Triplanetary - E. E. Smith (phonics reader TXT) 📗

he was back, and after Costigan had tested the ether-wall of the “bridal suite” to make sure that no warning signal from his desk or his servants could reach Roger within it, the two officers hurried away toward the room in which their space-armor was.

“Too bad they don’t wear uniforms,” panted Bradley, short of breath from the many flights of stairs. “Might have helped some as disguise.”

“I doubt it⁠—with so many robots around, they’ve probably got signals that we couldn’t understand anyway. If we meet anybody it’ll mean a battle. Hold it!” Peering through walls with his spy-ray, Costigan had seen two men approaching, blocking an intersecting corridor into which they must turn. “Two of ’em, a man and a robot⁠—the robot’s on your side. We’ll wait here, right at the corner⁠—when they round it take ’em!” and Costigan put away his goggles in readiness for strife.

All unsuspecting, the two pirates came into view, and as they appeared the two officers struck. Costigan, on the inside, drove a short, hard right low into the human pirate’s abdomen. The fiercely-driven fist sank to the wrist into the soft tissues and the stricken man collapsed. But even as the blow landed Costigan had seen that there was a third enemy, following close behind the two he had been watching, a pirate who was even then training a ray projector upon him. Reacting automatically, Costigan swung his unconscious opponent around in front of him, so that it was into an enemy’s body that the vicious ray tore, and not into his own. Crouching down into the smallest possible compass, he straightened out with the lashing force of a mighty steel spring, hurling the corpse straight at the flaming mouth of the projector. The weapon crashed to the floor and dead pirate and living went down in a heap. Upon that heap Costigan hurled himself, feeling for the pirate’s throat. But the fellow had wriggled clear, and countered with a gouging thrust that would have torn out the eyes of a slower man, following it up instantly with a savage kick for the groin. No automaton this, geared and set to perform certain fixed duties with mechanical precision, but a lithe, strong man in hard training, fighting with every foul trick known to his murderous ilk.

But Costigan was no tyro in the art of dirty fighting. Few indeed were the maiming tricks of foul combat unknown to even the rank and file of the highly efficient undercover branch of the Triplanetary Service; and Costigan, a Sector Chief, knew them all. Not for pleasure, sportsmanship, nor million-dollar purses did those secret agents use Nature’s weapons. They came to grips only when it could not possibly be avoided, but when they were forced to fight in that fashion they went in with but one grim purpose⁠—to kill, and to kill in the shortest possible space of time. Thus it was that Costigan’s opening soon came. The pirate launched a vicious coup de sabot, which Costigan avoided by a lightning shift. It was a slight shift, barely enough to make the kicker miss, and two powerful hands closed upon that flying foot in midair like the sprung jaws of a bear-trap. Closed and twisted viciously, in the same fleeting instant. There was a shriek, smothered as a heavy boot crashed to its carefully predetermined mark⁠—the pirate was out, definitely and permanently.

The struggle had lasted scarcely ten seconds, coming to its close just as Bradley finished blinding and deafening the robot. Costigan picked up the projector, again donned his spy-ray goggles, and the two hurried on.

“Nice work, Chief⁠—it must be a gift to roughhouse the way you do,” Bradley exclaimed. “That’s why you took the live one?”

“Practice helps some, too⁠—I’ve been in brawls before, and I’m a lot younger and maybe a bit faster than you are,” Costigan explained briefly, penetrant gaze rigidly to the fore as they ran along one corridor after another.

Several more guards, both living and mechanical, were encountered on the way, but they were not permitted to offer any opposition. Costigan saw them first. In the furious beam of the projector of the dead pirate they were riven into nothingness, and the two officers sped on to the room which Costigan had located from afar. The three suits of Triplanetary space armor had been locked up in a cabinet; a cabinet whose doors Costigan literally blew off with a blast of force rather than consume time in tracing the power leads.

“I feel like something now!” Costigan, once more encased in his own armor, heaved a great sigh of relief. “Rough-and-tumble’s all right with one or two, but that generator room is full of grief, and we won’t have any too much stuff as it is. We’ve got to take Clio’s suit along⁠—we’ll carry it down to the door of the power room, drop it there, and pick it up on the way back.”

Contemptuous now of possible guards, the armored pair strode toward the power plant⁠—the very heart of the immense fortress of space. Guards were encountered, and captains⁠—officers who signaled frantically to their chief, since he alone could unleash the frightful forces at his command, and who profanely wondered at his unwonted silence⁠—but the enemy beams were impotent against the ether walls of that armor; and the pirates, without armor in the security of their own planetoid as they were, vanished utterly in the ravening beams of the twin Lewistons. As they paused before the door of the power room, both men felt Clio’s voice raised in her first and last appeal, an appeal wrung from her against her will by the extremity of her position.

“Conway! Hurry! His eyes⁠—they’re tearing me apart! Hurry, dear!” In the horror-filled tones both men read clearly⁠—however inaccurately⁠—the girl’s dire extremity. Each saw plainly a happy, carefree young Earth-girl, upon her first trip into space, locked inside an ether-wall with an over-brained, under-conscienced human machine⁠—a super-intelligent, but lecherous and unmoral mechanism of flesh and blood, acknowledging no