Here were no feeble spheres of s.p.a.ce, commanding only the limited energies transmitted to their small receptors through the ether. Instead there were all the offensive and defensive weapons developed by hundreds of generations of warrior-scientists; wielding all the incalculable power capable of being produced by the ma.s.sed generators of a mighty nation. But for the breach opened in the circle by the irresistible surprise attack, they would have been invulnerable, and, hampered as they were by the defenseless ends of what should have been an endless ring, the hexans took heavy toll.

The heptagons, ma.s.sive and solidly braced as they were, and anch.o.r.ed by tractor rays as well, shuddered and trembled throughout their mighty frames under the impact of fiercely driven pressor beams. Sullenly radiant green wall-screens flared brighter and brighter as the Vorkulian absorbers and dissipators, mighty as they were, continued more and more to overload; for there were being directed against them beams from the entire remaining circ.u.mference of the stronghold. Every deadly frequency and emanation known to the fiendish hexan intellect, backed by the full power of the city, was poured out against the invaders in sizzling shrieking bars, bands, and planes of frenzied incandescence. Nor was vibratory destruction alone. Armor-piercing projectiles of enormous size and weight were hurled--diamond-hard, drill-headed projectiles which clung and bored upon impact. High-explosive sh.e.l.ls, canisters of gas, and the frightful aerial bombs and radio-dirigible torpedoes of highly scientific war--all were thrown with lavish hand, as fast as the projectors could be served. But thrust for thrust, ray for ray, projectile for ma.s.sive projectile, the Brobdingnagian creations of the Vorkuls gave back to the hexans.

The material lining of the ghastly moat was the only substance capable of resisting the action of its contents, and now, that lining destroyed by the uprooting of the fortress, that corrosive, brilliantly mobile liquid cascaded down in to the trough and added its h.e.l.lish contribution to the furious scene. For whatever that devouring fluid touched flared into yellow flame, gave off clouds of lurid, strangling vapor, and disappeared. But through yellow haze, through blasting frequencies, through clouds of poisonous gas, through rain of metal and through storm of explosive the two cones ground implacably onward, their every offensive weapon centered upon the fast-receding exposed ends of the hexan fortress. Their bombs and torpedoes ripped and tore into the structure beneath the invulnerable shield and exploded, demolishing and hurling aside like straws, the walls, projectors, hexads and vast mountains of earth. Their terrible rays bored in, softening, fusing, volatilizing metal, short-circuiting connections, destroying life far ahead of the point of attack; and, drawn along by the relentlessly creeping composite tractor beam, there progressed around the circ.u.mference of the hexan city two veritable Saturnalia of destruction--uninterrupted, cataclysmic detonations of sound and sizzling, shrieking, multi-colored displays of pyrotechnic incandescence combining to form a spectacle of violence incredible.

But the heptagons could not absorb nor radiate indefinitely those torrents of energy, and soon one greenishly incandescent screen went down. Giant sh.e.l.ls pierced the green metal walls, giant beams of force fused and consumed them. Faster and faster the huge heptagon became a shapeless, flowing ma.s.s, its metal dripping away in flaming gouts of brilliance; then it disappeared utterly in one terrific blast as some probing enemy ray reached a vital part. The cone did not pause nor waver. Many of its component units would go down, but it would go on--and on and on until every hexan trace had disappeared or until the last Vorkulian heptagon had been annihilated.

In one of the lowermost heptagons, one bearing the full brunt of the hexan armament, Kromodeor reared upright as his projector controls went dead beneath his hands. Finding his communicator screens likewise lifeless, he slipped to the floor and wriggled to the room of the Chief Power Officer, where he found Wixill idly fingering his controls.

"Are we out?" asked Kromodeor, tersely.

"All done," the Chief Power Officer calmly replied. "We have power left, but we cannot use it, as they have crushed our screens and are fusing our outer walls. Two out of seven chances, and we drew one of them. We are still working on the infra band, over across on the Second's board, but we won't last long...."

