"Are we out?" asked Kromodeor, tersely.
"All done," the Chief Power Officer calmly replied. "We have power left, but we cannot use it, as they have crushed our screens and are fusing our outer walls. Two out of seven chances, and we drew one of them. We are still working on the infra band, over across on the Second's board, but we won't last long...."
As he spoke, the mighty fabric lurched under them, and only their quick and powerful tails, darting in lightning loops about the bars, saved them from being battered to death against the walls as the heptagon was hurled end over end by a stupendous force. With a splintering crash it came to rest upon the ground.
"I wonder how that happened? They should have rayed us out or exploded us," Kromodeor pondered. The Vorkuls, with their inhumanly powerful, sinuous bodies, were scarcely affected by the shock of that frightful fall.
"They must have had a whole battery of pressors on us when our greens went out—they threw us half-way across the city, almost into the gate we made first," Wixill replied, studying the situation of the vessel in the one small screen still in action. "We aren't hurt very badly—only a few holes that they are starting to weld already. When the absorber and dissipator crews get them cooled down enough so that we can use power again, we'll go back."
But they were not to resume their place in the attack. Through the holes in the still-glowing walls, hexan soldiery were leaping in steady streams, fighting with the utmost savagery of their bloodthirsty natures, urged on by the desperation born of the knowledge of imminent defeat and total destruction. Hand-weapons roared, flashed, and sparkled; heavy bars crashed and thudded against crunching bones; mighty bodies and tails whipped crushingly about six-limbed forms which wrenched and tore with monstrously powerful hands and claws. Fiercely and valiantly the Vorkuls fought, but they were outnumbered by hundreds and only one outcome was possible.
Kromodeor was one of the last to go down. Weapons long since exhausted, he unwrapped his deadly coils from about a dead hexan and darted toward a storeroom, only to be cut off by a horde of enemies. Throwing himself down a vertical shaft, he flew toward a tiny projector-locker, in the lowermost part of one of the great star's points, the hexans in hot pursuit. He wrenched the door open, and even while searing planes of force were riddling his body, he trained the frightful weapon he had sought. He pressed the contact, and bursts of intolerable flame swept the entire passage clear of life. Weakly he struggled to go out into the aisle, but his muscles refused to do the bidding of his will and he lay there, twitching feebly.
In the power room of the heptagon a hexan officer turned fiercely to another, who was offering advice.
"Vorkuls? Bah!" he snarled, viciously. "Our race is finished. Die we must, but we shall take with us the one enemy, who above all others needs destruction!" and he hurled the captured Vorkulian fortress into the air.
As the heptagon lurched upward, the massive door of a lower projector locker clanged shut and Kromodeor collapsed in a corner, his consciousness blotted out.