"Kane, you're going to die where you stand!" The earphones almost shook from their connections.
And Jon pulled at Deanne, pulled her prone beside him on the smooth metal of the nearly-flat disc!
"Shield your eyes!"
Every gun in Stine's batteries blazed. Blazed, and smashed inward in a blinding, coruscating sea of blue-white flame that for a moment seemed to rival Procyon herself! For silent seconds, the great ship seemed to devour itself in the pent up energies suddenly unleashed in a single hell-spawned torrent of fire from its erupting bowels, then it was no longer matter but a great wraith of superhot gasses fast dissipating into the dark of Infinity.
"Jon! Jon, darling—"
"It's O.K., princess. It's O.K. now."
"But you—"
"I fixed his guns for him. He made me do it, remember? Oh, I fixed 'em good!"
And then they both laughed. Laughed until the tears came, two pygmies in Space, two pygmies against a solar system of planets with a whole universe to hear them.
Then slowly, two fine trails of fire started toward a slender, streamlined shape that hovered ten thousand miles off.