The Phantom raider had struck again!
My comrades. Thirty of them meeting their deaths out there in that moment. The thought numbed me. Captain Wilkes had leaped to his feet.
"Why—why, good Lord, it got them! And now—us next!"
Our convoy gone. Unquestionably that was because the phantom was after us!
"What are you going to do?" I murmured. "Not tell the passengers—"
"Good Lord, no. Nor the crew. What good would it do? We're not armed with long-range guns—no preparations to make. Only spread panic maybe among my men. Some of them might want to try and persuade me to turn back to Earth."
"And you're not going to do that?"
"Hell, no." Captain Wilkes was a choleric fellow. His ham-like fist crashed down on his desk. "I was told to run this cargo to Mars, and by Heaven, Fanning, that's what I'm going to do. Make a run for it." He swung for his controls. "I can use a greater Earth-repulsion and once we get past Asteroid-9, by a little jockeying I can use that, too. We'll see if there's any damn' phantom-ship going to overtake us."
It was a weird, gruesome feeling, realization that in all probability we were being pursued by something we couldn't see. Something still ten thousand miles away. Could it overtake us? Certainly not in less than a few hours, perhaps not even in a day. And then, would there be a flash of an electronic space-gun, weirdly from its unseen source? The crash of our hull, or our pressure-dome exploding outward; the wild rush and hiss of our air out into the vacuum of space? And then death by suffocation all in a minute or two.