CHAPTER III
Into the Zone
'Oh, the gloom of outer space,
Where the tailless cornets race,
And the sun's a star that almost disappears
When our rockets’ steady roar.
Sings the good old song owe more,
We're outward bound again, oh, Planeteers!'
SUAL AV'S throaty bass reverberated through the little control-room of the cruiser, in which she sat with Gunda Welk. It rose above the soft hissing of the rocket-tubes.
'Curse me if I can see anything to make up songs about,' growled the big Mercurian.
'You have no poetry in your soul, Gunda,' retorted the little Venusian with a grin. 'A poetic genius like myself doesn't make up her songs—they come to her out of the great ether.'
'They sound uncommonly like the bellowing of a Jovian marsh-calf when they do force themselves out,' said Gunda Welk dourly. 'Besides, you'll wake up Joan.'
'I'm awake,' came a voice behind them, and they turned.
Thorn came into the control-room, rubbing her eyes. Then she peered tautly through the broad window that framed a magnificent vista of black space and stars.
'What about the cruisers on our tail?' she asked quickly.
The big Mercurian shrugged. 'They're hanging on—we've heard their audio calls. And they've called up every Alliance cruiser in this part of the system. We've stirred up a hornets’ nest this time, Joan!'
Joan Thorn cut in the switch of the audio. From the speaker came a weird jumble of meaningless sound. All naval calls were always 'scrambled'to prevent eavesdropping; only an official unscrambler could translate them.
There was such an unscrambler in this little ship. Thorn had built it, out of her own naval experience. She hastily snapped it on, and the incoherent jumble of sounds from the speaker at once became a crisp, understandable voice.
'-our auras, which shows that present course of the fugitives is straight toward the Zone. Undoubtedly they're hoping to hide out there. It is imperative that we cut them off before they enter the Zone. Flagship Gull, signing off.'
'The Gull!' Thorn exclaimed, her brown face strange for a moment. 'I know that ship. It was old Commander Leigh speaking. She commands the Alliance patrol squadrons out here.'
Her thoughts swept her back into memory for a moment. She had, only four years before, commanded a cruiser of the Earth Navy that helped patrol this very sector of space, out here beyond the orbit of Mars, against a surprise League attack.
'They've guessed that we're making for the Zone,' Thorn went on. 'It's where all outlaws head for when things get too hot for them.'
'The whole system is too hot for us right now,' observed Sua Av. 'You should have heard the audio news bulletins going back and forth while you were sleeping. Three Planeteers try to kidnap Earth Chairwoman! Notorious outlaws foiled in daring attempt.’ The system's ringing with it!'
'It'll ring with the news if we're gunned out of space by those cruisers converging on us,' grunted Gunda Welk sourly. 'Do you think we can slip through them, Joan?'
'I think so,' Thorn clipped. 'We've got to keep straight on. Turkoon, the asteroid that's the pirates’ main base, lies in the part of the Zone almost directly ahead.'
Thorn stared with narrowed eyes through the broad window, into the magnificent star-flecked vault.
The little ship of the Planeteers was roaring out through the void at top speed, millions of miles outside the orbit of Mars. The bright, small disk of the sun was dead astern, its rays hiding the gray blob of Earth, away from which they had been fleeing for so many long hours.
Ahead of them, the void was thick with bright stars. Brilliant among them gleamed the big yellow topaz of Saturn, and beyond, and to the left, the fainter green sparks of Uranus and Neptune. Pluto was somewhere farther away, off to the right. And Erebus, their mysterious, ultimate goal, lay invisible still farther off—the dark, enigmatic outpost of the solar system.
Directly ahead of the racing little ship, only a few million miles away, extended a wide band of countless tiny specks of light, stretching parallel with the equator of the system. That broad band of light-specks was the Zone, the great asteroidal belt whirling between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
Thorn gazed tautly into the Zone. That mighty wilderness of countless planetoids and meteor-swarms, which all ordinary shipping avoided by running above or below, was the No Woman's Land of the Solanr System. In it the space pirates had long had their lairs, from which they still sallied forth to levy ton on the interplanetary shipping. Countless naval expeditions had tried to clean the place out, and had been baffled by the shifting swarms of meteors and tiny planets which made it impossible to conduct organized operations in there without prohibitive losses.
