Drac looked up from his calculating instruments. "Look! A circular
rotation: Horribly swift. But I've caught a picture. Look!"
He had a still image of one of the discs. It had saw-teeth at its thin
knife-like outer circumference. Whirling at tremendous speed, these
saw-toothed metal discs might cut into our dome, or some other part of
our ship.
At the next round, Grantline fired. The discs reddened a little, but
came on unharmed. From the other side, he fired again. Three of the
discs seemed to have been caught full. His bolts, sustained for their
fullest ten seconds of duration at this close, thousand-foot range,
took effect. The three discs seemed to crumble with a puff of
queerly-radiant vacuum spark-glows, then were gone.
But the others came closing in.
The _Cometara_ rang now with the excitement and alarm of the men.
Grantline could not set his gauges fast enough to fire at every round.
I had a sudden thought. With the rear rockets, I rolled us over. For a
moment we were hull-down to the passing discs. From our hull
gravity-plates I flung a full repulsion. Would it stave them off, bend
their orbit outward? It did not. Their course was unaltered.