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Updated: June 7, 2025
Rip wished for a communicator powerful enough to reach the Scorpius, but knew it was useless to try with his helmet circuit. The carrier waves of the snapper-boats were on the same frequency, and they would smother the faint signal from his bubble. But the boats might be able to hear if they got close enough! He had a swift memory of the communications circuits.
The Planeteers lashed the Connies' hands behind them with their own safety lines and, at Rip's orders, dumped all but one of them into the crater where Kemp was just finishing his cutting. Three snapper-boats remained. Rip watched, holding tightly to the arm of the Connie he had kept at his side. The man wore the insignia of an officer. The remaining snapper-boats were going to make it.
Sometimes there were pitched battles between groups of platoon size. But at that point the struggle ended. The law of the Federation said that no spaceship could fire on a Connie spaceship or on Connie land bases, except with special permission of the Space Council. The theory was that brief struggles between men, or even between small fighting craft like the snapper-boats, was not war.
He had sent the snapper-boats to try and draw fire in an attempt to find out more surely whether Planeteers or Connies had the thorium rock. "The Scorpius doesn’t know what’s going on," Rip told his Planeteers. "O’Brine didn’t know the cruiser was waiting to ambush him, so the rocket we fired made him think the Connies had taken us over." He put himself in O’Brine’s place.
The snapper-boats seemed miles away to Rip, but he plugged ahead until his belt light picked them up. He took a long look, then turned away, heartsick. The Connie's exhaust had charred them into wreckage. "Now what?" he asked. "I don't know, sir," Koa answered somberly. They went back to the cave, not hurrying because Rip no longer had the strength to hurry.
Landing craft and snapper-boats swarmed to meet them and within an hour after their arrival the Planeteers were surrounded by spacemen, cadets from the platform, and officers and men wearing Planeteer black. A cadet approached Rip and looked at him with awe. "Sir, I don’t know how you ever did it!"
Then, when they're pretty well satisfied that all is quiet, we'll show up." Rip grinned at his Planeteers. "We can have a real, old-fashioned surprise party." Koa slid the safety catch from his pistol. "With fireworks," he added. Repel Invaders! The snapper-boats came out of the darkness of space, leaving a glowing trail of fire. They were not graceful.
They didn’t see the Connie until the fire of its exhaust suddenly blasted above the horizon, then they ducked for cover. The cruiser had taken a swing at the other side of the asteroid. They peered out again and saw it making a turn to come back. "He won’t get us," Rip said confidently. "Our tough time will come when he sends a fleet of snapper-boats." "We’ll get a few," Koa replied grimly. "Wait!
"I'm staying here until I figure out some way to call them off. We can't just stand here and let them blast us. They're our own men." "Then I'm staying, too," Koa stated. A pair of snapper-boats flashed overhead and vanished below the horizon. Two more swept past from another direction. Rip watched, curious. What were they up to? Another pair quartered past them at high speed, then two more.
In Rip's place he would have no compunctions about using the knife, so instead of calling Rip's bluff, he agreed. The snapper-boats blew their front tubes, decelerating, and squashed down to the asteroid in a roar of exhaust flames, sending the Planeteers running out of the way. Rip thrust harder with his space knife and yelled, "Tell them!" The Connie officer nodded. "Turn up my communicator."
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