"Maybe, but snap out of it, girl—our hearts are still beating! We're not dead yet, and maybe we won't be. Perhaps they want to capture us alive, as they did before; if so, we may be able to hide out on them somewhere and pull off another escape. Things don't look very bright, I know, but we're not checking out until our numbers are actually run up!"
He hooked a hand under her belt as the shocks came closer, and stood tense and ready. The lancing plane cut through one end of their control room, and Stevens leaped with his companion toward the new-made opening; while the air shrieked outward into space and their suits bulged suddenly with the abrupt increase in pressure differential. While they were in midflight, the frightful blade of destruction cleaved its way through the control board and through the spot upon which they had been standing a moment before. As they passed the severed edge, en route into open spare, Stevens seized a metal brace and clung there, every nerve taut.
"Something funny here, Nadia," he said after a little, in a low tone. "They should have made one more cut, to make us absolutely blind and helpless. As it is, they've clipped off all our projectors, so we can't move, but I think we've got the whole control compartment of number two lifeboat untouched. If so, we can look around, anyway. Let's go!"
Floating without effort from fragment to fragment, they made their way toward the section of their cruiser as yet undamaged. They found an airlock in working order, and were soon in the second lifeboat, where Stevens hastily turned on a communicator and peered out into space.
"There they are! There's another stranger out there, too. They're fighting with her, now—that's probably why they didn't polish us off." Steel-braced, clumsy helmets touching, the two Terrestrials stared spell-bound into the plate; watching while the insensately vicious intelligences within the sphere brought its every force to bear upon another and larger sphere which was now so close as to be plainly visible. Like a gigantic drop of quicksilver this second globe appeared—its smooth and highly-polished surface one enormous, perfect, spherical mirror. Watching tensely, they saw flash out that frightful plane of seething energy, with the effects of which they were all too familiar, and saw it strike full upon the dazzling ball.
"This is awful, ace!" Stevens groaned. "They haven't got ray-screens, either, and without them they don't stand a chance. No possible substance can stand up under that beam. When they get done and turn back to us, we'll have to dive back to where we were."
But that brilliant mirror was not as vulnerable as Stevens had supposed. The plane of force struck and clung, but could not penetrate it. Broken up into myriads of scintillating crystals of light, intersecting, multi-colored rays, and cascading flares of sparkling energy, the beam was reflected, thrown back, hurled away on all sides into space in coruscating, blinding torrents. And neither was the monster globe inoffensive. The straining watchers saw a port open suddenly, emit a flame-erupting something, and close as rapidly as it had opened. That something was a projectile, its propelling rockets fiercely aflame; as smoothly brilliant as its mother-ship and seemingly as impervious to the lethal beams of the common foe. Detected almost instantly as it was, it received the full power of the savage attack. The hitherto irresistible plane of force beat upon it; ultra-violet, infra-red, and heat rays enveloped it; there were hurled against it all the forces known to the scientific minds within that fiendishly destructive sphere.
Finally, only a scant few hundreds of yards from its goal, the protective mirror was punctured and the freight of high explosive let go, with a silent, but nevertheless terrific, detonation. But now another torpedo was on its way, and another, and another; boring on ruthlessly toward the smaller sphere. Fighting simultaneously three torpedos and the giant globe, the enemy began dodging, darting hither and thither with a stupendous acceleration; but the tiny pursuers could not be shaken off. At every dodge and turn, steering rockets burst into furious activity and the projectiles rushed ever nearer. Knowing that she had at last encountered a superior force, the sphere turned in mad flight; but, prodigious as was her acceleration, the torpedoes were faster and all three of them struck her at once. There ensued an explosion veritably space-racking in its intensity; a flash of incandescent brilliance that seemed to fill all space, subsiding into a vast volume of tenuous gas which, feebly glowing, flowed about and attached itself to Cantrell's Comet. And in the space where had been the enemy sphere, there was nothing.
A slow-creeping pale blue rod of tangible force reached out from the great sphere, touched the wreckage of the Forlorn Hope, and pulled; gently, but with enormous power.
"Tractor beams again!" exclaimed Stevens, still at the plate. "Everybody's got 'em but us, it seems."