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The two forces advance to battle and maneuver for position. Then the pale purple of a Tonite beam lashes out in a blaze of fury against the screen of an enemy ship, and in so doing, its own screen is forced to blink out. For that one instant it is vulnerable and is a perfect target for an enemy ray, which, when loosed, renders its ship open to attack for the moment. In widening circles, it spreads. Each unit of the fleet, combining speed of mechanism with speed of human reaction, attempts to slip through at the crucial moment and yet maintain its own safety.
Loara Filip Sanat knew all this and more. Since his encounter with the battle cruiser on the way out from Earth, he had studied space war, and now, as the battle fleets fell into line, he felt his very fingers twitch for action.
He turned and said to Smitt, “I’m going down to the big guns.”
Smitt’s eye was on the grand ‘visor, his hand on the etherwave sender, “Go ahead, if you wish, but don’t get in the way.”
Sanat smiled. The captain’s private elevator carried him to the gun levels, and from there it was five hundred feet through an orderly mob of gu
He mounted the six steep steps to Tonite One and motioned the gu
Sanat turned to the co-ordinator at the gun’s visiplate, “Do • you mind working with me? My speed of reaction has been tested and grouped 1-A. I have my rating card, if you’d care to see it.”
The co-ordinator flushed and stammered, “No, sir! It’s an honor to work with you, sir.”
The amplifying system thundered, “To your stations!” and a deep silence fell, in which the cold purr of machinery sounded its ominous note.
Sanat spoke to the co-ordinator in a whisper, “This gun covers a full quadrant of space, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good, see if you can locate a dreadnaught with the sign of a double sun in partial eclipse.”
There was a long silence. The co-ordinator’s sensitive hands were on the Wheel, delicate pressure turning it this way and that, so that the field in view on the visiplate shifted. Keen eyes sca
“There it is,” he said. “Why, it’s the flagship.”
“Exactly! Center that ship!”
As the Wheel turned, the space-field reeled, and the enemy flagship wobbled toward the point where the hairlines crossed. The pressure of the co-ordinator’s fingers became lighter and more expert.
“Centered!” he said. Where the hairlines crossed the tiny oval globe remained impaled.
“Keep it that way!” ordered Sanat, grimly. “Don’t lose it for a second as long as it stays in our quadrant. The enemy admiral is on that ship and we’re going to get him, you and I.”
The ships were getting within range of each other and Sanat felt tense. He knew it was going to be close-very close. The Humans had the edge in speed, but the Lhasinu were two to one in numbers.
A flickering beam shot out, another, ten more.
There was a sudden blinding flash of purple intensity!
“First hit,” breathed Sanat. He relaxed. One of the enemy ships drifted off helplessly, its stem a mass of fused and glowing metal.
The opposing ships were not at close grips. Shots were being exchanged at blinding speed. Twice, a purple beam showed at the extreme limits of the visiplate and Sanat realized with a queer sort of shiver down his spine that it was one of the adjacent Tonites of their own ship that was firing.
The fencing match was approaching a climax. Two flashes blazed into being, almost simultaneously, and Sanat groaned. One of the two had been a Human ship. And three times there came that disquieting hum as Atomo-engines in the lower level shot into high gear-and that meant that an enemy beam directed at their own ship had been stopped by the screen.
And, always, the co-ordinator kept the enemy flagship centered. An hour passed; an hour in which six Lhasinu and four Human ships had been whiffed to destruction; an hour in which the Wheel turned fractions of a degree this way, that way; in which it swivelled on its universal socket mere hairlines in half a dozen directions.
Sweat matted the co-ordinator’s hair and got into his eyes; his fingers half-lost all sensation, but that flagship never left the ominous spot where the hairlines crossed.
And Sanat watched; finger on trigger-watched-and waited.
Twice the flagship had glowed into purple luminosity, its guns blazing and its defensive screen down; and twice Sanat’s finger had quivered on the trigger and refrained. He hadn’t been quick enough.
And then Sanat rammed it home and rose to his feet tensely. The co-ordinator yelled and dropped the Wheel.
In a gigantic funeral pyre of purple-hued energy, the flagship with the Lhasinuic Admiral inside had ceased to exist.
Sanat laughed. His hand went out, and the co-ordinator’s came to meet it in a firm grasp of triumph.
But the triumph did not last long enough for the co-ordinator to speak the first jubilant words that were welling up in his throat, for the visiplate burst into a purple bombshell as five Human ships detonated simultaneously at the touch of deadly energy shafts.
