"Can you talk, Nels?" demanded Kinnison of his communications officer, even before the air lock had closed.
"No, sir. They're blanketing us plenty," that worthy replied instantly. "Space's so full of static that you couldn't drive a power beam through it, let alone a communicator. Couldn't talk direct, anyway. Look where we are." He pointed out in the tank their present location.
"Hm-m-m. We couldn't have got much farther away from Earth without jumping the galaxy entirely. Boskone got a warning, either from that ship back there or from the disturbance. They are undoubtedly concentrating on us now. One of them will spear us with a tractor, just as sure as hell's a man-trap——"
The fledgling commander rammed both hands into his pockets and thought in black intensity. He must get this data back to base. But how? HOW? Henderson was already driving the vessel back toward the solar system with every iota of her inconceivable top speed, but it was out of the question even to hope that she would ever get there. The life of the Brittania was now, he was coldly certain, to be measured in hours—and all too scant measure, even of them. For there were hundreds of pirate vessels tearing through the void, forming a gigantic net to cut off her return to base. Fast though she was, one of that barricading horde would certainly manage to clamp a tracer ray upon her—and when that happened her flight was done.
Nor could she fight. She had conquered one first-class war vessel of the public enemy, it was true; but at what awful cost her captain knew only too well. The prodigious drain of power had almost emptied her accumulators. Also, and worse, the refractories of her main projectors were burned away practically to the shells. Without vastly heavier bracing fields than the Brittania carried, no substance, however stable, could stand up long under such hellish loads as they had had to handle.
The Q-gun was as useless as a fountain pen without full-driven offensive beams. One fresh vessel, similar to the one they had just left, could very easily blast his crippled mount out of space. Nor would there be only one. Within a space of minutes after the attachment of a tracer ray, the enforcement vessel would be surrounded by the cream of Boskone's fighters. There was apparently only one way out offering any chance at all of success; and slowly, thoughtfully, and finally grimly, young Vice Commander Kinnison—now and briefly Captain Kinnison—decided to take it.
"Everybody open your communicators and listen!" he ordered. "We must get this information back to base, and we can't do it in the Brittania. The pirates are bound to catch us, and our chance in another fight is exactly zero. We'll have to abandon ship and take to the lifeboats, in the hope that at least one of us will be able to get through their lines.
"The technicians and specialists will take all the data they got—information, descriptions, diagrams, pictures, everything—boil it down, and put it on a spool of tape. They will make thirty-nine copies of it, since there are just forty of us left, and one spool will be given to each man.
"There will be twenty boats, two men to a boat. We will start launching them after we have gone as far toward base as it is safe to go in this ship. Once away, use very little detectable power, or, better yet, no power at all, until you are sure that the pirates have chased the Brittania a good many parsecs away from where you are. From then on you'll be strictly on your own. Do it any way you can; but some way, any way, get your spool back to base. There's no use in me trying to impress you with the importance of this stuff; you know what it means as well as I do.