Cruisers massed together, we were leaping back, now, back toward
the spinning worlds, and toward the great crescent-formation of
cube-ships that faced us now. Before those thousands of cube-ships
had grasped what had happened, before they could turn, could change
their formation, our compact mass had driven into them. Then cruiser
thousands and cube-ship thousands were spinning and striking and
mingling together, smiting with black force-beams and crimson bolts
in titanic battle inside the tremendous electrical coma, whirling and
stabbing in awful combat, the comet-creatures for their comet and we
for our universe! Comet and galaxy had come to grips at last as those
two huge fleets caught and struck at each other!
Cubes and cruisers swirled and ran about us as our own cruiser
struggled through the wild ruck of the battle, our own black beams
stabbing to smash back cubes before and beside us, while through
the speech-instruments before me I cried orders to my mighty fleet,
directing the masses of cruisers that leapt and struck and soared at
the great square cubes about us. All space outside seemed a single
giant mass of struggling cubes and cruisers, cut across by blasting
crimson bolt and ebon beam, yet ever we were forcing the cube-ships
back, back over their ring of revolving disk-worlds, back over their
mighty central world, and then down toward it as they fought fiercely
against our black beams which drove great paths of destruction through
them!
The surface of that world was looming clearer beneath us, bathed in
white revealing light, as the giant battle swung lower down toward it.
I glimpsed the great circular clearing, the pyramid with the mechanism
and comet-guards on its summit, knew by the dial before me that but
minutes still remained to turn aside with it the colossal on-thundering
comet. Lower we swung toward the clearing, and as we did so the cubes
beneath stiffened against us, their uprushing hail of deadly red bolts
stabbing like an upward-falling rain of crimson death! But still more
deadly were the black beams that drove down through them from our
ships, and they were giving a little before us, sinking lower still,
when suddenly from the surface of the world below there rose up among
them another cube, one vastly greater than any of the others, one that
moved ponderously up to the center of the cube-ship fleet and then
glowed suddenly with a brilliant light. And as it did so the thousands
of cube-ships beneath us suddenly vanished! Disappeared from sight as
though they had never been, leaving below us only the spot of brilliant
light that marked the greater cube!
"That great cube!" Jurt Tul was crying. "It's a vibration-projector
of some kind, one whose vibrations make invisible all the cube-ships
around it and leave our ships and all else visible! And they're
attacking now!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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