The Mysterious Planet

CHAPTER 3 The Black Ship

CAN WE MATCH HER SPEED?” Griffith snapped out to Hoeck. The navigator jerked the sheet out of the typewriter and began studying the numbers that had been sent to indicate position and speed. His fingers jumped to a little calculator, and began work at interpreting them. Bob heard his father sounding a general alarm for the men to get back to duty on the double.

In front of the control room, a small hatch suddenly snapped open, and a six-inch rifle slid out rapidly, turret-mounted and fully compensated for recoil. He knew that all over the ship the various weapons would be made ready—cannon, guided-missile launchers, self-steering torpedoes, and a maze of others.

“Make it,” Hoeck decided, and threw another sheet to Griffith, who studied it, frowning heavily.

Anderson whistled as he saw the results, but went back to his seat at once, and began pulling out a suit of elastic cords and metal reinforcement. The others were doing the same, and the radio buzzed in Bob’s ear as general orders came over it for all men to get into high-acceleration harness.

His own harness was under his seat. He began slipping it on and binding it up as quickly as he could. It helped to ease the strain of high pressure by binding the body in a tight elastic sheath that prevented distortion and helped to maintain even blood circulation.

When it was on, he found a button on the seat, which

snapped it back to form a horizontal couch. Men could stand more strain when they lay completely horizontal to it.

“Ten seconds,” the radio said. Bob counted under his breath, but he was too fast. He’d reached thirteen before the pressure suddenly seemed to hit him with a leaden hand. His father had raised the acceleration to better than eight times the normal pressure of gravity, and cut on the side steering rockets, all together. Now they’d be turning and doubling in space in an attempt to reach the Ionian with the same speed and course she was following.

Bob had been given high-acceleration drills before, but never for as long a time. His brain seemed to go numb, except for a dull ache. His senses reeled and threatened to black out on him. His eyes would not focus, and he couldn’t see the others beside him. Nor could he hear them because of the roaring in his ears.

The little radio cut through his daze, carrying his father’s strained words. “Sparks, order the other ships to continue on course; they’re too slow for this. All men attention. We’re going into an encounter with pirates. The Lance has to take care of it alone. Ready all weapons, be prepared for unknown number of pirates.”

It seemed to take hours, though the high-acceleration flight probably lasted no more than half an hour. Even that was too long, though. They’d arrive worn and tired from the strain, even if the pirates hadn’t already done their job and gone sailing off without a trace.

Once piracy had nearly been stamped out, but now it seemed to be bolder than ever. There were rumors that the entire crew and passenger list of a couple of ships had been carried away.

Numbness of the acceleration pressure kept Bob from feeling the excitement that he should have experienced. He was almost completely unconscious by the time the high drive was cut, and they snapped back to light acceleration. He revived almost at once, though, to stare through the observation window, as his father and Hoeck were doing.

There was no sign of either the Ionian or pirates; they must have arrived too late! Then Anderson let out a sharp grunt, and cut on the big electronic telescope screen. In it, a bright silvery spindle showed up, with the standard lines of a freighter-passenger combination from one of Jupiter’s moons.

“Fool!” Hoeck said harshly.

“You can’t expect a merchant captain to take a fix in space without error,” Griffith told him.

“We’re lucky he wasn’t more off. But it doesn’t look as if he’s lucky. How far?”

“Three minutes. We’ll overtake them about as fast this way as we would by stopping to calculate a new high-drive jump,” Anderson guessed. But it was Hoeck’s nod that decided Griffith; the navigator could work such short courses out in his head with reasonable accuracy. Now he was setting up an automatic sequence on the board which would slow them down when they reached the Ionian.

Bob stared at the screen, where the ship was growing in size as they drew nearer.

Obviously the ship had been surprisingly close to their course and speed before the attack, or they couldn’t have done more than slip by too fast to help the other. At interplanetary speeds, a normal meeting in space lasted only fractions of a second. There wouldn’t be even time to fire a shot. It was that which made piracy possible, since a Navy ship could be still matching course while the pirates were already bound for their hide-out.

At first it looked as if that had happened this time. Then Anderson pointed to the radar screen. There were two shapes there, one obviously the Ionian, and the other larger. It must have been painted jet black, which would explain why it didn’t show in the telescope screen.

