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"You seem to forget that little matter of proof, Major. When your Patrol ships find a gutted ship and five corpses, they may suspect that something more than an accident was involved, but what can they prove? Nothing more than they could prove in the case of Roger Hunter's accident. Scout-ships have been known to explode before." He ran his hand over the metal cylinder.
Miran scout-ships had been sent out before this and severely handled by the concentrated fleets of the IP that hung grimly off Earth and Luna now. But the scouts had learned one thing. Mirans could never hope to attain a firm grasp on Earth while terribly armed Luna hung like a Sword of Damocles over their heads.
Majestically the Miran swung along beside the dead ship, a great magnetic tow-cable shot out toward it, to shy off at first, then slowly to be adjusted, and take hold in the magnetic shield of the T-208. The pilots of the watching scout-ships turned away. They knew what would happen. It did. Five ten twenty seconds passed.
The smaller craft went on a scouting mission, verifying that there was no new colony planted, that there was no man-made radiation anywhere in the system, that there was no likelihood of the fleet's presence or for that matter its continued existence becoming known to anybody not of its ship-crews. The scout-ships came back, reporting all clear.
Another six-man ship must go out but this ship will come back!" And with the order for another experimental ship, went the orders for commercial supplies of this new apparatus. Every IP ship must be equipped to resist it. Buck Kendall sailed on the six-man scout that went out this time. Again they swooped once at Phobos, again Miran scout-ships crumbled under the attack of the vicious UV beams.
Polyxenidas, receiving intelligence from his scout-ships, which were stationed in various places, that the Roman fleet lay at Delos, sent off an express to the king, who, quitting the business in which he was employed in Hellespontus, and taking with him all the ships of war, returned to Ephesus with all possible speed, and instantly called a council to determine whether he should risk an engagement at sea.
"The difference," said Buck Kendall slowly, when the reports came in from scout-ships in space that had witnessed the last struggle, "between an atomic generator and an atomic power-store, or accumulator, is clearly shown. We haven't an adequate source of power." McLaurin sighed slowly, and rose to his feet. "What can we do?"
For perhaps a minute and a half, the ship was without control, then the control was re-established and in vain the telescopes and instruments searched for the T-253. Lightless, her rockets out now, her fields damped down to extinction, the T-253 was lost in the pulsing, gyrating fields of half a dozen scout-ships. Kendall looked grimly at the crushed spot on the nose of the Miran.
"You'd rather it was that way." She looked at him for a long time, until he squirmed. Then she nodded and went away. An hour later the Wealdian space-fleet was reported, massed in space and driving for Dara. There were small scout-ships which came on ahead of the main fleet. They'd originally been guard-boats, intended for solar-system duty only and quite incapable of overdrive.
And to him the explosion of the atostor reservoirs was a terrible and mystifying calamity. To the men in the five tiny scout-ships, it was also a surprise, and a painful one. Even space-hardened humans were burned by the terrifically hard ultra-violet from the explosion. But they got some hint of what it had meant to the Mirans from the confusion that resulted in the fleet.
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