Part 6

Garstow rubbed his fleshy nose thoughtfully, then said, "It's in your hands, Captain." Then he cut out.

Rapidly Glayne organized the attack, placing his own cruiser division at the point of the spearhead. Smoothly the Stellar Guardian striking force flashed down on Scone III. As Glayne had anticipated, their sudden assault was little more than an armed landing. The Delbans were caught completely off guard. They put up a fanatical resistance with the auxiliary-powered Kellander secondary batteries, but the superior weight of Glayne's miatron blasters soon crushed every last shred of opposition.

As soon as the _Algol_ had jetted down on the immense space-port of the Karkara Fleet Station, a group of technicians in addition to the landing party raced off to confiscate an antennae unit for the big ship. Glayne set up an operations unit in the glassene dome of the _Algol_ to assign landing patterns to the other Guardian fleet units. The heaviest Cluster and Galactic class warships he assigned to fast orbits about Scone to defend the ships which had already landed.

After he saw that landing operations were proceeding smoothly he descended to the engine room of the _Algol_ to see how the installation of the antenna was progressing. Massive cables snaked across the deck in confusions, waiting to be hooked into the heavy buses which the technicians were jockeying into place. Outside on the hull, gangs of men were welding in the mesh antenna. Fuming, he looked at his wrist-chrono repeatedly.

"How much longer?" he asked Harbin impatiently.

"Thirty minutes at the most, sir," replied Harbin stiffly, refusing to meet Glayne's eyes.

Glayne rubbed his bristly cheek thoughtfully as he turned away. The young officer was determined to give him the silent treatment along with the rest of the officers in his crew. Word would spread; soon the whole fleet would hear of his cowardly negligence. He smiled thinly as he made his way back up to the navigation bridge. He had seen it happen before. There were just two ways to escape it. One was retirement. The other involved a Cardy gun placed at the temple....

The red light of his personal communicator was blinking intermittently when he regained the bridge. It was Garstow.

"Glayne!" he barked abruptly, "Bardled is on his way in with the fleet of Imperial Terra. And a dozen other Sectors have massed their fleets and are on the way, too."

"Excellent," said Glayne. "We're working faster now. We've put the Delban technicians to work and repaired the damage to their assembly lines. We ought to be able to handle a thousand ships an hour. How long before Bardled will arrive?"

"Four hours ... maybe six."

"I'm lifting in a few minutes," Glayne said. "When Bardled arrives, install the units in his heavy ships first. Those tubs will smash the Tjadlinn anti-shield if anything will."

Rapidly Glayne went on to sketch his plan of attack. When he finished, Garstow nodded ponderously. "Then we will sub-space as soon as we pick up the power broadcast. A sound strategy, Captain. Good luck!" His face faded from the screen.

* * * * *

The first of the big Cluster class battleships were easing down on vast fingers of flame when Harbin reported that the work of installation was complete. In quick succession the other cruisers of his division reported readiness and he gave the command to blast off.

The _Algol_ was almost two hundred million kilos below Scone System's plane of ecliptic when the hastily installed antenna unit began to pick up the first surges of power from the Tane Jewel. Cautiously the _Algol's_ pilot experimented with it, accustoming himself to unlimited power at his finger tips. One by one, the ship's atomic drivers fell silent as the pilot gained confidence.

"Raise the anti-shield, Lieutenant Harbin," Glayne said crisply over his inter-ship phone. "We'll sub-space right now."

Harbin's image stared at him incredulously from the communicator screen for an instant but he fought down the words that trembled on his lips.

"Aye, sir," he snapped.

Glayne was grimly amused at his anxiety but said nothing to relieve it. They were dangerously close to mass, he knew, but if Gort Bro-Doral could blast into sub-space directly from Sterle II with a shield supported by Jewel power, then he ought to be able to get away with it at two hundred million kilos from mass.

Briefly Glayne communicated his intent to the commanders of the thirty other cruisers in his division and their anti-shields began to build. At his curt command they dropped smoothly into sub-space, their shield generators heating up slightly as the sudden strain hit them.

