Author: Kirk Straughen
Synopsis: An unprovoked attack by an alien power on one of Earth’s spaceliners results in the kidnapping of a top scientist. Lieutenant Tyson Carlyle, the Solar Navy’s most daring special operations agent is sent on a suicide mission to rescue the savant. Marooned on icy Pluto, and surrounded by a hoard of weird and hostile intelligences, can our hero save the Inner Worlds form annihilation by the super-science of monstrous beings? If you want to know the answer then you'll have to read this action packed adventure.
Edit history: Minor changes were made to this story on 12 June 2021
Chapter 1: The Black Invaders
Lieutenant Tyson Carlyle watched the vision cube before him with grim concentration as the ghastly drama played out before his staring eyes. The crystal instrument, measuring sixty centimetres to a side, sat upon a metal desk in a secure, darkened room a kilometre beneath the Solar Navy’s lunar headquarters.
The deathly quiet of the room was broken only by the faint hum of the ventilation system and of the cube as the mechanisms in its silver base projected a three dimensional image within its crystal mass. A scene of star gemmed space was captured within the heart of the device, rendered with such realism that, to Carlyle, it was as if he was staring out the armoured port of an interplanetary dreadnaught.
Carlyle leaned forward, tensed at the scene as the instrument’s focal point shifted, drawing him into the recorded tragedy, the mechanism’s dim light throwing his rugged face into a harsh play of shadows: A spaceliner, like a giant cosmic whale harried by snapping sharks, was in its death throes. The bright cigar-shaped hull of durium alloy was marred with ugly holes that had been blasted through its plates by the swarming, relentless attackers.
A dozen diminutive black spheres, crimsoned with auras of blood red flame, spun about the wounded ship like angry wasps. Prominences of fire leapt from their ebony hulls to lash the hapless victim with streamers of incandescent energy. The spaceliner, her hull weakened by the savage bombardment, was breaking up. Carlyle growled an oath as huge sections came apart with slow and terrible inexorableness.
Bodies drifted through the tumbling wreckage – some in spacesuits, some without. The living and the dead vanished in swirls of glowing gas as the attackers sweeping fire caught them in its appalling radiance. The Lieutenant’s hands balled into tight fists of hard rage at the sight of this wanton murder.
A solitary lifepod darted clear of the stricken vessel, her propulsion-grids blazing with cobalt light as she sought escape from the black assassins. Instantly, the ebon spheres were after her like hounds upon the tail of a running hare. The pod pulled away, gained distance. Carlyle rooted silently, intensely. They were going to make it! Then he groaned in horror – the swift pursuers speared the fleeing lifepod with lances of greenish magnetic rays. The invaders swept their helpless victim into the hollow sphere they swiftly formed about her, accelerated, and in but moments had vanished with their captive into the illimitable vastness of the void.
The lights in the room came on. Carlyle blinked, and released the breath he had been tensely holding. He rubbed his swarthy, troubled face, leaned his heavily muscled frame back into the chair, and looked with a distressed expression at the being that faced him across the metal desk.
Senneth, chief of the intelligence arm of the Solar Navy, stared back at him with the inscrutable expression that was characteristic of Martians. Like all her people, she resembled a six foot tall praying mantis in general appearance, except that her body was covered in a shaggy pelt of russet fur that protected her from the cold of her native world.
Her head was more like that of a macaw than an insect, and the hands that had activated the lighting system were almost human in appearance. For a moment Senneth regarded Carlyle with eyes as black as polished onyx, allowing him time to regain his composure after watching the disturbing scene in the vision cube. Then, anticipating his numerous questions she spoke, her voice emanating from the translator about her neck that rendered Martian ultrasound into human speech.
“The attack upon the spaceliner, Queen of the Void, was captured forty eight Earth hours ago by Cyclops, the lunar observatory. It was pure good fortune that the astronomers happened to be looking at that area of space. Robertson, the chief scientist, tracked the spheres with his instruments and managed to trace them to Pluto. They made the trip in twenty four hours,” she added, significantly.
Carlyle did a rough calculation and was as astonished as he looked. Pluto, he knew, was now at its closest distance from Earth - approximately 4.2 billion kilometres - which meant the unknown craft would have to be travelling at about 50,000 kilometres per second, twice as fast as any vessel humans or Martians had ever built.
A cold chill crept over the lieutenant. An unprovoked attack had been made against an unarmed civilian vessel by alien ships that outclassed the Solar Navy’s best in terms of weapons and speed. Why, the fleetest interplanetary dreadnaught was nothing more than a popgun armed snail when compared with the black spheres terrible fighting prowess.
Carlyle’s mind swept back to the recent newscast announcing the loss of the Queen of the Void whilst in route to Mars – a disaster attributed to a faulty atomic power plant. Little wonder that the true cause of the tragedy had been kept secret from the public so as not to cause panic and alert the unknown enemy to the fact they had been observed. Little wonder, too, that he had been suddenly and covertly recalled from his well deserved R & R on Earth and conducted to one of the highest ranking officials in the Solar Navy.
Senneth interrupted his thoughts: “I know you’ve just completed a rather testing mission on Venus, but you can see our desperate plight – the civilized worlds face an unprecedented threat from a superior, undeniably hostile and unknown power. The Central Intelligence Committee feels strongly, as I do, that this attack is merely a prelude to interplanetary war.
“If that wasn’t bad enough Professor Ian Chan was aboard the stricken spaceliner. As you no doubt know he’s Earth’s top physicist. He was bound incognito for a conference on Mars to discuss a revolutionary breakthrough in physics. Chan’s body wasn’t among the dead, so he may have made it to the lifepod. If so he’s now a prisoner of the enemy. Chan’s knowledge is vital to the war effort. I can’t go into the full details because they’re highly classified. It is sufficient for you to know we desperately need him and, considering your success in dealing with the ‘Venusian Incident’, you were the most obvious Special Operations agent for what we have in mind.”
Carlyle smiled wryly at the term ‘Venusian Incident’ - a rather colourless and understated description of his adventures on that primitive, Bronze Age world of savage, steaming jungles and barbaric peoples. For a moment he recalled the mission – an exploration vessel had crashed in hostile territory, its survivors captured by the local warlord and held for ransom.
The night-time raid on the castle-like fortress sprang into his mind in vivid detail – the scaling of the towering walls, clash of swords, explosions and gunfire; the shrill cries of the blue humanoid savages and the screams of his own men as they were cut down by whistling arrows; the look of relief on the hostage’s faces as they were hustled from the grimy dungeons and pushed aboard the armoured gyrodyne that had plunged down into the courtyard, scattering foes left and right. It had been ten commandoes, with Carlyle as leader, against a fortress packed with savage foes. The enemy had been hit hard and fast. All hostages had been rescued with the loss of only two of his men. They had been hailed as heroes.
Carlyle focused his mind on the present threat. He knew that three robot exploration ships had been sent to Pluto over the last ten terrestrial years by the civilian Solar Exploration Administration. All had mysteriously stopped transmitting within about a half million kilometres of the planet. It now seemed that enemy action, not mechanical failure as thought, had ended their missions.
He quickly reviewed what was known of the ninth planet through telescopic observations. In his mind’s eye he saw a rocky brownish world, diminutive, smaller than Earth’s moon, its chasm riven circumference a mere 7,231.9 kilometres. It was a vision of a desolate sphere covered in an unearthly ice of frozen nitrogen and methane which sublimated to form a tenuous atmosphere when the temperature rose to its maximum of minus 223o C.
