fat round-nosed thing come up from the
_Victrix_, curving far out ahead of the passing _Enterprise_. She
was almost out of sight around the planet when she ran head-on into
it, and vanished in an awesome blaze. For a moment, he thought she
had been destroyed, then she lurched into sight and went around the
curvature of Audhumla.

Trask and the Mardukan were shaking hands with themselves at each
other in their screens; everybody in the _Nemesis_ command room was
screaming: "Well shot, _Victrix_! Well shot!"

Then the _Yo-Yo_ was coming around again, and Vann Larch was saying,
"Gehenna with this fooling around! I'll fix the expurgated
unprintability!"

He yelled orders--a jumble of code letters and numbers--and things
began going out. Most of them blew up in space. Then the _Yo-Yo_
blew up, very quietly, as things do where there is no air to carry
shock- and sound-waves, but very brilliantly. There was brief
daylight all over the night side of the planet.

"That was our planetbuster," Larch said. "I don't know what we'll
use on Dunnan."

"I didn't know we had one," Trask admitted.

"Otto had a couple built on Beowulf. The Beowulfers are good nuclear
weaponeers."

The _Enterprise_ came back, hastily, to see what had blown up. Larch
put off another entertainment of small stuff, with a fifty megaton
thermonuclear, viewscreen-piloted, among them. It had its own
arsenal of small missiles, and it got through. In the telescopic
screen, a jagged hole was visible just below the equator of the
_Enterprise_, the edges curling outward. Something, possibly a heavy
missile in an open tube, ready for launching, had gone off inside
her. What the inside of the ship was like, or how many of her
company were still alive, was hard to guess.

There were some, and her launchers were still spewing out missiles.
They were intercepted and blew up. The hull of the _Enterprise_
bulked huge in the guidance-screen of the missile and filled it; the
jagged crater that had obliterated the bottom of Dunnan's blue
crescent blazon spread to fill the whole screen. The screen went
milky white as the pickup went off.

All the other screens blazed briefly, until their filters went on.
Even afterward, they glared like the cloud-veiled sun of Gram at
high noon. Finally, when the light-intensity had dropped and the
filters went off, there was nothing left of the _Enterprise_ but an
orange haze.

Somebody--Paytrik, Baron Morland, he saw--was poundi