Now other of the Solarian ships were coming swiftly to the attack.
Suddenly a combination of three of the ten-man cruisers stopped another of the great ships instantaneously. There was another soundless crash, and the giant ma.s.s of wreckage that heaped suddenly up glowed dully red from the energy of impact.
But now the little ships of the invaders got into action. They had been delayed by the desperate attempts of the dreadnaughts to wipe out their enemies with the death rays, and they could not cover the great distances without some delay.
When a battle spreads itself out through a ten-thousand mile cube of s.p.a.ce--through a thousand billion cubic miles of s.p.a.ce--it is impossible to cover it instantaneously with any machine.
Already nearly a hundred and fifty of the giant liners had gone into making that colossal ma.s.s of junk in s.p.a.ce. They must protect the remaining cruisers! And it was that flight of small ships that did protect them. Many of the Solarians went down to death under their rays.
The death rays were exceedingly effective, but the heat rays were not able to get quite as long a range, and they were easily detected by the invisibility locators, which meant certain destruction, for a molecular motion ray would be there in moments, once they had been located.
The main fleet of the Solar System was already on its way, and every moment drew closer to this running battle, for the great ships of the Nigrans had, although they were entering the system cautiously, been going at a very high speed, as interplanetary speeds are measured. The entire battle had been a running encounter between the two forces. The Solarian force, invisible because of its small size, was certainly getting the better of the encounter thus far, but now that the odds were changing, now that the small ships had come into the fray, engaging them at close range, they were not having so easy time of it.
It would be many hours before the full strength of the Solarian fleet could be brought to bear on the enemy. They were not able to retire and await their arrival, for they _must_ delay the Nigran fleet. If even one of those great ships should safely reach the two planets behind them--!
But within a half hour of the original signal, the Rocket Squad had thrown itself into the battle with a fervor and abandon that has given that famous division a name that will last forever.
The small fliers of the Nigrans were beginning to take an appalling toll in the thinning ranks of the Solarians. The coming of the Rocket Squad was welcome indeed! They were able to maneuver as swiftly as the enemy; the speedsters were harder to spot than the Solarian ten-man and thirty-man boats. The Solarian speedsters were even smaller than the comparable Nigran craft, and some of these did a tremendous amount of damage. The heat ray was quite ineffective against the ten-man ships, even when working at full capacity, when produced by the small generators of the Nigran one-man boats. The cruisers could absorb the heat and turn it into power faster than the enemy could supply it. Beams from the monster interstellar liners were another matter, of course.
But the one-man speedsters had a truly deadly plan of attack against the liners. The plan was officially frowned upon because of the great risks the pilots must take. They directed their boats at one of the monster ships, all the power units on at full drive. As close to target as possible the man jumped from his ship, clothed, of course, in an alt.i.tude suit equipped with a radio transmitter and receiver.
Death rays could not stop the speedsters, and with their momentum, the invaders could not make it less deadly with their heat beam, for, molten, it was still effective. A projectile weighing twenty-two tons, moving a hundred miles a second, can destroy anything man can lift off a planet! Their very speed made it impossible to dodge them, and usually they found their mark. As for the risk, if the Solarian forces were victorious, the pilots could be picked up later, provided too long a time had not elapsed!
In the midst of the battle, the Solarians began to wonder why the Nigran fleet was decreasing so rapidly--certainly they had not caused all that damage! Then suddenly they found the answer. One of their ships--then another--and another fell victim to a pale red ray that showed up like a ghostly pillar of luminosity coming from nowhere and going nowhere! The answer? The invaders" ships were becoming invisible! The invisibility detectors were being overloaded now, and the hunt was hard, while the Nigrans were slipping past them and silently destroying Solarian ships!
The molecular motion rays were quite effective on an invisible ship--once it had been found. They were destroying the Nigrans as rapidly as they were being destroyed, but they were letting some of them slip past! The luminous paint bombs and bullets were now called into play. All enemy ships were shot at with these missiles, and invisibility was forestalled.
