Page:Weird Tales Volume 14 Issue 2 (1929-08).djvu/100

We were flashing into the narrow opening—from the great space-forts to right and left the deadly death- beams were stabbing out toward us in scores, in hundreds—the ships behind were almost upon us, their own death-beams stabbing toward us—and then I cried a single word to Korus Kan. He thrust the controls suddenly forward with a lightninglike move, and just as our ship was flashing into the narrow opening it dipped sharply downward instead and plummeted down through space while the ships just behind, before they could dip with us, had rushed into the opening and into the hell of death-beams that crossed and recrossed in it from the space-forts on each side!

The next instant, while we curved swiftly upward again, we saw the ten ships that had rushed into that opening whirling blindly about as the death-beams from their owm space-forts seared through them and wiped out all life inside them. Those in the great space-forts, realizing those ten to be their own ships, had turned off the beams in the next moment but were an instant too late, since in the narrow opening the ten ships were whirling crazily to that side and this, without guiding intelligence inside them, smashing into each other and into the space-forts on each side as they rushed insanely in all directions. And even as that wild confusion inside the opening was at its height our own ship had curved up and was flashing at full speed into the opening, between the space-forts!

For an instant, in that wild chaos of whirling ships, those in the space-forts did not glimpse our own flying ship and in that instant we were half through the great opening between them. Then they had seen us, had loosed their beams upon us in scores, and in the next instant all about us seemed a single tremendous melee of aimlessly whirling ships, and gigantic space-forts, and pale death-beams that sliced and swept about us. Thick about us flashed those ghostly fingers of death, and full before us two of the whirling ships collided and smashed with terrific force, then Korus Kan had dodged them by a swift shifting of the controls, our generators roared suddenly louder as he turned on our utmost speed, and the crazy chaos of ships and beams and forts about us had suddenly vanished, replaced by darkness and silence unutterable.

We were through, were racing out into the void again with the great vibration-wall and the dying universe it enclosed and the pursuing serpent-ships inside it dropping farther behind each moment! In the blackness that encircled us the djdng universe was a far-flung, dwindling glow behind us, and our own a far patch of misty light to the left, but there shone in the darknes far ahead a misty disk of radiant light, and it was toward this that our ship was heading. For we were flashing out again upon our interrupted mission, were flying out through the awful gulf of outer space once more toward the Andromeda universe!