"(novel) (ebook) - Perry Rhodan 0060 - (52) Fortress Atlantis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Perry Rhodan)

Now my instructions could be heard everywhere in the ship. The communication centre was attuned to hyperradio waves and operated with a scrambler code. All commands were transformed, consolidated and broadcast in a split second. The commanders listened in directly. There was only a slight delay caused by the deciphering but it amounted merely to 1/10th of a second.
I expected to receive the announcement of our success in shooting down our enemy any moment. One of us was bound to score a hit.








7/ ALIEN ATTACK

A terrible growl emanated from the loudspeakers, ear shattering as if the sound were excessively amplified. I nearly jumped out of my seat.
The officers in the Command Centre of the Tosoma-most of them veterans of the defence battles in the nebula sector-craned their necks, staring in disbelief, as if transfixed, at the gallery of panoramic observation screens.
However there was nothing to be seen. Our adversary was too far in the distance and Larsa's sun was too weak to make the dimmest reflex on the armoured hull of the unknown ship.
We continued our bombardment but received no sign of a hit. We only got a message from the heavy cruiser Igita under the prudent command of Capt. Cerbus that the registered object had veered off sharply in order to escape our energy salvos.
At the same moment we heard the eruption of fierce screaming. We didn't know what the cause of it was until we received the evaluation of the robot machine in the communication centre which reported with mechanical indifference: "Entire crew light-cruiser Matato casualty. Radio silent. Ship undamaged and maintaining its course. Fails to respond to interconnection commands."
Reports similar to this had not been unusual during the last 2 years. Yet there was something peculiar about its wording and it startled me. How could the ship be undamaged if its crew had been lost? And its course was still on target at the directed 10°?
While I was racking my brain over these inconsistencies, Capt. Inkar of the battleship Paito informed us that the foreign object had suddenly disappeared and that it had probably retreated by a transition jump. This was contradicted by the fact that the highly reliable structure sensors of my flagship had failed to register a space disturbance. At that short distance of no more than 3 million kilometres it was practically impossible not to notice even the most minor transition. There was no way of eliminating a disturbance of the warped space.
When we lost our target I broke off the one-sided battle and gave directions for salvaging the runaway cruiser Matato with a tractor-beam. The entire squadron performed a complicated 2-hour manoeuvre aimed at correlating with the flight of the Matato. Then we caught the 100-meter sphere in our irresistible tractor-beam and the vessel inched closer to the flagship.
During our weird battle we had swerved from our initial course and the 20 planet was now hardly visible as a pallid little disk between the sparsely distributed stars in this sector of the Milky Way.
After we had finally secured the Matato alongside the flagship, the officer in charge of the rescue team appeared. Lt. Cunor looked in astonishment at my light spacesuit as I flipped the helmet over my head and adjusted the oxygen supply.
"Are you coming with us, Your Highness?" he asked dubiously.
"Certainly," I said gruffly. "Are you ready?"
15 minutes later we opened the lower airlock of the light-cruiser whose crew no longer answered our calls. I climbed inside with 50 men and weapons ready to shoot. Capt. Tarth had joined us against my instructions. I could hear his hard breathing on my helmet-radio. I didn't wish to embarrass him but he understood my disapproving look and he frowned in disgust.
The Matato looked as if it had never had a crew aboard. We went systematically through every room without finding a single soul. When the search groups returned to the Commander Centre of the completely undamaged ship, my convictions were shaken to their foundations. The men spread out their hands in despair. I had never seen a more disconsolate bunch of people. I recalled the ominous warnings of my planning officer Feltif who had spoken of the sudden disappearance of living beings.
As I pondered the eerie mystery I heard someone utter an urgent cry for Lt. Cunor. We ran to the room where it came from and when the men stepped back to let me in, my heart almost stood still.
A member of the Matato's crew lay on the floor. His body was hard and stiff down to his thighs but his legs were threshing around as if he were panic stricken and trying to flee from some tormenting apparition.
It was a sight to make the most hard boiled men pale. I suppressed a groan, pushed Lt. Cunor to the side and kneeled down beside the helpless victim. When I tried to lift him up, I was unable to budge him. Not only was he as solid as rock but he weighed as much as well. The density of his organism must have been increased enormously. Only his legs that kept beating against the floor felt normal to the touch.
I made room for a physician who tried to give an injection to the injured man. He gave up in bafflement.
"What's the matter with him? Speak up!" I yelled at the medical officer. He looked at me, pale and stupefied. He didn't know. I directed him to take the soldier aboard the Tosoma and to try everything to restore him although I was afraid that it would be useless.
After we returned to the flagship, I ordered an emergency crew to take over the ghost ship. The men obeyed my orders with the greatest reluctance. They were stunned by their mates' weird fate that defied explanation.