Joan Thorn's brown hands clenched. In there, in the Zone, at the pirates’ asteroid base, was the boy who alone in the system, held the secret of mysterious Erebus, the secret that would make possible the securing of the precious radite from that far, dark planet. Somehow, that boy's secret must be secured.
'Calling flagship Gull!' suddenly boomed a deep voice from the audio speaker. 'Cruiser Tharine, reporting. Our aura shows the Planeteers’ ship four hundred thousand miles from us, eighteen degrees counter-sunwise.'
'Orders to Tharine,' rapped back Commander Leigh's hard voice swiftly. 'Close in before they slip past you into the Zone. Calling cruiser Rantal!'
'Rantal speaking!' came a quick voice.
'Chanage your course to eighty-six degrees sunwise,' hammered the Commander. 'You and the Tharine can catch the Planeteers between you if you put on all speed.'
Sua Av scratched her bald head and looked at Thorn. 'They're converging on us from two sides, Joan.'
'Damn them!' growled the huge Mercurian angrily. 'If they only knew that we Planeteers are risking our necks for the sake of the Alliance—'
'But they don't know. To them, we're outlaws who must be either captured or gunned,' Joan Thorn clipped. 'We've got to outrun those two cruisers! Turn the injectors on full, Gunda.'
The Mercurian quickly obeyed. Thorn leaned toward the bank of firing-keys, her eyes on the power gauges.
All modern space ships were propelled by the atomic disintegration of copper or a similar metal. The powdered metal's atoms were broken down by terrific electric voltages, in power chambers of heavy inertrum. Only inertrum, that artificial metal whose atoms were synthetically 'crystallized,' could stand the awful strain.
Much of the atomic energy generated in the chambers had to be fed back into them as electric voltage, to continue the process. But there was enough surplus to eject streams of protons at high speed from the inertrum rocket-tubes, propelling the ship.
Joan Thorn cut in all stern tubes. The little ship jerked forward with the deafening roar of the blast.
'Check the aura-chart,' she ordered Sua Av. 'See if we're losing those cruisers.'
The Venusian snapped on their ship's aura. The 'aura'was a field of electromagnetic vibrations radiated for a million miles in all directions by a projector in the ship. The vibrations were reflected back by any object within that radius of space, and automatically plotted and recorded on the aura-chart.
The chart was a sphere of pale light, poised above the window. At the center of the luminous sphere was a black dot representing their ship. Off to right and left of the black dot moved two red sparks, cutting in obliquely toward them as all advanced.
'They're close—no more than a quarter of a million miles,' reported Sua Av.
'The Zone isn't much farther than that ahead,' Thorn declared.
'But there's a big meteor swarm in the Zone directly ahead of us!' Gunda Welk exclaimed. 'We can't run into that!'
In the fore of the aura-chart sphere glimmered a cloud of very tiny crimson flecks, whirling, seething. It was the edge of a great cloud of meteors at the lip of the Zone, stretching across a million miles of space in front of their fleeing little ship.
Thorn could see the swarm in b
lack space ahead. Not the myriad meteors themselves, but a constant winking and flashing of tiny flares, where meteors in the whirling storm of stone struck and fused every few minutes.
'Rantal reporting!' rapped the audio speaker. 'Planeteers are now keeping their lead on us, and running straight on toward the Zone.'
'Keep after them!' ordered the Commander's grim voice. 'Swarm six-sixty-two is just ahead of them and they won't dare enter that. We'll have them boxed.'
'You heard, girls,' said Joan Thorn tightly. 'There's just one thing to do—run the swarm.'
'Let his go!' grinned Sua Av. 'It takes more than a few meteors to stop the Planeteers.'
'One thing sure,' said Gunda grimly. 'If we do run it safely, we'll lose those cruisers. They won't dare follow.'
Joan Thorn knew the peril into which their little ship was roaring. The chance of their winning through that vast, whirling stone-storm was less than one in two.
But the naval cruisers would not follow them in there, she was sure. And if she could run the swarm, she would be well inside the Zone and could turn and run counter-sunwise toward the asteroid Turkoon without fear of further pursuit.
'Here goes!' Sua Av breathed, as the aura-chart showed their ship approaching the edge of the great swarm.
