From our own cruiser, below me, there came now a running of feet and a shouting of hoarse voices, while there was a jarring and clanging of metal as the ray-tubes in the cruiser's sides were quickly made ready for action. Our speed was swiftly decreasing, now, and as I glanced ahead I saw that the globe-men's ships were apparently slackening speed also, advancing toward us more slowly and moving now in two short columns. They knew, as well as we, that if both fleets used their maximum speed they would be unable to make contact with each other, and they sought a decision no less than we.
Slowly, now, ever more slowly, the two fleets were moving toward each other. I could now plainly observe the approaching enemy cruisers, very similar in design to our own but with shorter, thicker hulls, their globe-men pilots plainly visible in their bright-lit conning-towers. Headlong they came toward us, and headlong we advanced to meet them. Then, when the two fleets were almost at the point of colliding, there leaped out toward us from the oncoming cruisers a multitude of balls of destroying pink fire.
I had been expecting this, and at the moment they fired I spoke a single word into the telestereo. Instantly our own cruiser and the whole vast fleet behind it slanted sharply upward, while the globe-men craft and their balls of fire passed harmlessly beneath us. And as we swept over them there burned down from our own cruisers the blue de-atomizing ray, striking more than a score of ships in the fleet below and annihilating them instantly. In a moment we had passed them and at once we circled, massed, and then sped back to strike another blow at the enemy fleet, which had also circled and was coming to meet us.
Again the two fleets were racing toward each other, and as they neared each other, rosy fire and blue ray crossed and clashed from fleet to fleet. I saw the flame-balls strike cruisers around and behind us, cruisers that vanished in whirling storms of fire, though fire it could not have been that raged so fiercely there in the airless void. In the other fleet, ship after ship was flashing into blinding blue light and disappearing, as our rays struck them. Then the two fleets had met, had mixed and mingled, so that the battle changed suddenly to myriad individual combats between cruisers, whirling and striking and falling there in the great gulf between the coldly smiling stars, flaring into pink flame or blue light and vanishing from sight.
"They whirled and struck and fell there in the great gulf between the coldly smiling stars."
Toward us flashed an enemy cruiser, but as its rosy flame leapt toward us we veered sharply to one side, while at the same moment there came from the hull beneath me the hiss of released rays. They struck the tail of the other, which had swerved a moment too late, and the next moment it flared a blue-lit wreck, then vanished. But now two enemy cruisers were swooping down on us from above, ramming headlong toward us. There was no time for us to twist aside from that fierce plunge, but before they could loose their flame upon us the blue ray of a ship beyond us stabbed across and struck one of the two, and in the moment that it hovered there, luminous with its own destruction, the other smashed squarely into it and then both had flared and vanished.