At long last the dark bulk of the main fleet approached, a scarcely visible cloud of tiny darting metal ships. The battle so far had been a preliminary engagement. The huge ships of the Nigrans were forced to stop their attack, and releasing the last of the fliers, to retire to a distance, protected by a screen of small ships, for they were helpless against the Solarian speedsters. Invisibility fell into disfavor, too, now that there were plenty of Solarian ships, for the Nigrans were more conspicuous when invisible than when visible. The radio detector could pick them out at once.
The entire Nigran fleet was beginning to reveal the disorder and uncertainty that arose from desperation, for they were cornered in the most undesirable position possible. They were outside the Solarian fleet, and their ships were lighted by the glare of the sun. The defenders, on the other hand, were in such a position that the enemy could see only the "night" side of them--the shadowed side--and, as there was no air to diffuse the light, they were exceedingly hard to find. In the bargain, the radium paint was making life for the Nigrans a brief and flitting thing!
The invaders began to pay an awful toll in this their first real engagement. They lacked the necessary power to cover the entire Solarian fleet with their death rays, and their heat weapons were of little help.
The power of the small ships did not count for much--and the big liners could not use their weapons effectively for their small fliers must be between them and their adversary. Despite this, however, the Nigrans so greatly outnumbered the Earth-Venus forces that it looked as though a long and costly war lay ahead.
At last the Solarian generals tried a ruse, a ruse they hoped would work on these beings; but they who never before had to plan a war in s.p.a.ce, were not sure that their opponents had not had experience in the art.
True, the Nigrans hadn"t revealed any especially striking generalship--had, in fact, committed some inexcusable blunders--but they couldn"t be sure. Though they didn"t know it, the Solarians had the advantage of thousands of years of planetary warfare to rely on. This stood them in good stead now.
The Nigrans were rallying rapidly. To their surprise, the forces of the Solarians were dwindling, and no matter how desperately this remnant fought, they could not hold back the entire force of the Nigran fliers.
At last it appeared certain that the small ships could completely engage the Solarian fleet!
Quickly the giant cruisers formed a great dense cone of attack, and at a given signal, the fliers cleared a hole for them through the great disc-shaped shield of the defenders. And with all their rays fanned out in a 100% overlap ahead of them, the Nigran fleet plunged through the disc of ships at close to four hundred miles per second. They broke through--were on their way to the unprotected planets!
The Solarian ships closed the gap behind them, and eighteen of the giant ships burst into wreckage as powerful beams found them, but for the most part the remnant of the defending forces were far too busy with the fliers to attack the large ships. Now, as the monster engines of destruction raced on toward the planets still approximately two billion miles away, they knew that, far behind them, their fliers were engaging the Solarians. They had left their guard--but the guard was keeping the enemy occupied while they were free to drive in!
Then from nowhere came the counterattack! Nearly five thousand thirty-man ships of Earth and Venus, invisible in the darkness of s.p.a.ce, suddenly leaped into action as the dreadnoughts sped past. Their destroying rays played over the nigh-helpless giants, and the huge ships were crumbling into colossal derelicts. With the last of their guard stripped from them, they fell easy prey to the attackers. Faster than they could keep count they were losing their warships of s.p.a.ce!
The ruse had worked perfectly! Nearly all of the ten-man and one-man ships had been left behind them in the original disc, while all the thirty-man light cruisers, and a few hundred each of the ten-man and one-man crafts sped away to form a great ring twenty thousand miles farther back. The Nigran fleet had flown blindly into the ambush.
There was only one thing left for them to do. They were defeated. They must return to their far-off black star and leave the Solarians in possession of their worlds. For all battle purposes their great force was nearly wiped out, only the fliers remained in force; and these could no longer be carried in the remnant of the great liners. Swiftly they fell back, pa.s.sing again through the disc, losing thirty more vessels, then raced swiftly away from the fleet of their enemies.
The Solarians, however, were not content. Their ships were forming in a giant hollow cylinder, and as the sphere of the Nigrans retreated, their beams playing behind them, the cylinder moved forward until it surrounded them, and they raced together toward the distant lightless sun. The Solar end of the cylinder swiftly closed, blocked by a group of huge ships which had taken no visible part in the battle. The Nigrans had stopped using their rays; and the Solarians followed in armed readiness, not molesting as long as they were not molested.
