Buck Rogers 2 - That Man on Beta (24 page)

From the control bridge of the D-III cruiser, Ardala could see Kane’s pursuit squadron returning, zeroing in on her own craft. She slapped frantically at control switches and knobs, struggling desperately to stabilize the cruiser and attempt an escape.

Instead the lights flickered, the ship’s trembling and tumbling increased. Ardala abandoned her futile efforts to work the flight controls and instead threw herself onto Buck’s inert body where it lay on the flight deck. “Wake up!” she demanded. “Buck! I didn’t mean to shoot you! You’ve got to help me, Buck!”

The spaceman groaned. At least he was alive!

But Ardala was unable to get him to his feet, unable to get him to resume control of the cruiser.

She looked up, desperately aware that the Draconian space ships were closing in. She couldn’t see into the cabins of Kane’s and the other ships, couldn’t see the pilots, working under Kane’s command, transfer the bulk of their power from their own propulsion systems into tractor beams that they locked, one after another, onto the big cruiser.

Slowly the power beams from the Draconian fleet took effect on the bigger ship. To the Princess Ardala, accustomed to having her every directive put into effect by eager underlings, the new motion of her cruiser was a delayed response to her own efforts to bring the ship under control. The cruiser’s trembling and tumbling smoothed out; she began slowly to move through space on a new, orderly path, far in advance of the Draconian fighters.

Her eyes wide and bright at the sight she misinterpreted, Ardala shrieked with triumphal laughter. “I did it,” she almost screamed. “I did it myself! What do I need with stupid men?”

She turned away from the control console and stood over Buck Rogers’ inert body. She drew back her royal foot and delivered a vicious, scornful kick to the unmoving spaceman.

Then the cruiser swung gracefully through space, starting to fall into formation with the Draconian pursuit squadron. Gradually it dawned upon Ardala that her efforts had not saved her or the ship at all—that she was being taken in tow by some invisible, intangible, irresistible force.

Ardala could not see the face of Kane, nor could she hear his words. But her vivid imagination conjured up a graphic—and basically accurate—image of his oily features distorted into a horrifying, triumphal grin. Her mind could summon up the sound of his raucous laughter and his scornful expressions of triumph as the royal cruiser came into formation with the Draconian fighters, from all outward appearances the flagship of a mighty fleet but in actuality a helpless pawn being dragged back to Villus Beta to face a fate best left unspeculated upon.

With a frantic cry, Ardala hurled herself upon the body of Buck Rogers once again. From love to scorn to hopeless dependence was the wild course of Ardala’s feelings for the earth-born spaceman. Now she needed him once again, and now she returned to her frantic pleadings, urgent demands that he rise, take control of the cruiser, help Ardala to escape the clutches of Kane.

But Buck Rogers did not move.

Instead, the big cruiser swung majestically into her position at the apex of the cone of Draconian pursuit ships. With equal majesty the whole formation swung around, pointed like an arrow in the direction from which all of the ships had originally come, and began moving with increasing speed back toward the spaceport at Villus Beta.

N I N E T E E N

On the telescreens of the starfighters of the Inner City defense squadron led by Colonel Wilma Deering, a formation of points of light swung into view. They were shaped—the formation, that is, for each individual light was merely a glowing dot—like a giant geometric cone.

Each of the points of light that made up the cone was of an identical brightness—indicating that the objects they represented were of the same size and mass—and an identical color—indicating that they were of the same composition.

The Inner City starfighters’ computers analyzed the points and their readout screens identified them. The pilots of the starfighters, under the new policy instigated since the arrival of Buck Rogers and his induction into the squadron, independently analyzed and identified the screen images. They checked their own conclusions against those of their ships’ computers, and agreed on the identity of the lights: Draconian high-speed spacefighters.

