So unexpected was the move that it caught the enemy gunner napping. For an instant he had a clear target before him. But he had not been expecting such luck, and before he could center his sights on the Chickadee, the smaller vessel was streaking down upon and over his own.
And Salvation Smith's voice shouted triumph through the room. "'Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord!'" he intoned, "'I shall repay!'" His hand jerked the release-stud.
And as though the metal skin of the enemy boat were tinfoil held above a flame, there appeared suddenly upon its hull a leprous spot of black, from the curling edges of which silvery alloy sloughed off in rolling, sluggish waves. From within the ship small motes poured forth, sucked out by the frigid vacuum of space to explode and die frightfully; sore, raw, pressured clots of matter that had been men. The other ship reeled for a moment like a stricken hart, then crumpled upon itself, a wildly spinning boomerang of death.
"You got 'em!" squealed Syd Palmer from his vantage spot at the perilens. "Got 'em all, Padre! No—there goes a life-skiff from the wreck!" His voice rose in sharp fear. "Omigod! Swing out, Chip! Swing—"
But Chip had seen the new danger as quickly as his comrade. Here was peril beyond Amborg's fondest devising. As the stricken ship, folding upon itself, spun aimlessly in space, its forejet wheeled like a flaming spiral—and from the prow still flamed the withering, crimson ray now untended by living hands!
Like a gigantic scythe it flailed the ether, swinging a huge curve directly toward the Chickadee. Vainly Chip jammed the studs before him, striving to escape above, below or beyond that sword of doom.
There came the ear-splitting crash of impact, metal screamed thin agony, rending itself to shreds somewhere aft; the Chickadee shuddered like a pole-felled steer under its mortal wound.
Instinct shot Chip's hands to the lock-stud which sealed the control chamber airtight from the rest of the ship; that action alone spared them for a few minutes. But each of them knew the ship was doomed to crash. Syd croaked, "Here! The bulgers! Get in them—quick!"
Split seconds later, they were three grotesque figures huddled before the control board, staring through quartzite globular headpanes at Chip's last, frenzied efforts to break the fall of the Chickadee. The studs beneath his fingers were unresponsive as the inarticulate phalanges of a broken limb. In vain and desperately he struggled to gain a modicum of control over the falling craft, now firmly gripped by Titania's gravitational field. They had fallen into the high atmosphere of the little globe, now; thin winds howled and bansheed about their sharded hull, and the walls of the room began to heat.
The aft jets were dead, the anti-gravs broken, helpless. There remained but one possible way in which to keep them from being crushed to bits. A prow landing, braked by the fore jets. It was dangerous, but—