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Wandl the Invader (version 2)

<h2>18</h2> During this time, on the Star-Streak, as we and the Wandl fleet made that preliminary circuit of the Moon, an incident[127] occurred which changed everything for me. I had noticed several times as we gathered in the Star-Streak's forward turret, that Venza and Anita were eying me. Their expressions were furtive, but I realized that they were trying to attract my attention. We had no opportunity to speak secretly. Molo or Meka, or that rat-faced guard, were always too near us; and Molo kept me busy with computations of our course. We rounded the Moon. We gathered with the Wandl fleet some twenty thousand miles above the lunar surface, and I watched that ship descend and land. Like Grantline, I wondered what for. Molo gave me no hint. I saw, through his 'scope, bloated figures in pressure suits unloading mechanisms. They seemed to be placing huge contact-discs in a circle on the lunar rocks. It was reminiscent of the Wandl gravity station, and the contact-beam which Molo had planted in Great-New York. Then at last the girls had an opportunity to whisper to me. A swift phrase came from Anita. "Gregg! Snap is alive. Hiding on board." I gasped. Snap alive? "Planning to rescue us. You and he can capture the Star-Streak!" "Anita! Tell me how." "No more now! Our room below—he's near it. He spoke to us." No more. She moved away from me. But it was enough. Snap alive! I recalled that when he fell beside the ship, no one had bothered to go down after the body, and at that time the hull-ports were open. After a time Meka took the girls below. I sat with Molo, gazing down at the dark and gloomy surface of the Moon. I had finished the mathematical work Molo had given me. My thoughts were with Anita and Venza, down in their cabin now with Meka. Perhaps even now Snap was joining them. I hardly heard Molo's low, muttered curses, as he set his lenses for a slight alteration of our slow circular course among the Wandl fleet. "That fellow at my gravity-shifts acts like a nitwit. He has them disarranged." It snapped me to sudden alertness. "Something wrong, Molo? Nonsense!"[128] "These men of my crew answer my controls too slowly. They should jump when my signals come." The plates suddenly shifted normally, but there had been an interval of delay. Molo was puzzled and annoyed. My heart pounded as I wondered if he would investigate. But he did not. "You had better sleep, Haljan. Take advantage now; we shall have action presently. Did you figure our emerging curve?" I shoved my computations across the table to him. "There." "You are quick, Haljan." "We should emerge from the Moon's shadow in about two hours." "But I will not hold that course. We're staying close near here with the other vessels, but I want some velocity always. Take your sleep, Haljan." I stretched on the narrow floor mattress. The turret was silent. I was aroused from a doze by Molo's activities in the turret. The girls and Meka were still below. The ever-silent Venusian, squatting in the turret corner, still had his gun upon me. I saw that Grantline's ships, over a wide fan-shaped spread, were advancing. And presently we were engaged in the soundless turmoil of battle. I cannot relate more than fragments, things I saw and experienced, during six or more hours of bursting electronic light and puffs of darkness in that spread of battle area within the Moon-shadow. It was a silent battle of crossing lights, ships a thousand miles apart, gathering velocity with great tangential curves; passing each other in a second; sweeping a thousand miles apart again; turning and coming back. A hundred engagements. The Star-Streak was very fast, very mobile, and, unlike all the other Wandl ships, had the allies' own weapons to use against them. I saw now why they called Molo the terror of the starways! We swept into the shadowed battle area. Over all its thousand-mile spread were the radiant Wandl gravity-beams, disturbing and impeding the course of Grantline's ships. There was the luminous gleam of projectile rockets, like little comets, soundless, launched by the Wandl craft, and the[129] radiance of the rocket-streams which all the vessels were using now for close maneuvering; the glare of Grantline's searchlight bombs and his white search-beams to disclose the deadly whirling discs which the weapons of his vessel must seek out and destroy. A chaos of silent light, stabbed here and there with Grantline's darkness bombs, bombs of limited local range which exploded in space and which, for a few minutes duration, absorbed all light-rays, giving a temporary effect of darkness. And then wreckage! Broken, leprous Wandl vessels whose barrage at close range had been smashed by Grantline's guns; torn and littered allied ships, struck by the huge exploding comet-projectiles and the whirling discs; airless hulks, and scattered fragments which no longer resembled a ship at all but only a hull plate or a torn segment of dome. And little drifting blobs, the survivors in pressure suits who had leaped from the wreckage; little blobs ignored, whirled away or drawn forward as by chance the sweeping gravity-beams fell upon them; tiny derelicts, floating stormtossed until the Moon's attraction caught and pulled them down, or a whirling disc cut through them, or the distant aura of a bolt shocked them to a merciful death. It was a three-dimensional, thousand-mile spread of fantasy infernal. Out of it, after an hour or two, a steady sift of every manner of wreckage was drifting down upon the Moon. The scene began to blur. A haze like glowing star-dust, or the radiance from a comet's tail, was spreading a weirdly luminous mist, blurring, obscuring the scene. This was the released electrons and the dissipating gases of the space guns and exploding projectiles, forming dust which glowed in the mingled starlight and Earthlight. The Star-Streak had plunged, during those six or eight hours, through the battle area. Our several encounters were all characterized by the Star-Streak's extreme flexibility, her speed, mobility, and Molo's reckless skill. We came through unscathed. There is a certain advantage for the man who seems not to care for his own life. But there was an encounter, the last one as it chanced, just before we emerged downward out of the fog and found ourselves no more than a thousand miles above the Moon's surface, where our adversary was equally reckless and only Molo's skill saved us.