"All right, Doll, do your stuff!" DuQuesne directed crisply, and threw himself headlong into a corner, falling into an inert, grotesque huddle.
Loring, now impersonating the dead commanding officer of the scout ship, sat down at the manual sender, which had not been seriously damaged, and in true Fenachrone fashion laid a beam to the mother ship.
"Scout ship K3296, Sublieutenant Grenimar commanding, sending emergency distress message," he tapped out fluently. "Am not using telemental recorder, as required by regulations, because nearly all instruments wrecked. Private 244C14, on watch, suddenly seized with space insanity, smashed air valves, instruments, and controls. Opened lock and leaped out into space. I was awake and got into suit before my room lost pressure. My other man, 397B42, was unconscious when I reached him, but believe I got him into his suit soon enough so that his life can be saved by prompt aid. 244C14 of course dead, but I recovered his body as per general orders and am saving it so that brain lesions may be studied by College of Science. Repaired this manual sender and have ship under partial control. Am coming toward you, decelerating to stop in fifteen minutes. Suggest you handle this ship with beam when approach as I have no fine controls. Signing off—K3296."
"Superdreadnought Z12Q, acknowledging emergency distress message of scout ship K3296," came almost instant answer. "Will meet you and handle you as suggested. Signing off—Z12Q."
Rapidly the two ships of space drew together; the patrol boat now stationary with respect to the planet, the huge battleship decelerating at maximum. Three enormous beams reached out and, held at prow, mid-section, and stern, the tiny flier was drawn rapidly but carefully against the towering side of her mother ship. The double suction seals engaged and locked; the massive doors began to open.
Now came the most crucial point of DuQuesne's whole scheme. For that warship carried a complement of nearly a hundred men, and ten or a dozen of them—the lock commander, surgeons and orderlies certainly, and possibly a corps of mechanics as well—would be massed in the airlock room behind those slowly opening barriers. But in that scheme's very audacity lay its great strength—its almost complete assurance of success. For what Fenachrone, with the inborn superiority complex that was his heritage, would even dream that two members of any alien race would have the sheer, brazen effrontery to dare to attack, empty-handed, a full-manned Class Z superdreadnought, one of the most formidable structures that had ever lifted its stupendous mass into the ether?
But DuQuesne so dared. Direct action had always been his forte. Apparently impossible odds had never daunted him. He had always planned his coups carefully, then followed those plans coldly and ruthlessly to their logical and successful conclusions. Two men could do this job very nicely, and would so do it. DuQuesne had chosen Loring with care. Therefore he lay at ease in his armor in front of the slowly opening portal, calmly certain that the iron nerves of his assassin aid would not weaken for even the instant necessary to disrupt his carefully laid plan.
As soon as the doors had opened sufficiently to permit ingress, Loring went through them slowly, carrying the supposedly unconscious man with care. But once inside the opaque walls of the lock room, that slowness became activity incarnate. DuQuesne sprang instantly to his full height, and before the clustered officers could even perceive that anything was amiss, four sure hands had trained upon them the deadliest hand weapons known to the superlative science of their own race.
Since DuQuesne was overlooking no opportunity of acquiring knowledge, the heads were spared; but as the four furious blasts of vibratory energy tore through those massive bodies, making of their every internal organ a mass of disorganized protoplasmic pulp, every Fenachrone in the room fell lifeless to the floor before he could move a hand in self-defense.