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Updated: May 6, 2025
Therefore Mars was not exactly habitable to Miran ships, because the great beams had been so perfectly figured that they were effective at a range of nearly twelve hundred miles. Deenmor station was attacked but it was a half-hearted attack, for Mirans were becoming distinctly skittish about fifteen-foot UV beams. Two badly blistered ships and the Mirans retreated to Jupiter.
There was one other station on Mars that stood a good chance of survival, Deenmor Station, with three of the big beams installed, and apparatus for their fourth was in the station, and being rapidly worked over. McLaurin did a wise and courageous thing, at which every man on Mars cursed.
They could, of course, have damaged it, but not severely enough to make up for the loss of their strictly limited power. The photocells had been working overtime, every minute of available light had been used, and still scarcely 2100 tons of charged mercury remained in the tanks of Mars Center and 1950 in the tanks at Deenmor.
To Phobos they went first, to the little inner satellite of Mars, scarcely eight miles in diameter, a tiny bit of broken metal and rock, utterly airless, but scarcely more than 3700 miles from the surface of Mars below. The Mars Center and Deenmor forts were wasting no power raying a ship at that distance.
The magnetic shield that had been re-established for the few minutes of this last, dying sting, fell. Deenmor station vanished in a sudden, colossal tongue of blue-green light as the ton of atomically distorted mercury was exploded by a projector beam turned on the tank.
Kendall switched on a noisy, humming fan viciously. The too-intelligible signals were drowned in its sound. "And tell them to destroy the apparatus before the last of the power is gone," McLaurin ordered softly. The men in Deenmor station did slightly better than that. Gradually they cut down their magnetic shield, and some of the magnetic bombs tore and twisted viciously at the heavy metal walls.
Methodically the men in Deenmor station used all but one ton of their power to completely and forever wreck and destroy the interstellar cripple that floundered for a few moments on the sands a bare mile away. Presently, before Deenmor was through with it, the atomic bombs stopped coming, and the atomic shells.
So if there's any question about getting the focus, we'll get along without it." "A real help, if you do. That would punch a hole before the Stranger ship could turn away as they do now." Kendall nodded. "That's what I was after. It is mainly for the forts, though. We'll have to signal the dope to the Mars Center and Deenmor stations. They can fix it up, themselves.
He ordered that all IP stations save these two be deserted, and all mercury fuel reserves be moved to Deenmor and Mars Center. The Mirans could not land on the North Western section of Mars, nor in the South Central region.
One ship started limping back to Jupiter, in tow of a second, while the rest began the slow, methodical work of wearing down the defenses of the Lunar Fort. Kendall looked out at the magnificent display of clashing, warring energies, the great, whirling spheres and discs of opalescent flame, and turned away sadly. "The men at Deenmor must have watched that for days. And at Mars Center."
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