There was one exception to the uniformity of objects: the lead ship of the Draconian squadron, the point of the spiral, was far brighter and differently colored from the others. Again the pilots racked their brains while their computers analyzed the image and shuffled through the electronic equivalents of file cards trying to identify the single exceptional point of light.

“I think that’s a Draconian D-III freighter,” one of the pilots ventured over the radio net. “Might actually
be
a freighter—though I don’t see why one would rate that kind of fighter escort—or it could be a basic D-III frame modified into a space cruiser.”

“I think that’s it,” Colonel Deering answered the pilot. “Check your computer readouts, all pilots.”

Every starfighter screen indicated Draconian D-III configuration.

“It might be a command ship or a royal cruiser. Same as that ship we spotted over the Inner City shield a while ago,” Wilma said. “Okay,” she resumed, “let’s head into action!”

In Kane’s Draconian ship, a voice boomed over the radio. “Inner City fighter squadron dead ahead, Chancellor. What are your orders—shall we attempt evasive maneuvers?”

“Evasive maneuvers!” the massive Kane roared. “Great sizzling sunspots, no! Turn around! Fight the sniveling weak earthers! Blow those ships out of the heavens!”

“But—they probably won’t attack us,” a Draconian voice said.

“They’ll certainly not attack us if we blow ’em out of the sky first,” Kane replied.

“But, sir! If we switch over power to combat maneuvers and laser torpedo action, we might lose control of the princess’ cruiser. It takes a lot of power to tow a D-III.”

“Worry about that later. Now’s fighting time, you pig!” Kane snarled into his radio.

“Yes, sir. Here we go. Switching power to laser torps. Ready, on my mark—commence fire!’

On the telescreens aboard the Inner City starfighters, the spiral-shaped formation of Draconian craft suddenly sprouted a whole new set of tinier, moving dots of brightness. The dots separated from their parent ships, headed away from the spiral formation and toward the starfighters.

“Draconian laser torpedoes!” an Earth pilot cried into the radio commo-net of the starfighters.

“All right,” Wilma Deering gave her instructions, “all starfighter pilots, prepare to dodge hostile fire. Commence evasive maneuvers—utilize defensive pattern A.”

The formation of Inner City fighters swerved in mid-space, with the uniformity and precision of a corps of precision swimmers.

The Draconian laser torpedoes passed among the Inner City ships, for the most part passing harmlessly at high speed and soaring away into space to join the eternally floating jetsam of the interstellar void. A few of the torpedoes, their mass-activated proximity fuses responding to the passage of starfighters, exploded.

Some did so harmlessly.

Others rocked starfighters with the sheer, savage power of their charges.

Wilma Deering was briefly shaken as her ship escaped a laser torpedo with a near miss. Wilma flicked on her radio, spoke into the tiny microphone. “Good work, starfighters. Another volley of laser torps on their way. Switch to pattern W for evasive maneuvers.”

Again the starfighters swung gracefully through a complex pattern of evasive action. Again most of the Draconian torpedoes sped past the starfighters, some of them exploding as their proximity fuses picked up the nearness of the little rocket ships.

This time, however, one of the laser torpedoes scored a direct, head-on hit against a starfighter. The laser-charge of the torpedo and the fuel and weapons supply of the starfighter vaporized in a huge blossoming explosion. In the vacuum of space there was of course no sound, although the starfighter pilots in the rest of the Inner City craft picked up a monstrous burst of electrical interference through their radios at the moment of detonation.

Circuit-breakers went out on a dozen visiscreens and had to be reset manually after the incredible flash had died away to a slowly fading and contracting glow.

A few of the pilots had taken direct radiation exposure through the viewports of their ships, and would carry skin burns back to med-bay from the engagement, submitting to anti-radiation sickness therapy lest they become delayed casualties of the present battle.

One of the Inner City pilots took a readout from his craft’s situation monitor. “That was ship number 14 that got it,” he read into his microphone.

“Acknowledged,” Wilma Deering said in a low voice. “That was Mark. He’s gone. All right, it’s obvious that no parley is possible. Let’s prepare to launch weapons in counteraction.

