"Gor Han! Najus Nar!" I shouted, as I saw them fall; then a deadly bolt of blinding crimson fire flashed past our cruiser's walls, missing us only by inches; I yelled crazily as the cube above that had loosed it was driven smashingly into the battle whirl about us by our swift-leaping force-beam. But about us now our cruisers were swiftly vanishing, as the hordes of cube-ships rushed upon them! They were stabbing out with black beams to the bitter end, driving cubes down to death with those beams, yet they were fast disappearing beneath the withering hail of deadly crimson electrical bolts. But a score of cruisers remained beside me, now but a dozen, as the crimson bolts still flashed thick, Jurt Tul's ship fighting side by side with my own. Then, as but a scant five or six cruisers remained, the target of all the blasting bolts from the massed cubes about us, there penetrated through the deafening roar of battle from the speech-instrument Jurt Tul's great voice.
"Back out of the comet!" he yelled. "It's our only chance, Khel Ken-to get outside until the rest of the Patrol's cruisers arrive!"
I saw, even through my mad bloodlust at that moment, that he was right and that our only chance of further action lay in winning clear of the comet. "Back, then!" I cried.
With the words our half-dozen cruisers zoomed upward and outward at such tremendous velocity that the deadly bolls from the thousands of cubes beneath fell short of us in our wild upward rush. Up-up-upward from that central world we shot, and outward. The cube-ships beneath were taken by surprise for the moment, then massed also and leapt up after us. And now, a scant six cruisers remaining of all the thousand that had been our force a few minutes before, we raced out from that central world, toward the darker circle in the distant coma's wall that was the one passage to outside space. Out over the ring of revolving disk-worlds we shot, out toward that opening, out-
But what was that? That swarm of tiny, square shapes, of gleaming little cube-shapes, which even at that distance we could see had darted suddenly from one side across the dark circle of the single opening? Close-massed in a compact swarm, they had shot out from the side to halt across that opening, hanging motionless there. Cube-ships, hundreds in number, that had flashed toward that opening from one side, to hang motionless there across it, while behind us there raced after us in deadly pursuit the other cube-ship thousands! Cube-ships that hung motionless, ready, across that round opening through the great coma, and at sight of which I cried aloud once more.
"They've cut us off-they're ahead of us!" I cried. "They've barred the one way to outside space and we're trapped here at the comet's heart!"
III
The moment that followed, as our ships slowed and hung motionless, with doom ahead and doom behind, was one in which the death that we had dared a score of times since reaching the comet loomed full before us. The cube-ships that barred the way ahead, the thousands racing toward us from behind-these were like death's great jaws closing upon us, and for an instant I felt myself surrendering to utter despair. But then, as my eyes dropped downward, toward the ring of outer smaller disk-worlds over which we had been flashing and above which we now hung, a flicker of hope shot through me and I turned swiftly to the speech-instrument.
"Down to those worlds below!" I cried. "There's a chance that we can hide on one of them until we can get out of the comet!"
Instantly, spurred to greater swiftness by our desperate situation, our half-dozen cruisers were slanting sharply down toward one of those revolving disk-worlds. The surface of that world leapt up with terrific speed toward us as we shot recklessly downward, and I sighted cities of pits and streets and mechanisms like that of the central world upon it, cities though that did not cover all its surface as in the central world, but were scattered about it, the rest of the disk-world's surface being a tumbled mass of mighty mountains and chasmed valleys, all of barren dark rock. It was down toward one of these tremendous chasms, near the disk-world's outer edge, that we were heading, every feature of that world's surface lying plain beneath us in the strange white light that bathed all these revolving worlds. Downward into that awful chasm our cruisers shot, and as they did so I glimpsed, high above, a swarm of tiny dark cube-shapes that had halted their pursuit of us, were circling about and dropping lower as though to discover our whereabouts!
Our lives depended on finding some place of hiding in this tremendous-walled chasm, I knew, and as we arrowed down, into its depths, white-lit by the same strange illumination, I gazed swiftly about for some place of concealment. A moment the search seemed hopeless, there being nothing but the chasm's narrow floor of barren rock, its towering jagged rock sides, and then as we shot along its length I sighted a great crack or crevice in one of them, a long, crack-like opening that was large enough to admit our cruisers, and behind which could be glimpsed the dark depths of some great cavernous hollow in the rock.
"Through that crack!" I ordered swiftly, saw Jurt Tul's cruiser move quickly toward it, scraping against the crack's jagged edges as it pushed through into the dark cavern behind. Another of our cruisers followed, and then the rest, one by one, until my own was scraping inside, just as I saw the cube-ships high above dropping toward us, splitting into divisions of a dozen ships each which were slanting down over all the surface of this world in search of us, one of them heading straight toward the great chasm!
As it slanted down toward us I gazed about me, saw that our six cruisers were hanging in a dark, cavernous abyss that seemed to extend far down into the depths of this disk-world. A rocky shelf just inside the crack-opening, though, seemed large enough for us to rest our ships upon; so instantly we brought them to rest there, cutting off the generators whose humming might betray us. Then, as our space-doors opened with a slight inward hiss from the higher-pressure air of the disk's atmosphere, I stepped quickly out, found Jurt Tul and the other cruiser captains beside me, and then we had all suddenly crouched down inside the great crack's edge as a score of the great cube-ships shot down into the white-lit chasm outside.
Peering out from the cavern's dark depths we saw those cubes hanging there, then moving slowly along the chasm's length as though in search of us. Down its length they disappeared and we breathed easier for a moment; then they reappeared, coming to rest on the chasm's floor directly beneath the opening in which we crouched, scarce a half-hundred feet below us. Tensely we watched, saw the doors were opening in those cubes' sides, creatures emerging, the comet-creatures of these strange worlds. And at sight of those creatures even our tense situation could not suppress our gasps. For they were-liquid-creatures! Creatures whose bodies were liquid instead of solid, creatures that were each but a pool of thick black liquid, flowing viscously about, in each of which pools floated two round, white blank disks, great white pupilless eyes.