7
Indignantly the Mayor of Steadheim bellowed from the space-phone speaker and Kim answered him patiently.
"The decoy still had a Disciplinary-Circuit field on," he explained for the tenth time. "You know about it! When you tried to go galumphing in, the field grabbed you and paralyzed you. When your muscles went iron hard, the relay on your wrist—you wear it to protect you from the fighter-beams—threw your ship into transmitter-speed travel.
"So you were somewhere else. When you came back you charged in again and the same thing happened. The relay protected you against our field as well as the enemy fighter-beams. That's all."
The mayor wheezed and sputtered furiously. It was plain that he had meant to distinguish himself and his four sons by magnificent bravery.
"There's something that needs to be done," said Kim. "Those two ships are smashed but they hadn't time to melt. There'll be hafnium in the wreckage, anyhow—and metal is scarce on Ades. See what you can salvage and get it to Ades. It's important war work. Ask for other ships to volunteer to help you."
The Mayor of Steadheim roared indignantly—and then consented like a lamb. In the space-navy of Ades there would not yet be anything like iron discipline. Kim led his forces as a feudal baron might have led a motley assemblage of knights and men-at-arms in ancient days. He led by virtue of prestige and experience. He could not command.
The fleet grew minute by minute as lost ships came in. And Kim worked out a new plan of battle to meet the fact that he could not hope to appear over Sinab with gigantic generators able to pour out Disciplinary-Circuit beams over the whole planet.
He explained the plan painstakingly to his followers and presently set a course for Sinab. A surprising number of ships volunteered to go to ground on Khiv Five with the Mayor of Steadheim to save what could be retrieved of the shattered two warships.
No more than thirty little craft of Ades pointed their noses toward Sinab. They went speeding toward it in a close-knit group, matching courses to almost microscopic accuracy and keeping their speed identical to a hair in hopes of arriving nearly in one group.
"So we'll try it again," said Kim into the space-phone. "Here we go!"
He pressed the transmitter-drive button and all the universe danced a momentary saraband—and far off to the left the giant sun Sinab glowed fiercely.
Five of the little ships from Ades were within detector-range. But there were four monstrous moving masses which by their motion and velocity were space-ships rising from the planet and setting out upon some errand of the murder-empire. The same thought must have come instantly to those upon each of the little ships. They charged.
There had been no war in space for five thousand years. The last space-battle was that of Canis Major, when forty thousand warships plunged toward each other with their fighting-beams stabbing out savagely, aimed and controlled by every device that human ingenuity could contrive.
That battle had ended wars for all time, the Galaxy believed, because there was no survivor on either side. In seconds every combatant ship was merely a mass of insensate metal, which fought on in a blind futility.
The fighting-beams killed in thousandths of seconds. The robot gunners aimed with absolute precision. The two fleets joined battle and the robots fixed their targets and every ship became a coffin in which all living things were living no longer, which yet fought on with beams which could do no further harm.
With every man in both fleets dead the warships raged through emptiness, pouring out destruction from their unmanned projectors. It was a hundred years before the last war-craft, its fuel gone and its crew mere dust, was captured and destroyed. But there had been no space-fight since—until now.
And this one was strangeness itself. Four huge, squat ships of war rose steadily from the planet Sinab Two. They were doubtless bound on a mission of massacre. The Empire of Sinab gave no warning of its purpose. It did not permit the option of submission.
Its ships headed heavily out into space, crammed with generators of the murder-frequency. They had no inkling of any ships other than those of their own empire as being in existence anywhere.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, a slim and slender space-craft winked into being—a member of Kim's squadron, just arrived. Within a fraction of an instant it was plunging furiously for the Sinabian monster.
TheStarshinealso flung itself into head-long attack, though it was unarmed save for projectors of a field that would not kill anyone. The other ships—and more, as they appeared—darted valorously for the giants.
Meteor-repellers lashed out automatically. Scanners had detected the newcomers and instantly flung repeller-beams to thrust them aside. They had no effect. Meteor-repellers handle inert mass but, by the nature of its action, an interplanetary drive neutralizes their effect.
The small ships flashed on.
Kim found himself grinning sardonically. There would be alarms ringing frantically in the enemy ships and the officers would be paralyzed with astonishment at the sudden appearance and instant attack by the space-craft which could not—to Sinabian knowledge—exist.
Four ships plunged upon one monster. Three dashed at another. Eight little motes streaked for a third and the fourth seemed surrounded by deadly mites of space-ships, flashing toward it with every indication of vengeful resolution.
The attacks were sudden, unexpected, and impossible. There was no time to put the murder-beams into operation. They took priceless seconds to warm up.
In stark panic the control-room officer of the ship at which theStarshinedrove jammed his ship into overdrive travel. The Sinabian flashed into flight at two hundred times the speed of light. It fled into untraceable retreat, stressed space folded about it.
Kim spoke comfortably into the space-phone:
"Everything's fine! If the others do the same...."
A second giant fled in the same fashion. The small ships of Ades were appearing on every hand and plunging toward their enemies. A third huge ship made a crazy, irresolute half-turn and also took the only possible course by darting away from its home planet on overdrive. Then the fourth!
"They'd no time to give an alarm," said Kim crisply. "Into atmosphere now and we do our stuff!"
The tiny craft plunged toward the planet below them. It swelled in theStarshine'sforward vision-ports. It filled all the firmament. Kim changed course and aimed for the limb of the planet. The ship went down and down.
A faint trembling went through all the fabric of the ship. It had touched atmosphere. There was a monstrous metropolis ahead and below. Kim touched a control. A little thing went tumbling down and down. He veered out into space again.
He watched by electron telescope. Like tiny insects, the fleet of Ades flashed over the surface of the planet. They seemed to have no purpose. They seemed to accomplish nothing. They darted here and there and fled for open space again, without ever touching more than the outermost reaches of the planet's atmosphere.
But it took time. They were just beginning to stream up into emptiness again when the first of the giant warships flashed back into view. This time it was ready for action.
Its beam-projectors flared thin streams of ions that were visible even in empty space. The ships of Ades plunged for it in masses. The fighting-beams flared terribly.
And the little ships vanished. Diving for it, plunging for it, raging toward it with every appearance of deadly assault, they flicked into transmitter-drive when the deadly beams touched them. Because the crews of every one were fitted with the wristlets and the relays which flung them into infinite speed when the fighting-beams struck.
In seconds, when the second and third and fourth Sinabian warships came back from the void prepared for battle, they found all of space about their home planet empty. They ragingly reported their encounter to headquarters.
Headquarters did not reply. The big ships went recklessly, alarmedly, down to ground to see what had happened. They feared annihilation had struck Sinab Two.
But it hadn't. The fleet of Ades had bombed the enemy planet, to be sure, but in a quite unprecedented fashion. They had simply dropped small round cases containing apparatus which was very easily made and to which not even the most conscientious of the exiles on Ades could object.
They were tiny broadcasting units, very much like one Kim had put in a decoy ship, which gave off the neuronic frequencies of the disciplinary circuit, tuned to men. The cases were seamless spheres, made of an alloy that could only be formed by powder metallurgy, and could not be melted or pierced at all.
It was the hardest substance developed in thirty thousand years of civilization. And at least one of those cases had been dropped on every large city of Sinab Two, and when they struck they began to broadcast.