From untold millions of projectors there raved out gigantic rods, knives, and needles of force, under the impact of which the defensive screens of Jalte's guardian citadels flamed into terrible refulgence. Duodec bombs were hurled—tight-beam-directed monsters of destruction which, swinging around in huge circles to attain the highest possible measure of momentum, flung themselves against Boskone's defenses in Herculean attempts to smash them down. They exploded; each as it burst filling all nearby space with blindingly intense violet light and with flying scraps of metal. Q-type helices, driven with all the frightful kilowattage possible to Medonian conductors and insulation, screwed in, biting, gouging, tearing in wild abandon. Shear-planes, hellish knives of force beside which Tellurian lightning is pale and wan, struck and struck and struck again—fiendishly, crunchingly.
But those grimly stolid fortresses could take it. They had been repowered; their defenses stiffened to such might as to defy, in the opinion of Boskone's experts, any projectors capable of being mounted upon mobile bases. And not only could they take it—those formidably armed and armored planetoids could dish it out as well. The screens of the Patrol ships flared high into the spectrum under the crushing force of sheer enemy power. Not a few of those defenses were battered down, clear to the wall shields, before the unimaginable ferocity of the Boskonian projectors could be neutralized.
And at this spectacularly frightful deep-space engagement Jalte, Boskone's galactic director, and through him Eichmil, First of Boskone itself, stared in stunned surprise.
"It is insane!" Jalte gloated. "The fools judged our strength by that of Helmuth; not considering that we, as well as they, would be both learning and doing during the intervening time. They have a myriad of ships, but mere numbers will never conquer my outposts, to say nothing of my works here."
"They are not fools. I am not sure—" Eichmil cogitated.
He would have been even less sure could he have listened to a conversation which was even then being held.
"QX, Thorndyke?" Kinnison asked.
"On the green," came instant reply. "Intrinsic, placement, releases—everything on the green!"
"Cut!" and the lone purple circle disappeared from tank and from reducer. The master technician had cut his controls and every pound of metal and other substance surrounding the negasphere had been absorbed by that enigmatic volume of nothingness. No connection or contact with it was now possible; and with its carefully established intrinsic velocity it rushed engulfingly toward the doomed planet. One of the mastodonic fortresses which lay in its path vanished utterly, with nothing save a burst of invisible cosmics to mark its passing. It approached its goal. It was almost upon the planet before any of the defenders perceived it; and even then they could neither understand nor grasp it. All detectors and other warning devices remained static, but: