sparks wildly like the glitter of a child's Fourth of July sparkler. The ship shuddered under the impact and glowed white hot along the scarred beam.

Like a speeded up motion picture shot, the Cat ship leaped away from the spaceport, leveling its own guns at the recumbent Artemis. The men in the Darkside caught a glimpse of the other ships bearing their projectors, and far above, Hartnett was elated to see that the superdreadnaught had extended the muzzles of its massive cyclotronic rifles.

The cruisers fired first, and the screens went blank, so the Terrans never saw the rest of it. But up in the darkened Control Chavez and Scott were witnesses to one of the greatest cataclysms men have ever seen.

The tiny disk of Oberon seemed to light up with a white fire; swelling like a glowing balloon and then shattering with a violence that left them speechless. The very atmosphere of Uranus under the low swinging moonlet boiled and billowed with a frightful incandescence, great prominences of radioactivated methane spouting high into the air as the very internal balance of the great planet teetered.

A shock-wave of corruscating fire shot out from the blazing surface of Oberon, engulfing the Martian warships in a sea of spinning, scintillating destruction. Like a tiny nova, the satellite flared in the black silence of deep space, vaporizing everything within ten thousand miles of it; churning the very vacuum into a hell of hard radiation.

Scott stared at the outside Geiger counters as they chattered their story of charged ions and electrons battering, even at this distance, at sheathing in the destroyer's hull.

Hartnett's shouted order to "... get the hell out of here!" was strictly unnecessary. By the time he had issued it, the remaining three ships of Blue Three were piling on Gs in the direction of Terra.

Though no one stayed to look at it, the sight of the remnants of Oberon forming into a thin ring around the grumbling Uranus must have been quite impressive.

Ten hours from Luna Base, Flotilla Blue Three's officers had assembled for a victory dinner in the wardroom. The last course was cleared away, and Chavez passed a quantity of his precious cheroots around.

He settled himself down beside Scott and dragged happily at his smoke.

It was Blake who burst out with the question that was 

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