The Mephistan fleet became a flaring holocaust of coruscating flame.
When the fifteen-minute deadline came, the Terrans fought a remainder of the huge Mephistan horde that had tried to stop them. The dead hulls, still incandescent, were easy to dodge, though most of them had fallen free long enough before to have them cross Terra's course ahead rather than at coincidence.
Combining the big turrets of the sluggers with the primary, secondary, and tertiary batteries of the constellation ships, Terra's forces fairly crushed the fragments of Mephisto's horde that remained.
And then the sky was clear once more. The winking lights of death were silent. The furor and clatter of the instrument rooms ceased more slowly as the alarms continued to pick out detritus and to reject such harmless stuff. The power rooms were quiet, too, and the generator rooms no longer resounded to the scream of overworked generators. A clean-up began, and droplets of metal from blown fuses mingled with blackened bits of contalloy from the circuit breakers. Pyrometers dropped back to the central portion of their scales, and the air, acrid and warm, cooled and became sweet again.
They looked, and saw that the sky was theirs—completely.
Mephisto was a disk in the sky below them.
It beckoned—or did it taunt?
XI.