Perry Rhodan NEO: Volume 8 [Complete] by Arndt Ellmer Hubert Haensel

Author:Arndt Ellmer, Hubert Haensel
Language: eng
Format: epub

1.

A Desperate Gambit

Vega system, on board the Last Hope

“This is Perry Rhodan speaking. I have a message for Genkt-Tarm, the supreme commander of the Topsidan invasion fleet. We have what you are looking for. I repeat, we have what you are looking for.”

They had been brave words. Audacious words. Perhaps even foolish words. For he had nothing. He didn’t even know if his conjecture about the background of the lizard beings’ invasion of the Vega system was accurate or not. Had they indeed come to this solar system looking for something? If so, what? Was it the transmitters—the mysterious transport devices used by the Ferrons, originating who knew where?

The crew of the enormous Rugr-Krehn was pulling the tiny Last Hope inside with a tractor beam. It was a grotesque sight: the Rugr-Krehn was an Arkonide battleship that had been captured by the Topsidans. A steel ball with a diameter of eight hundred meters. The Last Hope, with its circumference of sixty meters, looked like a toy model of the enormous starship.

A huge hatch had opened in the Rugr-Krehn’s equatorial bulge, like a mouth waiting to devour them. Behind it seethed blackness, darker still than all of space, in which at least the distant stars offered light—and hope.

Thora had found confident words, had stressed that Rhodan’s bluff had obviously worked. Genkt-Tarm or other higher-ups in the Topsidian military leadership were loading the Last Hope in.

She saw it positively. He couldn’t muster the same optimism. He asked himself why they were loading them in. To keep them prisoner and interrogate them? Or to negotiate? To hear whatever lies the aliens had come up with? Or to shoot them and take the Last Hope as loot?

“We need to get ready,” he said. “Thora will take over command. I’ll hand myself over to the Topsidans, while—”

“We hide!” Thora smiled, as he expected of her, but it no longer exuded the icy chill it had until recently. “Tschubai, you’ll jump with us to a suitable place. I’ll lead the field team—it’s not for nothing that I know my way around an Arkonide ship better than anyone else. The Rugr-Krehn may have been captured and taken over by the Topsidans, but it’s still one of my people’s ships. And we don’t like being stolen from.”

She took a brief look at each member of her small group: the teleporter Ras Tschubai, the scanning mutant Wuriu Sengu, who could see through solid matter, the two Ferrons Chaktor and Lossoshér, and finally she looked Perry Rhodan in the eye. “In the worst case, I know how to destroy a ship like this from the inside. And that’s exactly what we’ll do if all our other plans come to nothing.”

He didn’t object. Of course not. Thora was developing exactly what was right and necessary: the backup plan. The...emergency exit that would deliver a painful blow to the enemy if Rhodan’s real plan didn’t work out.

Assuming we’re not way past that point already.

What could they hope to achieve? They were a desperate group of half of a dozen originating from three different planets.

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