Their defensive screens radiated fiercely, high into the violet, under the appalling punishment being dealt out to them by the batteries of ship and shore, but they did not go down. Nor did the grip of a single tractor loosen from its anchorage. And in minutes the squat and monstrous maulers came up. Out went their cosmic-energy blocking screens, out shot their tractor beams, and out from the refractory throats of their stupendous projectors there raved the most terrifically destructive forces generable by man.
Boskonian outer screens scarcely even flickered as they went down before the immeasurable, the incredible violence of that thrust. The second course offered a briefly brilliant burst of violet radiance as it gave way. The inner screen resisted stubbornly as it ran the spectrum in a wildly coruscant display of pyrotechnic splendor; but it, too, went through the ultra-violet and into the black.
Now the wall shield itself—that inconceivably rigid fabrication of pure force, which only the instantaneous detonation of twenty metric tons of "duodec" had ever been known to rupture—was all that barred from the base metal of Boskonian walls the utterly indescribable fury of the maulers' beams. Now force was streaming from that shield in veritable torrents.
So terrible were the conflicting energies there at grips that their neutralization was actually visible and tangible. In sheets and masses, in terrific, ether-racking vortices, and in miles-long, pillaring streamers and flashes, those energies were being hurled away—hurled to all the points of the sphere's full compass, filling and suffusing all near-by space.
The Boskonian commanders stared at their instruments, first in bewildered amazement and then in sheer, stark, unbelieving horror as their power intake dropped to zero and their wall shields began to fail—and still the attack continued in never-lessening power. Surely that beaming must slacken down soon. No conceivable mobile plant could throw such a load for long!
But those mobile plants could—and did. The attack kept up, at the extremely high level upon which it had begun. No ordinary storage cells fed those mighty projectors; along no ordinary busbars were their Titanic amperages borne. Those maulers were designed to do just one thing—to maul—and that one thing they did well, relentlessly and thoroughly.
Higher and higher into the spectrum the defending wall shields began to radiate. At the first blast they had leaped almost through the visible spectrum, in one unbearably fierce succession of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and indigo, up to a sultry, coruscating, blindingly hard violet. Now the doomed shields began leaping erratically into the ultra-violet. To the eye they were already invisible; upon the recorders they were showing momentary flashes of black.
Soon they went down; and in the instant of each failure one vessel of Boskonia was no more. For, that last defense gone, nothing save unresisting metal was left to withstand the ardor of those ultra-powerful, ravening beams. As has already been said, no substance, however refractory or resistant or inert, can endure even momentarily in such a field of force. Therefore, every atom, alike of vessel and of contents, went to make up the searing, seething burst of brilliant, incandescently luminous vapor which suffused all circumambient space.
Thus passed out of the scheme of things the vessels of the solarian detachment of Boskonia. Not a single vessel escaped; the cruisers saw to that. And then the attack thundered on to the bases themselves. Here the cruisers were useless; they merely formed an observant fringe, the while continuing to so blanket all channels of communication that the doomed bases could send out no word of what was happening to them. The maulers moved up and grimly, doggedly, methodically went to work.