But it did no good.
"No."
"Get the motors started!" I called to Captain Crane. "LeConte, you help her." Then I turned to Koto and in the dark waved a fist under his nose. "You idiot—"
"No, my friend," he laughed at me. "You killed Leider. LeConte put out the lights. Captain Crane will pilot the ship. Now it's my turn. You will pardon my insubordination, but you will also please to hurry up the gangway before I knock you unconscious and throw you up. Damn it, it's my explosive, anyway, isn't it? Who has the best right to fire it?"
[79] With that he whirled away from me.
"Don't wait!" he called over his shoulder.
I laughed at him and sang out the order to Captain Crane to stand by. As for myself, I remained standing on the small platform at the foot of the gangway.
The moment Captain Crane flipped a switch which flooded the control room and a score of ports along the hull with golden light, I thought the yells which rose from the other room and the far side of this one would blow the roof off. By the time we felt a quiver run through the hull, and heard the sweet, deep-throated hum of the gigantic power plant, a mob of Orconites had formed for a new attack. It was hideous that we could not wait for Koto in darkness, but the light was essential to Captain Crane's preparations, so there was nothing to be done. I felt that Koto's chances of getting back to us were one in a thousand.
Yet suddenly, as I still clung to the foot of the gangway, LeConte thrust his head from the control room door and yelled at me to hang on tight. At once the ship moved forward, and, rolling easily on her ground gear, swung left and lunged toward the swooping mob of Orconites.
Handling that space flier in the cavern was like trying to navigate a one-hundred-thousand-ton freighter in a pond. But Captain Crane did it—she whom I had once accused, to myself, of misnavigating and wrecking our other ship. The Orconites had formed themselves in a dense group. We went into them, mowed them down, stopped under the great arch which led to the inky black power rooms, backed up, and, as the screaming lines reformed, crunched terrifically into them again.