Defensive screens full out, the pirate stayed free and tried to run. No soap. She merely slid around upon the frictionless inner surface of the zone. She rolled and she spun. Then she went inert and rammed. Still no soap. She struck the zone and bounced; bounced with all of her mass and against all the power of her driving thrust. The impact jarred the Dauntless to her very skin; but the zone's anchorages had been computed and installed by top–flight engineers and they held. And the zone itself held. It yielded a bit, but it did not fail and the shear–planes of the pirates could not cut it.
Then, no other course being possible, the Boskonians fought. Of course, theoretically, surrender was possible, but it simply was not done. No pirate ship ever had surrendered to a Patrol force, however large; none ever would. No Patrol ship had ever surrendered to Boskone—or would. That was the unwritten, but grimly understood code of this internecine conflict between two galaxy–wide and diametrically–opposed cultures; it was and had to be a war of utter and complete extermination. Individuals or small groups might be captured bodily, but no ship, no individual, even, ever, under any conditions, surrendered. The fight was—always and everywhere—to the death.
So this one was. The enemy was well–armed of her type, but her type simply did not carry projectors of sufficient power to crush the Dauntless" hard–held screens. Nor did she mount screens heavy enough to withstand for long the furious assault of the Patrol ship's terrific primaries.
As soon as the pirate's screens went down the firing stopped; that order had been given long since. Kinnison wanted information, he wanted charts, he wanted a few living Boskonians. He got nothing. Not a man remained alive aboard the riddled hulk, the chart–room contained only heaps of fused ash. Everything which might have been of use to the Patrol had been destroyed, either by the Patrol's own beams or by the pirates themselves after they saw they must lose.
"Beam it out," Craig ordered, and the remains of the Boskonian warship disappeared.
Back toward Lyrane II, then, the Dauntless went, and Kinnison again made contact with Helen, the Elder Sister. She had emerged from her crypt and was directing affairs from her—"office" is perhaps the word—upon the top floor of the city's largest building. The search for the Lyranian leaders, the torture and murder of the citizens, and the destruction of the city had stopped, all at once, when the grounded Boskonian cruiser had been blasted out of commission. The directing intelligences of the raiders had remained, it developed, within the "safe" confines of their vessel's walls; and when they ceased directing, their minions in the actual theater of operations ceased operating. They had been grouped uncertainly in an open square, but at the first glimpse of the returning Dauntless they had dashed into the nearest large building, each man seizing one, or sometimes two persons as he went. They were now inside, erecting defenses and very evidently intending to use the Lyranians both as hostages and as shields.
Motionless now, directly over the city, Kinnison and his officers studied through their spy–rays the number, armament, and disposition of the enemy force. There were one hundred and thirty of them, human to about six places. They were armed with the usual portable weapons carried by such parties. Originally they had had several semiportable projectors, but since all heavy stuff must be powered from the mother–ship, it had been abandoned long since. Surprisingly, though, they wore full armor. Kinnison had expected only thought– screens, since the Lyranians had no offensive weapons save those of the mind; but apparently either the pirates did not know that or else were guarding against surprise.
Armor was—and is—heavy, cumbersome, a handicap to fast action, and a nuisance generally; hence for the Boskonians to have dispensed with it would not have been poor tactics. True, the Patrol did attack, but that could not have been what was expected. In fact, had such an attack been in the cards, that Boskonian punitive party would not have been on the ground at all. It was equally true that canny old Helmuth, who took nothing whatever for granted, would have had his men in armor. However, he would have guarded much more completely against surprise…but few commanders indeed went to such lengths of precaution as Helmuth did. Thus Kinnison pondered.
"This ought to be as easy as shooting fish down a well—but you'd better put out space–scouts just the same," he decided, as he Lensed a thought to Lieutenant Peter vanBuskirk. "Bus? Do you see what we see?"
"Uh–huh, we've been peeking a bit," the huge Dutch–Valerian responded, happily.
"QX. Get your gang wrapped up in their tinware. I'll see you at the main lower starboard lock in ten minutes." He cut off and turned to an orderly. "Break out my G–P cage for me, will you, Spike? And I'll want the 'copters— tell them to get hot."
"But listen, Kim!" and "You can't do that, Kinnison!" came simultaneously from Chief Pilot and Captain, neither of whom could leave the ship in such circumstances as these. They, the vessel's two top officers, were bound to her; while the Lensman, although ranking both of them, even aboard the ship, was not and could not be bound by anything.
"Sure I can—you fellows are just jealous, that's all," Kinnison retorted, cheerfully. "I not only can, I've got to go with the Valerians. I need a lot of information, and I can't read a dead man's brain—yet."
While the storming party was assembling the Dauntless settled downward, coming to rest in the already devastated section of the town, as close as possible to the building in which the Boskonians had taken refuge.
One hundred and two men disembarked: Kinnison, vanBuskirk, and the full company of one hundred Valerians.
Each of those space–fighting wild–cats measured seventy eight inches or more from sole to crown; each was composed of four hundred or more pounds of the fantastically powerful, rigid, and reactive brawn, bone, and sinew necessary for survival upon a planet having a surface gravity almost three times that of small, feeble Terra.
Because of the women held captive by the pirates, the Valerians carried no machine rifles, no semi–portables, no heavy stuff at all; only their DeLameters and of course their space–axes. A Valerian trooper without his space–axe? Unthinkable! A dire weapon indeed, the space–axe. A combination and sublimation of battle–axe, mace, bludgeon, and lumberman's picaroon; thirty pounds of hard, tough, space–tempered alloy; a weapon of potentialities limited only by the physical strength and bodily agility of its wielder. And vanBuskirk's Valerians had both—plenty of both. One– handed, with simple flicks of his incredible wrist, the smallest Valerian of the Dauntless" boarding party could manipulate his atrocious weapon as effortlessly as, and almost unbelievably faster than, a fencing master handles his rapier or an orchestra conductor waves his baton.
With machine–like precision the Valerians fell in and strode away; vanBuskirk in the lead, the helicopters hovering overhead, the Gray Lensman bringing up the rear. Tall and heavy, strong and agile as he was—for a Tellurian—he had no business in that front line, and no one knew that fact better than he did. The puniest Valerian of the company could do in full armor a standing high jump of over fourteen feet against one Tellurian gravity; and could dodge, feint, parry, and swing with a blinding speed starkly impossible to any member of any of the physically lesser breeds of man.
Approaching the building they spread out, surrounded it; and at a signal from a helicopter that the ring was complete the assault began. Doors and windows were locked, barred, and barricaded, of course; but what of that? A few taps of the axes and a few blasts of the DeLameters took care of things very nicely; and through the openings thus made there leaped, dove, rolled, or strode the space–black–and–silver warriors of the Galactic Patrol. Valerians, than whom no fiercer race of hand to hand fighters has ever been known—no bifurcate race, and but very few others, however built or shaped, have ever willingly come to grips with" the armored axe–men of Valeria!