"We can fire about half our guns; we still have a few missiles left. Seventy per cent of the ship's sealed off, and we've been holed in a dozen places. We have power enough for lift and some steering-way. We can't make lateral way except at the expense of lift." Which made the _Victrix_ practically a stationary target. He yelled over his shoulder at Karffard to cut speed all he could without tearing things apart. "When that cripple comes into view, start circling around her. Get into a tight circle above her." He turned back to the man in the screen. "If we can get ourselves slowed down enough, we'll do all we can to cover you." "All you can is all you can; thank you, Prince Trask." "Here comes the _Enterprise_!" Karffard shouted, with obscenely blasphemous embellishments. "She hairpinned on us." "Well, do something about her!" * * * * * Vann Larch was already doing it. The _Enterprise_ had taken damage in the last exchange; Koreff's spectroscopes showed her halo-ed with air and water vapor. Her instruments would be getting the same story from the _Nemesis_; wedge-shaped segments extending six to eight decks in were sealed off in several places. Then the only thing that could be seen with certainty was the blaze of mutually destroying missiles between. The short-range gun duel began and ended as they passed. In the screen, he had seen a fat round-nosed thing come up from the _Victrix_, curving far out ahead of the passing _Enterprise_. She was almost out of sight around the planet when she ran head-on into it, and vanished in an awesome blaze. For a moment, he thought she had been destroyed, then she lurched into sight and went around the curvature of Audhumla. Trask and the Mardukan were shaking hands with themselves at each other in their screens; everybody in the _Nemesis_ command room was screaming: "Well shot, _Victrix_! Well shot!" Then the _Yo-Yo_ was coming around again, and Vann Larch was saying, "Gehenna with this fooling around! I'll fix the expurgated unprintability!" He yelled orders--a jumble of code letters and numbers--and things began going out. Most of them blew up in space. Then the _Yo-Yo_ blew up, very quietly, as things do where there is no air to carry shock- and sound-waves, but very brilliantly. There was brief daylight all over the night side of the planet. "That was our planetbuster," Larch said. "I don't know what we'll use on Dunnan." "I didn't know we had one," Trask admitted. "Otto had a couple built on Beowulf. The Beowulfers are good nuclear weaponeers."