In the black heavens the Sun was merely a bright star in the void of cosmic night. Chiron, Nix and Hydra – the world’s three moons - fled across its bleak sky like dismal wraiths. It seemed impossible that life could have evolved in such a hostile environment so distant from the life giving warmth of the Sun. Carlyle said as much to Senneth.
The Martian spread her hands in a fanwise gesture – the equivalent of a human shrug.
“They may be from another star,” she speculated. “Perhaps they’ve established a base on the outermost planet of our solar system. At the moment we just don’t know. What we do know beyond doubt is that it is imperative Chan be rescued if he’s still alive.”
Senneth paused for a moment. The tinny translator didn’t give much in the way of emotional inflection to her voice, and her bird-like visage was unreadable, but even so Carlyle had an idea of what was coming.
“This is virtually a suicide mission,” she continued. “We’ll send you in on a small ship disguised as a meteor. You’ll be on your own due to space limitations. We have no idea what their detection instruments are like. We’re hoping the smaller the object the greater the chance of it slipping through their defences, but it’s possible you may be blasted to atoms before you even land...”
Senneth left her sentence hanging, and in the pause Carlyle felt the weight of responsibility settle upon him as he recalled his military oath to defend the Inner Worlds. The Solar Navy had grown out of first contact between Earth and Mars with Morison’s historic expedition of 2015. Scientists rejoiced at the discovery of intelligent life, but the governments of both worlds were wary of each other, which had led to each developing military spacecraft – a move that simply increased mutual suspicion.
An arms race ensued. Cultural misunderstandings occurred, which aggravated the progressively tense situation. In 2020 a human spy was captured by Martian intelligence in the act of stealing military secrets. Intemperate politicians on both sides inflamed deteriorating relations, resulting in a dangerous game of brinkmanship.
In 2021 the red madness of war erupted over disputed space-boarders. The fleets of both worlds were launched. Battles raged in the sky above Mars and Earth. The heavens were starred with atomic fire. Ships fell, burning like meteors in the night. Cities were blasted to radioactive ruin by nuclear missiles. On Earth London burned; on Mars it was Pohu, her rose crystal towers, towers that had stood for five thousand years, were shattered beyond recognition.
In a matter of days millions died on both planets. Appalled, humane politicians on both sides seized the reins of their respective governments and put an end to the insanity. Armistice was established, and the long task of rebuilding shattered lives, cities and trust between the worlds began.
It was now 2035. Both Mars and Earth had slowly integrated their space forces to form the Solar Navy, a move designed to help unite both peoples. A lasting peace had been established between the worlds. The pre-technological civilizations of Venus were no threat to anyone but themselves: They weren’t capable of carrying their belligerence beyond their world, but they weren’t capable of helping in the coming conflict, either.
It was up to Mars and Earth, working together, to defeat the black invaders. Carlyle wasn’t a coward. He knew he had to play his part in the coming conflict, but he wasn’t reckless, either – he had no desire to die, especially if the manner of his death was horrible, which it probably would be if he was captured by whatever operated the black spheres. His mind went through a list of alternative candidates for the mission, rejected them. Cool and objective reason told him he was the best man for the job.
Carlyle firmed his resolve. Duty called and it was a call his moral sense compelled him to answer. Every man who joined the Solar Navy knew he might have to give his life in the defence of freedom, and he was no exception.
“I’ll go,” he said, fighting off understandable apprehension. “Fill me in on the details.”
Chapter 2: Enemy Planet
Carlyle watched the orb of Pluto swell steadily in the vision cube of his diminutive and cramped ship. His camouflaged craft, travelling at 10 kilometres per second, had been carried within a million kilometres of the planet by the interplanetary dreadnaught Sabre, and then launched from the mother ship under the cover of ‘silent running’, a term borrowed from the days of submarine warfare, and now applied to a spaceship that wasn’t radiating any detectable electromagnetic emissions that would give away its position.
An hour to go, thank God, thought Carlyle as he glanced at the chronometer. So far there was no sign that the enemy considered the hollowed out meteor, which measured thirty metres in length, anything other than what it appeared to be – a lump of cosmic rock tumbling towards Pluto under its own momentum and at an acceleration that was normal for such a body.
Carlyle, however, didn’t relax. He knew that every passing minute drew him closer to the unknown enemy, and increased the chance they would penetrate his disguise. He sweated in his space-armour. There wasn’t room to stretch his cramped limbs in the claustrophobic confines of the ship, and after twenty five hours in such conditions the strain upon his mind and body was beginning to tell, a fact not helped by the knowledge that if he succeeded in rescuing Chan the return trip would be even worse.
Thoughts of the professor added the torment of an ethical dilemma to his discomfort. Senneth had made it abundantly and brutally clear that the rescue of the savant was the sole purpose of his mission – any other survivors would be left to whatever grim fate awaited them. Carlyle knew that with billions of lives at stake such sacrifices had to be made, but even so he couldn’t sooth his conscious with this brutal fact.
Time passed with laggard slowness. Minutes seemed to stretch to hours, hours to aeons. The void was a vast monster that had swallowed him in the black throat of eternity. After a seeming age he sighted his goal and straggling time picked up its pace. Pluto’s orb swelled steadily until its dark sphere filled the entire vision cube. The surface of the enigmatic world was before him – rugged, bleak mountains thrust their tortured peaks towards the sable sky. The surface was riven by black chasms that were abysses of endless night. Methane hoarfrost glinted coldly in the icy starlight.
Carlyle shivered at a landscape as inviting as an open grave, and seemingly just as devoid of life. A light flashed on his instrument board. The Earthman tensed. Now was the moment of extreme danger – when the propulsion field kicked in to kill his forward rush – a moment when the enemy could detect the flare of breaking energy. He resolutely forced the ugly thought from his mind and manipulated the controls.
Deceleration hit him like the hammer of Thor. A crushing weight pressed him into the shock absorbing harness. He groaned. An alarm, like a bell of doom, sounded. In the vision cube he caught a glimpse of a rushing sphere wrapped in crimson flame. Carlyle’s heart seemed to miss a beat. His armoured glove slammed with desperate force against the eject button.
There was an explosion. Reality became a kaleidoscope of chaotic impressions – stars, bleak rock, stars – a sickening whirl, then blackness crashed upon him with the weight of mountains and all thought ceased.
**********
Carlyle regained consciousness, amazed that he was still alive. He ached abominably, but the space-armour’s inbuilt diagnostics revealed that neither he nor his suit was badly damaged: the autodoc – a sophisticated and self-actuating first aid kit had pumped him full of healing drugs, which soon erased his agony.
The Earthman carefully freed himself from the ejection pod and rolled on his back. No enemy ships hovered above him – his own craft had self-destructed when he’d been flung clear, and the flare of the explosion had no doubt momentarily covered his getaway. But he had no illusions of safety – his only means of escape from this world had been destroyed, and the enemy would soon have ground patrols out looking for wreckage.
The Earthman glanced at his chronometer – several minutes had elapsed since the attack. He carefully stood in the low gravity and took stock of his surroundings. He had fallen into one of the planet’s narrow chasms. All about him sheer, rugged walls of bleak stone mounted upwards for hundreds of metres to a thin strip of star gemmed sky, concealing him from his unearthly enemies.
He was surrounded by huge chimney-like structures which were thermal vents formed when organic chemicals, dissolved in liquid methane heated by radioactive minerals, precipitated upon contact with Pluto’s chilly, tenuous atmosphere. The vents were coated in thick mats of purple slime – chemosynthetic silicon based micro-organisms that fed on the compounds deposited by fluid bubbling up from subterranean reservoirs.