“Ready—arm torpedoes.”

Aboard every starfighter, pilots were clicking over brilliant red switches from “stand-by” to “armed.”

“Three—two—one—” Colonel Deering counted down.

In every starfighter, thumbs poised over launch buttons.

“Fire!”

A swarm of deadly hornets sped from the starfighters toward the Draconian interceptor ships. Deadly hornets, yes—but each hornet was a laser torpedo, each of them housed not in the carapace of an insect but in the ply-formed housing of a weapons container; each was propelled not by a pair of whirring gossamer wings but by a miniature fusion-reactor in its tail.

And each carried as its sting, not a bloated sack of chemical venom, but a sealed generator of pure, ravening radiation, ready to escape at the first-opportunity—to send an enemy ship tumbling through space, reduced to white-hot fragments and glowing radioactive vapor.

The Draconians threw their ships into evasive maneuvers of their own. Most of the Draconians escaped with little or no damage, but two of the fighter craft sustained fatal hits, exploded and spun away, bearing their pilots to certain death and perpetual preservation in the absolute frigidity and utter vacuum of outer space.

The massive D-III cruiser that led the Draconian formation was rocked by a near miss. The tractor beams of the Draconian pursuit craft had been cut by now: those craft needed all the power and all the control they could muster to hold their own in combat engagement with their Inner City adversaries.

As the cruiser resumed its tumbling through space, the Princess Ardala resumed her frantic ministrations, pleadings, and demands addressed to the semi-conscious Captain Buck Rogers.

Hysterical now, Ardala dealt the spaceman a stinging slap on the face.

Buck snapped around, a look of fury on his face at the pain and the affront he had suffered. But in an instant he took in the situation and made a frantic dive across the cabin, into the pilot’s command chair again. He began hurriedly slapping at control switches, shutting down one system after another throughout the ship.

“What are you doing? What are you doing?” Ardala cried frantically.

“Killing our power!” Buck yelled back at her.

More and more laser torpedoes were passing near the royal cruiser. A series of them blasted in quick succession, all but engulfing the rocking, quivering ship in a seething sea of flame and radioactivity.

“Buck!” Ardala yelled. “I don’t understand! Why are you cutting all the power in our ship?”

“We’re caught between two forces,” Buck shouted. “There’s no way to escape, so I’m going to play dead. If they think we’re done for they may stop firing at us!”

The last of the D-III’s power system faded away into darkness. In the deep of space an eerie sub-twilight illumination filled the cabin of the ship, punctuated by frequent, blinding glares of light as torpedoes exploded near or on contact with fighter craft.

“Is this the same ship that brought me to Villus Beta?” Buck shouted at Ardala.

She thought for a moment. “Yes!” she replied.

Buck scrabbled in a concealed compartment behind a circuit panel beneath the console. He found what he was looking for after a few seconds of searching: it was a miniature line-beam transmitter that Ellis 14 had provided him on Earth.

Buck examined the transmitter. “This is what I wanted—we may get out of this yet. But the power source is all shot. How can I—?”

Without waiting for the help that he knew Ardala would never provide, Buck scrambled under the console and began to strip away the insulation from a major power cable. He pried open the casing of the line-beam and jury-rigged a connection between the little transmitter and the D-III’s main power system.

“This is crazy,” Buck said. “Listen—we tapped in onto a peculiar inductance flux and we’re getting radio signals on the line-beam.”

In a faint, distorted tone overlaid with constant loud cracklings, Buck and Ardala heard the conversation taking place between Colonel Wilma Deering and the senior pilots of the Inner City defense squadron.

“Colonel,” a man’s voice said, “let’s all zero in on that Draconian D-III lead ship. Blast the damned space barge right out of the known universe!”

“But I’m not getting any power reading from it. The ship seems to be dead,” Wilma Deering replied.