For the enemy, as has been said, did not have the Patrol's smooth perfection of control. Thus several of Civilization's fleets, acting in full synchronizing, could and repeatedly did rush upon one unit of the foe; inglobing it, blasting it out of existence, and dashing back to stations; all before the nearest-by fleets of Boskone knew even that a threat was being made. Thus ended the second phase of the battle, the engagement of the two Grand Fleets, with the few remaining thousands of Boskone's battleships taking refuge upon or near the phalanx of planets which had made up their center.
Planets. Seven of them. Armed and powered as only a planet can be armed and powered; with fixed-mount weapons impossible of mounting upon any lesser mobile base, with fixed-mount intakes and generators which only planetary resources could excite or feed. Galactic Civilization's war vessels fell back. Attacking a full-armed planet was no part of their job. And as they fell back, the supermaulers moved ponderously up and went to work. This was their dish; for this they had been designed. Tubes, lances, stilettos of unthinkable energies raved against their mighty screens; bouncing off, glancing away, dissipating themselves in space-torturing discharges as they hurled themselves upon the nearest ground. In and in the monsters bored, inexorably taking up their positions directly over the ultra-protected domes which, their commanders knew, sheltered the vitally important Bergenholms and controls. Then they loosed forces of their own. Forces of such appalling magnitude as to burn out in the twinkling of an eye projector shells of a refractoriness to withstand for ten full seconds the maximum output of a first-class battleship's primary batteries!
The resultant beam was of very short duration, but of utterly intolerable poignancy. No material substance could endure it even momentarily. It pierced instantly the hardest, tightest wall shield known to the scientists of the Patrol. It was the only known thing which could cut or rupture the ultimately stubborn fabric of a Q-type helix. Hence it is not to be wondered at that as those incredible needles of ravening energy stabbed and stabbed and stabbed again at Boskonian domes every man of the Patrol, even Kimball Kinnison, fully expected those domes to go down.
But those domes held. And those fixed-mount projectors hurled back against the supermaulers forces at the impact of which course after course of fierce-driven defensive screen flamed through the spectrum and went down.
"Back! Get them back!" Kinnison whispered, white-lipped, and the attacking structures sullenly, stubbornly gave way.
"Why?" gritted Haynes. "They're all we've got."
"You forget the new one, chief—give us a chance."
"What makes you think it'll work?" the old admiral flashed the searing thought. "It probably won't—and if it doesn't—"
"If it doesn't," the younger man shot back, "we're no worse off than now to use the maulers. But we've got to use the sunbeam now while those planets are together and before they start toward Tellus."