"Space battle!"
"Dammit man—Oh God, it's four or six months flight time there, isn't it?"
"Yes," said Paul. "Just stick around. We'll win!"
"Grayson, you've got to win!"
The ice cap was dotted with craters. Tiny spots of black among the sea of glittering white were men struggling in the icy cold to reach the fight for the final link between Mother Earth and her distant Daughter. In the sky above, Isolationist and Coalitionist fought with nerve and iron to separate versus maintain the original solidarity of the galaxy.
Paul, riding the front of the incoming radio beacon beam, had no idea of how the fight was going.
But of Huston's hundred ships and one hundred and seventeen of Hoagland's only nine were left with Huston and seven left with Hoagland. The collected survivors in the relay station numbered thirty souls—determined souls of the same determination of the men who stood at Concord Bridge.
The plain around the station was a mess of bomb craters; desperation measures but all misses. The glass dome itself was holed with a half-gross of shells fired into the station, and three of the big parabolic antenna-reflectors were drilled with four-inch holes but still electrically functional. Master fighters now because they were survivors, Nine and Seven faced one another cautiously. They raced in, faced one another harshly, like frigates sailing in to receive a heavy broadside, clashed, and came on through as Five and Three.
Huston's crew circled in a mad melee, five of them in overwhelming odds now. They herded the Three high, caught them in an englobement, and made a flaming kill a hundred miles above the planet, then raced forward as Hoagland started to flee for his life, his campaign defeated.
With the ice cap dotted with death and wreckage, Huston's command ship left the other four to guard the Upper Sky while he scouted the surface, using his power ruthlessly to cow Hoagland's separated survivors into abject surrender.