serpent-ships were flashing, the only surviving remnant of their vast fleet, that our two armadas had conquered and all but destroyed. Back toward the Cancer cluster they were fleeing, upon whose thronging worlds all the hordes of the serpent-races were massed, and within which those hordes, we knew, would be laboring still to complete the great cone that now we could destroy. So on after them our own fleet leapt, a score of thousands of mighty ships in close formation thundering after our flying enemy.
Past mighty, flaming suns we were racing, in pursuit, past slow-turning great worlds that moved about those suns and that we raced between and past, through the galaxy's giant stars toward its edge, toward the Cancer cluster. On-on-after the fleeing serpent-craft we raced, until far before us through the crowding suns there came into view the great cluster toward which they were heading, a gigantic, globular swarm of suns there at the galaxy's edge. The serpent-ships had reached it, now, were dropping swiftly down toward it, and as we too flashed above it we dropped after them in hot pursuit. Down-down-the great ball of flaming suns was growing swiftly in size as we neared it, the countless thronging worlds between those suns, packed now with the serpent-races, visible beneath-down-down-and then suddenly, in obedience to some unseen order, the serpent-ships fleeing downward beneath us had halted, had turned, and then were driving straight back up toward us.
So utterly unlocked for was that swift, fierce attack that before we could swerve aside our downward-rushing thousands of craft had crashed straight into the uprushing serpent-ships. Then the moment after that wild shock in which hundreds, thousands of ships had smashed head-on together, there was battle again there above that mighty ball of suns, with the giant splendor of our galaxy to one side and the infinite vault of outer space to the other, a battle such as in sheer, concentrated intensity none of us had ever yet experienced. Like senseless mechanisms, with the mad energy of despair, the serpent-ships drove toward us, flinging away their lives to hold us longer from the great cluster beneath and its crowded, serpent-peopled worlds, throwing themselves upon us with such awful fierceness that, outnumbering them as we did, our fleet reeled and staggered there beneath their blows.
Our ships were falling by the hundreds each moment, but now we gripped ourselves, sprang upon the attacking serpent-ships with a fury that matched their own, summoning all the strength of despair ourselves as the vast battle hung thus in the balance, ourselves leaping down upon the serpent-ships with a suicidal recklessness that sent them into annihilation swiftly beneath us. For a single wild moment, it seemed, their ships and ours alike had gathered their utmost powers for one last supreme effort, were throwing themselves upon each other with a last mad burst of strength, and in that moment death-beam and red ray and unseen force-shafts flashed thick through space from ship to ship. Then the serpent-ships were thinning in number before us, fewer and fewer, as regardless of our losses we pressed our fierce attack, until at last but a scant score of them remained, a score that in the next moment were gone also, flaring crimson or crumpling and collapsing. A battered remnant of what had once been two tremendous fleets, but ten thousand ships left of all our countless thousands we hung there in space above the cluster-alone. The serpent-ships were gone at last. The serpent-fleet was no more.
'We've won!' My cry of triumph was taken up and repeated, by Jhul Din beside me, by our followers beneath, by all, I knew, in our ships about us as we hung there. We had won. Had annihilated to the last one the countless serpent-ships, there in awful battle, reeling with them out of the outer void and through the galaxy, through thundering suns and whirling worlds, past dark-star and comet, through the mighty flames of the great nebula. Had swept the last of their fleet from space and now were moving down toward the great cluster beneath, toward the thronging suns and countless worlds among them, where all the hordes of the serpent-races were massed, dropping down to destroy the last mighty mechanism with which they had sought to conquer and annihilate us. We had-
But what was that below? Our downward-rushing ships had paused, millions of miles still above the great cluster, and we were gazing down toward it, toward a vast, dark shape that was rising from among its swarming suns! A colossal dark cone, that was coming slowly, deliberately, up among those suns and at sight of which our cries had died on our lips, our faces masks of blank horror! It was the mighty death-beam cone of the serpent- creatures! It was the colossal generator of death that they had brought with them unfinished from the dying universe, that their serpent-hordes in the cluster beneath had labored upon while we had fought our mighty battle, and that now, while the last of the serpent-ships had held us back a moment longer, they had completed. Up toward us it was coming, slowly rising among the mighty cluster's suns, ponderously, deliberately, and we knew that in a moment more it would be rising out of that cluster, would be annihilating all life in our ships with a single sweep of its colossal beams of death, would be sailing deliberately on to wipe all the life from the galaxy's worlds, and give those worlds forever to the serpent-hordes massed in the cluster beneath! We had not won, but lost.
