The warships of Boskone fought back. Many of the Patrol's defensive screens blazed hot enough almost to mask the scarlet beacons; some of them went down. A few Patrol ships were englobed by the concerted action of two or three subfleet commanders more co-operative or more farsighted than the rest, and were blasted out of existence by an overwhelming concentration of power. But even those vessels took toll with their primaries as they went out; few, indeed, were the Boskonians who escaped through holes thus made.
At a predetermined instant each dreadnought stopped, to find herself one nut of an immense, red-flaming hollow sphere of ships packed almost screen to screen. And upon signal every primary projector that could be brought to bear hurled bolt after bolt, as fast as the burned-out shells could be replaced, into the ragingly incandescent inferno which that sphere's interior instantly became. For two hundred million discharges such as those will convert even a very large volume of space into something utterly impossible to describe.
The raving torrents of energy subsided and keen-eyed observers swept the scene of action. Nothing was there except jumbled and tumbling white-hot wreckage. A few vessels had escaped during the closing in of the sphere, but none inside it had survived this climactic action—not one in five thousand of Boskone's massed fleet made its way back to dark Jarnevon.
"Maneuver fifty-eight—hipe!" and Grand Fleet shot away. There was no waiting, no hesitation. Every course and time had been calculated and assigned.
Into the Second Galaxy the scarcely diminished armada of the Patrol hurtled—to Jarnevon's solar system—around it. Once again the crimson sheathing of civilization's messengers almost disappeared in blinding coruscance as the outlying fortresses unleashed their mighty weapons; once again a few ships, subjected to such concentrations of force as to overload their equipment, were lost; but this conflict, although savage in its intensity, was brief. Nothing mobile could endure for long the utterly hellish energies of the primaries, and soon the armored planetoids, too, ceased to be.
Some ships, attacked on every hand, watched meters climb, strain against stopping—and saw huge converters, hopelessly overloaded, vanish in gouts of atomic flame.
"Maneuver fifty-nine—hipe!" and Grand Fleet closed in upon somber Jarnevon itself.