Mason kept anxious watch of the progress of the fleet. No one knew what would happen when the battleships arrived and surrounded the Lavoisier, but they had not long to wait. The ships were hardly more than minutes away from the planet.
As if guided by a single mind, the ships turned slowly in the black sky as their navigators and lookouts spotted and set a course for the luminous bubble that marked the force shell hiding the Lavoisier.
To the crewmen watching from within, it was a fearful sight to witness the sudden plunging flight of those twenty mighty ships. Simultaneously, a score of fearful Atom Streams were turned upon the bubble, apparently not in the futile hope of burning through the protection, but to destroy the minute sensory probes and prevent the ship from navigating away from the planet.
In spatial combat, where the ship was free to wheel and turn and defend itself, it would not have been so easy to destroy the probes. But with the ship motionless upon the surface of the planet, the streams of incomprehensible fire washed over every square millimeter of the surface of the shell, probing, destroying and setting off the multitude of relays within the Lavoisier, closing the hairlike openings in the shell as the probes were burned away.
Mason moved away as one after another of the segments on his plates went dead until there was no vision whatever of the outside world.
He turned to the others and motioned toward the dead plates. "This is it."
The spell that fell upon them was broken minutes later by Illia's abrupt voice on the interphone.
"The operation is finished."