For I knew, even in that desperate instant, that that was the explanation. Those red-shining ships had been specially designed to project a great force into the ether behind them that would cause gigantic currents to whirl through that ether instantly, and the flight of the serpent-fleet had been feigned to give them a chance to use those ships! They had loosed the vast ether-currents behind them as they fled on before us, currents that had flung the ships of our fleet to all sides like a handful of toys as we raced into them! And now, with our ships scattered far across the heavens in all directions, our fleet shattered and disorganized and incapable of resistance, the massed thousands of serpent-ships ahead had turned and were racing back toward us!
Back they came, flashing in a close-massed formation still, gathered thousands of great ships speeding back upon our own ship and upon the few hundreds of our ships scattered directly about us. In an instant more they would reach us, and the death-beams of their mighty fleet would sweep us out of existence, would wipe out our few ships and proceed onward, annihilating the far-scattered ships of our great fleet before they could gather to resist! Motionless we hung there in space, in that instant, as they raced back toward us, the remnant of their mighty fleet looming vast before us, and I heard as through a great stillness the clang of the cylinders beneath as our Andromedans swung them forward, to die fighting to the last!
"It's the end, Dur Nal!" Jhul Din was shouting, and I turned to him, my eyes meeting his strangely, steadily, in that instant.
"The end for us—and for our universe," I said, softly. Then in the next instant the mighty serpent-fleet was looming gigantic above and ahead of us, was flashing down in one titanic swoop upon us!
But what was that? Midway in that swooping plunge the serpent-fleet had halted, had recoiled! In a daze we looked up toward it, about us, behind us—and then we were crying out in our excitement. For there from above and behind us was racing toward us a new, tremendous fleet of ships, ships that were not oval like the serpent-ships, or long and flat like our Andromedan craft, but were long and tapering and cigar-like, as the ships of the Interstellar Patrol had been! In a vast armada of tens of thousands they were sweeping out from the center of our galaxy, toward and over us at a speed equal to our greatest speed, and then from them narrow rays of dazzling red light were springing out, striking thick among the massed serpent-ships ahead, annihilating those they struck in bursts of blinding crimson light! And as I saw that I cried aloud again.
"They're our own galaxy's ships!" My great cry was like a trumpet-call of faith and hope in that mad moment. "They're the great fleet of ships the Council Chief said they'd build—and they're striking out now with us to save our universe!"
16. From Outside the Universe!
The moment that followed was one of action and combat on such a scale as to stun the senses. Even as the great fleet of our galaxy rushed forward upon the serpent-fleet that had recoiled before it, the far-scattered ships of our own great armada had had time to rush in toward me again, to mass behind me. Then, as my fingers flashed down on the signal-keys, our own Andromedan fleet and the mighty galaxy-fleet above us were leaping as one toward the serpent-ships! Before those ships had time to dodge us we were upon them, the galaxy-fleet flashing above them and our own beneath them, and as we flashed thus above and beneath them thousands of deadly force-shafts struck up toward the serpent-ships from beneath, while from above countless brilliant crimson rays burned down toward them.
It was a scene unimaginable, that, as the three great fleets crossed and clashed. Three titanic armadas, each of thousands of close-massed mighty ships, that whirled and struck and ran there in the space between the crowding stars, three far-distant universes coming at last to death-grips within one of those universes. Flashing beneath the serpent-fleet it seemed that in all the firmament above us was but a single vast mass of oval ships, and as our invisible force-shafts stabbed up in swift revenge toward those ships they were crumpling here and there, collapsing and falling, whirling away toward the nearest of the thundering suns about us, while other ships among and above them were flaring wildly in great explosions of crimson light and vanishing as the annihilating rays of the fleet of the Federated Suns struck down upon them from above.