[130] We came upon a Venus police ship. We plunged, as though seeking a collision, and the Venus ship was willing. For a moment of chaos, both barrages held against the exchange of bolts. Then we rolled over and tilted down from the impulse of the stern rockets. The passing must have been within feet, not miles; and in that second, Molo timed a shot to strike at the enemy bottom. It went through their barrage. Behind us, a second later, there was only strewn wreckage of the ship, so finely powdered that it became a silvery radiance, like moonlight shining on a little patch of fog. "Not too bad?" Molo gazed around for appreciation. "Not bad, Gregg Haljan? Molo is not too unskillful?" We hung now close above the Moon's surface, with the battle area over us. Out of the fog up there came the drifting wreckage; and now the Wandl ships were coming down, one by one. Not so many of them now; no more than ten of them emerged. Grantline did not follow. His ships withdrew the other way. The fog gradually dispersed. Grantline could now take stock of the battle; he had been victorious. One might call it that, since his percentage of strength, numerically, was greater now than when the battle began. Ten remaining Wandl ships, and the allies had about twenty-five. Another hour passed. Grantline's twenty-five ships were gathered in a close group, ten thousand miles above the Moon's surface. Under them, the ten Wandl vessels and the Star-Streak seemed ranging in a five hundred mile circle. Down through it, on the rocks of the Moon in the foothills of the Apennines, the mechanism established there abruptly sprang into action. It was a giant gravity-beam. Of infinitely greater power than any Wandl vessel could generate, it flung out its spreading, conical ray. So this had been the purpose of all the Wandl tactics, to manipulate Grantline into his present position. This gravity-beam, though far smaller, was comparable to the one used by the Wandl control station. A rock contact against a huge mass, Wandl, and here, the Moon were necessary to give the ray its power. No ship could generate such a ray, so the Wandlites chose this battleground where they could establish themselves upon our deserted Moon.[131] The beam had about a hundred foot diameter at its base on the rocks; it passed upward through the circle of Wandl vessels and its spread bathed all of Grantline's ships at once. An attractive beam, so powerful that the ships were helpless; against all their efforts they were pinned and drawn downward. A slight velocity at first, but with a tremendous acceleration. Within an hour they were hurtling, coming together as they speeded down the narrowing cone of the beam. The ten thousand miles, their distance above the Moon, was cut to five thousand. The Wandl ships drew aside, keeping well out of range to let them pass; in another thirty minutes they would crash against the rocks. I gazed in horror from the Star-Streak's turret. We were sidewise to the angle of the beam. Grantline's ships were pulled together now into almost a fifty-mile group. They hung all askew, helplessly pinned, some broadside, some upended. The movement of their fall was so rapid that even with the naked eye it was apparent. "Got them now," Molo chuckled. "This is the end for them, Gregg Haljan." There were only three of us in the turret: Molo and I, and my watchful, silent guard who sat cross-legged, with a ray-gun pointed at me. Meka and the two girls were below during all the engagement. It was over now. During this lull Molo had sent the men from the deck gun ports to their hull quarters. Our decks were empty now; the bridges and catwalks up here had momentarily no occupants. The Star-Streak had little velocity, only a slow drift downward toward the Moon's surface, which now was only a few hundred miles beneath us. The lunar disc was a great dark spread of desolation, with only the sunlight topping the distant horizon limb. And from under us, to the side, was the source of the giant gravity-beam. Over us were the watch-Wandl vessels, and, still higher, the helpless knot of Grantline's ships hurtling down. "Got them now," Molo repeated. "In another...." He never finished. From the open doorway of the turret a figure rose up. Snap! His aspect, even more than his appear[132]ance, transfixed me. Snap, with his clothes torn; grimy and spattered with blood; his face pale and gaunt, with hollow, blazing eyes. And above it, the shock of rumpled red hair. In one hand he clutched a ray-gun, and in the other a blood-stained knife! My guard squatting on the floor, half-turned. Snap's bolt met him before he could raise his weapon. He tumbled dead almost at my feet. And mingled with the hiss of the bolt was Snap's shout at the unarmed Molo. "Into the corner, you! Back up, you damned traitor, else I'll kill you as I've killed everyone else on this ship!" <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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