Whether the Boskonians expected to meet a perfectly placed fleet or whether they expected to emerge into empty space, to descend upon a defenseless Tellus, is not known or knowable. It is certain, however, that they emerged in the best possible formation to meet anything that could be brought to bear. It is also certain that, had the enemy had a Z9M9Z and a Kinnison-Worsel-Tregonsee combination scanning its Operations tank, the outcome might well have been otherwise than it was.
For that ordinarily insignificant delay, that few minutes of time necessary for the Boskonians' orientation, was exactly that required for these two hundred smoothly working Rigellians to get Civilization's shock globe into position.
A million beams, primaries raised to the hellish heights possible only to Medonian conductors and insulation, lashed out almost as one. Screens stiffened to the urge of every generable watt of defensive power. Bolt after bolt of quasi-solid lightning struck and struck and struck again. Q-type helices bored, gouged and searingly hit. Rods and cones, planes and shears of incredibly condensed pure force clawed, tore and ground in mad abandon. Torpedo after torpedo, charged to the very skin with duodec, loosed its horribly detonant cargo against flinching wall shields, in such numbers and with such violence as to fill all circumambient space with an atmosphere of almost planetary density.
Screen after screen, wall shield after wall shield, in their hundreds and their thousands, went down. A full eighth of the Patrol's entire count of battleships were wrecked, riddled, blown apart or blasted completely out of space in the paralyzingly cataclysmic violence of that first, seconds-long, mind-shaking, space-racking encounter. Nor could it have been otherwise; for this encounter had not been at battle range. Not even at point-blank range; the warring monsters of the void were packed practically screen to screen.
But not a man died—upon Civilization's side at least—even though practically all of the myriad of ships composing the inner sphere, the shock globe, was lost. For they were automatic; manned by robots; what little superintendence was necessary had been furnished by remote control. Indeed it is possible, although perhaps not entirely probable, that the shock globe of the foe was similarly manned.
That first frightful meeting gave time for the reserves of the Patrol to get there, and it was then that the superior Operations control of the Z9M9Z made itself tellingly felt. Ship for ship, beam for beam, screen for screen, the Boskonians were, perhaps, equal to the Patrol; but they did not have the perfection of control necessary for unified action. The field was too immense, the number of contending units too enormously vast. But the mind of each of the three Unattached Lensmen read aright the flashing lights of his particular volume of the gigantic tank and spread their meaning truly in the infinitely smaller space model beside which Admiral Haynes, master tactician, stood. Scanning the entire space of battle as a whole, he rapped out general orders—orders applying, perhaps, to a hundred or to five hundred planetary fleets. Kinnison and his fellows broke these orders down for the operators, who in turn told the vice admirals and rear admirals of the fleets what to do. They gave detailed orders to the units of their commands, and the line officers, knowing exactly what to do and precisely how to do it, did it with neatness and dispatch.
There was no doubt, no uncertainty, no indecision or wavering. The line officers, even the rear and vice admirals, knew nothing, could know nothing whatever of the progress of the engagement as a whole. But they had worked under the Z9M9Z before. They knew that the maestro Haynes did know the battle as a whole. They knew that he was handling them as carefully and as skillfully as a master at chess plays his pieces upon the square-filled board. They knew that Kinnison or Worsel or Tregonsee was assigning no task too difficult of accomplishment. They knew that they could not be taken by surprise, attacked from some unexpected and unprotected direction; knew that, although in those hundreds of thousands of cubic miles of space there were hundreds of thousands of highly inimical and exceedingly powerful ships of war, none of them were, or shortly could be, in position to do them serious harm. If there had been, they would have been pulled out of there, beaucoup fast. They were as safe as anyone in a warship in such a war could expect, or even hope, to be. Therefore they acted instantly; directly, whole-heartedly and efficiently; and it was the Boskonians who were taken, repeatedly and by the thousands, by surprise.