The fury of the beams rebounded in scintillating torrents, shot off in blinding streamers—
Nor was that superbly disguised citadel designed for defense alone. Knowing now that the last faint hope of continuing in business upon Bronseca was gone, and grimly determined to take full toll of the hated Patrol, the defenders in turn loosed their beams. Five of them shot out simultaneously, and five of the panels of mobile screen flamed instantly into eye-tearing violet. Then black. These were not the comparatively feeble, antiquated rays which Haynes had expected, but were the output of up-to-the-minute, first-line space artillery!
Defenses down, it took but a blink of time to lick up the caterpillars. On, then, the destroying beams tore, each in a direct line for a remote-control station. Through tremendous edifices of masonry and steel they drove, the upper floors collapsing into the cylinders of annihilation only to be consumed almost as fast as they could fall.
"All screen-control stations, back, fast!" Haynes directed crisply. "Back, dodging! Put your screens on automatic block until you get back beyond effective range. Spy-ray men! See if you can locate the enemy observers directing fire!"
But no matter how far back they went, Boskonian beams still sought them out in grimly persistent attempts to slay. Their shielding fields blazed white, their refractories wavered in the high blue as the overdriven refrigerators strove mightily to cope with the terrific load. The operators, stifling, almost roasting in their armor of proof, shook sweat from the eyes they could not reach as they drove themselves and their mechanisms on to even greater efforts; cursing luridly, fulminantly the while at carrying on a space war in the hotly reeking, the hellishly reflecting and heat-retaining environment of a metropolis!
And all around the embattled structure, within the Patrol's now partially open wall of screen, spread holocaust supreme; holocaust spreading wider and wider during each fractional split second. In an instant, it seemed, nearby buildings burst into flame. The fact that they were fireproof meant nothing whatever. The air inside them, heated in moments to a point far above the ignition temperature of organic material, fed furiously upon furniture, rugs, drapes, and whatever else had been left in place. Even without such adventitious aids the air itself, expanding tremendously, irresistibly, drove outward before it the glass of windows and the solid brickwork of walls. And as they fell, glass and brick ceased to exist as such. Falling, they fused; coalescing and again splashing apart as they descended through the inferno of annihilatory vibrations in an appalling rain which might very well have been sprinkled from the hottest middle of the central core of hell itself. And in this fantastically potent, this incredibly corrosive flood the ground itself, the metaled pavement, the sturdily immovable foundations of skyscrapers, dissolved as do lumps of sugar in boiling coffee. Dissolved, slumped down, flowed away in blindingly turbulent streams. Super-structures toppled into disintegration, each discrete particle contributing as it fell to the utterly indescribable fervency of the whole.
More and more panels of mobile screen went down. They were not designed to stand up under such heavy projectors as "Wemblesons" mounted, and the Boskonians blasted them down in order to get at the remote-control operators back of them. Swath after swath of flaming ruin was cut through the Bronsecan capital as the enemy gunners tried to follow the dodging caterpillar tractors.
"Drop down, maulers!" the commander-in-chief ordered. "Low enough so that your screens touch ground. Never mind damage—they'll blast the whole city if we don't stop those beams. Surround him!"