13: The Sailing of the Fleet
As that score of glowing disk-ships, with our own hundred sun-swinging craft in their grip, flashed up and out of sight, our fighting-ships were flashing upward with the three hundred fighting-ships of the serpent-creatures racing down to meet us. Then, before we could swerve aside from their mad downward charge to pursue the attraction-ships, they had met us, and in all the world about us there was nothing for the moment but crashing and striking ships. Even as they had flashed down upon us, and we up to meet them, the invisible shafts of force from our cylinders had stabbed up and crossed their downward-reaching death-beams, so that scores of their own ships had crumpled and collapsed in the instant before we met them, scores of ours in turn driving crazily forward and sidewise as the pale beams wiped all life from them in that same moment. As we met them, though, it seemed that our ships and theirs were all to perish alike in crashes in midair, without further need of weapons, so terrific was the impact.
All about us in that moment I glimpsed ships smashing squarely into down-rushing serpent-ships, while our own craft spun and whirled as racing ships grazed along its sides. Then, hanging in the air there a scant mile above the ground, we whirled and grappled with the serpent-craft in a fierce, wild struggle. Their whole aim, we knew, was to keep us occupied long enough to permit the escape of their attraction-ships with our own sun-swinging craft in their grasp, while our object, in turn, was to brush aside these serpent-ships before us and race in pursuit of the attraction-ships. Charge and struggle as we might, though, in the moments following we could not break loose from the fury of the serpent-creatures' attack, who drove toward us with death-beams whirling in all the mad recklessness of despair.
I saw Andromedan ships all about us driving aimlessly away as those pale beams struck them, saw others destroyed by serpent-ships that crashed deliberately into them, and then pouring up from beneath came the masses of the great fleet beneath, thousands of ships that raced up and around the struggling serpent-ships, crumpling and destroying them with countless invisible shafts of force from their cylinders. Within another moment the last of the enemy craft had vanished, but by that time our own ship and a half-thousand others were flashing up in pursuit of the attraction-ships.
Up, up we raced-up until the giant world was but a tiny ball beneath, hanging at the center of the great ring of suns-but then we stopped, and hung motionless. For we were, we saw, too late. About us there stretched only the far-reaching circles of flaming suns that made up the Andromeda universe, with no sign of the attraction-ships or their prey. In those moments that the struggling serpent-craft had held us back, the attraction-ships had flashed out from this universe into the boundless gulf of space, with the hundred sun-swinging craft in their grasp, with Korus Kan himself in one of those ships. On none of our space-charts were they visible, safe from our pursuit out in the void, and we knew that somewhere in that void our sun-swinging craft and all in them were meeting their end, held in the relentless grasp of the attraction-ships and destroyed by them, since the sun-swinging craft could project their own terrific forces only downward. We were too late. Silently, slowly, we slanted back down toward the great central world.
As we came to rest there, among the tens of thousands of other gathered ships, I saw Jhul Din and our followers, aroused from beneath by the battle, running forward to meet me. I saw him glance about as he came toward me, inquiry in his glance, and then I shook my head.
'We've lost the most powerful weapon of the whole Andromedan fleet,' I told him, slowly. 'And we've lost, too, Korus Kan.'
I think that in the hours that followed, while the last thousands of ships swept in from all quarters of the Andromeda universe to gather around us, it was the loss of our friend that lay heavier on the minds of both myself and the Spican than that of the hundred sun-swinging ships. Those hundred ships, we knew, would have enabled us to wreck all the serpent-universe, whereas now we must meet them ship to ship, and trust to courage and fighting-power alone to win for us. Yet even their loss seemed small to us beside that of the friend with whom we two had roved all the ways of our galaxy in the cruisers of the Interstellar Patrol, with whom we had dared across the void and through the serpent-universe and its perils, toward this Andromeda universe. Silent, though, we remained, watching the thousands of long, flat ships massing about us, and it was still in silence that I received from the Andromedan leaders the knowledge that I had been chosen to command their vast fleet in its great attack, since I was familiar with the serpent-universe which we were to attack.
A half-dozen hours after the raid of the serpent-ships, the last of the Andromedan craft had sped in from the farthest suns of their universe, and a full hundred thousand mighty ships covered the surface of the great world as far as the eye could reach, gleaming there beneath the light of the belted suns above. Long, grim and ready they waited, their gaseous Andromedan crews alert at the controls, while before us lay in the central clearing our own long, flat flagship. In it, too, the Andromedan crew stood ready, the scant score of my own strange followers among them, its space-door open and waiting for our start. Standing beside it, though, Jhul Din and I paused; then I turned back to where the score or more of Andromedans that were their leaders, the chiefs of their great council, stood.
Tall, steady figures of strange, thick green gas they stood there, regarding me, I knew. They had gathered all their forces to save a universe alien to themselves, to crush the serpent-peoples, and had placed all those forces under the command of myself, an alien to them. The greatness of their spirit, the calm, vast magnanimity of them, struck home to me in that moment, and impulsively I reached a hand out toward them once more, felt it grasped and gripped as though by solid flesh by a score of gaseous arms; a moment in which, across all the differences of mind and shape, the beings of two universes gripped hands in kinship of spirit. Then I had turned from them, and with Jhul Din was moving into our great ship, up to the pilot room, where the Spican took his position at the controls. The space-door below slammed shut, our generators throbbed suddenly, and then we were slanting smoothly upward.
Before me stood a tall, square instrument bearing a bank of black keys-keys that transmitted to the ships of our vast fleet my formation and speed orders, as I pressed them. I pressed one now, as we shot upward, glimpsed a long rank of ships on the ground behind and beneath us rising smoothly after us in answer, pressed another and saw another rank rising and following, until within a few moments more the whole of the vast fleet, a hundred thousand gleaming ships, had risen and was driving up and outward, with our flagship in the van. Up we moved, until we were slanting up over the ring of mighty suns that encircled the great central worlds and the swarms of smaller planets, that central world vanishing behind us as we flashed on, and the great circle of suns about it, and the suns beside us, all dropping smoothly behind.
Out between those great circles of suns we moved, our great fleet in a long, streaming line to avoid all danger of collisions with the suns and worlds about us. I saw the Andromedans in the pilot room with me standing motionless by its windows as we flashed on past the circled suns and swarming worlds of their universe, knew that they were watching those suns and worlds drop behind as they moved out to the great struggle that would decide the fate of their universe as well as of my own. Then at last we were racing out between the last great circles of suns, out over the edge of the Andromeda universe into the blackness and emptiness of outer space once more.
Now as the great darkness of the void lay before us, I pressed the keys before me in swift succession, and at once the thousands of ships behind me leapt into a new formation, that of a colossal hollow pyramid that flashed through space with my flag-ship at its apex. Faster and faster our great fleet shot out into the void, the tremendous mass of ships behind me uniformly increasing their speed, until at last at our utmost velocity we were racing on toward the serpent-universe ahead.
Outward, into the darkness and silence of the eternal void, we were flashing once more, but as I stood with Jhul Din there in the pilot room, watching the great Andromeda universe dwindling in the darkness behind us, no exultation filled me. We had done what none in our galaxy ever before had done, had crossed the gulf and procured the aid with which we were racing to crush our enemies before they could pour down upon us, but my thoughts were not on these things but on the friends we were leaving behind us. Somewhere out in the void from that Andromeda universe, Korus Kan had gone to his death with the sun-swinging ships, and as we sped on through the void toward the serpent-universe it was the thought of that that held our minds rather than that of the great battle
