Гарри Гаррисон: Galactic Dreams

If the stern-faced Corpsmen had any doubts, they kept them to themselves, for that is the way of the Corps. They did what had to be done and next morning, at exactly 0304:00 hours, the mighty bulk of the Indefectible hurled itself into space. The roaring MacPherson engines poured quintillions of ergs of energy into the reactor drive until they were safely outside of the gravity field of Earth. Jax labored over the engines, shoveling the radioactive transvestite into the gaping maw of the hungry furnace, until Steel signaled from the bridge that it was changeover time. Then they changed over to the space eating Kelly drive. Steel jammed home the button that activated the drive and the great ship leaped starward at seven times the speed of light. Since the drive was fully automatic, Jax freshened up in the fresher, while his clothes were automatically washed in the washer, then proceeded to the bridge.

(Note — When the inventor, Patsy Kelly, was asked how ships could move at seven times the speed of light when the limiting velocity of matter, according to Einstein, was the speed of light, he responded in his droll Goidelic way, with a shrug, “Well-sure and I guess Einstein was wrong.”)

“Really,” Steel said, his eyebrows climbing up his forehead. “I didn’t know you went in for polkadot jockstraps.”

“It was the only thing I had clean. The washer dissolved the rest of my clothes.”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s the larshniks of Biru-2 who have to worry! We hit atmosphere in exactly seventeen minutes and I have been thinking about what to do when that happens.”

“Well I certainly hope someone has! I haven’t had time to draw a deep breath, much less think!”

“Don’t worry, old pal, we are in this together. The way I figure it we have two choices. We can blast right in, guns roaring, or we can slip in by stealth.”

“Oh, you really have been thinking, haven’t you.”

“I’ll ignore that because you are tired. Strong as we are I think the land-based batteries are stronger. So I suggest that we slip in without being noticed.”

“Isn’t that a little hard when you are flying in a thirty-million-ton spacer?”

“Normally, yes. But do you see this button here marked invisibility? While you were loading the fuel they explained this to me. It is a new invention, never used in action before, that will render us invisible and impervious to detection by any of their detection instruments.”

“Now that’s more like it. Fifteen minutes to go, we should be getting mighty close. Turn on the old invisibility ray ….”

“Don’t!”

“Done. Now what’s your problem?”

“Nothing really. Except that the experimental invisibility device is not expected to last more than fifteen minutes before it burns out.”

Unhappily, this proved to be the case. One hundred miles above the barren, blasted surface of Biru-2 the good old Indefectible popped into existence.

In the minutest fraction of a millisecond the mighty spacesonar and super-radar had locked grimly onto the invading ship while the sublights flickered their secret signals, waiting for a correct response that would reveal the invader as one of theirs.

“I’ll send a signal, stall them. These larshniks aren’t too bright.”

Steel laughed. He thumbed on the microphone, switched to the intestellar emergency frequency, then bit out the rasping words in a sordid voice. “Agent X-9 to prime base.

Had a firefight with the patrol, shot up my codebooks, but I got all the *** ***s, ha-ha! Am coming home with a load of 800,000 long tons of the hellish krmml weed.”

The larshnik response was instantaneous. From the gaping, pitted orifices of thousands of giant blaster cannon there vomited forth ravening rays of energy that strained the very fabric of space itself. These coruscating forces blasted into the impregnable screens of the old Indefectible which, sadly, was destined not to get much older, and instantly punched their way through and splashed coruscatingly from the very hull of the ship itself. Mere matter could not stand against such forces unlocked in the coruscating bowels of the planet itself so that the impregnable impervialite metal walls instantly vaporized into a thin gas which was, in turn, vaporized into the very electrons and protons (and neutrons too) of which it was made.

Mere flesh and blood could not stand against such forces. But in the few seconds it took the coruscating energies to eat through the force screens, hull, vaporized gas, and protons, the reckless pair of valiant Corpsmen had hurled themselves headlong into their space armor. And just in time! The ruin of the once great ship hit the atmosphere and seconds later slammed into the poison soil of Biru-2.

To the casual observer it looked like the end. The once mighty queen of the spaceways would fly no more for she now consisted of no more than two hundred pounds of smoking junk. Nor was there any sign of life from the tragic wreck to the surface crawlers who erupted from a nearby secret hatch concealed in the rock and crawled through the smoking remains with all their detectors detecting at maximum gain. Report! the radio signal wailed. No sign of life to fifteen decimal places! snapped back the cursing operator of the crawlers before he signaled them to return to base. Their metal cleats clanked viciously across the barren soil, and then they were gone. All that remained was the cooling metal wreck hissing with despair as the poison rain poured like tears upon it.

Were these two good friends dead? I thought you would never ask. Unbeknownst to the larshnik technicians, just one millisecond before the wreck struck down two massive and almost indestructible suits of space armor had been ejected by coiled steelite springs, sent flying to the very horizon where they landed behind a concealing spine of rock, which, just by chance was the spine of rock into which the secret hatch had been built that concealed the crawlway from which the surface crawlers with their detectors emerged for their fruitless search, to which they returned under control of their cursing operator, who, stoned-again with hellish krmml weed, never noticed the quick flick of the detector needles as the crawlers reentered the tunnel, this time bearing on their return journey a cargo they had not exited with as the great door slammed shut behind them.

“We’ve done it! We’re inside their defenses,” Steel rejoiced. “And no thanks to you, pushing that Mrddl-cursed invisibility button.”

“Well, how was I to know?” Jax grated. “Anyways, we don’t have a ship anymore but we do have the element of surprise. They don’t know that we are here, but we know they are here!”

“Good thinking. Hssst!” he hissed. “Stay low, we’re coming to something.”

The clanking crawlers rattled into the immense chamber cut into the living stone and now filled with deadly war machines of all description. The only human there, if he could be called human, was the larshnik operator whose soiled fingertips sprang to the gun controls the instant he spotted the intruders, but he never stood a chance. Precisely aimed rays from two blasters zeroed in on him and in a millisecond he was no more than a charred fragment of smoking flesh in the chair. Corps justice was striking at last to the larshnik lair.

Justice it was, impersonal and final, impartial and murderous, for there were no “innocents” in this lair of evil. Ravening forces of civilized vengeance struck down all that crossed their path as the two chums rode a death-dealing combat gun through the corridors of infamy. “This is the big one.”

Steel grimaced as they came to an immense door of gold plated impervialite before which a suicide squad committed suicide under the relentless scourge of fire. There was more feeble resistance, smokily, coruscatingly, and noisily exterminated, before this last barrier went down and they strode in triumph into the central control, now manned by a single figure at the main panel. Superlash himself, secret head of the empire of interstellar crime.