Sual Av, from the ‘scope eyepiece, shouted to John Thorn, who was now holding the controls of the Venture.
"League cruisers are pouring up out of Copernicus crater — at least a hundred and fifty of them!"
"Then Copernicus must be where Philip Blaine's laboratories are, where Trask is now!” Gunner yelled.
"We'll hit those cruisers before they can form up for battle!” Thorn cried. “On suits, everybody! Give the order, Lana!"
As the pirate girl shouted the order into the audio, the pirate ships grouped swiftly together into a phalanx of which the Venture was the apex. And as they drove straight down toward the lunar surface, the crews struggled hastily into their suits.
Thorn, at the controls, saw the sunlit surface of the moon rushing up toward them, an airless, white desert plain, with Copernicus crater almost directly underneath, the vast white blankness of the Mare Imbrium northward, and the towering Appenines northwestward.
Out of the circular crater of Copernicus, a fifty-mile plain surrounded by a ring of stupendous peaks, League cruisers were swarming up like startled hornets from their nest. But before they could gain altitude or fall into battle formation, the phalanx of pirate ships crashed down among them.
It was a whirling chaos of battle then for minutes, a raging dogfight of League and pirate ships low across the surface of the moon. Atom-shells clogged space with blinding flares, fatally hit ships went whirling down out of control to crash on the lunar desert, other ships collided in midspace and tumbled in a single twisted mass of wreckage.
But the Companions of Space maintained their formation. The pirates were fighting with traditional ferocity, pouring shells from every gun, increasing the disorganization of the League ships. Unable to form up, broken into scattered groups of ships that rapidly fell prey to the concentrated fire of the pirates, Trask's squadron was losing two ships to the pirates’ one.
When but a score of the League ships survived, those survivors turned and fled back toward Copernicus. At once, Thorn swung the Venture around in the same direction.