Kim Rendell in the _Starshine_ flashed back from the last of the twenty planets of Sinab as six monster ships emerged from seeming nothingness. The _Starshine's_ detectors flicked over to the "_Danger_" signal-strength. Alarm-gongs clanged violently. The little ship hurtled past a monster at a bare two-hundred miles distance, and there was another giant a thousand miles off, and two others and fifth and sixth.... The six ships drew together into battle formation. Their detectors, too, showed the _Starshine_. More, as other midgets flicked into being, returning from their raid upon the Empire, they also registered upon the detector-screens of the battle-fleet. The fighter-beams of the ships flared into deadliness. They were astounded, no doubt, by the existence of other space-craft than those of Sinab. But as the little ships flung at them furiously, the fighting-beams raged among them. Small, agile craft vanished utterly as the death-beams hit--thrown into transmitter-drive before their crews could die. But the Sinabians could not know that. They drove on. Grandly. Ruthlessly. This planet alone possessed space-craft and offered resistance. It had appeared only normal that all the men on Ades should die. Now it became essential. The murder-fleet destroyed--apparently--the tiny things which flung themselves recklessly and went on splendidly to bathe the little planet in death. The midgets performed prodigies of valor. They flung themselves at the giants, with the small hard objects that had destroyed an empire held loosely to the outside of their hulls. When the death-beams struck and they vanished, the small hard objects went hurtling on. They could have been missiles. They traveled at miles per second. But meteor-repellers flung them contemptuously aside, once they were no longer parts of space-craft with drive in action. The little ships tried to ram, and that was impossible. They could do nothing but make threatening dashes. And the giants went on toward Ades. From forty million miles to thirty millions the enemy squadron drove on with its tiny antagonists darting despairingly about it. At thirty millions, Kim commanded his followers to flee ahead to Ades, give warning, and take on board what refugees they could. But there were nineteen million souls on Ades--at most a million had crowded through to Terranova in the Second Galaxy--and they could do next to nothing. At twenty millions of miles, some of the midgets were back with cases of chemical explosive. They strewed them in the paths of the juggernaut ships. With no velocity of their own--almost stationary in space--someone had thought they might not activate the Sinabian repellers. But that thought was futile. The repeller-beams stabbed at them with the force of collisions. The chemical explosives flashed luridly in emptiness and made swift expanding clouds of vapor, of the tenuity of comets' tails. The enemy ships came on.