reens which were enemy ships
seemed to separate as they drew nearer. But all happened with infinite
and infuriating deliberation.

It was worth waiting for. There was truly a clumping of enemy ships
ahead. Some of them were less than ten miles apart. In a
two-hundred-mile sphere there were forty ships. They'd been moving to
consolidate themselves into a mutually assisting group. What they
accomplished was the provision of a fine accumulation of targets. Before
they could organize themselves, the Kandarian fleet swept through them.
It vastly outnumbered them in this area.

It smashed them. Bombs flashed in emptiness. There were gas-clouds and
smoke-clouds which stayed behind in space as the fleet went on.

"_New coordinates_," said the familiar authoritative voice. It gave
them. "_There's another enemy condensation. We hit it!_"

The fleet swung in space. It drove on and on and on. Interminable time
passed. Then there were flashes brighter than the stars. A Kandar
cruiser blew up soundlessly. But far, far away other things detonated,
and what had been proud structures of steel and beryllium, armed and
manned, became mere incandescent vapor.

A third clumping of Mekinese ships. The Kandarian fleet overwhelmed it;
overrode it; used exactly the tactics the Mekinese might have used. It
ruthlessly made use of its local, concentrated strength. It was
outnumbered in the whole battle area by not less than ten to one. But
the Mekinese fleet was scattered. Where it struck, the Kandarian fleet
was four and five, and sometimes twenty, ships to one.

It was a smaller fleet in every class of ships, but it was compact and
controlled and it made slashing plunges through the dispersed and
confused enemy. With ordinary missiles three ships could always destroy
two, and four could destroy three. But in the battle of the gas-giant
planet, where there was fighting the Kandarians were never less than two
to one. They were surrounded by enemies, but when those enemies tried to
gather together for strength, the mass of murderously-fighting ships of
Kandar swung upon the incipient group and blasted it.

Nearly half the Mekinese fleet was out of action before Bors's ship
fired a single missile. He'd sat in the skipper's chair, and from time
to time, the course of all the fleet was changed, and he saw that his
ship kept its place rigidly in formation. But he had given not one order
out of routine before the enemy strength was half gone. The