After a moment, the stabilizing energies regained interior control. The images on Elva’s screen steadied. She drew a shaken lungful of air and watched. Out of formation, the Askol plunged within a kilometer of her sister ship the Zuevots—just when that cyclopean hull smashed into the cruiser Fodorev. Fire sheeted as accumulator banks were shorted. The two giants crumpled, glowed white at the point of impact, fused, and spun off in a lunatic waltz. Men and supplies pinwheeled from the cracks gaping in them. Two gun turrets wrapped their long barrels around each other like intertwining snakes. Then the whole mess struck a third vessel. Steel chunks exploded into space.

Through the noise and the human screaming, Golyev’s voice blasted. “Pipe down there! Belay that! By Creation, I’ll shoot the next man who whimpers! The enemy will be here in a minute. All stations, by the numbers, report.”

A measure of discipline returned. These were fighting men. Instruments fingered outward, the remaining computers whirred, minds made deductive leaps, gunners returned to their posts. The Vaynamoan fleet passed through, and the universe exploded in brief pyrotechnics. Many a Chertkoian ship died then, its defenses too battered, its defenders too stunned to ward off the tracking torpedoes. But others fought back, saved themselves, and saw their enemies vanish in the distance.

Still they tumbled off course, their engines helpless to free them. Elva heard a physicist’s clipped tones give the deduction from his readings. The entire fleet had been caught in a cone of gravitational force emanating from that massive object detected in orbit. Like a maelstrom of astronomical dimensions, it had snatched them from their paths. Those closest and in the most intense field strength—a fourth of the armada—had been wrecked by sheer deceleration. Now the force was drawing them down the vortex of itself.

“But that’s impossible!” wailed the Askol’s chief engineer. “A gravity attractor beam of that magnitude …Admiral, it can’t be done! The power requirements would burn out any generator in a microsecond!”

“It’s being done,” said Golyev harshly. “Maybe they figured out a new way to feed energy into a space distorter. Now, where are those figures on intensity? And my slide rule …Yeh. The whole fleet will soon be in a field so powerful that—Well, we won’t let it happen. Stand by to hit that generator with everything we’ve got.”

“But sir …we must have—I don’t know how many ships—close enough to it now to be within total destruction radius.”

“Tough on them. Stand by. Gunnery Control, fire when ready.”

And then, whispered, even though that particular line was private and none else in the ship would hear: “Elva. Are you all right down there? Elva!”

Her hands had eased their trembling enough for her to light a cigarette. She didn’t speak. Let him worry. It might reduce his efficiency.

Her screen did not happen to face the vortex source and thus did not show its destruction by the nuclear barrage. Not that that could have registered. The instant explosion of sun-center ferocity transcended any sense, human or electronic. Down on Vaynamo surface, in broad daylight, they must have turned dazzled eyes from that brilliance. Anyone within a thousand kilometers of those warheads died, no matter how much steel and force field he had interposed. Twoscore Chertkoian ships were suddenly manned by corpses. Those further in were fused to lumps. Still further in, they ceased to exist save as gas at millions of degrees temperature. The vessels already crashed on the giant station were turned into unstable isotopes, their very atoms dying.