Carlyle gazed in wonder at the smaller forms of life grazing upon the purple ooze – crawling creatures resembling eight limbed starfish covered in black segmented exoskeletons. And upon these browsers other sable things did feed – ovoid vampires that stalked their prey on many spindly legs, and pierced their victims with spidery limbs to drain them of their frigid blood.
One of the predators ineffectually stabbed his armoured boot with its proboscis-leg. Carlyle cursed, stomped the thing to ruin. It broke like glass. The Earthman shivered – strange, unearthly life: The chill monsters of a frozen world that knew nothing of light and warmth - mindless creatures living out their bleak existence on a frosty globe so remote that the beneficent Sun was merely a bright star in the darkness of eternity.
The grim environment, the disastrous loss of his ship that had had no doubt doomed his mission to utter failure – all combined in an abysmal ferment of despair. Carlyle was hard pressed to shake off these grim thoughts. He had an assignment to complete – the fate of three worlds was in his hands. Failure was unthinkable. He must succeed despite the overwhelming odds.
Quickly, he salvaged what equipment he could from the pod. Before he had ejected from the stricken craft his ship’s computer had downloaded data to his armour. Sensors had detected a surface feature unlikely to be a natural formation – one that had been hinted at by long range observations from Sabre. It was a flimsy clue, but the only one he had. The lieutenant scanned the coordinates and set off up the chasm, grimly wondering what kind of intelligences had evolved upon this awful, inhospitable sphere, and what he could to thwart their sinister plans.
A half hour’s walk brought Carlyle in sight of the anomaly. He had climbed out of the chasm at its shallow end and was now crouched behind a pitted boulder, peering cautiously at the titanic structure that seemed to have been carved out of the soaring mountain, at least three kilometres high, that the rift bordered.
The architecture was alien, disturbing. The strange geometry seemed to waver in the cold starlight – all jarring angles and uncompromising planes. Towers, cones and spheres, each faceted like weird jewels, were melded together in bizarre, incongruous configurations that rose up and ever upward. There appeared neither windows nor doors, nor any other form of planning or ornament remotely human.
Streaks of luminous minerals striated the rock from which the city was carved, casting an eerie greenish glow over the scene. An aura of grim coldness cloaked the alien metropolis, which was ancient when Egypt’s pyramids were young. Menace, too, was here - forbidding beings whose chill, inhuman intelligence was reflected in their intimidating, sky climbing abode that had no kinship with the works of Man.
The weight of the mountain-city seemed to fall upon Carlyle with hope crushing force. What could one man accomplish against the might of chill beings whose age old science seemed beyond the comprehension of mere mortals? The grim scene of the Queen of the Void’s destruction replayed itself in his mind. Anger flared, fuelled his resolve. Again, he flung off the black cloud of despair and rose in silent challenge to the power of the unknown foe.
An alarm sounded – his space-armour’s sensors had detected sudden movement behind him. The lieutenant turned, gasped. A hoard of creatures was boiling out of the chasm he had quitted five minutes ago. Each snake-like being was five metres in length. Their sinuous bodies were sheathed in black, glassy scales. Their heads resembled those of ants, but with three eyes that blazed with a malignant, yellow radiance. Two long and powerful tentacle-like limbs projected from behind the head. These branched into finger-like digits that grasped unfathomable weapons of jutting cones and rods.
Carlyle leapt. A beam of actinic fire burst from the foremost creature’s armament and blasted the boulder where he had stood. The stone melted, bubbled like butter under a blowtorch. The Earthman unclipped his Barrett M1-11 shoulder-fired rocket-rifle and sent a flaring missile into the midst of his attackers.
A silent explosion ripped apart the squirming hoard, flinging dismembered monsters left and right in a gory cloud of spinning body parts. The Earthman, using his space-armour’s jetpack, dodged frantically. Deadly rays flashed on all sides in narrow misses. Again, he fired into the rushing foe. It was as if the Pit had vomited forth all its demons.
Explosions burst like hellish fireworks, illuminating the bleak landscape with harsh eruptions of blinding light. Carlyle sweated. The creatures came on in an unstoppable rush, uncaring, oblivious to the slaughter of their fellow beings. He glimpsed a dozen spheres rushing towards him from the alien city. He was surrounded, outnumbered dozens to one. He fought on, grimly aware of the inevitable outcome as he weaved and dodged his foe’s web of sizzling rays.
The end came with sudden violence: An enemy ray struck his rocket-rifle, detonated the missile in the breech. The explosion flung Carlyle backward. He spun through the void – limp, inanimate as a rag doll hurled aside by a tempestuous child. An ebon sphere broke formation and swept swiftly upon the drifting body. It spat out a magnetic ray. The greenish beam clung to the dented, scorched armour of the drifting man, pulled him within the craft. For a moment the strange ship hung in space, then arrowed towards the alien city.
A section of wall in the towering sinister metropolis wavered, vanished. The black craft slipped within, bearing its captive to an unknown fate. Matter resolidified, sealing the entrance with a finality that was like the last spadeful of earth upon a grave.
**********
Carlyle awoke with a muttered curse. He opened his eyes and dazedly looked about. He was in an irregular room of dark rock whose luminous, greenish striations provided a dim, sickly light that was barely strong enough to break the hold of absolute blackness. Memory came flooding back – his mission, the attack of the creatures. He had obviously been captured.
His space-armour had been removed. That he still lived indicated a breathable atmosphere. His captors must have constructed a pressurized cell with an environment capable of sustaining humans. No doubt they wished to study him, and he shuddered at the thought of what that might entail.
A voice cut through his whirling thoughts – soft, feminine, and tinged with vast relief: “You’re conscious at last, thank God!”
The lieutenant turned. A young woman sat next to him – one of the survivors of the captured lifepod. Her stylish clothes, once beautiful, were torn and soiled rags that barely concealed her shapely figure. Her hair, as dark and glossy as a raven’s wing, spilled across one naked shoulder and fell in a velvet cascade to her lissom waist. Gentile almond eyes, set in a face of oriental beauty, regarded him with womanly appeal that fired his sense of protective manliness.
For a moment he stared, his tongue stopped by the sight of such unexpected beauty upon this forbidding world of bleak horror. He thought of Senneth’s orders – could he abandon her to the alien horrors that were her captors?
The girl blushed under his intense scrutiny, dropped her eyes. Her actions made Carlyle intensely aware of her vulnerability. To hell with cold blooded Martian logic! He’d save the girl if he could. Indeed, he couldn’t have lived with himself otherwise. Quickly the lieutenant introduced himself.
“I’ll get you out of here,” he concluded with more confidence than he felt, “and any other survivors as well, especially Professor Ian Chan. Have you seen him?”
The girl forced herself to smile. He could see she was putting on a brave front, one that couldn’t hide obvious signs she had been weeping almost constantly – an understandable reaction to the nightmare ordeals she had undergone.
“I’m Catherine Chan, Professor Chan’s daughter.” The girl’s full lips quivered. “It’s... It’s too late for my father and the others.” Her facade of valour broke under the weight of nightmare memories. Tears flooded from her haunted eyes. She buried her face in her hands, and wept with unrestrained, heartfelt sorrow.