They plunged on through sub-space, building up to incredible velocities in that nether dimension where such commonplace things as mass and light did not exist. Glayne's mind worked rapidly, analyzing his plan of battle for any defects. Obviously the enemy would mass his fleet at the all-important Tjadlinn. If his calculations were correct, his cruiser division would pop into normal space right among them. If they struck fast enough, they could disorganize the Delbans sufficiently for Garstow and Bardled to get in among them with the heavy units of their fleets. And that, he knew, would be the end of the Delban Grand Fleet.

The discoid was another matter. Paradoxically, it contained within it the very source of the power which they would use to destroy it. The only possible way the Delbans could deprive them of the Jewel power would be to turn off the non-directional broadcast entirely. That, however, would leave them open to an attack by the regular miatron batteries of the heavy Guardian and Terran battleships. They could not possibly hope to beat off such an attack with their Kellander secondaries. Hence, Glayne reasoned, they would keep up the power broadcast at all costs.

Satisfied with his plan, Glayne let his mind relax and drift where it wanted. Abruptly it turned to thoughts of Niala Chodred and he winced at the pain which filled him. Grimly, he realized that if the silent treatment by his fellow officers failed to ruin him, the bitter acid of remorse which burned his soul would certainly accomplish the job.

X

One instant the fleet of the Delban Empire was assembling about the vital Tjadlinn discoid in an orderly fashion. An instant later all hell broke loose amid its massed ranks.

Glayne's cruiser division popped out of sub-space at two hundred kilometers per second and flailed through the Delbans like a giant scythe. His eyes glued to the small battle screen in front of him, Glayne clipped off rapid commands over the ship-to-ship communicator that kept him in touch with the rest of his group.

Three Delban warships--one a battle-ship--had been caught with their shields down and were now exploding enthusiastically in nova-fashion. A dozen others had been heavily damaged by the slashing miatron beams as they vainly sought to lift their shields.

The _Algol_ screamed in protest as the pilot flung her around to bore in again. Her armored hide seemed to crawl in squealing agony at the twenty G turn. Glayne panted, on the verge of blacking out. Dimly he glimpsed the strained features of the pilot wracked with spasms of coughing that flung lobs of blood and lung tissue against the terraced banks of instruments at his side....

Then they were among the Delbans again, slashing right and left with Kellander miatron beams. This time the Delbans were ready for them and replied with a vengeance. Torrents of energy smashed at the _Algol's_ shield which shuddered like a live thing under the impact. Behind Glayne a knot of sweating gunnery officers rattled off firing data to waiting Kellander crews before the mammoth battle screen. Somewhere in the bowels of the ship the accumulators were screaming as they fed the Jewel energies from the antenna to the smoking banks of shield generators and the ravenous Kellander condensers. But dominating the ear-splitting crescendo of the _Algol_ in full fighting stride was the continuous, ravening thunder of Kellander projectors as they flung their blasts at the Delban warships.

Glayne saw that his division had scattered widely--but, at the same time, the disorganization of the Delbans was even more evident. Unaware that the sudden attack was a feint to draw them away from Tjadlinn, a dozen Delban fleet divisions abandoned the Jewel to join the fray.

As the Guardian Captain scanned the screen, he saw that the tide was fast running in favor of the Delbans. The _Anza_ was finished for the day. A flotilla of swift Delban destroyers had darted in with mines and torpedoes, one of which had gotten through her shield and exploded with a devastating energy concussion against her stern, sheering off plates and jet tubes by it force. The _Altor_ and _Astrid_ were cornered by a dozen Delban Galactics and Clusters and their shields coruscated in brilliant hues as they trembled on the point of collapse. A third Guardian ship, the _Aesir_, blasted in to offer aid and even as Glayne watched, hurled her energies in a concerted salvo at a point just below the jets of one of the Delban Clusters. Its shield coruscated brilliantly, tottered, and suddenly it was strewing its guts, nova-fashion. Almost immediately the _Aesir_ followed her example as a salvo of Galactic beams struck her amidships, rupturing her shield. A torpedo ripped into the bridge of the _Astrid_ and she exploded in an eye-searing nova. The _Altor_ managed to limp away in the confusion, her beralloy hide mangled and torn from a near miss.