As he spoke, the mighty fabric lurched under them, and only their quick and powerful tails, darting in lightning loops about the bars, saved them from being battered to death against the walls as the heptagon was hurled end over end by a stupendous force. With a splintering crash it came to rest upon the ground.

"I wonder how that happened? They should have rayed us out or exploded us," Kromodeor pondered. The Vorkuls, with their inhumanly powerful, sinuous bodies, were scarcely affected by the shock of that frightful fall.

"They must have had a whole battery of pressors on us when our greens went out--they threw us half-way across the city, almost into the gate we made first," Wixill replied, studying the situation of the vessel in the one small screen still in action. "We aren't hurt very badly--only a few holes that they are starting to weld already. When the absorber and dissipator crews get them cooled down enough so that we can use power again, we'll go back."

But they were not to resume their place in the attack. Through the holes in the still-glowing walls, hexan soldiery were leaping in steady streams, fighting with the utmost savagery of their bloodthirsty natures, urged on by the desperation born of the knowledge of imminent defeat and total destruction. Hand-weapons roared, flashed, and sparkled; heavy bars crashed and thudded against crunching bones; mighty bodies and tails whipped crushingly about six-limbed forms which wrenched and tore with monstrously powerful hands and claws. Fiercely and valiantly the Vorkuls fought, but they were outnumbered by hundreds and only one outcome was possible.

Kromodeor was one of the last to go down. Weapons long since exhausted, he unwrapped his deadly coils from about a dead hexan and darted toward a storeroom, only to be cut off by a horde of enemies. Throwing himself down a vertical shaft, he flew toward a tiny projector-locker, in the lowermost part of one of the great star's points, the hexans in hot pursuit. He wrenched the door open, and even while searing planes of force were riddling his body, he trained the frightful weapon he had sought. He pressed the contact, and bursts of intolerable flame swept the entire pa.s.sage clear of life. Weakly he struggled to go out into the aisle, but his muscles refused to do the bidding of his will and he lay there, twitching feebly.

In the power room of the heptagon a hexan officer turned fiercely to another, who was offering advice.

"Vorkuls? Bah!" he snarled, viciously. "Our race is finished. Die we must, but we shall take with us the one enemy, who above all others needs destruction!" and he hurled the captured Vorkulian fortress into the air.

As the heptagon lurched upward, the ma.s.sive door of a lower projector locker clanged shut and Kromodeor collapsed in a corner, his consciousness blotted out.

"Well, that certainly tears it! That's a ... I...." Stevens' ready vocabulary failed him and he turned to Brandon, who was still staring narrow-eyed into the plate, watching the destruction of the hexan city.

"They've got something, all right--you've got to hand it to them,"

Brandon replied. "And we thought we knew something about forces and physical phenomena in general. Those birds have forgotten more than we ever will know. Just one of those things could take the whole I-P fleet, armed as we are now, any morning before breakfast, just for setting-up exercises. We've got to do something about it--but what?"

"It's okay--whatever you say. There may be an out somewhere, but I don't see it," and Stevens' gloomy tone matched his words.

Highly trained scientists both, they had been watching that which transcended all the science of the inner planets and knew themselves outcla.s.sed immeasurably.

"Only one thing to do, as I see it," Brandon cogitated. "That's to keep on going straight out, the way we're headed now. We'd better call a council of war, to dope out a line of action."

CHAPTER XII

The Citadel in s.p.a.ce

For the first time in many days Brandon and Westfall sat at dinner in the main dining room of the _Sirius_. They were enjoying greatly the unaccustomed pleasure of a leisurely, formal meal; but still their talk concerned the projection of pure forces instead of subjects more appropriate to the table; still their eyes paid more attention to diagrams drawn upon sc.r.a.ps of paper than to the diners about them.

"But I tell you, Quince, you're full of little red ants, clear to the neck!" Brandon snorted, as Westfall waved one of his arguments aside.

