In spite of himself Kinnison's mind insisted upon painting the ghastly picture: the awful explosion; the pirate's screen still intact; the raving gases driven backward along the tube of force. The bare metal of the Q-gun's breech, he knew, was not and could not be reënforced by the infinitely stronger, although immaterial shields of pure energy which protected the hull; and no conceivable substance, however resistant, could impede, save momentarily, the unimaginable forces about to be unleashed.
Nor would there be time to release the Q-tube after the explosion but before the Brittania's own destruction; for if the enemy's shield stayed up for even a fraction of a second, the unthinkable pressure of the blast would propagate backward through the already densely compressed gases in the tube, would sweep away as though it were nothing the immensely thick metallic barrier of the gun breech, and would wreak within the bowels of the patrol ship a destruction even more complete than that intended for the foe.
Nor were his men in better case. Each knew that this was the climactic instant of his whole existence; that life itself hung poised upon the issue of the next split second. Hurry it up! Snap into it! Will that crawling, creeping thing never strike? Some prayed briefly; some swore bitterly; but prayers and curses were alike unconscious and had precisely the same meaning—each man, white of face and grim of jaw, clenched his hands and waited, tense and straining, for the impact.
III.
The missile struck, and in the instant of its striking the coldly brilliant stars were blotted from sight in a vast globe of intolerable flame. The pirate's shield had failed, and under the cataclysmic force of that horrible detonation the entire nose section of the enemy vessel had flashed into incandescent vapor and had added itself to the rapidly expanding cloud of fire. As it expanded, the cloud cooled. Its fierce glare subsided to a rosy glow, through which the stars again began to shine. It faded, cooled, darkened, revealing the crippled hulk of the pirate ship. She was still fighting; but ineffectually, now that all her heavy forward batteries were gone.
"Needlers, fire at will!" barked Kinnison, and even that feeble resistance was ended. Keen-eyed needle-ray men, working at spy-ray visiplates, bored hole after hole into the captive, seeking out and destroying the control-panels of the remaining beams and screens.
"Pull 'er up!" came the next order. The two ships of space flashed together—the yawning, blasted-open fore end of the once cigar-shaped raider solidly against the Brittania's armored side. A great port opened.
"Now, Bus, it's all yours. Classification to three places—A point A A. They're human or approximately so. Board and storm!"
Back of that port there had been massed a hundred fighting men—dressed in full panoply of space armor, armed with the deadliest weapons known to the science of the age, and powered by the gigantic accumulators of their ship. At their head was Sergeant VanBuskirk, six and a half feet of Dutch-Valerian dynamite, who had fallen out of Valeria's cadet corps only because of an innate inability to master the intricacies of higher mathematics. Now the attackers swept forward in a black-and-silver wave.