Three times a ray caught the Red Rover for an instant, but her amazing maneuvers, which had evidently been long practised by her crew, carried her on a course so erratic and puzzling that the few rays that found her were soon shaken off.
Before the pirate flier reached the Triton, the treasure vessel was drifting helpless, with all rays out. The Red Rover passed by her, continuing on her dizzily whirling course until she was directly between the two remaining fliers.
"Hold her still," the Prince then shouted into the tube. "And fire all rays, fore and aft."
Blinding opalescent rays jetted viciously from the two rings of tubes. Since the Red Rover lay between the two vessels, they could not avoid firing upon each other. Her own rays, being fired in opposite directions, served to balance each other and hold her at rest, while the rays of the enemy, as well as those of the pirate that impinged upon them, tended to send them into spinning flight through space.
Blinding fluorescence obscured the vitrolite panels, and the stout walls of the Red Rover groaned beneath the pressure of the hail of atoms upon them. Swiftly they would heat, soften, collapse. Or the insulation would burn away and the electric charge electrocute her passengers.
The enemy was in a state as bad. The white beams of the pirate flier had found them earlier, and could be held upon them more efficiently. It was a contest of endurance.
Suddenly the jets of opalescence snapped off the pirate. Bill, gazing out into star-dusted space, saw the two Patrol vessels spinning in mad flight before the pressure of the rays, glowing white in incandescent twisted ruin.
A few minutes later the Red Rover was drifting beside the Triton holding the wrecked treasure-flier with electromagnetic plates. The air-lock of the pirate vessel opened to release a dozen men in metal vacuum suits, armed with ray pistols and equipped with wrecking tools and oxygen lances. The Prince was their leader.
They forced the air-lock of the Triton, and entered the wreck. In a few minutes grotesque metal-suited figures appeared again, carrying heavy leaden tubes filled with the precious vitalium.