were thousands of League warships less than twelve parsecs away.

They were coming on in pursuit but they were not bunching as he had hoped. They merely held a somewhat shorter and thicker line than before.

He knew that he'd have to act anyway. He couldn't let them get closer before unloosing the Disruptor, remembering Jhal Arn's caution.

"Hold the Ethne here and point it exactly at the center of the League battle-line," Gordon ordered hoarsely.

Giron's fleet was now behind them, as the Ethne remained facing the oncoming League armada.

Gordon was at the control-panel of the Disruptor transformer. He threw in the six switches of the bank, turning each rheostat four notches.

The gauge-needles began to creep across the dials. The generators of the mighty battleship roared louder and louder as the mysterious apparatus sucked unimaginable amperage from them.

Was that power being stored somehow in the force-cones on the prow? And what had Jhal Arn told him? Gordon tried to remember.

"-the six directional gauges must exactly balance if the thrust is not to create disaster!"

The gauges did not balance. He frantically touched this rheostat, then that one. The needles were creeping up toward the red critical marks, but some were too fast, too fast!

Gordon felt beads of sweat on his face, felt stiff with superhuman strain as the others watched him. He couldn't do this! He dared not loose this thing in blind ignorance!

"Their columns are coming fast-eight parsecs away now!" Val Marlann warned tightly.

Three, then four of the needles, were on the red. But the others were short. Gordon hastily notched up their rheostats.

They were all above the red mark now but did not exactly match. The Ethne was shaking wildly from the thunder of its straining turbines. The air seemed electric with an awful tension.

The needles matched! Each was in the red zone on the gauge, each at the same figure-

"Now!" cried Gordon hoarsely, and threw shut the main release-switch.