The votron's telepathic dirge chronicled the latter fact. She had expected nothing else.
She had only to find the relay beside her cot, press the key that would set in motion gigantic prime movers in the heart of the great globe, and the conquerors would join the conquered in the wide and nameless grave of space.
But life, now doled out by the second, was too delicious to abandon immediately. Her mind, like that of a drowning person, raced hungrily over the memories of her past.
For twenty years, in company with her great father, she had watched The Defender grow from a vast metal skeleton into a planet-sized battle globe. But it had not grown fast enough, for when the Scythian globe, The Invader, sprang out of black space to enslave the budding Terran Confederacy, The Defender was unfinished, half-equipped, and undermanned.
The Terrans could only fight for time and hope for a miracle.
The Defender, commanded by her father, Gordon, Lord Kane, hurled itself from its orbit around Procyon and met The Invader with giant fission torpedoes.
And then, in an intergalactic proton storm beyond the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, the globes lost their bearings and collided. Hordes of brute-men poured through the crushed outer armor of the stricken Defender.
The prone woman stirred uneasily. Here the images became unreal and terrible, with the recurrent vision of death. It had taken the Scythians nine years to conquer The Defender's outer shell. Then had come that final interview with her father.
"In half an hour our last space port will be captured," he had telepathed curtly. "Only one more messenger ship can leave The Defender. Be on it."
"No. I shall die here."