Our titanic battle had reached its height, its climax, I knew, and with the fierce, desperate fury born of that realization, our ships were leaping upon the serpent-craft. It was a battle out of nightmare, that awful struggle, a battle of the thousands of ships of three great universes that grappled with each other to the death there in that hell of thundering flame. Gaseous Andromedans in their long, flat ships, writhing serpent-creatures with their oval craft, strange, dissimilar shapes from the races of all the galaxy's suns in their great, cigar-like hulls--all swayed and smote and stabbed there together in that stupendous struggle, pale beam and red ray and unseen shaft of force whirling this way and that through the seas of raging fire through which we reeled. On and on we whirled, all thought of everything but the enemy ships before us gone as each of the thousands of ships struck out with all its powers for its races, its universe! Swiftly now, rocking and grappling there in the nebula's glowing ocean, with flame above and below and on each side and all about us, ships around us were vanishing, crashing into each other blindly amid the roaring fires, taking deadly toll of each other with their mighty weapons. But ever more swiftly, assailed on all sides by our terrific attack, the serpent-ships were decreasing in number, and though our own craft whirled to death about us also I saw that rapidly the serpent-ships were being annihilated in scores and hundreds as with the fury of utter reckless single-mindedness we leapt upon them. Thousands by thousands their ships were vanishing, and though hardly a score of thousands of ships remained now of our two mighty fleets the serpent-ships had been reduced to a fourth of that number by our terrible attack! Still upon them we sprang, there in the nebula's fires, our force-shafts and red rays whirling ceaselessly through the thundering flames about us toward them, though sullenly still their beams sprang to meet us. Through that inferno of flame, between and through the whirling ships about us, our own craft leapt, its cylinders still stabbing forth crumpling death to the oval ships about us, and then suddenly, in answer to some signal flashed among them, all those oval craft, those serpent-ships, had driven swiftly upward from the mighty battle, into the roaring fires above us. In those fires, while we too drove up through the flaming ocean in pursuit of them, they gathered for an instant, massing together, and then were flashing away, through the nebula's flaming sea and out of it into open space once more, flashing together back toward the galaxy's edge! "The Cancer cluster!" Jhul Din was screaming, now. "They're in flight--they're heading back toward the cluster!"