We were plunging at Tollgamo's ship. Its portes were red with glare. The enemy rays now were lessening. It seemed that only one or two were left. And the battle now had changed its aspect. From the broken Tollgamo ships, many of the Gorts had safely emerged, with helmets and weighted shoes so that now they were walking, swaying on the rocky bottom. Five hundred or more of them. And the girls swooped down at them. Myriad hand to hand combats between the unweildy Gorts and the Arron virgins that plunged at them like darting hungry sharks. The bottom now was strewn with the dead as the girls plunged and fought and we darted our cylinder among them, struggling to find opportunity to strike with our rays. Where was Nereid? Again cold apprehension struck at me; it was so long since I had seen her. And now a new ghastly horror was entering the turgid scene. Attracted by the lights, the muffled roars and the blood, monsters of the deep were coming. Eaters of carrion. Sea vultures. Some came in little swarms, a thousand tiny silvery shapes, darting at the bodies, picking at them until only white skeletons lay here on the slimy sea bottom. Other shapes, huge with glaring round eyes like torches, came slithering from the deeps, searching for the dead, seizing the wounded. "That Tollgamo ship is all that's left," Leh was saying. He sped us toward it. Quite obviously now it was trying to escape. Forty or fifty girls were clinging to its hull; too close for its single remaining ray weapon to hit them; girls with close-held projectors eating with bubbling red electro-glare into the hull-plates. We had a glimpse into one of the bullseye portes--gas fumes and red glare in there; and the Gorts, trapped there, in a panic making ready to disembark. We lay close, firing our bolts. Suddenly a wounded girl was drifting past our turret; she seemed struggling to get to our little pressure porte. Nereid? Then I saw that it was Venta. She got into the porte; and I pumped out the water; threw myself in and bent over her. She was gasping, but still trying to smile at me. "We--we have won, Earthman." "Yes. Yes, Venta. You just lie quiet. Have you seen Nereid?" "Yes. Here, just a little while ago. I don't know, now." I stared out the porte bullseye. The Tollgamo ship was breaking; I could see its air coming out in bubbling puffs that caught our cylinder and shoved it away. That ship would be water-filled in a moment. And then I stiffened; tense with horror as I stared. A little side exit-porte of the wrecked vessel suddenly opened. A single huge figure lunged out. A dark-clad giant figure, with round air-helmet and weighted shoes. Tollgamo! He was no more than fifty feet from me; a red sheen of light struck his helmet so that I could see his face with its quiet, grim smile. And then suddenly, in a leaping dive, he flung himself forward, and seized a girl who was clinging to the vessel's side, blasting with her ray-torch.