"Charles L. Harness-Stalemate in Space" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harness Charles L)

Stalemate in Space
by Charles L. Harness
This story copyright 1949 by Charles L. Harness.Reprinted by permission of Linn Prentiss.This copy
was created for Jean Hardy's personal use.All other rights are reserved. Thank you for honoring the
copyright.

Published by Seattle Book Company, www.seattlebook.com.




* * *


One

* * *


At first there was only the voice, a monotonous murmur in her ears.
"Die now-- die now-- die now-- "
Evelyn Kane awoke, breathing slowly and painfully. The top of the cubicle was bulging inward on her
chest, and it seemed likely that a rib or two was broken. How long ago? Years? Minutes? She had no
way of knowing. Her slender right hand found the oxygen valve and turned it. For a long while she lay,
hurting and breathing helplessly.
"Die now-- die now-- die now-- "
The votron had awakened her with its heart-breaking code message, and it was her duty to carry out
its command. Nine years after the great battle globes had crunched together, the mentors had sealed her
in this tiny cell, dormant, unwaking, to be livened only when it was certain her countrymen had either
definitely won-- or lost.
The votron's telepathic dirge chronicled the latter fact. She had expected nothing else.
She had only to find the relay beside her cot, press the key that would set in motion gigantic prime
movers in the heart of the great globe, and the conquerors would join the conquered in the wide and
nameless grave of space.
But life, now doled out by the second, was too delicious to abandon immediately. Her mind, like that
of a drowning person, raced hungrily over the memories of her past.
For twenty years, in company with her great father, she had watched The Defender grow from a vast
metal skeleton into a planet-sized battle globe. But it had not grown fast enough, for when the Scythian
globe, The Invader , sprang out of black space to enslave the budding Terran Confederacy, The
Defender was unfinished, half-equipped, and undermanned.
The Terrans could only fight for time and hope for a miracle.
The Defender, commanded by her father, Gordon, Lord Kane, hurled itself from its orbit around
Procyon and met The Invader with its giant fission torpedoes.
And then, in an intergalactic proton storm beyond the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, the globes lost their
bearings and collided. Hordes of brute-men poured through the crushed outer armor of the stricken
Defender.
The prone woman stirred uneasily. Here the images became unreal and terrible, with the recurrent
vision of death. It had taken the Scythians nine years to conquer The Defender 's outer shell. Then had
come that final interview with her father.
"In half an hour our last space port will be captured," he had telepathed curtly. "Only one more