“The appearance of this battleship has very much disrupted your plans to strut like conquering heroes among the slaves on Athena, hasn’t it?”
“Not exactly,” Humbolt replied. “Our plans are a little broader in scope than that. There are two new cruisers on Athena, ready to leave the shops ten days from now. We’ll turn control of Athena over to the humans there, of course, then we’ll take the three cruisers and the battleship back by way of Ragnarok. There we’ll pick up all the Ragnarok men who are neither too old nor too young and go on to Earth. They will be given training en route in the handling of ships. We expect to find no difficulty in breaking through the Gern lines around Earth and then, with the addition of the Earth ships, we can easily capture all the Gern ships in the solar system.”
“ ‘Easily’!” Narth made a contemptuous sneer of the word. “Were you actually so stupid as to think that you biological freaks could equal Gern officers who have made a career of space warfare?”
“We’ll far exceed them,” he said. “A space battle is one of trying to keep your blaster beams long enough on one area of the enemy ship to break through its blaster shields at that point. And at the same time try to move and dodge fast enough to keep the enemy from doing the same thing to you. The ships are capable of accelerations up to fifty gravities or more but the acceleration limitator is the safeguard that prevents the ship from going into such a high degree of acceleration or into such a sudden change of direction that it would kill the crew.
“We from Ragnarok are accustomed to a one point five gravity and can withstand much higher degrees of acceleration than Gerns or any other race from a one-gravity world. To enable us to take advantage of that fact we have had the acceleration limitator on this cruiser disconnected.”
“
!”
The red dot flickered on the viewscreen, trembled, and was suddenly a gigantic battleship in full view. He touched the acceleration control and Narth’s next words were cut off as his diaphragm sagged. He swung the cruiser in a curve and Narth was slammed sideways, the straps cutting into him and the flesh of his face pulled lopsided by the gravity. His eyes, bulging, went blank with unconsciousness.
The powerful blasters of the battleship blossomed like a row of pale blue flowers, concentrating on the stern of the cruiser. A warning siren screeched as they started breaking through the cruiser’s shields. He dropped the detector screen that would shield the cruiser from sight, but not from the blaster beams, and tightened the curve until the gravity dragged heavily at his own body.
The warning siren stopped as the blaster beams of the battleship went harmlessly into space, continuing to follow the probability course plotted from the cruiser’s last visible position and course by the battleship’s robot target tracers.
He lifted the detector screen, to find the battleship almost exactly where the cruiser’s course analyzers had predicted it would be. The blasters of the battleship were blazing their full concentration of firepower into an area behind and to one side of the cruiser. They blinked out at the sight of the cruiser in its new position and blazed again a moment later, boring into the stern. He dropped the detector screen and swung the cruiser in another curve, spiraling in the opposite direction. As before, the screech of the alarm siren died as the battleship’s blasters followed the course given them by course analyzers and target tracers that were built to presume that all enemy ships were acceleration-limitator equipped. The cruiser could have destroyed the battleship at any time—but they wanted to capture their flagship unharmed. The maneuvering continued, the cruiser drawing closer to the battleship. The battleship, in desperation, began using the same hide- and-jump tactics the cruiser used but it was of little avail—the battleship moved at known acceleration limits and the cruiser’s course analyzers predicted each new position with sufficient accuracy. The cruiser made its final dash in a tightening spiral, its detector screen flickering on and off. It struck the battleship at a matched speed, with a thump and ringing of metal as the magnetic grapples fastened the cruiser like a leech to the battleship’s side. In that position neither the forward nor stern blasters of the battleship could touch it. There remained only to convince the commander of the battleship that further resistance was futile. This he did with a simple ultimatum to the commander:
“This cruiser is firmly attached to your ship, its acceleration limitator disconnected. Its drives are of sufficient power to thrust both ships forward at a much higher degree of acceleration that persons from one-gravity worlds can endure. You will surrender at once or we shall be forced to put these two ships into a curve of such short radius and at an acceleration so great that all of you will be killed.”
Then he added, “If you surrender we’ll do somewhat better by you than you did with the humans two hundred years ago—we’ll take all of you on to Athena.”
The commander, already sick from an acceleration that would have been negligible to Ragnarok men, had no choice.
His reply came, choked with acceleration sickness and the greater sickness of defeat:
“We will surrender.”
*
*