Carlyle held the crying girl in his arms. The professor, the Inner World’s only hope or so Senneth intimated, was dead. With an effort he fought off the rising tide of depression. It wouldn’t do for him to go to pieces. There was the girl to think about. Slowly she settled, and the lieutenant carefully drew the tragic tale from her with his gentle questioning: The swift and terrible attack on the spaceliner – screams of the stricken, the wild panic of the passengers and the mad stampede for the lifepods as the ship broke up all around them. Only four survivors had managed to escape the murderous destruction of the vessel – Professor Chan, his daughter and two other men.
The disaster, though, was a mere prelude to the true terror of their nightmare ordeal: The trip to Pluto, bleak, inhospitable – a world of darkness and unearthly monsters. Carlyle blanched as Catherine described the cold, merciless intelligences, their inhuman and ruthless vivisection experiments on the captives. Her words conjured up sickening sights: The screams of the victims, the blood, and the unimaginable horror of their death agonies. His brain reeled at the sickening thought.
“They’re completely alien,” concluded the girl, timorously. “Dad tried to communicate with them, but it was virtually impossible. They’ve more in common with a colony of termites than they have with us. They know nothing of human emotions – love, compassion, mercy.” Catherine shuddered in his arms as he stroked her hair.
“What do they want?” asked Carlyle. “Why did they attack us? Is there any way we can negotiate with them?”
“From what dad could figure out they need radioactive elements – as sunlight is essential to Life on Earth as a source of energy, so too, are radioactive elements to Pluto’s biosphere. The heat produced from their decay keeps the methane springs from freezing – springs which provide food for chemosynthetic micro-organisms which are the basis of the food chain.
“But over billions of years these elements have been decaying to stable forms. The methane springs are freezing. Pluto is a dying world, and the rocky inner planets have an abundance of radioactive elements that they need. But as for reasoning with them, trading with them... Well, their minds are just too different from ours. To them we’re just vermin that need exterminating.”
Carlyle passed a hand across his troubled face. It seemed war was inevitable. The civilized worlds faced an implacable, inhuman enemy that had no compunctions about committing global genocide. It was a truly appalling thought that left him shaken to the core – Earth, Venus and Mars being overrun by such nightmare beings. And to make matters worse Chan was dead. Still, his daughter lived and she might have some knowledge of his research.
A slithering sound jerked the Earthman’s head around before he could question her. One wall of their prison was perforated with fist size holes, and it was here from which the noise had come. The girl blanched, tensed in his arms.
“One of them is coming,” she gasped. “Please, don’t... don’t let it take me alive.”
Carlyle stood, stepped protectively in front of the girl, determined to fight until he could fight no more. A circular section of the perforated wall vanished. A Plutonian slithered in. It was cloaked in a silvery aura – some kind of force field to protect it from the hostile human environment. Its three glowing eyes regarded him with cold, inhuman intelligence.
“Kill me,” Catherine begged, desperately.
Carlyle ignored her. He couldn’t do it. To him it was too much like murder. The creature advanced. He faced it alone, unarmed. He sprang at it with a wild yell, his powerful thighs propelling him like a missile in the low gravity. He hurled his body at the monster’s ugly head, fists extended like twin battering rams.
The creature, though, was faster. A ropy limb snapped out like a cracking whip. The scaly tentacle struck Carlyle across the chest, drove the breath from his lungs and hurled him against the wall. Catherine screamed. The Earthman collapsed upon the floor. He heard her cry again as the monster’s other limb snaked about her with swift, steely strength and dragged her struggling form out the door.
Chapter 3: Citadel of Terror
Carlyle struggled up. Fear for the girl rode him like a demonic horseman. He leapt for the door, but wasn’t fast enough. It resolidified and he crashed painfully against the adamantine barrier. The cursing Earthman looked through an aperture in the partition. The walls of the second chamber were lined with towering mechanisms that looked more like abstract sculptures of rods, cones and spheres than scientific instruments.
But it wasn’t these strange devices that held his horrified gaze: Again the lieutenant swore as he saw Catherine’s captor strap her to a metal table. The girl’s piercing screams struck him with the force of hammering blows. The Plutonian reared up like a striking cobra, selected a thin blade from a rack of wicked instruments. The girl’s screams reached a piercing crescendo as her clothes were cut away to expose her breasts belly and loins to the chill gaze of her inhuman tormentor.
Carlyle was beside himself with sick horror. In but moments Catherine would writhe in unimaginable agony under the slicing blade. There was one chance to save the girl, albeit slim. He pressed his palms to the resolidified door and activated his genetically engineered bio-weapon.
The two hundred thousand electrocytes in his body – specialised living cells capable of storing electricity – sent a pulse of six hundred volts through the barrier. There was a hiss, a flare of leaping sparks as alien circuitry was shorted by the charge. Catherine screamed as the monster, too intent upon its operation to notice the disturbance, pressed its scalpel against her trembling flesh. The barrier held. Blood spurted. The Earthman shouted wildly. Then the door gave way beneath his thrusting palms like shattering glass.
Carlyle stumbled across the threshold. The monster turned at the loudness of the sound. Unperturbed, the thing drew a weapon from the belt about its middle. The lieutenant sprang back. Rock bubbled under the lashing ray, the hurled scalpel bounced off stone. Spurring desperation leant the Earthman almost superhuman speed and strength - he bounced off the wall he had sprung against, launched himself at the beast like a rocket. He struck the creature as it was about to fire again, and sent it crashing back against the further wall. The thing dropped its weapon, which tumbled out of reach. But it wasn’t defenceless - one ropy limb lashed out, seized him in a crushing grip; the other struck him with whipping blows.
The Earthman grunted, ignored the searing pain inflicted by the wildly flailing limb. He grabbed the tentacle about his waist and thrust his fingers through the silvery force field. The monster jerked wildly as Carlyle sent burning current pouring through its body*. The lieutenant was thrown clear by the creature’s convulsing tentacle. He hit the high ceiling painfully, bounced off and fell in slow motion to the floor.
Carlyle gritted his teeth against the pain and strove to shake off the dazing effects of the blow. He was falling towards the monster’s weapon. But the creature was also stirring. It began to crawl weakly towards the death dealing implement. The Earthman sweated, cursed. It seemed a nightmare race where one runs and runs, but gains no ground.
The Plutonian drew closer, nearer. The lieutenant desperately stretched his bruised and battered body to the utmost. The monster made a frantic lunge. Its tentacle coiled about the weapon at the same time Carlyle’s fingers fell upon it. Its other limb struck at the man. More by luck than skill the Earthman was the first to find the firing button. A stabbing ray flashed out, sliced the creature’s ugly head in twain like a sword of blazing fire. The thing collapsed, writhed madly for a moment then lay deathly still.
Carlyle lay upon the floor, breathing hard and trembling from his near escape from death. But Catherine’s moans soon stirred him to action. He rose and quickly moved to her side. Relief washed over him – the incision on the stomach of the semiconscious girl was only a superficial wound. He swiftly severed her restraints with the alien’s scalpel, and gently patted her face.
“Come on Catherine, wake up,” he urged. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
The girl’s eyes snapped open. She screamed, thrashed wildly about. Carlyle caught her arms as they tumbled off the table.
“It’s all right,” he soothed. “I killed the thing. You’re safe now.”
Safe for the moment, true, but it might be a very short respite. For all he knew the alarm may have been given, and hoards of the monsters might be mere seconds away from bursting within the room. Carlyle looked quickly about as the sobbing girl clung to him. His eyes fell upon his battered space-armour. The suit was on a bench against the wall with other items of his equipment.
