Then Kinnison's flying finger tip touched a button and the Q-gun spoke. From its sullen throat there erupted a huge torpedo. Slowly the giant projectile crept along, watched in awe and amazement by the officers of both vessels. For to those space-hardened veterans the velocity of light was a veritable crawl; and here was a thing that would require four or five whole seconds to cover a mere ten kilometers of distance!
Slowly the giant projectile crept along—watched in awe and amazement by the officers of both vessels.
For to those space-hardened veterans the velocity of light was a veritable crawl—and here was a thing that would require four or five whole seconds.
But, although slow, this bomb might prove dangerous, therefore the pirate commander threw his every resource into attempts to cut the tube of force, to blast away from the tractor beams, to explode the sluggish missile before it could reach his wall shields. In vain; for the Brittania's every beam was set to protect the torpedo and the mighty rods of energy without whose grip the inertialess mass of the enemy vessel would offer no resistance whatever to the force of the proposed explosion.
Slowly, so slowly, as the age-long seconds crawled into eternity, there extended from enforcement vessel almost to pirate wall a raging, white-hot-pillar—the gases of combustion of the propellent heptadetonite—ahead of which there rushed the Q-gun's tremendous shell with its horribly destructive freight. What would happen? Could even the almost immeasurable force of that frightful charge of duodecaplylatomate break down a wall shield designed to withstand the cosmic assaults of meteoric missiles? And what would happen if that wall screen held?