Harl said something on his private circuit, and a flat image appeared before them. "That's from a camera aboard the Vengeance. It's transmitting by gravitic means, so we'll be able to see everything up to the detonation."

The picture showed the Maelstrom with the Mush-faces' planet off to one side. Abruptly the blue planet vanished. Startled, Lal glanced up and saw that the planet was sitll in his sky. He realized ashamedly that the Vengeance had made its jump. Since the wagon's orientation in space was still the same, the stars had not moved.

Then the camera hunted-and found. At the center of the screen Lal saw a tiny white dot that drifted slowly across the field of stars. That couldn't be the Enemy. It couldn't be closer than ten thousand kilometers. The detonation of the Vengeance would have been quite effective at that range, but the jump should have been more accurate.

Apparently the same thought had occurred to e'Kraft, who said, "Navigation, how far is the Vengeance from target?"

"Ten kilometers. The enemy craft is less than nine meters long."

Less than nine meters long. The smallest insterstellar craft the Dorvik ever made was more than a kilometer wide. The Enemy was superior to anything Lal had imagined. If only there were some way to capture the Enemy craft, to learn its secrets. Possibly even more important, to learn what monster would annihilate a sun.

"Detonate the Vengeance"

And the screen turned gray.

E'Kraft spoke. "The entire mass of the wagon has been converted to energy, Puissance."

Lal stared stupidly: it was so anticlimactic. They had just created more energy in a second than the average G-class star produces in an hour, yet this explosion was observable only as a blank image screen, or the motion of a tiny hand on the dial of a gravitic surge detector. It would take ten hours for the light from that explosion to reach them. Even then it would set houses afire on the blue planet.