Flash! Flash! Flash! Three points of light, as unbearably brilliant as atomic vortices, sprang into being upon the fortress' side. Three needle rays of inconceivable energy lashed out, hurtling through the cruisers' outer screens as though they had been so much inactive webbing. Through the second and through the first. Through the wall shield, even that ultrapowerful field scarcely flashing as it went down. Through the armor, violating the prime tenet then held and which has just been referred to, that no object free in space can be damaged--in this case, so unthinkably vehement was the thrust, the few atoms of substances in the space surrounding the doomed cruisers afforded resistance enough. Through the ship itself, a ravening cylinder of annihilation. For perhaps a second--certainly no longer--those incredible, those undreamed-of beams persisted before winking out into blackness; but that second had been long enough. Three riddled hulks lay dead in space, and as the three original projectors went black three more flared out. Then three more. Nine of the mightiest of Civilization's ships of war were riddled before the others could hurl themselves backward out of range! * * * * * Most of the officers of the flagship were stunned into temporary inactivity by that shocking development, but two reacted almost instantly. "Thorndyke!" the Admiral snapped. "What did they do, and how?" And Kinnison, not speaking at all, leaped to a certain panel, to read for himself the analysis of those incredible beams of force. "They made superneedle rays out of their main projectors," Master Technician Laverne Thorndyke reported, crisply. "They must have shorted everything they've got onto them to burn them out that fast." "Those beams were hot--plenty hot," Kinnison corroborated the findings. "These recorders go to five billion and have a factor of safety of ten. Even that wasn't anywhere nearly enough--everything in the recorder circuits blew." "But how could they handle them--" von Hohendorff began to ask. "They didn't. They pointed them and died," Thorndyke explained, grimly. "They traded one projector and its crew for one cruiser and _its_ crew--a good trade from their viewpoint." "There will be no more such trades," Haynes declared. Nor were there. The Patrol had maulers enough to englobe the enemy craft at a distance greater even than the effective range of those suicidal beams, and it did so. Shielding screens cut off the Boskonians' intake of cosmic power and the relentless beaming of the bulldog maulers began. For hour after hour it continued, the cordon ever tightening as the victims' power lessened. And finally even the Gargantuan accumulators of the immense fortresses were drained. Their screens went down under the hellish fury of the maulers' incessant attack, and in a space of minutes thereafter the structures and their contents ceased to exist save as atomic detritus.