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, massive and solidly braced as they were, and anchored by
tractor beams as well, shuddered and trembled throughout their mighty frames under
the impact of fiercely-driven pressors. 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 circumference 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 shells, 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 massive 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 into the trough and
added its hellish 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 walls, projectors, men, 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 circumference 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 shells pierced
the green metal walls, giant beams of force fused and consumed them. Faster and
faster the huge heptagon became a shapeless, flowing mass, 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—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 store-room,
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 a burst of intolerable flame swept the entire passage 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 massive 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 x—you’ve got to hand it to ’em,” Brandon replied.
“Here we thought we knew something about forces and physical phenomena in
general—and those birds’ve 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 by me—you tell ’em. 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 outclassed 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 12
The Citadel in Space
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 scraps 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. “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