n the
communicator said coldly:

"_All ships attention! With old-style missiles we could do everything
we've accomplished so far. But the Mekinese are refusing battle now.
They'll begin to slip away in overdrive if we keep chopping them down in
groups. We have to give them a chance or they'll run away. The new
missile system works perfectly. All ships break formation. Find your own
Mekinese. Blast them!_"

Bors said in a conversational voice, "There are three Mekin ships
yonder. They look like they're willing to start something. We'll take
them on."

He pointed carefully to a spot on the screen. His small ship swung away
from the rest of the fleet. It plunged toward a battleship and two heavy
cruisers who had joined forces and appeared to attempt to rally the
still-stronger-than-Kandar invaders.

They became objects rather than specks upon the screens. They were
visible things on the direct-vision ports. Something flashed, and rushed
toward the little Kandarian space-can.

"Fire one, two, three," Bors ordered.

Things hurtled on before him. A screen showed that the missiles first
fired by the enemy went off-course, chasing the later-fired missiles
from the _Isis_. The Mekinese shots had automatically become
interceptors when Kandarian missiles attacked their parent ships. But
they couldn't anticipate a curved course and their built-in computers
weren't designed to handle a rate of change of acceleration. The three
Mekinese ships ceased to exist.

"Let's head yonder," said Bors.

He pointed again, on the screen. Within the radar's range there were
hundreds of tiny blips. Some were marked with a nimbus apiece. They were
friends. Many, many more were not.

The Mekinese fleet, too, could determine its own numbers in comparison
to the defending fleet. Pride and rage swept through Mekinese
commanders, as they saw the Kandarians deliberately break up their
formation to get their ships down to the level of the enemy. It was
unthinkable for a Mekinese ship to refuse single combat! And when two
and three could combine against a single ship of Kandar....

The invaders had reason to fight, rather than slip into overdrive. They
still outnumbered the ships from Kandar. And for a Mekinese commander to
flee the battle area without having engaged or fired on an antagonist
would be treason. No man who fled without fighting would stay alive.
There had to be a recording of battle offered or accepted, or the
especially mercile