The _Algol_ herself was in trouble. Two Delban Stellars were hurling torrents of energy at her shield, making it coruscate in a blaze of overloaded power foci. A pack of destroyers was circling hungrily, looking for a chance to dart in and plant their seeds of destruction. The pilot maneuvered desperately, but the overloaded power lines could not shunt sufficient power through the drivers to pull them out of their difficulty.

Glayne swore, wondering where the rest of the fleet was. It couldn't go on much longer. The _Akkad_ had novaed; the _Ashlar_ and _Asgard_ had disappeared without leaving a trace. Only six of his original thirty were in fighting shape--and even as he watched he had to revise it to five. The _Atlas_, surrounded by a dozen enemies, exploded in nova-fashion as her shield collapsed.

And then the void was suddenly full of great warships bearing the Guardian and Terran insignia, appearing magically in the midst of the Delbans. What had appeared to be triumph suddenly turned into a rout for the Delbans. Badly disorganized, they attempted to flee back to the safety of the mighty Kellander projectors of Tjadlinn.

* * * * *

But Glayne's annihilated cruiser division had done its work well; the Delbans, drawn too far from the discoid, were cut off by the fleets that opposed them. They fought desperately and fanatically, but there was only one possible outcome. One after another they exploded nova-fashion as the massed salvos of the tremendous Terran and Guardian battle ships swept aside their shields and touched destructive fingers to their beralloy sides.

Glayne's ship-to-ship suddenly crackled into life and Garstow's heavy face appeared on the screen. "My boy," he boomed, "I'm proud of you. Excellent work! We've bagged them all at almost no cost. Bardled tells me he didn't lose a ship."

Glayne gazed stupidly at him for a moment before he could adjust himself to the idea of victory. Then he said quietly: "I have five ships left out of a command of thirty."

"Oh! ... that's too bad," mumbled Garstow, his broad face becoming serious. "What I mean to say is--"

"The chaplain will say what needs to be said," Glayne cut in with unnecessary bitterness. "If you still want me to run this show, then I submit that we attack Tjadlinn without delay."

Admiral Garstow nodded, his face like a deflated balloon.

Quickly Glayne outlined his plan for the assault on the discoid itself. The battle would be fought between the Kellander accumulator and condenser capacity of the massed fleets and the total generator capacity of the mighty anti-shield which the Delbans would raise from the discoid. If the Delban shield capacity was less than the massed strength of the fleet, then the discoid would be destroyed. But if the Delbans held them off, they would try something else.

It took several hours to assemble the scattered and highly numerous Terran and Guardian warships into a closely-integrated formation. Matters were not helped by the appearance of dozens of warships from the fleets of other Sectors. They roamed about searching for enemy stragglers, but succeeded only in getting in the way. Finally, however, Glayne got them organized and the enormous fleet moved ponderously on Tjadlinn.

The Delbans waited behind their featureless grey shield, not firing a single Kellander blast at the advancing fleet. When it reached to within fifty kilometers of the discoid, Glayne gave the order to commence fire.

In the center of the huge discoid the Jewel, the Second Universe of the Elder Tane, blazed with a chill, golden luminescence. It did not waver a fraction as the tremendous energy demands struck it. The power drains fed voraciously of its infinite energies and flooded them into sub-space. The cumbersome mesh antennae on the hulls of the numberless ships in the massed fleet gulped it up and transmitted it to screaming accumulators which in turn fed it to the ravenous Kellander condensers. They, in turn, cast it through the miatron projectors at the shield of Tjadlinn from whence it had emerged.

For minutes on end those titanic torrents of energy blasted at that phenomenal shield. But it held. The inconceivable energies could not crack it. Not even when every single accumulator and condenser in the massed fleets of the Terran Combine labored at peak capacity did the shield so much as tremble. Not even to the extent of a tiny spider web of coruscation along the power foci.