Then we resumed our course again. Shortly before landing, my chief mathematician Grun asked to see me and soon entered, accompanied by his assistants. He was a fairly small man and quite old but his unusually smooth skin indicated that he had received a biomedical rejuvenation treatment. The Great Council had adopted a policy of prolonging the lives of more and more men if they were considered to be outstanding and irreplaceable. Earlier it had been unthinkable to obtain permission for a reactivation by submitting a request. Now every capable man was badly needed and Grun was one of them.
While Capt. Tarth held a conference with the commanders in an adjacent room, I devoted my attention to the scientist.
"The matter represents more a physical puzzle than a medical problem, Your Highness," he explained. "The patient is still alive. The nerve paths to his legs have been immobilized. We've observed that the rigid-looking hand of the man has moved about 3 millimetres to the left during the last hour and I've ordered a study of the movement. I suspect that the total condensation of the organic fabric is subject to a relativity-time effect. The course of normal events which is valid for us no longer seems to apply to the injured man with the exception of his legs."
"Madness," I exclaimed in exasperation. "How do you explain it?"
"We're still investigating a tentative theory, Your Highness. We're thinking of the possible existence of a new weapon whose effect is restricted exclusively to organic life. It could be a converter-projector which creates a field with a focal point producing a structure transformation. Organic matter becomes dematerialised and enters a different state. In our particular case the soldier seems to have been touched only by the weak fringes of the field and the legs remained entirely beyond its radius. The result was that no dematerialisation took place, only an internal compression of the body. Simultaneously a shift of his relative time occurred. It is possible that the patient is going through the entire experience on a slow-motion scale. We're certain that he moved his hand. The movements of his legs are no longer controlled by his conscious mind."
I could feel the moisture blurring my eyes, a sign of my excitement. Grun had lectured with the detached manner of a scientist.
"Have you drawn any conclusions?" I asked nervously.
"Yes and no, Your Highness. Such a weapon could decide the war with the methane-breathers if we could succeed in capturing one of these mysterious ships."
"How?" I challenged him.
Again Grun had some advice. "We'll have to wait for their next attack and refrain from using our customary tactics. I would recommend the conversion to ray-cannons of some of our more obsolete cruisers' impulse engines which function on super-dimensional principles. Instead of jeopardizing the lives of our men, we ought to rig up a remote-control steering system for the ships. If it should come to the worst, we would lose only a few outdated vessels."
Grun had a good head on his shoulders and the proposition he had outlined seemed logical. However I had one objection: "The technical aspects of the war are only of secondary importance to me. As the Chief of a special squadron I have to know first of all who our enemy is. I'm inclined to rule out that we're dealing with a spaceship of the methane-breathers. If they had such weapons in their possession, we'd have already encountered them in the nebula sector. It's more likely that we're facing here a different type of highly intelligent beings who may not even be aware that we're engaged in a mortal combat with those monsters."
"According to my figures there's a 97% probability of this being true," the physicist acknowledged. "I've already computed it and I believe we're confronted by an entirely new situation."
I was grateful that he didn't insist on sending a report to the Great Council on Arkon. I wouldn't have known what to tell them. Our situation was so perplexing that I preferred to await further developments in the hope of clearing it up a little better.
I chose the 2 oldest cruisers of my squadron for the experiment. Their crews were transferred to the depleted Matato and to the battleship whose commander needed more technicians. I wrote off the 2 remote-controlled warships but I still had more than 40 heavy and light cruisers at my disposal.
After Grun had excused himself I descended with the 3 units of my squadron into the fog-like atmosphere of the 2nd planet. The capital Amonaris on a mountain slope near the equatorial ocean gave the impression of swarming with refugees.
The big robot brain in the mountains, which had been started by the criminal administrator Amonar, was now finished. After landing I immediately gave instructions to send all our available technicians to the robot fortress in order to double the reinforcements of its defences.
3 hours later the 2 old cruisers Titsina and Volop were put into the well-equipped spaceship yard of Larsa. Every effort was made to modify the cross-section of the powerful impulse field jets to adapt them as military weapons and to augment the existing electronic remote control system by a semi-automatic switch arrangement for the armament designed to react to ultra-microwave steering signals. It required a great amount of material, time and experts, the latter fortunately available on Larsa.
Next I inspected the areas that had come under attack and where 150,000 colonists were reported to have vanished without a trace. The chief physicist Grun and his staff joined me and we cautiously set foot on the first of the fully automatic farms.