Holes poked in the ultra-hard glass dome near the edge of the station wall sprouted revolver barrels. The relay station became a block house protected by Huston's survivors. The first crash had been a blessing instead of a defeat, for Huston's men defended the station against Hoagland's surviving crews. Huston's survivors made their way to the station, leaving their dead and the dead of their enemy on the ice behind them, and bit by bit the numbers embattled in the relay station grew.
For any one of Hoagland's men, once within the station, could stop this battle merely by firing a single revolver shot through one of the vitals of the radio beacon receiver. Or hitting it with any hard instrument. Or just by flipping the "ON-OFF" toggle switch that controlled the entire station.
Both flights, diminished now, hit one another in a mad pass high above the planet. Space filled with bits of jagged metal and the silent shells that would someday end up as satellites to some distant sun—to possibly confuse some space miner that found a piece of nickel-steel completely machined and fitted with copper expansion-bands in an orbit around an unpopulated stellar system.
Numbers being equal, Huston's men had one small advantage. They wanted to hit Hoagland's crew. Hoagland's gang had two objectives. They wanted to destroy the station, and so part of their efforts was directed towards the station itself while only the rest was directed at Huston's flight.
The flights passed through one another leaving space strewn with ruin; and circled down on opposite sides of a great circle to cross the ice cap face to face again only a few miles above the relay station perched precisely on the polar axis. The wind whistled and the odd-smelling atmosphere took on another odor as the battle raged briefly above the relay station. The ice was dotted again with divots of flaming hell thrown high by missed bombs and water ran from the hot craters in starred rivulets to freeze later in a curiously beautiful pattern.
Again diminished, the flights whirled, stalking and sparring like swordsmen, cautious, angry, hating.
And while the embattled fleets of spacecraft circled one another, Paul Grayson was far in space, coming out of superdrive, confident that he had outrun or at least disappeared from instant contact with the enemy. Alpha IV was far, far behind. Latham's Triplets were only stars in a neat equilateral triangle below. Very bright stars, but none the less true stars showing no disc to the naked eye.
"Now what?" asked Stacey. "That was damned close, Little Friend."
"Do we go back?" asked Nora.
"I'd rather not," said Stacey. "I prefer to die in bed at the age of one hundred and seventeen after a long, pleasant, active, and interesting life."