The amplifiers thundered, “Up screens! Cease firing! Ease into Needle formation!”
Sanat felt the deadly pall of uncertainty squeeze his throat. He knew what had happened. The Lhasinu had finally managed to set up their big guns on Lunar Base; big guns with three times the range of even the largest ship guns-big guns that could pick off Human ships with no fear of reprisal.
And so the fencing match was over, and the real battle was to start. But it was to be a real battle of a type never before fought, and Sanat knew that that was the thought in every man’s mind. He could see it in their grim expressions and feel it in their silence.
It might work! And it might not!
The Earth squadron had resumed its spherical formation and drifted slowly outwards, its offensive batteries silent. The Lhasinu swept in for the kill. Cut off from power supply as the Earthmen were, and unable to retaliate with the gigantic guns of the Lunar batteries commanding near-by space, it seemed only a matter of time before either surrender or a
The enemy Tonite beams lashed out in continuous blasts of energy, and tortured screens on Human ships sparked and fluoresced under the harsh whips of radiation.
Sanat could hear the buzz of the Atomo-engines rise to a protesting squeal. Against his will, his eye flicked to the energy gauge, and the quivering needle sank as he watched, moving down the dial at perceptible speed.
The co-ordinator licked dry Ups, “Do you think we’ll make it, sir?”
“Certainly!” Sanat was far from feeling his expressed confidence. “We need hold out for an hour-provided they don’t fall back.”
And the Lhasinu didn’t. To have fallen back would have meant a thi
The Human ships were down to crawling speed-scarcely above a hundred miles an hour. Idling along, they crept up the purple beams of energy, the imaginary sphere increasing in size, the distance between the opposing forces ever narrowing.
But inside the ship, the gauge-needle was dropping rapidly, and Sanat’s heart dropped with it. He crossed the gun level to where hard-bitten soldiers waited at a gigantic and gleaming lever, in anticipation of an order that had to come soon-or never.
The distance between opponents was now only a matter of one or two miles-almost contact from the viewpoint of space warfare-and then that order shot over the shielded etheric beams from ship to ship.
It reverberated through the gun level:
“Out needles!”
A score of hands reached for the lever, Sanat’s among them, and jerked downwards. Majestically, the lever bent in a curving are to the floor and as it did so, there was a vast scraping noise and a sharp thud that shook the ship.
The dreadnaught had become a “needle ship!”
At the prow, a section of armor plate had slid aside and a glittering shaft of metal had lunged outward viciously. One hundred feet long, it narrowed gracefully from a base ten feet in diameter to a needle-sharp diamond point. In the sunlight, the chrome-steel of the shaft gleamed in flaming splendor.
And every other ship of the Human squadron was likewise equipped. Each had become ten, fifteen, twenty, fifty thousand tons of driving rapier.
Swordfish of space!
Somewhere in the Lhasinuic fleet, frantic orders must have been issued. Against this Oldest of all naval tactics-old even in the dim dawn of history when rival triremes had maneuvered and rammed each other to destruction with pointed prows-the super-modem equipment of a space-fleet has no defense.
Sanat forced his way to the visiplate and strapped himself into an anti-acceleration seat, and he felt the springs absorb the backward jerk as the ship sprang into sudden acceleration.
He didn’t bother with that, though. He wanted to watch the battle! There wasn’t one here, nor anywhere in the Galaxy, that risked what he did. They risked only their lives; and he risked a dream that he had, almost single-handed, created out of nothing.
He had taken an apathetic Galaxy and driven it into revolt against the reptile. He had taken an Earth on the point of destruction and dragged it from the brink, almost unaided. A Human victory would be a victory for Loara Filip Sanat and no one else.
He, and Earth, and the Galaxy were now lumped into one and thrown into the scale. And against it was weighed the outcome of this last battle, a battle hopelessly lost by his own purposeful treachery, unless the needles won.
And if they lost, the gigantic defeat-the ruin of Humanity-was also his.
The Lhasinuic ships were jumping aside, but not fast enough. While they were slowly gathering momentum and drifting away, the Human ships had cut the distance by three quarters. On the screen, a Lhasinuic ship had grown to colossal proportions. Its purple whip of energy had gone out as every ounce of power had gone into a man-killing attempt at rapid acceleration.
And nevertheless its image grew and the shining point that could be seen at the lower end of the screen aimed like a glittering javelin at its heart.
Sanat felt he could not bear the tension. Five minutes and he would take his place as the Galaxy’s greatest hero-or its greatest traitor! There was a horrible, unbearable pounding of blood in his temples.