The communicator spoke: "Commander to Marshal: Located the
mother-fleet."
"Yes?"
"We're hitting them now--as per orders. But this is a warning. If we
don't stop 'em first, they'll be there in fifteen minutes. They're on
collision course!"
"Expected that," said Guy, worriedly.
"O.K.," said Ben in what he hoped would be an encouragement. "Now
we'll see if your battle-plan works."
"I keep worrying that it won't."
"If it didn't have merit," observed Ben dryly, "it wouldn't have been
adopted."
"I want to get out there and pitch."
"You gotta stay in here and hope they pitch to your call," said
Williamson.
* * * * *
Twelve minutes later, the Mephistan fleet came into long-detector
range, and the entire Terran fleet opened fire. The heavies, still
circling the fleet, took up the job as soon as they came into range,
and the space between became filled with flashes of fire as crossed
MacMillan beams neutralized one another and spent their mighty energies
in light and heat. The power rooms of the ships became a noisy clatter
of automatically opening and closing circuit breakers as the MacMillan
overloads worked the safety-circuits. Now and then the ultra-loud
clamor of the fuse alarms rang out above the chattering racket, and the
power gangs worked furiously to replace master line-fuses while the
rest of the ship fumed and fretted without power for offense or defense.
The heavies--the sluggers--got between the constellation ships and the
Mephistans, and their super-powered AutoMacs outfought the lighter
turret-mounts of the Mephistans.
They took their long-range toll, and then as the Mephistans came
into torpedo range, the sluggers fell back through the open-work
pattern of the constellation ships. From here on in, the omni-powerful
battlecraft would have to face battle with every weapon.
Unleashed energy filled the gap between the fleets, and the sky below
the decelerating ships became a blazing graveyard of ruin as the ships
lost drive and went free, falling ahead of the main body.
Word flashed through the Terran fleet that the _Centuriad II_ had
discovered the interference frequency of the Mephistan torpedoes.
Technicians in all Terran ships shifted their transmitters to the
called frequency, and the torpedoes lost their aiming perfection.
But they were not safe.
Wandering torpedoes continued to roam in among the Terran fleet and
touched off fountains of flame and death.
Then from point-blank range, the sub-ships of Terra flashed in through
the Mephistan fleet. In one great swarm they came. From the virtual
zero of the detectors--that in-close distance that limited the minimum
range--torpedoes dropped into being from nowhere and hit full upon ship
after ship.
The Mephistan fleet became a flaring holocaust of coruscating flame.
When the fifteen-minute deadline came, the Terrans fought a remainder
of the huge Mephistan horde that had tried to stop them. The dead
hulls, still incandescent, were easy to dodge, though most of them had
fallen free long enough before to have them cross Terra's course ahead
rather than at coincidence.
Combining the big turrets of the sluggers with the primary, secondary,
and tertiary batteries of the constellation ships, Terra's forces
fairly crushed the fragments of Mephisto's horde that remained.
* * * * *
And then the sky was clear once more. The winking lights of death were
silent. The furor and clatter of the instrument rooms ceased more
slowly as the alarms continued to pick out detritus and to reject such
harmless stuff. The power rooms were quiet, too, and the generator
rooms no longer resounded to the scream of overworked generators. A
clean-up began, and droplets of metal from blown fuses mingled with
blackened bits of contalloy from the circuit breakers. Pyrometers
dropped back to the central portion of their scales, and the air, acrid
and warm, cooled and became sweet again.
They looked, and saw that the sky was theirs--completely.
Mephisto was a disk in the sky below them.
It beckoned--or did it taunt?