Many days this strange flight lasted, till at last the great yellow sun, Sol, had faded in the distance to an unusually brilliant star. Then, suddenly visible out of the darkness, a strange black world loomed ahead, and the Nigran ships settled swiftly toward it. Through the airlocks the great liners settled to their planet. No action was taken so long as the Solarian ships were not menaced, but for eight long months the darting ships hung above the four englobed worlds of Nigra.
Then at last the astronomers of Earth and Venus sent through the billions of miles of ether their message of safety. The guard could return home, for the sun they had been guarding would soon be too far from Earth or Venus to make any attack logical. Despite this, for years to come the fleet would guard the rim of the System, just to be sure; but it appeared that the suns had pa.s.sed, never again to meet.
A strange thing had happened during the pa.s.sing of the stars. Pluto no longer circled Sol; it had been captured by Nigra! The great fleet returned to a changed Solar system. Sol was still at its center, but there were now ten planets, including two new ones that the sun had captured from Nigra in return for Pluto; and all the planets had shifted a bit in their orbits.
What the ultimate effect on the planets will be, we cannot say as yet.
The change thus far is certainly not very great, though a somewhat warmer climate exists now on Earth, and it is a bit cooler on Venus. The long-range difference, however, will be exceedingly interesting.
The Solar System has just pa.s.sed through an experience which is probably unique in all the history of the mighty nebula of which our sun is an infinitesimal part. The chances that one star, surrounded by a system of planets, should pa.s.s within a hundred billion miles of another star, similarly accompanied, was one in billions of billions. That both systems should have been inhabited by intelligent races--
It is easy to understand why the scientists could not believe Arcot"s theory of attack from another sun until they had actually seen those other worlds.
In that war between two solar systems we learned much and lost much.
Yet, in all probability we gained more than we lost, for those two new-old planets will mean tremendous things to us. Already scientists are at work in the vast museums and ancient laboratories that are on them, and every day new things are being discovered. We lost many men, but we saved our worlds, and we learned many invaluable secrets from the invaders. In addition, we have but scratched the surface of a science that is at least a thousand million years old!
EPILOGUE
Taj Lamor looked out across the void of s.p.a.ce toward a fading point of yellow light. Far in the distance it glowed, and every second moved it many more miles farther from him. They had lost their struggle for life and a new sun, he had thought when he turned back, defeated, from that distant sun. But time had brought new hope.
They had lost many men in that struggle, and their dwindling resources had been strained to the limit, but now there was hope, for a new spirit had been born in their race. They had fought, and lost, but they had gained a spirit of adventure that had been dormant for millions of years.
Below him, in the great dim ma.s.s that was their city, he knew that many laboratories were in the full swing of active work. Knowledge and its application were being discovered and rediscovered. New uses were being found for old things, and their daily life was changing. It was again a race awake, rejuvenated by a change!
As the great sea of yellow fire that was that strange sun had faded behind their fleeing ships, leaving their dead planets still circling a dead sun, he had thought their last chance was gone forever. But hope had reawakened, with the birth of new ideas, new ways of doing things.
Tordos Gar had been right! They had lost--but in the losing, they had won!
Taj Lamor shifted his gaze to a blazing point of light, where a t.i.tanic sea of flame was burning with a brilliance and power that, despite the greater distance, made the remote yellow sun seem pale and dim. The blue-white glow told of a monster star, a star far brighter than the one they had just left. It had become the brightest star in their heavens.
On their ancient star charts it was listed as a red giant, named Tongsil-239-e, which meant it was of the fifth magnitude and very distant. But in the long ages that had pa.s.sed since it was cla.s.sified, it had become a mighty sun--a star in its prime.
How were they to reach it? It was eight and one half light years away!
Their search for the force that would swing a world from its...o...b..t had at last been successful. The knowledge had come too late to aid them in their fight for the yellow sun, but they might yet use it--they might even tear their planets from their orbits, and drive them as free bodies across the void. It would take ages to make the trip--but long ages had already pa.s.sed as their dark planet swung through the void. What difference would it make if they were or were not accompanied by a dead star?
True, the star that was now their goal was a double star; their planets could not find orbits about it, but they might remedy that--they could tear one star free and hurl it into s.p.a.ce, making the remaining sun suitable for their use.
But they _would_ escape this dead sun.