Glayne barked a command to cease fire. He saw that the hail of torpedoes and mines which they had strewn had penetrated the shield. But they had been detonated by roving beams from the Tjadlinn secondaries before they could strike the surface of the discoid. If they could get through that mighty barrier, Glayne reasoned, then so could the _Algol_. He peered into the battle screen, attempting to locate the mammoth landing dock of the discoid through its shimmering grey shield.

He made his decision. Garstow's face came to life on his communicator screen. Briefly he communicated his intention to the Guardian leader. When he had finished, Garstow nodded soberly and mumbled farewell.

When he learned that the _Algol's_ Kellander batteries had been rigged to fire by remote control from the pilot's seat, Glayne contacted Harbin.

"Abandon ship!" he ordered laconically when the youngster's face filled the screen.

"Wha--what?" blurted Harbin incredulously.

"I said," Glayne repeated curtly, "abandon ship. Make haste!"

"Aye, sir," said Harbin. His face still mirrored astonishment as it faded from the screen.

XI

Glayne sat alone in the pilot's massive shock seat of the _Algol_. The instruments rose about him on all sides in terraced banks with the battle screen directly in front of his eyes. Tentatively he reached for the firing studs, accustoming his fingers to their shape. When he saw that the last of the _Algol's_ lifeboats had been picked up he realized that the time had come.

He transferred his gaze to the discoid that was vague and indistinct beneath its anti-energy shield. Fastening his eyes to the armored outer lock doors of the landing dock, he gently fed power to the drivers. The _Algol_ shuddered and gradually picked up speed. Glayne dropped the anti-shield, realizing that he would never get through the barrier with the energized shield functioning. But once he was through, it would have to go up quickly or his ship would be shattered by the roving secondaries. Hand hovering tensely over the shield control, he guided the ship toward the landing dock.

His speed increased; at twenty kilometers he was streaking toward the discoid in a free fall, all energy sources quiet. Fifteen--ten--five--and the _Algol_ was boring through the energy barrier, stormed and buffeted as it sought to impede the passage of the individual circuits. Suddenly she emerged _inside_ the shield and Tjadlinn was rushing upwards.

Like lightning Glayne's fingers stabbed at the shield control and fed power to the drivers. He braked the ship crazily to avoid the lashing secondary beams that reached hungrily for him. Once ... twice--and yet a third time the Kellander beams found the cruiser and slashed through her half-formed shield, dealing terrific blows to the plummeting ship.

Then the massive beralloy doors of the landing stage were expanding hugely in his screen and he braked with all the power he could shunt into the straining drivers. Somehow his clutching fingers found the Kellander firing studs and he lashed out repeatedly against the outer lock. It whitened, ran into slag, crusted, and flared again and again as the ravening bolts struck it. Desperately Glayne fought to prevent blackness encroaching on the corners of his vision.

Suddenly a rending, thundering roar filled the _Algol_ and she was crashing headlong through the weakened beralloy doors of the landing dock. But even above that deafening roar, Glayne could hear the scream of twisted and tortured metal. Then the big ship stopped moving and all was quiet except for the shriek of air escaping through the crevices around her mangled hull.

Groggily, Glayne shook his head in an effort to shake off the black-out which had engulfed his vision. In spite of his circulation exercises he couldn't see anything. Then a glimmering of the answer occurred to him and with wild surmise he experimentally flicked the firing stud of the ship's Kellanders.

Nothing happened.

Then Glayne understood. Every bit of the ship's power was cut off, including the lights and the battle screen. Obviously the Jewel power was cut off. Evidently the impact of the _Algol's_ crash had jarred the delicate power drains so that Tjadlinn was once again without power. But he'd have to make sure.

Heartened, he rose and took a space suit from the locker, checking to see if its light torch was operating. As he turned away, a vague, ridiculous hope struck him. He took a second suit from the locker.

* * * * *

Twisted and buckled beralloy plates had sheered long, jagged gashes in the equally tough armor of the cruiser, Glayne saw, as he clambered from the emergency lock. A little air still sighed through the huge rent which the cruiser had smashed in the skin of the discoid. The gigantic landing dock was dwarfed by the three hundred meter bulk of the cruiser. Small Delban craft had been flung violently on either side and now littered the walls with their battered bodies. One or two of the Delban technicians had been caught by the crash and were either smeared thinly along the blastway or turned inside out as their bodies exploded from lack of air pressure.