Then, as Bob looked closer, he could just make it out. It was invisible unless he knew where to look.

Suddenly space seemed to flare up around it. The Ionian had obviously fired a torpedo, and it had caught the pirate dead center. In the glare the ship seemed to be about six hundred feet long, as big as a full-sized battlewagon. But its lines were different. It was large and rounded at both ends, with a narrower middle that made it look something like a streamlined dumbbell. There were no vanes or projections of any kind.

Beside Bob, his father sucked in sharply on his breath, just as another torpedo went off. One should have finished the black ship, but nothing seemed to happen, except that space around the ship turned faintly blue, and then gradually sank to red and disappeared.

“Screens!” Anderson barked.

Commander Griffith nodded slowly. “It can’t be; science proved that screens capable of soaking up a blast like that are impossible. But he’s got them, anyhow. No wonder the pirates are getting bolder. Hey!”

Two torpedoes had caught the black ship dead center. But again it rode them out easily, with only a somewhat stronger glow around it. Bob had read up on the Navy’s attempts to get screens, long ago. But nobody had been able to come up with anything which could turn the energy of a violent explosion aside or slow up a projectile enough to do any good. They had talked about twisting space a bit—whatever that meant—but they hadn’t been able to do it.

Now the Lance was closer to the scene. The black ship seemed not to notice them. It turned about quickly, with no jetting of rockets, and pointed squarely toward the Ionian. Something must have been done, but there was no sign aboard the black ship. Yet the nose of the Ionian suddenly turned white hot and melted into a metal vapor that spread out rapidly through space.

This time even Hoeck cried out. “Heat ray!”

It was another thing the Navy scientists had worked on, and given up. As they had explained it, anything hot enough to project through space and burn would be too hot to be contained in any instruments needed to handle it.

Now the black ship darted in against the Ionian, completely covering the merchant ship from view. It must have been a boarding and looting operation, though no details could be seen.

Griffith leaped to the control panel, and a second later the guns of the Lance began pounding explosive projectiles at the black ship. They hit, but there was only a fault glow.

A warning gong sounded, and Bob braced himself as Hoeck began twisting the Lance to come up against the pirate. Commander Griffith was calling men on the intercom. Now he looked up at Anderson.

“This is emergency enough,” he stated. “We’re breaking out our own secret weapon. And let’s hope it works… Hey!”

Hoeck had cut the deceleration and was accelerating again. In the screen, Bob saw the reason. The black ship had pulled away as calmly as if it had been alone in space and was now heading outward toward Neptune. Again, there was no sign of rocket blast. It simply moved, with no sign of how.

“Hold it, Hoeck!” The Commander reached for the” emergency controls, again restoring deceleration. “We’ve got to worry about the people on the Ionian first. We can’t leave people dying, however much I’d like to catch that pirate!”

Bob groaned, though he knew his father was right.

Half a minute later they had matched speeds with the crippled ship. Men already had the connecting tube ready to snap from the Lance to the open lock of the Ionian, and Hoeck gentled the cruiser in against the freighter.

“No air inside,” the exploring party reported back in a couple of minutes.

That meant that anyone inside who hadn’t been able to get into a space suit almost at once would be dead. It usually took several minutes to don the bulky suits, too—longer than life was possible without air.

Griffith nodded as Bob reached into a locker for one of the emergency suits. “Go along, if you like. But stay behind Anderson.”

They went down, once the suits were on. Men were waiting in the lock, equipped with cutting tools to free anyone aboard the Ionian who might be trapped, or fastened behind airtight bulkheads. They all swung into line behind Anderson, going down the rubbery tunnel and into the air lock of the Ionian. There the inner lock was stuck, open a crack, but not enough for entrance; some of the crew were just cutting it free as they went in.

Nobody was on the other side to greet them, and that was a bad sign. Anyone trapped on the vessel should have been waiting eagerly for the rescue party. They went up the catwalk toward the control room. Everything was in fair order, but nobody was there.

“Nothing, Commander,” Anderson was reporting back. “No sign of bodies, either. We’re going to spread out and go through the ship.”

He detailed men off in pairs, to begin at the ruined nose and work back to the engine room.