He picked up Catherine, the dead monster’s weapon, and swiftly moved to the bench. A quick examination revealed the armour was still operative thanks to the triple redundancy built into its systems. By now the girl had settled somewhat and he stood her on her feet.
She struck an unconscious but enticing pose reminiscent of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus – one hand across her breasts, the other upon her loins. Carlyle ran his eyes over her alluring figure, which was too generous for her dainty hands to conceal. The girl blushed at his appreciative gaze and demurely turned away.
Carlyle silently upbraided himself. Here he was, trapped in an alien citadel with innumerable monstrous foes on every side, and ogling an attractive woman – the delightful curve of fulsome breasts, belly and hips crowned by the jewel of her exquisite countenance - instead of thinking of escape. Shaking his head at his own folly, he focused his thoughts upon their desperate and immediate plight.
“I’m going to get you out of here,” he said as he removed an Emergency Pressure Suit from its canister. “Quickly, put this on. We have to hurry.”
The girl took the EPS and unrolled it. It looked like a white wetsuit. Carlyle helped her into it and sealed the flexible visor to its hood. Though he conducted himself in a professional manner, the nearness of the girl and her beauty inevitably moved him. Their eyes touched for a moment and she read desire in his glance.
It was mere seconds, yet that fleeting look was a catalyst to that strange chemistry of the soul wherein his passion stirred within her emotions to match his own. He read it clearly in the widening of her limpid eyes, the fluttering of her dark lashes and the mantling flush upon her cheeks. Then Eros’ interlude was broken as he hurriedly struggled into his bulky armour and connected the EPS to it by an umbilical cord, which would provide power and oxygen to her from his own systems.
“There’s only one chance we have,” he explained after he completed the connection and established communication. “The lifepod you came in - if we can get to it we can escape. Do you know where it is?”
Catherine nodded as the lieutenant rapidly clipped on the rest of his gear. She realized that he needed her help if they were to survive, if the Inner Worlds were to survive the Plutonian menace. The thought of him dying, of billions dying because of some weakness on her part was intolerable. The girl, inspired by his example of unyielding heroism in the face of extreme danger, hardened her resolve and dug deep into her inner strength. Gone was the timorous woman of a few moments ago.
“They cut us out of it,” she replied. “But I think the drive systems are undamaged.”
“Then lead the way,” replied Carlyle, determined to save the girl no matter if all the devils of Pluto’s deepest hell stood between them and freedom.
Catherine hesitated; then snatched up an item from the bench. It was a triangular device of black metal with silver cones studding both sides.
“It’s one of their translators,” she explained. “It seems to work by some principle akin to telepathy. It might be useful.”
Carlyle nodded. They both moved to the laboratory’s further end, the girl in the lead. A blank wall stood before them - solid, impenetrable with ponderous immovability.
“We entered here,” she said. “I’m sure of it.”
The Earthman fired the alien weapon, swept it round in a blazing circle. Stone smoked, bubbled. A disc of rock crashed to the floor revealing the interior of an airlock chamber. They stepped within and Carlyle cut through the second wall. The room’s air rushed out into the near vacuum of the passage beyond.
Catherine gasped, pointed as both stepped cautiously out upon the way. Carlyle stifled an oath. Two Plutonians were wriggling along the passage towards them. The Earthman fired. One creature went down, but the other darted swiftly into an adjoining corridor before he could bring his ray to bear upon it.
“Quick,” ordered Carlyle, “cling to my back.”
Catherine wrapped her arms about his neck, her legs about his torso. The armour’s jetpack burst to life as a hoard of monsters boiled out another tunnel. Carlyle, the girl clinging to him and giving directions, hurtled down the passageway as rays flared. The lieutenant zigzagged with wild evasiveness, barely avoiding the slashing beams. He spun about and hurled a percussion grenade amongst the wriggling foe. The explosion ripped the slithering monsters to gory ruin, but the blast’s expanding cloud of superheated gas struck the fleeing pair, spun them like a leaf in a millrace.
A wall leapt at them. Catherine clung in terror. Carlyle sweated, fought to stop their mad tumble. The armour’s jets flared. They leapt away from death, fled down the tunnel-like way and plunged into an expansive clover-shaped launch bay at the girl’s direction.
The Earthman’s eyes darted about the chamber and locked upon the lifepod, which was grounded in a segment of the room. In an instant flaring hope was crushed by black despair that wrung a bitter imprecation from the man. The ship had been disassembled for analysis and now lay in parts too numerous for any hope of rapid repair. His eyes flicked to the entrance. Any moment now the remaining foe would burst within the bay.
“Let’s take one of their own ships,” urged the girl. “It’s our only chance.”
Carlyle rocketed towards five nearby spheres in another lobe-shaped section of the chamber, full of admiration for the girl’s quick thinking under pressure. The globes swelled, towered over him as he approached and landed by the closest one. Forty metres of featureless ebon metal confronted him with stark blankness. There wasn’t the slightest hint of any access port.
The Earthman swore as a sensor alarm in his armour shrilled its dire warning. He turned. The enemy was upon them – a swarm of creatures slithered through the launch bay’s door. Carlyle dropped to a knee, bravely shielding Catherine with his armour. Cruel fate was bringing all its dire artillery to bear upon them. A stabbing ray flamed above his head as he fired his weapon, hurled his last grenade and pulled the girl to the floor.
Crimson fire burst within the bay – a torrent of burning light that swept away the foe in roiling flames of blazing energy. The charred remains of monsters were flung in all directions as if by a madman in a charnel house. Carlyle and the girl were hurled against the sphere by the backwash of the deadly blast. The lieutenant held Catharine protectively with one arm. Heroically, he lurched erect and saw more nightmare creatures rushing through another entrance. His heart sank – the things were implacable, unstoppable.
The creatures hurled themselves in a slithering rush at Carlyle and the girl. The Earthman jumped aside, carrying the frightened woman with him. A ray flared against the sphere’s black hull in a narrow miss. Grim faced, the lieutenant fired, but the alien weapon was dead, inert – its charge depleted. He cursed, threw the useless armament at the foe – a final act of futile but brave defiance.
“Look,” cried Catherine, pointing. “The ship’s port – it’s open!”
Carlyle threw a glance behind him as a searing beam exploded at his feet. A dark portal had miraculously opened in the hull. Wild hope soared. Another burning ray stabbed out. It struck his armour. Metal was blasted to ruin. Catherine screamed in horror. Carlyle staggered; alarms were going off in his helmet like the unholy bells of a satanic church. A second beam struck him, flared in a coruscation of prismatic light. Reflected energy struck the girl, slashed her suit with stabbing fire-needles. She cried in pain, sagged to the floor.
The lieutenant’s body was on fire with sickening agony from the ray and his suit was quickly losing oxygen. He fought desperately through the sea of pain. Gasping for breath he caught the moaning girl up in both arms. A quick look showed him the EPS’ autoseal function was closing the holes in her suit, but how badly injured was she? He didn’t know and there wasn’t time to find out – his armour, already damaged, had taken two direct hits and was failing fast. Vision dimming, he leapt with the dregs of his strength for the aperture, diverting his life support to Catherine. The monsters closed for the kill. A dozen deadly rays darted at his back, and then he knew no more.
* Endnote: Carlyle isn’t electrocuted for the same reason electric eels aren’t electrocuted when they discharge their electrocytes – namely, a combination of resistance to pain and insulation of vital organs.
