Four squatly massive semiportable projectors crashed down upon their magnetic clamps and in the fierce ardor of their beams the thick bulkhead before them ran the gamut of the spectrum and puffed outward. Some score of defenders were revealed, likewise clad in armor, and battle again was joined. Explosive and solid bullets detonated against and ricocheted from that highly efficient armor, the beams of DeLameter hand projectors splashed in torrents of man-made lightning off its protective fields of force.

But that skirmish was soon over. The semiportables, whose vast energies no ordinary personal armor could withstand, were brought up and clamped down; and in their holocaust of vibratory destruction all life vanished from the pirates' compartment.

"One more bulkhead and we're in their control room!" VanBuskirk cried. "Beam it down!"

But when the beams pressed their switches nothing happened. The pirates had managed to jury rig a screen generator, and with it had cut the power beams behind the invading forces. Also they had cut loopholes in this bulkhead, through which, in frantic haste, they were trying to bring heavy projectors of their own into alignment.

"Bring up the ferral paste," the sergeant commanded. "Get up as close to that wall as you can, so they can't blast us!"

The paste—an ultra-modern development of thermite—was brought up and the giant Dutchman himself troweled it on in furious swings, from floor up and around in a huge arc and back down to floor. He fired it, and simultaneously some of the enemy gunners managed to angle a projector sharply enough to reach the farther ranks of the enforcement men. Then mingled the flashing, scintillating, gassy glare of the thermite and the raving energy of the pirates' beam to make of that confined space a veritable inferno.

But the paste had done its work, and as the semicircle of wall fell out the soldiers of the Lens leaped through the hole in the still-glowing wall to struggle hand to hand against the pirates, now making a desperate last stand. The semiportables and other heavy ordnance powered from the Brittania's accumulators were, of course, useless. Pistols were ineffective against the pirates' armor of hard alloy; hand rays were equally impotent against its defensive shields.

Now heavy hand grenades began to rain down among the combatants, blowing enforcement men and no few pirates to bits. For the outlaw chiefs cared nothing that they killed some of their own men, if in so doing they could take a proportionately greater toll of the law. And worse, a crew of gunners was swiveling a mighty projector around upon its hastily improvised mount, to cover that sector of the great compartment in which the policemen were most densely massed.

But the minions of the law had one remaining weapon, carried expressly for this eventuality, and no mean weapon it proved to be. The space ax—a combination and sublimation of battle ax, mace, and bludgeon—a massively needle-pointed implement of potentialities limited only by the physical strength and bodily agility of its wielder.