The chart showed the two converging cruisers making a frantic effort to head them off. But it was too late. Already, in the chart, the Planeteers’ ship was entering the swarm.
Thorn looked forth tensely through the window. The aura was useless, now that they were actually in the swarm. Her only chance now was in the quickness of her eyes and hands.
Space outside the window still looked empty, for the density of even the densest meteor swarm is not high. But Thorn could glimpse all around them the quick red glows, quickly fading and re-appearing, of meteors colliding and fusing.
A jagged black oblong mass turning over slowly, expanded with lightning speed in front of her. Her hand smashed a starboard-tube firing key, and the little ship lurched wildly aside from the oncoming monster.
A moment later, two smaller black masses passed some distance on the right, revolving around each other. Then there was a rattle, as of hail, as tiny particles struck the ship walls.
Scree-e-e! The tiny scream of air escaping through a pierced wall reached their ears with startling suddenness.
'Hull punctured!' rasped Thorn, without turning.
'I'll get it!' panted Sua Av, grabbing up the electro-fusing kit and darting toward the tiny hole in the wall.
'Better get our space-suits on,' Thorn continued rapidly without turning her head. 'We may get holed again.'
Gunda Welk hastily hauled in the suits from a cabinet amidships. The Mercurian took over for a moment while Thorn struggled into the suit and glassite helmet, and then Thorn went back to her tense watch while her two comrades donned their suits.
A soundless flash of red light burgeoned on the left in space, faded, and then blazed up again and veered toward the ship as a third meteor struck the two that had just collided.
Thorn frantically swung the ship upward. The fusing, swiftly-cooling mass passed close underneath.
Another mass of bullet-like particles struck the racing ship. Air screeched out through new holes, and the airgauge on the panel started flashing a warning red light as pressure diminished. Sua Av was working hastily with the fusing kit to close the new hull-punctures.
Thorn glimpsed a peculiar gleaming meteor directly ahead, coming dead on at the ship. She had plenty of time to curve the ship aside. But as she did so—
'Above you!' yelled Gunda Welk wildly.
Thorn looked up, just glimpsed the huge, ponderous mass thundering down on the ship from above-a tiny planetoid, black and jagged and massive, spinning on its axis as it bore noiselessly down on them.
Thorn's hand on the keys blasted the ship to starboard with the speed of light. But she knew, even as she acted, that she was too late. She could not quite get clear.
There came a grinding shock, a scream of riven metal. She and Gunda Welk were thrown crazily together at a side of the control-room. Her head rang inside her helmet.
She scrambled up, clutching a stanchion. There was a dead, unusual silence. She looked back into the stern of the ship, past Sua Av, who was scrambling unsteadily to their side.
''We're wrecked!' Thorn exclaimed, her heart plummeting.
The little planetoid had crumpled up the whole stern half of the ship like cardboard. The air inside it was gone. The crumpled little craft was drifting silently in space, revolving slowly around the jagged planetoid that had been its Nemesis.
'Hell!' swore Gunda Welk, her voice coming to the other two in their helmets through the short-range audio with which all space-suits were equipped. 'We were almost through, too!'
'What do we do now?' Sua Ay asked, her green eyes perplexedly staring through the glassite of her helmet.
Thorn shrugged heavily. 'I don't know. I was a fool to try to run the swarm. But it looked like our best chance.'
'It was,' said the big Mercurian loyally. 'Even though we didn't quite make it.'
'We've got to get out of here somehow to Turkoon, that pirate asteroid,' Thorn said. 'We can't just cling to this wreck until the oxygen in our suit tanks gives out.'
She examined the audio and other instruments. All wrecked by the shock. 'I suppose we're lucky to escape with our lives. But we've merely postponed death if we can't get away from here.'
Sua Av peered out through the cracked window, into the black abyss in which they were floating. The Venusian stiffened as she glimpsed something beyond the jagged, spinning planetoid about which their wreck was revolving.
'Joan, a ship is running up along the edge of the swarm!' she exclaimed. 'I can see its lights!'
Thorn and the Mercurian leaped to the window. They stared at the little blob of light, coming slowly closer.
'If it's one of those cruisers that pursued us, we're done for,' said Gunda Welk tautly.
'It's not!' cried Thorn suddenly. 'It's a pirate ship!'