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Sebastian MacMaine might have died with the others except that the Shudos, as the flagship, was to trail behind the fleet, so her drive had not yet been activated. The Shudos was still in orbit, moving at only a few miles per second when the Earth fleet struck. Her drive never did go on.
After fifteen minutes of high acceleration, her atomic rockets had cut out, and now she moved serenely at constant velocity, looking as dead as a battered tin can. "I don't see anything," Captain Verenski said. "The Kerothic symbols on the side. Palatal unvoiced sibilant, rounded " "I don't read Kerothic, major," said the captain. "I " Then he blinked and said, "Shudos!" "That's it.
"We're a thousand miles from the Shudos now; close in slowly until we're within a hundred yards. The boarding parties will don armor and prepare to board while we're closing in. At a hundred yards, we stop and the boarding parties will land on the hull. I'll give further orders then. "One more thing.
The advantage lay with MacMaine, for, while the computer could not logically fathom the intuitive processes of its human opponent, MacMaine could and did have an intuitive grasp of the machine's logic. MacMaine didn't need to know every variable in the pattern; he only needed to know the pattern as a whole. The Shudos was well in the rear of the main body of the Kerothi fleet.
The High Commander paused for a moment, then he said: "Proceed with the investment of the insignia." The Strategy General Sebastian MacMaine, sometime Colonel of Earth's Space Force, and presently a General of the Kerothi Fleet, looked at the array of stars that appeared to drift by the main viewplate of his flagship, the blaster-boat Shudos.
Half an hour later, Major Thornton stood on the hull of the Shudos, surrounded by the sixty men of the boarding party. "Anybody see anything through those windows?" he asked. Several of the men had peered through the direct-vision ports, playing spotlight beams through them. "Nothing alive," said a sergeant, a remark which was followed by a chorus of agreement.
A bomb, only a short distance away as the distance from atomic disintegration is measured, sent the Shudos spinning away, end over end, like a discarded cigar butt flipped toward a gutter, one side caved in near the rear, as if it had been kicked in by a giant foot. There was still air in the ship, MacMaine realized groggily as he awoke from the unconsciousness that had been thrust upon him.
In the long run, they never had a chance at all. MacMaine waited with almost fatalistic complacence for the inevitable to happen. When it did happen, he was ready for it. The Shudos, tiny flagship of what had once been a mighty armada and was now only a tattered remnant, was floating in orbit, along with the other remaining ships of the fleet, around a bloated red-giant sun.
Then, out of nowhere, comes a fleet of ships we didn't even know existed, and they've smashed us at every turn." "If they are ships," said Loopat, the youngest officer of the Shudos staff. "Who ever heard of a battleship that was undetectable at a distance of less than half a million miles? It's impossible!" "Then we're being torn to pieces by the impossible!" Hokotan snapped.
The Shudos of Keroth. The flagship of the Kerothi Fleet." The look in the major's eyes was the same look of hatred that had come into the captain's. "Even if its armament is still functioning, we have to take the chance," Major Thornton said. "Even if they're all dead, we have to try to get The Butcher's body." He picked up the microphone again. "Attention, Group.
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