Chapter 4: Battle in the Void
Carlyle regained consciousness. His armour had been removed and Catherine was bending worriedly over him, tending his wounds. The girl had unfastened her EPS and pushed it down about her waist to apply a spray on dressing to the burn upon her torso. Catherine’s breasts hung like ripe fruit, temptingly within reach. But the lieutenant was in no condition to appreciate the fact. His dazed mind struggled through the pain of his injuries in an effort to comprehend what had happened. The last thing he remembered was leaping for the black portal of the alien ship.
“What,” he groaned ... “where?”
“Relax,” replied Catherine as she gently pushed him back upon the crystal floor and applied more spray on dressing to the livid burn upon his chest. “We’re in the sphere. While you were fighting those monsters I was wishing desperately that a door would open, and it did. The translator must have converted my thoughts into the Plutonian language. Dad speculated that many of their devices were controlled by telepathy, or something very much like it, and he was right. The air we’re breathing was manufactured by the ship at my command. It was all a very near thing, though.”
Carlyle’s thoughts became more coherent as Catherine completed her ministrations, and the local anaesthetic in the dressing began to take effect. He rose to an elbow and looked about as the girl resealed her suit for the sake of modesty. The lieutenant’s breath caught in his throat and his eyes widened in sheer amazement. All about him was the star spangled blackness of space – it was if he was floating in the void.
He looked down through the crystal floor and was struck by vertigo. He hung above an abyss of space dusted with stars. An instant of unreasoning panic seized him – where was the ship? His hands spasmodically clutched at the transparent substance he lay upon, then reason came to the fore and he realized the scene must be a projection like that of a planetarium.
Carlyle turned and saw Pluto rapidly receding into the distance. The ship was under way in response the mental commands of the girl transmitted to its computer through the translation device. Relief flooded him at that realization; then he sobered as a swarm of pulsing crimson specks appeared in the foreground of the scene. He drew Catherine’s attention to the display.
The girl’s brow creased in puzzlement. “I’ll see if I can magnify the image,” she replied.
The view before them wavered; then resolved into clarity that made Carlyle clench his jaw and the girl blanch. A fleet of alien spheres was hurtling towards them, erupting from the planet like a swarm of enraged wasps from a shaken nest. The lieutenant experienced a sickening sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, and his heart was clutched by dread. The enemy’s ships must number at least a thousand strong – the Solar Navy was outgunned ten to one.
Almost instantly Carlyle realized what had happened: They had captured a Plutonian ship – a gold mine of sophisticated alien technology, and the enemy had launched their invasion before the inner worlds could benefit from analysis of the prize. It seemed to the shocked lieutenant that his actions had precipitated the very thing he most feared. It was dark irony indeed.
“Here,” said Catherine, her voice breaking through his racing thoughts. “Take the translator and guide the ship.”
Carlyle gave her a puzzled look as she thrust the device into his hands.
“No time to explain,” continued the girl as she bent over his armour and removed its miniature toolkit. “Look,” she warned, sharply. “The enemy is almost upon us.”
The lieutenant turned, swore. The Plutonian fleet had assumed a vast crescent shaped formation. The armada was closing fast. Alien hieroglyphs scrolled across the scene. Carlyle’s palms were sweating as the translator thrust into his mind the Terrain equivalents of speed and distance. The pursuing ships were newer, fleeter craft.
He dropped their sphere into a reckless dive that would take them beneath the enemy. Six attackers peeled off from the horns of the formation and dove upon him like plummeting hawks. The pursuing craft flared with auras of crimson fire. Enormous prominences of light struck out like the arching claws of a titanic fire-monster. Carlyle sweated, whirled his ship away from the blazing streamers of actinic radiance.
His own ship spat a flashing bolt of pure destruction. One pursuing craft exploded in a pyrotechnic flare that hurled white hot fragments across the inky void. Carlyle dodged another burst of fire, soared. He felt no motion. It was as if some strange force held him to the disc-shaped floor, and that the very heavens whirled about him in a mad dance as he swiftly hurled his ship through a giddy maze of evasive evolutions.
From the corner of his eye he glimpsed Catherine working feverishly with a miscellany of circuitry she had cannibalised from his armour. But there wasn’t time to wonder at what the girl was doing – the surviving enemy craft had formed a pentagonal formation and were hurtling at him like blazing comets.
Rays of purple light lanced from the pursuing ships to a focal point in the centre of the squadron, and a flaming sphere of hellish radiance began to swell where these blazing beams converged. Carlyle watched the growing globe in fascinated terror as it became a ball of concentrated seething energy that flamed and pulsed like an evil, malignant sun.
The beams that fed the deadly micro-star snapped forward like a slingshot’s band and hurled the lethal sphere at Carlyle’s craft with terrific velocity. The Earthman’s ship darted clear of the rushing orb of seething radiation. It missed him by a heart stopping margin and he released the breath he’d tensely held.
But then chill fear raked the man – the streaking globe of leaping fire whirled about and once more hurtled at him in a flash of speed. Carlyle threw his ship into a series of mad manoeuvres in a desperate bid to evade the blazing death that clung to every sweeping turn he made, and matched his wild plunges in perfect imitation like a sentient thing of preternatural menace.
The flaming sphere drew nearer, swelled until the frightened, grim faced man could see its blades of spinning light that drove it through the void. Again, Carlyle desperately tried to dodge his rushing nemeses. But the weird missile caught him by surprise – it flung out incandescent tendrils that snared his fleeing ship in coils of raging force.
Carlyle fought desperately to free his straining craft from the tenacious grip of the fiery tentacles. Sweat drenched him as alarm glyphs flashed across his visual field in a string of dire warnings. A gaping maw opened in the blazing orb, its rim edged with fang-like flames of leaping fire that spun about in a blur if fearful incandescence.
Into that blazing maw he frantically fired bolt after bolt of blistering radiation, but his frenzied gunnery only fed the seething, swelling orb. The fiery tendrils contracted with augmented strength, drew the Earthman’s helpless ship towards the seething throat of the energy-mechanism conjured by Plutonian super-science.
The weapon’s inferno of an orifice, like the very jaws of Hell gaped wide, drew nearer until it became an incandescent vortex of leaping energy that filled Carlyle’s vision with its drenching, soul destroying light and pierced his heart with the black dismay of death’s finality.
Thoughts streamed through his mind – of Catherine, the death of Earth; the end of all he now realized he held most dear. Then, when all seemed lost, a vast and silent explosion of silvery light erupted in an all encompassing flare of coruscating radiance. The Earthman sensed more than saw needles of leaping, swirling luminescence spread outwards like ripples in a pond. It seemed he was the centre of a vast cyclone of spinning argent fire that swept all before it in a wild blaze of unstoppable destruction.
The energy-mechanism was caught in the flood of seething light that pierced its fiery structure with lancing rays of silver force whose fierceness hurled it well across the void. The thing exploded in the distance with astounding violence that buffeted the ship with intense radiation pressure that sent it spinning crazily.
Carlyle fought desperately to right his tumbling ship. The heavens spun in an insane whirl. Pluto loomed as the craft hurtled towards it, for his evasive manoeuvres had brought him close to the icy globe. The craft plunged out of control towards its rugged surface. Bleak mountains loomed like thrusting spears against which in but moments the hapless vessel would smash to fatal ruin.
At the last possible moment Carlyle regained control of his tumbling ship and veered away from the jagged peaks. The craft shot skyward towards the star flecked heavens, and once again Pluto’s frozen orb receded into the darkness of the void.
