Eight minutes later they were approaching the scene. Spread out on a shapeless form ten million miles across, tongues and streamers of raw energy flared forward, flaying space before it as it came. At a hundred and seventy thousand miles per second it came toward Sanaron, so near to the velocity of light that the roaring particles of energy had enormous mass. No need for the great searchlights here, for the coverage of the explosion was so great that there was no need to filter the blackness away. Instead, Guardians played before the oncoming death and fought it. With a quiet disregard for death, Steve ran his little ship to within a mile of the raving storm front and matched its velocity. White-faced and awed, William Wrightwood watched the horror without really knowing how close he was to death. It was too big to be personal, that flaming front. He saw the circling ships fighting first this tongue and then that, saw the planers fencing the streamers in, holding them while coners sucked away the raving energies and spread them too far apart to be tangible. He saw the swampers soar in to chill a raving island of exploding space, and watched with heaving stomach one of the Guardians get touched by a lance of flame--saw it go searing into death to recreate an island of raw fire of itself. Then the mad attack against the roaring furnace cleared; Wrightwood began to see that there was a pattern to this. Methodically the Guardians were isolating the forward-reaching tongues of energy from the main mass; cutting them off, and swamping them. From behind, as Steve circled the scene, planers and swampers were closing in on the trailing flame, chopping it off bit by bit and chilling it out of existence. Sanaron was no longer a star lost in the stellar field. It was a flaming disc that could be seen, but to look at it hurt the eyes. Steve knew; Sanaron was not too far away. He hurled his ship to the front again. And then, as though it were a wave hitting a breakwater, the coruscating front dashed against the massed warp-planes of a whole squadron of Guardians, braced, planted, ready and waiting. The planes buckled and the squadron was forced back but the raving front flattened against the planes and was washed aside; turned back, spread to curl around the edges like tongues of doom reaching for the prey that lurked behind the wall. The squadron retreated, forming its shape as it went, until firm pressor rays behind the out-flung planes felt for and caught the core of Sanaron's outermost planet. With planetary mass behind, the squadron held a parabolic shield in space, ploughing a hole in the racing field of exploding energy. * * * * * Fire and flame enveloped the planet, passed around it, held from it by the warp-planes of the Guardians. A ship crumpled and died; its place was refilled by a spare. Another ship ran out of power abruptly and it was replaced until it could drop into the planet and recharge.