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.
Thorn tried to keep Lann behind her as she advanced with Gunda and Sua Av at the head of the pirates, her atom-pistol hot in her gloved hand from firing.
'Gun them all down!' old Stilicha's shrill voice was crying from her suit audio.
'Joan, look—they're destroying the machine, over there!' Sua Av yelled, wildly pointing.
Thorn glimpsed where the Venusian pointed, far on the other side of the colossal mechanism. A little group of space-suited women there were firing into Blaine's huge machine with their atom-pistols, endeavoring to destroy its generators.
'Forward!' Thorn shouted. 'We've got to stop them.'
They rushed forward. And ahead of them bounded the space dog, Ool, great-fanged jaws yawning wide!
Reckless of their own lives, maddened with apprehension, the Planeteers shot their way forward through the disorganized mob of League defenders.
With Lann Cain now close behind them, they forced through to the other side of the gigantic machine.
Thorn recognized the tall, spacesuited figure of the leader of the little group who were trying to destroy the mechanism. The face inside that glassite helmet was the bony green face and insanely raging eyes of Hasna Trask.
'Throw down those guns!' ‘Thorn yelled through her suit-audio. 'Surrender!'
'I'll surrender this way!' Trask's crazed, harsh voice came back.
The dictator shot at Thorn in the same instant. The little shell flicked past Thorn and exploded behind her—and Lann Cain sank to the floor as the blinding flare touched his side.
Wild with rage, Thorn raised her gun to fire. But Ool was ahead of her. The big space dog, eyes terrible as it saw its master fall, arced through space in a leap straight at Trask.
The huge jaws closed upon the throat of the dictator's space-suit and tore. The other League women beside Trask shrunk back appalled, raising their hands in surrender.
The battle in the cavern behind the Planeteers was over. The remaining League defenders, seeing their Leader fall, raised their hands in surrender also, dropping their weapons.
Thorn was bending frantically over the fallen pirate boy.
'Lann!' she cried.
'I'm ... not much hurt,' the boy stammered, stumbling up with her help. 'The side of my suit is scorched. I threw myself aside to avoid the shell, and that's why I fell.'
He sprang unsteadily forward, and gripped Ool's collar to pull her off the prostrate dictator. But it was too late. The space dog's great tusks had ripped through Hasna Trask's suit and torn her throat.
Trask looked up at them with pale eyes curiously drained of emotion.
'I ... would have ruled the system for its own good,' she murmured. 'I would have—' She sighed, and was still.
So a dictator died...