The lieutenant wiped the sweat from his brow with a trembling hand, and calmed his racing heart with steady breath. The ordeal had been absolutely terrifying. After a moment he’d pulled himself together thanks to mental discipline and began to quickly look about. Space was clear of attacking ships – they’d no doubt been blasted to utter ruin by the fearsome burst of silvery radiance.
But what had caused that awesome flare of outlandish radiation? His eyes fell upon the girl and the strange device her deft hands had swiftly wrought. It was a mechanism of three crystal cones that had been part of his armour’s Dynamax generator, but were now linked together in an unusual configuration, and connected to a large gold ring the girl had worn – a ring he’d previously taken little notice of. Here, he was sure, was the cause of the mysterious energy burst that had destroyed their inhuman enemies.
“Yes,” said Catherine who had guessed the direction of his thoughts. “The ring contains the core circuitry to my father’s invention – a device capable of harnessing a limitless source of extra-dimensional energy that makes atomic weapons look like firecrackers. I assume it was for this knowledge that you were sent to rescue him. Luckily I was his chief assistant, so the knowledge isn’t lost.”
Carlyle nodded, amazed. He wondered how this simple looking device could master such awesome power, and by his inquisitive stare the girl again divined the course his mind was set upon.
Catherine smiled impishly. “If I told you that,” she quipped mischievously, “I’d have to kill you.” But then she quickly sobered as a sombre thought struck its unnerving blow. “The alien fleet,” she gasped. “It’s still heading for the inner worlds and has a head start on us.”
No more was needed to be said. Carlyle hurled their craft in pursuit at maximum velocity. Shortly, an indistinct image appeared in the lieutenant’s visual field. His face hardened into angry lines when he magnified the scene – it was the tumbling wreckage of the interplanetary dreadnaught Sabre. They hadn’t stood a chance against the overwhelming might of the Plutonian armada. He thought of the men aboard, some of whom he’d known. Sorrow was a tight, painful band about his throat.
Their vessel flashed by the shattered remnants of the warship. Carlyle increased the magnification of his visual field to maximum, and saw the enemy fleet about ten million kilometres ahead of him. The spheres were heading for the inner worlds, the cold inhuman intelligences guiding them bent on merciless destruction. Fear gripped the lieutenant with talons of icy dread. His ship was at maximum velocity, yet the enemy’s superior speed meant he’d never catch up to them, and when the armada divided its forces to attack Mars, Earth and Venus simultaneously, as he was sure it would, he knew he couldn’t be in three places at once.
Despite their terrific speed the hours dragged by with leaden steps. Catherine tinkered with her device, modifying the instrument so it could refract all electromagnetic radiation about their craft, thus rendering them invisible. Carlyle watched the girl as she worked. His gaze traced the lines of her face and figure. She caught his intent longing stare, and smiled to herself in the way women do when they know they are being admired by a desirable man.
Carlyle, although wanting to, didn’t press his advantage – with the fate of three worlds hanging in the balance the gravity of their plight made seduction seem rather inappropriate under such pressing circumstances. They ate of his rations and then slept. The man’s slumber was disturbed by nightmares of Earth’s destruction – burning cities, the dead and dying littering the rubble choked streets like autumn leaves.
He quickly woke when Catherine shook him, only to have nightmare replaced by worse reality.
“We’re nearing Mars,” gasped the girl. “The armada - -it’s breaking into separate formations to attack the inner worlds.”
Dread struck Carlyle like a blow. The moment he most feared had arrived, and despite many hours of thought he was bereft of an effective stratagem to save the day.
Chapter 5: Horror from Beyond
Catherine noted the stricken look on Carlyle’s face as he gazed through the aperture in their screen of invisibility, and looked upon the armada as it began the process of division into three independent fleets.
“It’s not too late. I’ve further modified the device,” she hastily explained, pointing at the instrument which had grown to intricate complexity. “I can now project a field of energy that will significantly accelerate our craft.” The girl threw a worried glance at the ramifying armada. “But I fear there is no time for detailed explanations. Pilot our ship and leave the rest to me.”
Their vessel leapt forward at Carlyle’s command and the alien fleet swelled in his field of vision with astounding rapidity. He looked at Catherine hunched over the strange device, which was now enveloped in a halo of glowing amber motes. He realised she must have been labouring feverishly on the mechanism whilst he slept, and felt rather guilty at not helping even though he knew the forces that she dealt with were well outside his field of expertise.
An explosion of alarm glyphs cut off his thoughts with frightening suddenness. Despite their invisibility the enemy had detected their presence, perhaps sensing the subtle distortion of space about the ship. In an instant Carlyle’s vessel became the focus of hundreds of stabbing rays. Their shield refracted the deadly inferno, but nonetheless the ship was buffeted by the impact of the furious assault.
Carlyle hurled his craft clear, zigzagging evasively as the enemy swept into strange formations of icosahedrons, dodecahedrons and octahedrons, each ship linked to the other by purple rays of force. In an instant the Earthman was surrounded by these swirling forms – giant generators of weird destruction. Rays erupted from them, wove together into immense serpentine mechanisms of energy that shimmered like sinister auroras of greenish flame.
A dozen machines of crystallized force rushed at him, their blazing apertures vomiting forth burning orbs of kaleidoscopic fire. Catherine acted. An immense spinning, pulsing ring of silver light edged with teeth of crimson fire swept about their ship. Carlyle dodged the flaming spheres and at the girl’s command hurled their craft among the leaping foe.
The rushing fire-mechanisms were slashed by spinning teeth of crimson radiance. Streamers of emerald light spurted from their sundered forms, which vanished in glittering explosions of chromatic flame that drenched space with dazzling prismatic bursts as the alien fleet swarmed about in constantly morphing forms of geometric solids.
Carlyle’s craft rushed among the Plutonians, its spinning ring of slashing energy wrecking havoc among the whirling foe. Spheres by the hundreds exploded, formations were broken. The enemy reformed. Lancing rays spun more monstrous devices upon lathes of blazing light. Three grotesque constructs swept down upon the Earthman’s ship – segmented corkscrews of opal flame whose multitudinous blazing vanes beat upon space-time’s fabric to swiftly hurl their fiery spinning forms at the loan attacker.
Carlyle threw his craft aside, but too late: Portals in the mechanisms gaped wide like the blazing pit of grim Abaddon. Whips of incandescent light snapped out from the horrid orifices and smashed through the sphere’s spinning ring of fire. The girdling blades of light flickered, vanished like a storm tossed candle flame. The ship was struck. It spun away like a battered top.
The Earthman fought to regain control as the machines of strange atomic fire swept in for the coup de grace. He saw his ship’s defensive screen was down and knew that when those lashes of burning flame struck their unprotected craft a second time the bitter end would come.
Sparks hissed and snapped about the ship’s interior as Catherine worked furiously on her instrument, which had been damaged by a flaring discharge of alien circuitry. From the corner of her eye she glimpsed Carlyle struggling to control the craft. His brow was beaded with sweat, his face set in grim and determined concentration as he wrestled mentally with their stricken vessel. The deadly mechanisms drew near, closer still until they loomed above the plummeting craft like fiery Titans.
This is it, thought Carlyle bitterly as the weapons’ ports gaped wide and tongues of blazing fire struck with all the sizzling fury of a demon’s lash. But then a spinning spider web of light sprang up between the darting tongues and their intended target. Catherine flung the whirling net of force. It rushed towards the mechanisms, snared the weapons before their whipping tongues of incandescence could strike the tumbling craft.
