On we went, our gigantic mass of grappling craft staggering into that narrow gap between the great suns, with their awful roaring fires all about us, now. Hundreds after hundreds of ships on the edge of our struggling mass were vanishing in those fires as they reeled too far to the side, or were licked up by the mighty, outrushing prominences, only tiny spurts of flame marking their end. Yet still we whirled and smote at each other, there, until the walls of stupendous fire about us had dropped back, until we were reeling out from between the suns, staggering through them, and were swaying on into the space ahead of us, raging on between the galaxy's thundering suns in our colossal battle of giants. Reeling thus onward in mad combat I saw for an instant that now among the suns before us there stretched the gigantic, glowing mass of the great nebula we had glimpsed to the left at the battle's beginning, a tremendous ocean of flaming gas there in the heavens toward which our vast field of struggling ships was swaying. I saw, too, that but a score of thousands of ships were left now of each of the three great mingled struggling fleets, and then all else left my mind as fiercely toward us swooped again a pair of the serpent-ships about us, one beneath and one above with their death-beams stabbing up and down toward us as they drove upon us! At the instant they did so our cylinders had shot down crumpling death upon the uprushing ship beneath, and then, as the one above leapt down toward us before the shafts could be turned on it, Jhul Din whirled our craft up in a great leap, the sharp prow of our ship ripping through the rear end of that ship as though through paper, annihilating all in that ship as the awful cold of airless space rushed into it. An instant it hung there, all dead in it that instant, and then, before it could drive aimlessly away, a shaft of red rays stabbing out of the great mêlée behind us had touched it and destroyed it.