"You must have had help to get that far off--no one man could possibly be as wrong as you are. Why, those fields absolutely will...."

"Hi, Quincy! Hi, Norman!" a merry voice interrupted. "Still fighting as usual, I see! What kind of knights are you, anyway, to rescue us poor damsels in distress, and then never even know that we're alive?" A tall, willowy brunette had seen the two physicists as she entered the saloon, and came over to their table, a hand outstretched to each in cordial greeting.

"Ho, Verna!" both men exclaimed, and came to their feet as they welcomed the smiling, graceful newcomer.

"Sit down here, Verna--we have hardly started," Westfall invited, and Brandon looked at the girl in a.s.sumed surprise as she seated herself in the proffered chair.

"Well, Verna, it's like this...." he began.

"That's enough!" she broke in. "That phrase always was your introduction to one of the world's greatest brainstorms. But I know that this is the first time you have had time even to eat like civilized beings, so I'll forgive you this once. Why all the registering of amazement, Norman?"

"I'm astonished that you aren't being monopolized by some husband or other. Surely the officers of the _Arcturus_ weren't so dumb that they'd stand for your still being Verna _Pickering_, were they?"

"Not dumb, Norman, no. Far from it. But I'm still working for my M. R. S. degree, and I haven't succeeded in snaring it yet. You'd be surprised at how cagy those officers got after a few of them had been captured. But they are just like any other hunted game, I suppose--the antelopes that survive get pretty wild, you know," she concluded, plaintively.

"Well, that certainly is one tough break for a poor little girl,"

Brandon sympathized. "Quince, our little Nell, here, hasn't been done right by. I'm bashful and you're a woman-hater, but between us, some way, we've simply got to take steps."

"You might take longer steps than you think," Verna laughed, her regular, white teeth and vivid coloring emphasized by her olive skin and her startling hair, black as Brandon's own. "Perhaps I would like a scientist better than an I-P officer, anyway. The more I think of it, the surer I am that Nadia Newton had the right idea. I believe that I'll catch me a physicist, too--either of you would do quite nicely, I think," and she studied the two men carefully.

Westfall, the methodical and precise, had never been able to defend himself against Verna Pickering's badinage, but Brandon's ready tongue took up the challenge.

"Verna, if you really decided to get any living man he wouldn't stand a chance in the world," he declared. "If you've already made up your mind that I'm your meat, I'll come down like Davy Crockett's c.o.o.n. But if either of us will do, that'll give us each a fifty-fifty chance to escape your toils. What say we play a game of freeze-out to decide it?"

"Fine, Norman! When shall we play?"

"Oh, between Wednesday and Thursday, any week you say," and the two fenced on, banteringly but skilfully, with Westfall an appreciative and unembarra.s.sed listener.

Dinner over, Brandon and Westfall went back to the control room, where they found Stevens already seated at one of the master screens.

"All x, Perce?"

"All x. The observers report no registrations during the last two watches," and the three fell into discussion. Long they talked, studying every angle of the situation confronting them; until suddenly a speaker rattled furiously and an enormous, staring eye filled both master plates. Brandon's hand flashed to a switch, but the image disappeared even before he could establish the full-coverage ray screen.

"I'm on the upper band--take the lower!" he snapped, but Stevens'

projector was already in action. Trained minds all, they knew that some intelligence had traced them, and all realized that it was of the utmost importance to know what and where that intelligence was. Stevens found the probing frequency in his range and they flashed their own beam along it, encountering finally one of the monstrous Vorkulian fortresses, far from Jupiter and almost directly between them and the planet! Its wall screens were in operation, and no frequency at their command could penetrate that neutralizing blanket of vibrations.

"What kind of an eye was that--ever see anything like it, Perce?"

Brandon demanded.

"I don't think so, though of course we got only an awfully short flash of it. It didn't look like the periscopic eyes that those flying snakes had--looked more like a hexan eye, don't you think? Couldn't very well be hexan, though, in that kind of a ship."