And presently we were engaged in the soundless turmoil of battle. I
cannot relate more than fragments, things I saw and experienced,
during six or more hours of bursting electronic light and puffs of
darkness in that spread of battle area within the Moon-shadow. It was
a silent battle of crossing lights, ships a thousand miles apart,
gathering velocity with great tangential curves; passing each other in
a second; sweeping a thousand miles apart again; turning and coming
back. A hundred engagements.
The _Star-Streak_ was very fast, very mobile, and, unlike all the
other Wandl ships, had the allies' own weapons to use against them. I
saw now why they called Molo the terror of the starways!
We swept into the shadowed battle area. Over all its thousand-mile
spread were the radiant Wandl gravity-beams, disturbing and impeding
the course of Grantline's ships. There was the luminous gleam of
projectile rockets, like little comets, soundless, launched by the
Wandl craft, and the radiance of the rocket-streams which all the
vessels were using now for close maneuvering; the glare of Grantline's
searchlight bombs and his white search-beams to disclose the deadly
whirling discs which the weapons of his vessel must seek out and
destroy. A chaos of silent light, stabbed here and there with
Grantline's darkness bombs, bombs of limited local range which
exploded in space and which, for a few minutes duration, absorbed all
light-rays, giving a temporary effect of darkness.
And then wreckage! Broken, leprous Wandl vessels whose barrage at
close range had been smashed by Grantline's guns; torn and littered
allied ships, struck by the huge exploding comet-projectiles and the
whirling discs; airless hulks, and scattered fragments which no longer
resembled a ship at all but only a hull plate or a torn segment of
dome. And little drifting blobs, the survivors in pressure suits who
had leaped from the wreckage; little blobs ignored, whirled away or
drawn forward as by chance the sweeping gravity-beams fell upon them;
tiny derelicts, floating stormtossed until the Moon's attraction
caught and pulled them down, or a whirling disc cut through them, or
the distant aura of a bolt shocked them to a merciful death.
It was a three-dimensional, thousand-mile spread of fantasy infernal.
Out of it, after an hour or two, a steady sift of every manner of
wreckage was drifting down upon the Moon. The scene began to blur. A
haze like glowing star-dust, or the radiance from a comet's tail, was
spreading a weirdly luminous mist, blurring, obscuring the scene. This
was the released electrons and the dissipating gases of the space guns
and exploding projectiles, forming dust which glowed in the mingled
starlight and Earthlight.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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