He clicked off. Only minutes later, the combat-alert order came through. In the next ten minutes, Bors's ship hummed for five, was quiet for three, and then, two minutes early, all inner compartment doors closed quietly and there was that muffled stillness which meant that everybody was ready for anything that might happen.
In the control room, Bors watched out of a direct-vision port, giving occasional glances to the screens. There were flecks of light from innumerable stars. Then the shining cloud-bank of the gas-giant planet went black. Screens showed all of the fleet—each blip with a nimbus about it which identified it as a friend, not a foe. There was the blip of the leading ship, the "point" of the formation. There were the flanking ships and all the martial array of the fleet.
Then the screens sparkled with seemingly hundreds of blips which seemed to swirl and spin and whirl again in total and disordered confusion.
Gongs clanged. A voice said, "Co-o-ntact! Enemy fleet ahead. Wide dispersion. They're milling about like gnats on a sunny day!"
A curt and authoritative and well-recognized voice snapped, "All ships keep formation on flagship. Course coordinates...." The voice gave them. "There's a clump of enemy ships beginning to organize! We hit them!"
The fleet of Kandar came around the gas-giant world and flung itself at the fleet of Mekin. It seemed that everything was subject to intolerable delay. For long, sweating, unbearable minutes nothing happened except that the fleet of Kandar went hurtling through space with no sensation or direct evidence of motion. The gas-giant planet dwindled, but not very fast. The bright specks on the screens which were enemy ships seemed to separate as they drew nearer. But all happened with infinite and infuriating deliberation.
It was worth waiting for. There was truly a clumping of enemy ships ahead. Some of them were less than ten miles apart. In a two-hundred-mile sphere there were forty ships. They'd been moving to consolidate themselves into a mutually assisting group. What they accomplished was the provision of a fine accumulation of targets. Before they could organize themselves, the Kandarian fleet swept through them. It vastly outnumbered them in this area.
It smashed them. Bombs flashed in emptiness. There were gas-clouds and smoke-clouds which stayed behind in space as the fleet went on.
"New coordinates," said the familiar authoritative voice. It gave them. "There's another enemy condensation. We hit it!"
The fleet swung in space. It drove on and on and on. Interminable time passed. Then there were flashes brighter than the stars. A Kandar cruiser blew up soundlessly. But far, far away other things detonated, and what had been proud structures of steel and beryllium, armed and manned, became mere incandescent vapor.