Bob went with Anderson. There was still no sign of bodies. That was stranger than anything else. They hadn’t expected too much chance of finding men alive, but the dead should have been scattered around. They worked their way back slowly, opening every door, but nothing showed up.

Anderson cracked open a big hatch and cast the light on his helmet down it. “Storage cargo—completely empty. Bob, can you make out that label on the floor?”

Bob stared at the torn strip of paper, and strained his eyes. “Looks like Biotics—With Care” he finally decided.

“Must be right,” Commander Griffith’s voice came over the radio. “The Ionian came from Io, where they raise most of our drugs; and from her rate, she must have been coming straight across from Jupiter to Neptune—probably bringing valuable drugs to Outpost to take care of the possible dangers from Planet X there. Maybe you can’t find anyone yet because there were no passengers.”

They went on, finding all the freight holds emptied. Finally they reached the engine-room entrance, and waited for the others to catch up.

“Better pray,” Anderson advised. “Men might just manage to get back here and seal up. If that hatch is locked, we may find them. If it isn’t, then nobody’s on board.”

One of the men threw himself against the door, and it opened quietly. There was no blast of air. The engine hold was as empty as the rest of the ship, and there were still no bodies lying about. They hunted through the ship again, without finding anyone.

In the control room, Anderson and Bob went through the ship’s papers, but those had also been rifled. There was a passenger list, but there was no way of knowing for what trip it was meant. From it, though, they discovered that the Ionian normally shipped between Io and Earth, and carried a crew of seventeen, with as many as thirty-five passengers. Her maximum acceleration was listed as just under two gravities of thrust—but that would be enough to build up her present speed if she had come all the way from Jupiter, around the sun, and back through Jupiter’s orbit, heading for Neptune.

Anderson found another book, listing equipment. “They carried sixty suits,” he reported.

“Enough for all the passengers and crew, with a few spares.” His young face was sweating, and the blond hair that showed through his helmet was matted down against his forehead.

Even at best, the space suits were uncomfortable for long wearing, though men could live in them for days.

At Griffith’s suggestion, they went down to search all the lockers for space suits. When they had finished counting, all sixty were still on board.

“All right,” the Commander ordered finally. “Come on back, and make it fast. We’ll abandon the Ionian until a tug came out and salvage her.”

They went back silently. It was completely impossible for the pirates to have taken all the freight and every man on board the ship off in no more than the single minute they had been locked together. Yet it had happened. Everything was beginning to come out the same—the events were impossible, but the black ship had done them, all the same.

Bob’s eyes jumped to the radar screen as soon as he was back in the control room of the Lance of Deimos and climbing out of bis suit. He sighed with relief. The pip on the screen showed that the pirate ship was still within radar range. “Not that we can do much against them,” he muttered glumly to himself.

Griffith looked up from the calculations Hoeck was making. “Don’t be too sure of that, son,” he said. “We’ve got a few tricks up our own sleeves. The Navy’s been secretly testing a proton cannon for years, and we have one of the first working models. Ever hear of it?”

Bob nodded doubtfully. The Sunday Supplements and science fiction magazines had been speculating on it for years, but it had finally been put down as a failure. The idea was that hydrogen should be broken down to electrons and protons. The electrons were to be sent out in one stream, and the protons in another, so that the ship using the weapon wouldn’t become electrically charged, as it would have done if either had been ejected alone. The trouble had been that the guns previously made could just blast through a thin sheet of paper.

“You’ll see it in action soon,” Griffith promised. “And it works. Just a matter of getting the speed of the protons high enough. This will cut through ten feet of steel in less than a second. It’s still under security wraps, so keep mum about it, after we hit Outpost. Ready yet, Hoeck?”

The navigator nodded, and indicated the control setup. Griffith pressed the general alert for acceleration and gave the crew ten seconds to strap down for it, after the automatic second warning went off. Bob had just succeeded in getting into his harness when the ship blasted off again.

Either his first dose of high drive had given him more power to stand it or the rest while exploring the Ionian had restored him more than he had thought. This time he took it without blacking out and without completely losing the power to focus his eyes. He set his gaze on the radar screen, and waited.

The outline of the black ship on the screen began to grow. At this rate, they’d be up to it in a matter of minutes. Then Bob was going to find out what a real space battle was like.