"You said it." A shiver of fear gripped the young man, and he could feel himself trembling. His father threw a comforting arm across his shoulders. "First battles are always toughest," he said evenly, and Hanlon calmed instantly.
He turned his attention to the screen again. That neighboring ship was struggling desperately to escape, knowing she could not stand much more.
"What's the matter with that pilot?" Hanlon yelled. "Why don't he flip her over and beat it?"
"Seems to be held by something," his father's anxious voice was tense. "Have those others got some sort of tractor beam?"
"Tractors?" Hanlon looked up in surprise. "I've read about them, but thought they were impossible."
"Impossible to us because we haven't got 'em yet," Newton said absently. "They are theoretically possible."
Every beam from every Corps ship was piercing downward. Suddenly other ships were appearing, and the young man realized that the light cruisers were coming down to add their might to that of the battleships and heavies.
Four of the light cruisers maneuvered swiftly below the battleship next to the Sirius, one below the other, and in the instant of their alignment the big ship broke free, while the others flashed away from that restricting, holding tractor, or whatever it was.
It seemed like hours that Hanlon's eyes strained, trying to see what was going on. They had slowed, his spaceman's sense told him, and now he could see they were within the atmosphere, not too high above the ground. Now he could make out huge, squat mechanisms from which those deadly rays were pouring.
The Guddus, with their lack of knowledge of things mechanical, had not reported these to Hanlon, else he could have warned Admiral Ferguson about them, and the attack might possibly have been handled differently.