"We still are a-whoopin'; may the rockets roar!"
Even as that plaintive, laughing voice cut across the prostrate, half-blinded man's brain, so spoke more mightily the thunder of the atomics, flinging the mighty hull up the ways into the illimitable starshine. His nerve centers revolted. The agonizing white of afterjets initially super-charged; then that excruciatingly painful splash of furious lightning intermeshed and blazing in supernal glory on the ship's side.
The very roof of the heavens seemed to cleave in twain. The universe became one crazy, all encompassing roar; the skies were a livid, screaming wave of white, brain singeing, ear bursting agony.
Frederix was blasted end over end, his bones snapping like matchwood, intolerable pain crushing in on him—
Vibration upon mad vibration. Reverberation of hell thunder. Pain—unutterable, endless voids of swimming pain—
Consciousness remained. Sound—crushing sound.
And, at length, silence.
The man tried to drag his broken, throbbing, bleeding body from beneath the debris of the hangars against which he had been thrown, which had sheltered him from the highest fury of that unleashed cargo of seedrona, set aspark by the short circuit caused by the disrupting blast of unnatural lightning, radium transformed into flame.
Frederix looked up into the blackness and strained to see beyond it. A faint, almost ironic smile crossed his pain wracked, bleeding lips. Gone, the minions of those who sought to subjugate a system—gone, the deadly cargo which, treated and compressed, would have destroyed the spacestations and laid the World bare to conquest.