Although stars moved across the visiplates in flaming, zigzag lines of light, as pursued and pursuer passed system after solar system in fantastic, light-years long hops, yet Henderson kept his cruiser upon the pirate's tail and steadily cut down the distance between them. Soon a tractor beam licked out from the patrol ship, touched the fleeing marauder lightly, and the two space ships flashed toward each other.
Nor was the enemy unprepared for combat. One of the crack raiders of Boskone, master pirate of the known universe, she had never before found difficulty in conquering any vessel fleet enough to catch her. Therefore, her commander made no attempt to cut the beam. Or rather, since the two inertialess vessels flashed together to repeller-zone contact in such a minute fraction of a second that any human action within that time was impossible, it would be more correct to say that the pirate captain changed his tactics instantly from those of flight to those of combat.
He thrust out tractor beams of his own, and from the already white-hot refractory throats of his projectors there raved out horribly potent beams of annihilation, beams of dreadful power which tore madly at the straining defensive screens of the patrol ship. Screens flared vividly, radiating all the colors of the spectrum. Space itself seemed a rainbow gone mad, for there were being exerted there forces of a magnitude to stagger the imagination—forces to be yielded only by the atomic might from which they sprang—forces whose neutralization set up visible strains in the very fabric of the ether itself.
The young commander, seated at his conning plate, clenched his fists and swore a startled, deep-space oath as his eyes swept over the delicately accurate meters and gauges before him; for under the frightful impact of that instantaneously launched attack his outer screen was already down and his second was beginning to crack!
"We'll have to scrap the regulation battle plan!" he barked into his microphone. "Open all motors to absolute top; cut all resistance out of No. 3 Circuit. Dalhousie, cut all repellers, bring us right up to their zone. All you beamers, concentrate on area K. Break down those screens!" Kinnison was hunched rigidly over his panel; his voice came grittily through locked teeth. "Cut all your resistors if you have to, the motors and accumulators will hold long enough. There, that's better. Our third is up again and theirs is going down. Come on, boys, burn 'em down! Give 'em everything you can put through the bare bus bars! No matter what it takes, get through to that wall shield, so that I can use this Q-gun!"
Little by little, under the stupendous force of the Brittania's attack the defenses of the enemy began to fail, and Kinnison's hands flew over his controls. A port opened in the patrol ship's armored side and an ugly snout protruded—the projector-ringed muzzle of a squat and monstrous cannon. From its projector bands there leaped out, with the velocity of light, a tube of quasi-solid force which was, in effect, a continuation of the rifle's grim barrel; a tube which crashed through the weakened third screen of the enemy with a space-racking shock and struck savagely, with writhing, twisting thrusts, at the second.
Aided by the massed concentration of the Brittania's every battery of short-range beams, it went through—and through the first. Now it struck the very wall shield of the outlaw—that impregnable screen which, designed to bear the brunt of any possible inert collision, had never been pierced or ruptured by any material substance, however applied.
To this inner defense the immaterial gun barrel clung. Simultaneously, the tractor beams, hitherto exerting only a few dynes of force, stiffened into unbreakable, inflexible rods of energy, binding the two ships of space into one rigid system; each, relative to the other, immovable.