For hour on hour, the three great battleships had rushed at their highest speed toward the fateful rendezvous near the distant spark of Deneb, toward which the Empire forces were retreating.
“The Barons are fighting!” Hull Burrel cried to Gordon from the telestereo into which he was peering with flaming eyes. “God, look at the battle off the Cluster!”
“They should be drawing back by now toward the Deneb region as Giron's forces are doing!” Gordon said.
He was stunned by the telestereo scene. Transmitted from one of the Cluster ships in the thick of that great battle, it presented an almost incomprehensible vista of mad conflict.
To the eye, there was little design or purpose in the struggle. The star-decked vault of space near the gigantic ball of suns of Hercules Cluster seemed pricked with tiny flares. Tiny flares, shining forth swiftly and as swiftly vanishing. And each of those flares was the bursting of an atomic broadside far in space.
Gordon could not completely visualize that awful battle. This warfare of the far future was too strange for him to supply from experience the whole meaning of that dance of brilliant death-flares between the stars. This warfare, in which ships far, far apart groped for each other with radar beams and fired their mighty atom-guns by instant mechanical computation, seemed alien and unearthly to him.
The pattern of the battle he witnessed began slowly to emerge. That will-of-the-wisp dance of flares was moving slowly back toward the titanic sun-swarm of the Cluster. The battle-line was crackling and sparkling north and northwest of the great sun-cluster now.
“They're pulling back, as Giron ordered,” Hull Burrel said. “Good God, half the Barons' fleet must be destroyed by now.”
Val Marlann, captain of the Ethne, was like a caged tiger as he paced back and forth between the stereos.
“Look at what's happening to Giron's main fleet retreating from Rigel!” he said hoarsely. “They're hammering it like mad now. Our losses must be tremendous.”
The stereo at which he glared showed Gordon the similar, bigger whirl of death flares withdrawing westward from Rigel.
He thought numbly that it was as well he couldn't visualize this awful armageddon of the galaxy as the others could. It might well shake his nerve disastrously, and he had to keep cool now.
“How long before we'll rendezvous with Giron's fleet and the Barons'?” he said to Val Marlann.
“Twelve hours, at least,” said the other tautly. “And God knows if there'll be any of the Barons' ships left to join up.”
“Curse Shorr Kan and his fanatics” swore Hull, his craggy face crimson with passion. “All these years, they've been building ships and devising new weapons for this war of conquest.”
Gordon went back across the room, to the control-board of the Disruptor apparatus. For the hundredth time since leaving Throon, he rehearsed the method of releasing the mysterious force.
“But what does that force do when I release it?” he wondered again, tensely. “Does it act, as, a giant beam of lethal waves, or a zone of annihilation for solid matter?”
Vain speculation. It could hardly be those things. Brenn Bir would not have left solemn warning that it could destroy the galaxy, if it were!
Hours of awful strain passed as the Ethne's little squadron drew nearer the scene of the titan struggle. Every hour had seen the position of the Empire's forces growing worse.
Giron, retreating southwestward to join the battered Hercules fleet still fighting off the Cluster, had been joined finally by the Lyra, Polaris and Cygnus fleets near the Ursa Nebula.
The Empire commander had turned on the pursuing League armada and had fought savagely there for two hours, a staggering rearguard action that had involved both forces in the glowing Nebula.
Then Gordon heard Giron ordering the action broken off. The order, in secret scrambler-code like all naval messages, came from their own stereos.
“Captain Sandrell, Lyra Division-pull out of the Nebula. The enemy is forcing a column between you and the Cygnus Division.
The Lyra commander's desperate answer flashed. “Their phantoms have piled up the head of our column. But I'll-”
The message was abruptly interrupted, the stereo going dark. Gordon heard Giron vainly calling Sandrell, with no response.
“It's what happens over and over!” raged Hull Burrel. “An Empire ship reports phantoms near, and then suddenly its report breaks off and the ship drifts silent and disabled.
“Shorr Kan's new weapon!” gritted Val Marlann: “If we only had an idea what it is.
Gordon suddenly remembered what Shorr Kan had told him, when he had boasted of that weapon in Thallarna.
”…it's a weapon that can strike down enemy warships from inside them!”
Gordon repeated that to the others and said, “Maybe I'm crazy but it seems to me the only way they could strike down a ship from inside is by getting a force beam of some kind in on the ship's own stereo beams. Every ship that has been stricken has been stereoing at the time.”
“Hull, it could be,” said Val Marlann. “If they can tap onto our stereos and use them as carrier-beams right into our own ships-”
He sprang to the stereo and hastily called Giron and told him their suspicion.
“If you use squirt transmission on our scrambler code it may baffle their new weapon,” Val Marlann concluded. “They won't be able to get a tap on our beams in time. And keep damper-equipment in your stereo-rooms in case they do get through.”
Giron nodded understandingly. “We'll try it. I'll order all our ships to use only momentary transmission, and assemble messages from the squirts on recorders.”
Val Marlann ordered men with “dampers,” the generators of blanketing electric fields that could smother dangerous radiation, to stand by near their own stereos.
Already, the Empire ships were obeying the order and were “squirting” their messages in bursts of a few seconds each.
“It's helping-far fewer of our ships are being disabled now,” Giron reported. “But we've been badly battered and the Barons' fleet is just a remnant. Shall we fall back south into the Cluster?”
“No!” Gordon said. “We daren't use the Disruptor inside the Cluster. You must hold them near Deneb.”
“We'll try,” Giron said grimly. “But unless you get here in the next four hours, there'll not be many of us left to hold.”
“Four hours?” sweated Val Marlann. “I don't know if we can. The Ethne's turbines are running on overload now!”
As the Ethne's small squadron rushed on southward toward the white beacon of Deneb, the great battle east of the star was reeling back toward it.
Death-dance of flaring, falling starships moved steadily westward through the galactic spaces. Up from the south, the battered remnants of the Barons' valiant fleet was coming to join with the Empire and Kingdoms' fleets for the final struggle.
Armageddon of the galaxy, in truth! For now the triumphant two main forces of the Cloud were joining together in the east and rushing forward in their final overwhelming attack.
Gordon saw in the telestereo and radar screens this climactic struggle which the Ethne had almost reached.
“A half hour more-we might make it, we might!” muttered Val Marlann through stiff lips.
The watch officer at the main radar screen suddenly yelled. “Phantoms on our port side.”
Things happened then with rapidity that bewildered John Gordon. Even as he glimpsed the Cloud phantom-cruisers suddenly unmasking in the radar screen, there was a titan flare in, space to their left.
“One of our escort gone!” cried Hull Burrel. “Ah!”
The guns of the Ethne, triggered by mechanical computers swifter than any human mind could be, were going off thunderously.