"Bandits dead ahead," droned the voice from the radar bridge calmly, "trying to envelop us."
Tom's hand shot out for the intercom to relay orders to the power deck and glanced quickly at the scanner. He almost cheered. "Steve—I mean, Captain Strong. The rest of the fleet! It's coming in! Attacking from top-side!"
"By the craters of Luna, you're right!" yelled the young Solar Guard captain, as he saw the white blips on the scanner screen. "O.K., it's time to stop running and fight!"
The Solar Guard reinforcements swooped down on the fighting ships with dazzling speed, and the sky over the jungle belt of Venus base was so thick with zooming, firing, maneuvering ships that observers on the ground couldn't tell one ship from another. For an hour the battle raged. During the seesawing back and forth it seemed as if all ships must be blasted into space junk. Finally the superior maneuvering and over-all spacemanship of the Solar Guard vessels began to count heavily, and the Nationalist ships began to plunge into the jungle or drift helplessly out into space. Reforming, the Solar Guard ships encircled the enemy in a deadly englobement pattern, and wheeling in great co-ordinated arcs through space, sent combined volleys of torpedoes crashing into the enemy ships. The space battle was over, a complete Solar Guard victory.
Strong called to the remaining ships of his fleet, "Take formation K. Land and attack the enemy base according to prearranged order. The enemy fleet is destroyed, but we still have a big job to do."
"What happens now, sir?" asked Tom, relaxing for the first time since the space battle had begun.
"We try to destroy their base and put an end to this rebellion as quickly as possible," replied Strong coldly.
One by one, the ships of the Solar Guard fleet landed around the rim of the canyon base. Troop carriers, that had stood off while the space battle raged, disgorged hundreds of tough Solar Guard Marines, each carrying shock rifles, paralo-ray pistols, and small narco grenades that would put an enemy to sleep in five seconds. A half-hour later, after the last Nationalist ship had been blasted out of the skies, the rim of the canyon was alive with Solar Guardsmen waiting to go into action. Many had comrades in the Solar Guard ships lost in the space fight and they were eager to avenge their friends.
"How many ships did we lose, sir?" asked Tom, after the squadron commanders had made their reports to Captain Strong.
"Forty," said Strong grimly. "But the entire Nationalist fleet was wiped out. Thank the universe that their radar was knocked out, or we would have been completely wiped out."