Thorn saw that the League men were retreating into the entrance of a big airlock set in the crater floor beside the great window. An airlock that he knew must give entrance into the lunar cavern beneath that held Blaine's laboratory.
With a fierce rush, the pirates swept on. Men among them fell by dozens from the bursting shells of the enemy's guns. But they were firing back as they charged, using their atom-pistols with deadly effect as they ran. Old Stilicho was shooting with two weapons, his faded eyes burning inside his glassite helmet with fierce battle-light. “They've jammed the airlock!” Thorn yelled. “At them!"
The retreating League soldiers could not all pass through the airlock quickly enough. Down among those who were congested at its entrance swept Thorn and his wild followers.
The League men, hopelessly outnumbered, refused to surrender. Only when all lay dead could Thorn and his party advance through the door of the airlock, which led downward.
They poured into it, forcing open the inner door. Air whistled out past them, and from the blue-lit depths below atom-shells whizzed up at them. But they pressed savagely on, down the ramp below the airlock, down into the vast and gloomy lunar cavern.
CHAPTER XXII
Blaine's Weapon
The cavern into which the Planeteers and their companions had fought their way was of huge dimensions, a thousand feet across and two hundred in height. It was illuminated by krypton lamps and by the flood of brilliant sunlight that poured in through the big glassite window in the rocky ceiling.
At the center of the cavern, under that window, loomed a colossal and unfamiliar mechanism. It was a great, gleaming chromaloy sphere, supported by girders above a massed complexity of power-chambers and generators. Everything else in the cavern was dwarfed by that towering, gleaming globe.
The space-suited League soldiers, both those who had retreated from outside and those in the cavern who had hastily donned their suits, were firing savagely at their attackers.