They took their long-range toll, and then as the Mephistans came into torpedo range, the sluggers fell back through the open-work pattern of the constellation ships. From here on in, the omni-powerful battlecraft would have to face battle with every weapon. Unleashed energy filled the gap between the fleets, and the sky below the decelerating ships became a blazing graveyard of ruin as the ships lost drive and went free, falling ahead of the main body. Word flashed through the Terran fleet that the _Centuriad II_ had discovered the interference frequency of the Mephistan torpedoes. Technicians in all Terran ships shifted their transmitters to the called frequency, and the torpedoes lost their aiming perfection. But they were not safe. Wandering torpedoes continued to roam in among the Terran fleet and touched off fountains of flame and death. Then from point-blank range, the sub-ships of Terra flashed in through the Mephistan fleet. In one great swarm they came. From the virtual zero of the detectors--that in-close distance that limited the minimum range--torpedoes dropped into being from nowhere and hit full upon ship after ship. The Mephistan fleet became a flaring holocaust of coruscating flame. When the fifteen-minute deadline came, the Terrans fought a remainder of the huge Mephistan horde that had tried to stop them. The dead hulls, still incandescent, were easy to dodge, though most of them had fallen free long enough before to have them cross Terra's course ahead rather than at coincidence. Combining the big turrets of the sluggers with the primary, secondary, and tertiary batteries of the constellation ships, Terra's forces fairly crushed the fragments of Mephisto's horde that remained. * * * * * And then the sky was clear once more. The winking lights of death were silent. The furor and clatter of the instrument rooms ceased more slowly as the alarms continued to pick out detritus and to reject such harmless stuff. The power rooms were quiet, too, and the generator rooms no longer resounded to the scream of overworked generators. A clean-up began, and droplets of metal from blown fuses mingled with blackened bits of contalloy from the circuit breakers. Pyrometers dropped back to the central portion of their scales, and the air, acrid and warm, cooled and became sweet again. They looked, and saw that the sky was theirs--completely. Mephisto was a disk in the sky below them. It beckoned--or did it taunt? XI. Terra deployed, encircled, and closed down upon Mephisto III. A flurry of up-shooting energy broke out, catching the planet-slow spacecraft easily. Down-fire crisscrossed the third moon of Mephisto, silencing some batteries.