iles hit, but they could never be sure they were their
own. Then, suddenly, the number of hits increased. They doubled and
tripled and quadrupled.

"All hands!" barked Bors. "The fleet of Kandar is wading into this
fight. Be careful to pick your targets! No Kandar ships! Save your
missiles for the enemy!"

Someone, man-handling missiles for faster and more long-continued firing
than any ship-designer ever expected, gasped, "Come on boys! Missiles
for Mekin!"

It became a joke, which seemed excruciatingly funny at the time.

Nobody saw all the battle, or even a considerable part. There was a
period when the _Liberty_, alone, fought like the deadliest of
gadflies. It appeared in the middle of a Mekinese sub-formation, loosed
missiles and vanished before anything could be intercepted. There was no
target for Mekinese bombs to home on when they got to where the
_Liberty_ had been.

Then the fleet of Kandar appeared. It broke out in single ships and in
pairs, and then in groups of fives and tens. The general order for the
Mekinese fleet had been picked up, and the fleet of Kandar seemed to
have gone mad.

The flagship tried to fight in orthodox fashion, for a time. It depended
on the attraction its missiles had for Mekinese to keep it in space. But
presently it was alone, and the battle was raging confusion scattered
over light-minutes, and somebody went down in to the engine room and
brazed in a low-power overdrive unit--providentially made by a junior
officer--and the flagship of the Kandarian fleet waded in erratically,
never knowing where it would come out, but rarely failing to find a
Mekinese ship to launch at.

The third phase of the battle was much more of an open fight, ship
against ship, except that more and more Kandarian ships were using
low-power overdrive--clumsily and inefficiently, but to the very great
detriment of Mekin's grand fleet. The Mekinese officers could not quite
grasp that their antagonists were doing the impossible. They became
confused.

The fourth phase of the battle consisted of mopping-up operations in
which individual ships were hunted down and destroyed by the simple
process of a Kandarian ship seeming to materialize from nowhere a mile
or half a mile from an enemy, launching one missile and seeming to
dematerialize again and vanish.

Very few Mekinese ships went into overdrive. Probably most of them
didn't believe what was happening. Perhaps four ships, out of the entire
grand