"Now, Joey!" almost screamed Slops. "Aim the cannon at the rubble. Hold it firm. Full strength!"
And I did. I yanked the controls over to full power and aimed the heat gun straight into the heart of the rubble. The radiation was invisible, of course. Our enemies couldn't know we had an operative weapon. I held it for seconds which dragged like centuries. Nearer we were hurtling toward doom, nearer and nearer.
I cried, "Nothing's happening, Skipper! We're going to crash in a minute. I might as well turn the gun on one of their ships—"
"Hold it!" shrieked Captain Slops. "It's working as I hoped. Hold it steady, Joey!"
And now, returning my gaze to the target, I saw what he meant. Something strange and weird was happening—not to us or to the enemy spacecraft, but to the Bog itself! Like a huge, churning kettle it was seething, rolling, boiling! And even as I cried aloud my astonishment, one of the tinier bits of matter plummeted down from the overhanging canopy of death to rattle against the hull of Ras Thuul's flagship.
Then another ... and another ... and then a large piece. A hunk of rock which must have weighed half a ton. It struck one of the Jovian vessels like a sledgehammer, and a huge gap split in the spaceship's seams. There came signs of frenzied activity from aboard the enemy boat; fire spurted from stern-jets as engineers hurriedly warmed their rockets.
We saw two warships, desperately trying to get under way, ram each other head on. Three more were crushed, beaten shapeless, by the tons of stony metal that smashed their very girders. The last, Ras Thuul's flagship, met its doom most horribly. It was caught as in a vise between two mountainous boulders which rolled tangentially over it. When they separated, all that remained of a once proud ship was a flattened, lacerated shred of tortured steel.
In the unbelievable shambles, two of the cruisers collided.