The detector sensitives fastened to Pell's wrists had been twinging more frequently and more painfully. They were less than five million miles from their goal—only three hours from the blue-green disc that blossomed and expanded even as they watched it in the screen.
"Better put on your shock suit, Gret. We've come as far as it is safe—we've got to decelerate now," he said.
Grunting with annoyance, he tried to shrug himself into the weightless garment which slithered about in his grasp. He flipped on the suit's power and sighed with satisfaction at the gentle kneading of the massagers. He clipped his liquid-cushioned eye-stops in place and squeezed into his seat, putting on the helmet.
"Ready now, Pell," Gret's voice came out over the inter-com.
Pell grunted and began to wind up the converter. Somewhere deep in the ship's bowels it began to sing up the scale as the starter electros were clutched in. His detector began to clack and clatter busily as its relays responded to the impact of DIC radar which converged on the ship. Pell smiled mirthlessly as he fed full converter thrust to the braking jets and waited expectantly for the detector to give him the alarm.
It did so—soon.
The red warning lights flickered and the alarm clamored intermittently up and down the scale. They had his position and orbit now.
The minutes of waiting piled up with agonizing slowness. Pell turned down the sensitives of the detector. Its constant shrilling assaulted his ear-drums painfully. Steadily he fed braking thrust to the forward jets until the needle stood at a body-battering 19 G's. He turned up the oxygen flow in his helmet with a flexing of his cheek muscles. His backbone felt as if it were in imminent danger of being forced through his body and blackness hung just off the edges of his vision.
Somewhere out there in that star-studded blackness was the enemy. The main body was not in detector range yet, but it was there, nevertheless. Jockeying into position, warming up their blasters, swinging turrets to hair-line accuracy and waiting ... waiting....
His detector clattered determinedly now. Pell glanced at it. A brief smile flitted over his hard, tensed features. At least two were out of range.