The net curved in upon itself, became a sphere. The trapped creations struggled wildly to free themselves from the blazing mesh of force. Flares of actinic light erupted from the mechanisms’ madly writhing forms as the flaming globe contracted with all the crushing might of a collapsing star. The things disintegrated in a burst of blinding radiance that lanced through the webbed sphere’s apertures like spears of nuclear incandescence.
Hundreds of enemy craft were struck by these raving beams of force, their shattered forms sent spinning across the void like deranged pinwheels. Carlyle’s ship survived by the narrowest of margins as deadly flares flashed all about. He regained control of the reeling vessel, but his relief was short lived – he saw their swirling dogfight had carried them beyond Mars and close to Earth.
Space was littered with the glowing wreckage of alien vessels, but even so at least half the armada was still intact. Squadrons were peeling off and flashing towards the world while the bulk of the fleet flung a multitude of blazing rays at the Earthman’s dancing ship. By a miracle Carlyle dodged the stabbing beams of hellish incandescence, but he knew his luck would soon run out.
“Catherine,” he cried. “We’ve got to finish this now. Those ships will reach Earth in mere seconds!”
“I’m working on it,” replied the harried girl as she wiped sweat from her brow and adjusted the device.
Hundreds of spiked spheres of golden force shot through with crimson fire materialized about the Earthman’s ship. The whirling energy missiles shot outwards in a stupendous rush. They crashed against the enemy ships. Space exploded in seething fireballs. In an instant the Plutonian armada had been reduced to a turgid cloud of incandescent gas.
But the threat wasn’t over – at least a hundred ships were still hurtling towards Earth. Carlyle saw them, saw also the full might of the Solar Navy rushing at them in readiness to give desperate battle. The enemy ships had formed up into a spinning star tetrahedron formation that charged towards the defenders with contemptuous might. Space was starred with nuclear explosions as the interplanetary dreadnaughts fired salvo after salvo of atomic missiles at the winging foe.
But the crimson auras of the hurtling spheres were an impervious shield that turned aside the frightful devastation with scornful ease. Claws of shimmering force sprang out from the star tetrahedron as it whirled towards the Solar Navy and before their ships could take evasive action the mighty engine of destruction was upon them in a lightening whirlwind of unbridled annihilation.
Carlyle watched in horror as talons of slashing force tore apart his comrade’s vessels like rats being battered by a satanic tiger. In but moments the pride of the Solar Navy had been reduced to a spinning cloud of wreckage. The star tetrahedron rolled on towards the undefended Earth – a dark nemesis of unstoppable malignant might, and only he and Catherine stood between it and their fair world’s impending doom.
Wild fear etched bleak lines on Carlyle’s visage. He hurled his craft in mad pursuit. The thought of billions perishing was a burning spur to his determination. He saw the alien fleet undergo a rapid evolution as it progressed beyond the orbit of the Moon. The star tetrahedron broke apart and became a gigantic whirling ring.
Helical rays of violet force sprang from every ship to meet at a focal point in the centre of the spinning spheres’ formation. The lancing beams mounted in intensity. They tore apart the very fabric of space-time, opening a flame edged gateway to an alien universe, and from this weird portal erupted a titanic cloud of glowing purple mist shot through with seething lightening as black as the devil’s heart.
Carlyle watched in speechless horror as the immense roiling cloud put forth masses of glowing streamers that writhed like the mighty arms of a planet size kraken. The thing radiated fell menace that chilled the Earthman to the core. Somehow he knew it was alive – an unspeakable horror from some otherness so strange it would drive one mad to look upon it.
The thing swept towards the Earth, its masses of writhing limbs reaching out, hungering to clutch the world, to wrap about it in a smothering embrace that would consume all life upon the globe. Sweat drenched the man. Fear was in his heart. What could he do; what could anyone do to stop this horror from beyond the universe? Catherine, too, looked upon the writhing thing, her face a mirror to Carlyle’s wild emotions. The girl knew they had one chance – slim and suicidal. Quickly, she explained it to the worried man.
He looked at the girl. She was calm with resolute bravery. Her noble beauty moved him deeply, but there was no time to speak the words that were in his heart.
Carlyle nodded. “We’ll try it,” he simply said, repressing the bleak thought that these words were most likely the last he’d say to her, to anyone.
Their ship shot forward in a blistering rush of speed. In but moments they were upon the ring of enemy spheres, which Catherine shattered with a multitude of blazing rays. Then they were through the whirling, glowing wreckage of the foe and plunging towards the world destroying entity.
Immense blades of raging flame leapt from Carlyle’s ship transforming it to a titan mace – a morning star of whirling, blazing incandescence three thousand kilometres in diameter – the weapon of a god. The planet size monster loomed before them – immense, intimidating, and brimming with alien menace as it closed rapidly upon the helpless Earth.
Carlyle, pale but resolute, threw his spinning craft within the glowing turgid substance of its roiling form. Blades of light slashed the thing to vaporous ribbons as he plunged towards its core. Black lightening thundered about the Earthman’s hurtling craft. Turbulence struck like the hand of a giant, flinging the ship wildly about.
The entity went mad. It spun in deranged agony, careened, sought to escape the unbearable torment in its murky innards. The thing reacted. Streamers of violet radiance coiled about Carlyle’s ship with crushing force. Alarm glyphs flared. The hull cracked wide. The Earthman heard the dreadful hiss of escaping air. It was the end.
He staggered towards Catherine. Sparks from shattered mechanisms singed him. The craft was buffeted so savagely that its inertia dampening mechanisms couldn’t cope. Carlyle was flung to his knees. He slid towards the girl as the ship pitched wildly, caught hold of her. They clung to each other as the vessel broke up all around them – shattering like a cracked eggshell. There was a tremendous flare of light; then oblivion crashed in upon him as he was hurled against the floor.
**********
Carlyle opened his eyes. He was amazed when he saw where he was. He was lying on a sandy beach shaded by swaying palm trees. Above was a cloudless, sun drenched sky whose heat was tempered by the cooling breeze that tousled his hair.
For a moment he thought he was hallucinating – a near death experience, perhaps; for the contrast between the desperate space battle in which the ship had clearly been destroyed and this pleasant scene was so enormous that it made him doubt the reality of what his eyes beheld. The pain of his injuries, however, convinced him this was no illusion.
Muttering a curse and clutching his aching head with one hand, he attempted to rise to search for the girl. A hand firmly stopped him from rising further, this quickly followed by a stern command to rest. He turned his head and saw Catherine kneeling next to him. Relief flooded him and he let her ease him to the sand, weak with blessed joyfulness. But this quickly turned to knifing fear.
““The entity,” he gasped, as his gaze shot skyward.
“Destroyed,” soothed the girl as she stroked his troubled brow. “I managed to enclose us in a bubble of force as the ship broke up. I saw its end as I brought us within Earth’s atmosphere – the whirling blades of force had torn it asunder, and what remained dissipated like windblown mist. The Plutonians won’t be bothering us for quite some time, if at all.”
“Thanks to you,” he said, taking her hand, and gazing at her with more than just admiration.
Catherine blushed. “I can’t take all the credit. We work well together.”
“Yes,” he replied as he traced her beauteous continence with a gentle hand. “And I’d like to get to know you better as I feel we can be more than just a team.”
“The authorities,” protested the girl, a little flustered by his attention and the feelings it engendered in her. “Shouldn’t we...”
“To hell with the officious brass hats,” he grinned. “I can think of better ways to spend this interlude.”
Shortly, she found out just how right he was.
THE END