Hurriedly Glayne flashed his torch about, trying to find the mono-car which his party had used to get to Selzi-Narfid's quarters. The car itself was gone but he found the gleaming mono-rail and followed it at a rapid trot. Fortunately the passage was well-equipped with automatic air-locks, one of which had whipped in place when the air pressure dropped suddenly. When he came to the first of these, he found that the dilator was without power. He fumed at the wasted time as he burned around the lock with his torch and triggered the mechanism with his finger.

After he closed it behind him, Glayne picked up his jogging pace down the mono-rail passage. He felt a kind of grim, ruthless hatred when he thought of Bro-Doral. He hoped wistfully that he would find the sneering sadist before Garstow's energy beams ripped the discoid to pieces.

He wondered what had happened to Niala Chodred. During the battle he had consciously held his thoughts away from her and the dull ache of her memory. A chill loathing spread through him as he thought of the Vibra-Death. He knew of the agonies of that nerve torture; it produced not one slow death but thousands. More passionately than ever he longed to find the Bro.

Suddenly Glayne felt the floor of the discoid tremble under his feet. At first he ignored it, but it grew persistently stronger and he realized that the fleet was again hurling its energy beams at the discoid--but this time they were penetrating because there was no shield to stop them. He quickened his pace, rounded a long curve, and found that he had reached his goal.

He vaulted the high curbing and pounded down the tapestried corridor to the wide entrance stage. The dilator stud refused to operate, so Glayne burned into the lock to operate the stud. He discovered that the port itself was locked and a sudden unreasoning hope blazed up in him. With rapid movements he burned the lock out altogether and threw his weight against the door. With a wheeze it dilated and he staggered into the luxurious apartment, stumbling from the force of his own momentum.

He was scrambling to his feet when something hit him. It was soft with rounded contours which he perceived even through the unsympathetic thickness of his spacesuit. And it had red hair and green eyes.

It was Niala.

"Glayne ... oh, Glayne," she murmured, clinging tightly to him.

"But ... but you're not hurt," he stammered, his mind striving to adjust to the realization of a hope which it had long rejected.

"I thought they had killed you," she sobbed happily. "But you got away."

"Yes, he did," remarked a third voice, familiar and hated. "It was unfortunate."

Glayne whirled. Gort Bro-Doral stood inside the entrance stage, a black Cardy gun in his hand.

"Without you in the audience, Captain, I didn't see much point in amusing myself with the girl. But now that you have returned, Glayne--"

The big Guardian crouched to spring at the Delban, gathering his legs under him.

"I shouldn't do that, Captain," Bro-Doral observed sharply, waving the Cardy menacingly. "Life is too sweet to throw it away so rashly, isn't it? Besides, such refined methods require time and I fear your leader, Admiral Garstow, doesn't propose to give us that commodity."

It was true, Glayne realized. The energy beams of the assaulting fleets were smashing tremendous blows at the discoid so that it shuddered violently. The shocks increased in strength even as he turned his attention to them. Somewhere deep in Tjadlinn air was escaping with a screaming whistle where the skin was ruptured.

"You seem to have no idea how hideous Death is, Glayne," said the Delban, approaching them slowly. "Out here on the periphery of the galaxy we like to make some sort of a ceremony of his coming--you see, he is always hovering around us." The Delban produced his explosive, nasal snicker. "Death is a fascinating subject; I have often wondered why you people in the Main Galaxy ignore him. Ever present, you know. And always waiting for you to step into his dark embrace."

Glayne watched Bro-Doral narrowly. He was but a couple of meters away. As the blows of the Kellander beams smashing into the discoid increased, he became more preoccupied with his subject and his grip on the Cardy grew lax. Glayne's hand tightened imperceptibly on the spare spacesuit.

"--out here on the Edge," Bro-Doral was saying, "Life is considered only a prelude to Death. Personally--"

* * * * *