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It may be some new engine of destruction, which the hexan was towing at such a distance that the explosion of our torpedo did not destroy it. Since there are no signs of hexan activity and since it will not take much fuel, we shall investigate that radiation."
The frightful planes and beams of immeasurable power simply spent themselves harmlessly against those sparklingly radiant green walls seemingly as absorbent to energy as a sponge is to water, since the eye could not detect any change in the appearance of the screens, under even the fiercest blasts of the hexan projectors.
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.
An instantaneously extinguished flare of incandescence marked the passing of the hexan sphere into nothingness, and the cruiser shot back toward Callisto in search of more prey. It was all too plentiful, and twenty times the drama was reenacted before approaching day made it necessary for Czuv to take the controls and dive the vessel into the westermost landing-shaft of Zbardk.
Hand-weapons flashed viciously, tearing at steel armor and at bulging space-suits. Space-hooks bit and tore. Pikes and lances were driven with the full power of brawny arms. Here and there could be seen trooper and hexan, locked together in fierce embrace far from any hand-line six limbs against four, all ten plied with abandon in mortal, hand-to-hand, foot-to-foot combat.
But as Captain Czuv had foretold, the detection was a fraction of a second too late, rapidly as their screens responded, and the two men of Zbardk uttered together a short, fierce cry of joy as a brilliant flash of light announced the annihilation of the hexan vessel. "But hold!" The observer stared into his screen.
"Free exits?" snapped the Captain of the Portal, and twelve keen-eyed observers studied minutely screens and instrument panels connected to the powerful automatic lookout stations beneath the rims of the widely separated volcanic craters from which their craft could issue into Callisto's somber night. "No hexan radiation can be detected from Exit Eight," came the report.
With a mighty lunge of his powerful body he wrenched out the support and with a continuation of the same motion, he brought the jagged oak head of his terrible club down full upon the crown of the second hexan, who had already torn one guard apart and was leaping toward Czuv, his hereditary foe.
There, upon the broken and unprotected ends of the hexan cordon, their points of attack lay: theirs the task to eat along that annular fortress, no matter what the opposition might bring to bear to channel in its place a furrow of devastation until the two cones, their work complete, should meet at the opposite edge of the city.
Then what was left of the cones would separate into individual heptagons, which would so systematically blast every hexan thing into nothingness as to make certain that never again would they resume their insensate attacks upon the Vorkuls. Having counted the cost and being grimly ready to pay it, the implacable attackers hurled themselves upon their objectives.
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