Adventure stories; Science fiction; Space warfare -- Fiction
Crash!--a mighty shock flung us sidewise as our craft reeled over, and
we glimpsed a serpent-ship that had flashed down on us from above,
grazing past us. Our force-shafts leapt from the cylinders toward it,
missed it, and then as its death-beams whirled toward us in passing
there burned past us from behind a brilliant red ray that touched it
and destroyed it in a great burst of crimson light! Then in the next
instant our cylinders were swinging toward a trio of close-ranked
serpent-ships that were rushing toward us, one behind the other. The
death-beams of the foremost leapt out, seared along the edge of our
ship, but at the same moment that foremost ship had crumpled suddenly
beneath our force-shafts, and before the two behind it could swerve
they had crashed into that twisted wreck of metal and into each other.
Then all three buckled, shattered hulks were drifting sidewise from the
battle.
But now all about us an awful glare was growing, and as we whirled
and struck there I looked up to see that our titanic mass of tens of
thousands of struggling ships, whirling on with all their speed and
striking with all their power at each other, were drifting blindly
toward the two flaming yellow suns that loomed now in dazzling size and
splendor just before us! Yet on, on we were whirling, stabbing, soaring
and vanishing, locked still in the colossal death-grip of universes,
on until all about and before us was nothing but thundering, blinding
walls of flame as we reeled sidewise into those two great suns!
Even as we soared and struck there, our force-shafts stabbing in
crumpling death toward the serpent-ships that leapt toward us, I saw
that far away on each side the vast mass of struggling ships, extending
as far as the eye could reach, was reeling sidewise with us, vanishing
already by scores and by hundreds as they reeled into the out-leaping
fiery prominences of the giant golden suns before us. Yet on and on
we were whirling still, all organization and plan gone now, with the
two thundering suns beside us like vast ramparts of blazing fire
across all the heavens, into which we were moving. Then suddenly those
ramparts were all about us, titanic walls of awful flame that seemed to
enclose the great mass of our thousands of struggling ships, and as we
dipped and struck and ran I saw that our great masses were reeling in
_between_ the two suns!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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