"Cease firing!" Clayton rapped into his microphone. The dreadful beam expired. "Break cone formation! Independent action—light cruisers and scouts, get those bombs! Heavy cruisers and battle cruisers, engage similar units of the Blacks, two to one if possible. Chicago and Boise, attack Black Number One. Bolivar and Himalaya, Number Two. Europa and Johannesburg, Number Three!"
Space was full of darting, flashing, madly warring ships. The three Black super-dreadnaughts leaped forward as one. Their massed batteries of beams, precisely synchronized and aimed, lashed out as one at the nearest Patrol super heavy, the Boise. Under the vicious power of that beautifully-timed thrust that warship's first, second, and third screens, her very wall-shield, flared through the spectrum and into the black. Her Chief Pilot, however, was fast—very fast—and he had a fraction of a second in which to work. Thus, practically in the instant of her wall-shield's failure, she went free; and while she was holed badly and put out of action, she was not blown out of space. In fact, it was learned later that she lost only forty men.
The Blacks were not as fortunate. The Chicago, now without a partner, joined beams with the Bolivar and the Himalaya against Number Two; then, a short half-second later, with her other two sister-ships against Number Three. And in that very short space of time two Black super-dreadnaughts ceased utterly to be.
But also, in that scant second of time, Black Number One had all but disappeared! Her canny commander, with no stomach at all for odds of five to one against, had ordered flight at max; she was already one-sixtieth of a light-year—about one hundred thousand million miles—away from the Earth and was devoting her every energy to the accumulation of still more distance.
"Bolivar! Himalaya!" Clayton barked savagely. "Get him!" He wanted intensely to join the chase, but he couldn't. He had to stay here. And he didn't have time even to swear. Instead, without a break, the words tripping over each other against his teeth: "Chicago! Johannesburg! Europa! Act at will against heaviest craft left. Blast 'em down!"
He gritted his teeth. The scouts and light cruisers were doing their damndest, but they were out-numbered three to one—Christ, what a lot of stuff was getting through! The Blacks wouldn't last long, between the Hill and the heavies ... but maybe long enough, at that—the Patrol globe was leaking like a sieve! He voiced a couple of bursts of deep-space profanity and, although he was almost afraid to look, sneaked a quick peek to see how much was left of the Hill. He looked—and stopped swearing in the middle of a four-letter Anglo-Saxon word.
What he saw simply did not make sense. Those Black bombs should have peeled the armor off of that mountain like the skin off of a nectarine and scattered it from the Pacific to the Mississippi. By now there should be a hole a mile deep where the Hill had been. But there wasn't. The Hill was still there! It might have shrunk a little—Clayton couldn't see very well because of the worse-than-incandescent radiance of the practically continuous, sense-battering, world-shaking atomic detonations—but the Hill was still there!
And as he stared, chilled and shaken, at that indescribably terrific spectacle, a Black cruiser, holed and helpless, fell toward that armored mountain with an acceleration starkly impossible to credit. And when it struck it did not penetrate, and splash, and crater, as it should have done. Instead, it simply spread out, in a thin layer, over an acre or so of the fortress' steep and apparently still armored surface!
"You saw that, Alex? Good. Otherwise you could scarcely believe it," came Kinnison's silent voice. "Tell all our ships to stay away. There's a force of over a hundred thousand G's acting in a direction normal to every point of our surface. The boys are giving it all the decrement they can—somewhere between distance cube and fourth power—but even so it's pretty fierce stuff. How about the Bolivar and the Himalaya? Not having much luck catching Mr. Black, are they?"
"Why, I don't know. I'll check ... No, sir, they aren't. They report that they are losing ground and will soon lose trace."