Since a base is always much more powerfully armored than is a battleship, the reduction of these fortresses took longer than had the destruction of the fleet. But the bases could no longer draw power from the Sun or from any other heavenly body, and their other sources of power were comparatively weak. Therefore, their defenses also failed under that never-ceasing assault. Course after course their screens went down, and with the last one went the base. The maulers' beams went through metal and masonry as effortlessly as steel-jacketed bullets go through butter, and bored on, deep into the planet's bedrock, before their frightful force was spent.
Then around and around they spiraled, until nothing whatever was left of the Boskonian works; until only a seething, white-hot lake of molten lava in the midst of the planet's frigid waste was all that remained to show that anything had ever been built there.
Surrender had not been thought of. Quarter or clemency had not been asked, nor offered. Victory, of itself, was not enough. This was, and of stern necessity had to be, a war of utter, complete, and merciless extinction.
XIV.
The enemy strongholds so insultingly close to Prime Base having been obliterated, the solarian fleet sailed on into space. For a few weeks game was plentiful enough. Hundreds of raiding vessels were overtaken and held by the patrol cruisers, then blasted to vapor by the maulers.
Many Boskonian bases were also reduced. The locations of most of these had long been known to the intelligence service; others were detected or discovered by the fast-flying cruisers themselves. Marauding vessels revealed the sites of others by succeeding in reaching them before being overtaken by the cruisers. Others were found by the tracers and loops of the signal corps.
Very few of these bases were hidden or in any way difficult of access, and most of them fell before the blasts of a single mauler. But if one mauler was not enough, others were summoned until it did fall. One fortress, a hitherto unknown and surprisingly strong Sector Base, required the concentration of every mauler of the solarian fleet; but they were brought up and the fortress fell. As has been said, this was a war of extinction and every pirate base that was found was reduced.
But one day a cruiser found a base which had not even a spy-ray shield up, and a cursory inspection showed it to be completely empty. Machinery, equipment, stores, and personnel had all been evacuated. Suspicious, the patrol vessels stood off and beamed it from afar, but there were no untoward occurrences. The structures simply slumped down into lava, and that was all.
Every base discovered thereafter was in the same condition, and at the same time the ships of Boskone, formerly so plentiful, disappeared utterly from space. Day after day the cruisers sped hither and thither throughout the vast reaches of the void, at the peak of their unimaginably high pace, without finding a trace of any Boskonian vessel. More remarkable still, and for the first time in years, the ether was absolutely free from Boskonian interference.