There was a silence-a silence of death-in that moment, as the stupendous cone rose up through the ball of suns beneath. Still, silent, we hung there-our doom rising up beneath us-a moment in which there whirled through my brain confused, swift visions-our awful battle in vain-our universe and the Andromeda universe the serpent- peoples', our races gone forever-and then suddenly into my whirling brain there penetrated a choking cry. It was from Jhul Din, and he was at the window, strangling, staggering, pointing out into the black void of outer space beside us, out to where a little swarm of great shapes were rushing headlong toward us out of that void. A hundred great shapes that were like mighty hemispheres of metal, domed and flat-bottomed and gleaming-
'It's the sun-swinging ships!' Jhul Din's great cry stabbed into my dazed brain like a sword of sound. 'It's Korus Kan and the sun-swinging ships. They escaped from the attraction-ships that captured them-have come across the void after us-'
The sun-swinging ships. The ships that with Korus Kan in them had been captured and that we had thought destroyed, but that somehow, in the void outside the Andromeda universe, had escaped from the attraction-ships that held them, had sped across the void after us and were now racing in among us, hanging above the giant cluster of suns beneath, up through which the great cone of doom was rising. Then from those hundred domed ships hanging there, there sprang downward vast, broad rays of dark, purple-glowing force, the force with which the Andromedans had moved all their suns, vast rays that spread out fanwise as they shot down and that formed a continuous, unbroken wall of purple-glowing force about all the great cluster beneath, screening all in that cluster from the gravitational pull of everything outside, from the pull of the galaxy that alone counterbalanced the attraction of the cluster's suns toward each other. And as that counterbalancing pull was shut off that alone had held the suns of the giant cluster in their balanced positions, those suns began slowly to move-to move toward each other.
Slowly at first they moved, and then faster and faster, sweeping majestically in toward each other, the whole giant cluster of swarming suns contracting, condensing. Inward they moved, and now sun was crashing into sun, at the cluster's center, sending up towering bursts of awful flame as they met in titanic shock. Inward the thronging, blazing suns swept still, crashing now through all the cluster into each other, worlds that circled about them vanishing in great bursts of fire as they plunged into or were caught between the suns that crashed about them. Almost to the great cluster's top had the giant death-cone reached, as the suns about and below it hurtled inward to doom, and then we saw two mighty suns on each side of it that were rushing inward and toward it, converging upon it, annihilating themselves and it together in the gigantic shock of their collision. On and on, sun moving into sun, they went, all the worlds about them vanishing into their fires, annihilating forever all the serpent-hordes that had massed upon them, all matter and all life inside that cluster perishing as its thundering suns crashed gigantically into each other. On and on, until but a single colossal core of fire remained below us, formed by all the cluster's crashing suns, and that already, as the domed ships among us turned off their screening force, was beginning to expand outward, to swell out into a vast nebula of flaming gas. A mighty nebula there where the great cluster had been. A giant nebula that held within its fires all that had been the countless invading serpent-hordes who had swept upon us from-and who had been annihilated at the last by others from-outside the universe.
17: Outward Once Again
Standing outside the mighty tower of the Council of Suns, with the light of great Canopus brilliant on all about us, Jhul Din, Korus Kan and I watched, days later, as our Andromedan allies bade us farewell. Behind us were grouped the massed thousands of the Council, with its Chief, Serk Haj, beside us, while in close-ranked rows on the ground before us rested the five thousand Andromedan ships that were all that remained of the mighty fleet of a hundred thousand that had come across the void to our universe. From those ships the dozen of the Andromedan leaders were coming toward us, while in them their crews awaited the start.
