Warnings screamed into the distant pirate base and Helmuth, tense at his desk, took personal charge of his mighty fleet. On the field of action Kinnison's screens flamed out in stubborn defense; tracers and tractors snapped under his slashing shears; the baffles disappeared in an incandescent flare as he shot maximum blast into his drive; and space again became suffused with the output of his now ultra-powered multiplex scrambler.
And through that murk the Lensman directed a thought toward Earth, with the full power of mind and Lens.
"Port Admiral Haynes—Prime Base! Port Admiral Haynes—Prime Base! Urgent! Kinnison calling from the direction of Sirius—urgent!" he sent out the fiercely-driven message.
It so happened that at Prime Base it was deep night, and Port Admiral Haynes was sound asleep. But his ever-vigilant Lens received the message, and like the trigger-nerved old space cat that he was, the admiral came instantly awake. Scarcely had an eye flicked open than his answer had been hurled back: "Haynes acknowledging. Send it, Kinnison!"
"Coming in, in a pirate ship—VanBuskirk, Thorndyke, and I, and a crew of Velantians. All the pirates in space are on our necks. But we're coming in, in spite of hell and high water! Don't send up any ships to help us down. They could blast you out of space in a second, but they can't stop us. Get ready. It won't be long now!"
Then, after the port admiral had sounded the emergency alarm, Kinnison went on: "Our ship carries no markings, but there's only one of us and you'll know which one it is. We'll be doing the dodging. They'd be crazy to follow us down to base, with all the stuff you've got, but they act crazy enough to do almost anything. If they do follow us down, get ready to give 'em everything you've got. Here we are!"
Pursued and pursuers had touched the outermost fringe of the stratosphere; and, slowed down to optical visibility by even that highly rarefied atmosphere, the battle raged in incandescent splendor. One ship was spinning, twisting, looping, gyrating, jumping and darting hither and thither—performing every weird maneuver that the fertile and agile mind of the Lensman could improvise—to shake off the horde of attackers.
The pirates, on the other hand, were desperately determined that, whatever the cost, that Lensman should not land. Tractors would not hold and the inertialess ship could not be rammed. Therefore, their strategy was that which had worked so successfully four times before in similar case—to englobe the ship completely and thus beam her down. And while attempting this englobement they so massed their forces as to drive the Lensman's vessel as far as possible away from the grim and tremendously powerful fortifications of the patrol's Prime Base, almost directly below them.
But those four other patrol-manned pirate ships which the pirates had recaptured had not been driven by Lensmen; and in this ship Kinnison, the Lensman, was now calling upon his every resource of instantaneous nervous reaction, of brilliant brain and of lightning hand, to avoid that fatal trap. And avoid it he did, by series after series of fantastic maneuvers never set down in any manual of space combat.