The beam winked out, Klovia's sun flashed on. The sunbeam was—and is—clumsy, unwieldy, quite definitely not rapidly maneuverable. But it had done its work; now the component parts of Civilization's Grand Fleet started in to do theirs.
Since the Battle of Klovia—it was and still is called that, as though it were the only battle which that warlike planet has ever seen—has been fought over in the classrooms of practically every civilized planet of two galaxies, it would be redundant to discuss it in detail here.
It was, of course, unique. No other battle like it has ever been fought, either before or since—and let us hope that no other such ever will be. It is studied by strategists, who have so far offered many thousands of widely variant profundities as to what Port Admiral Haynes should have done. Its profound emotional appeal, however, lies only and sheerly in its unorthodoxy. For in the technically proper space battle there is no hand-to-hand fighting, no purely personal heroism, no individual deeds of valor. It is a thing of logic and mathematics and of science, the massing of superior fire power against a well-chosen succession of weaker opponents. When the screens of a spaceship go down that ship is done, her personnel only memories.
But here how different! With the supposed breakdown of the lines of communication to the flagship, the subfleets carried on in formation. With the destruction of the entire center, however, all semblance of organization or of co-operation was lost. Every staff officer knew that no more orders would emanate from the flagship. Each knew chillingly that there could be neither escape nor succor. The captain of each vessel, thoroughly convinced that he knew vastly more than did his fleet commander, proceeded to run the war to suit himself. The outcome was fantastic, so utterly bizarre that the Z9M9Z and her trained co-ordinating officers were useless. Science and tactics and the million lines of communication could do nothing against a foe who insisted upon making it a ship-to-ship, yes, man-to-man affair!
The result was the most gigantic dog fight in the annals of military science. Ships—Civilization's perhaps as eagerly as Boskonia's—cut off their projectors, cut off their screens, the better to ram, to board, to come to grips personally with the enemy. Scout to scout, cruiser to cruiser, battleship to battleship, the insane contagion spread. Haynes and his staff men swore fulminantly, the Rigellians hurled out orders, but those orders simply could not be obeyed. The dog fight spread until it filled a good sixth of Klovia's entire solar system.
Board and storm! Armor—DeLameters—axes! The mad blood lust of hand-to-hand combat, the insensately horrible savagery of our pirate forebears, multiplied by millions and spread out to fill a million million cubic miles of space!