Outside the Universe by Edmond Hamilton

As that score of glowing disk-ships, with our own hundred sun-swinging craft in their grip, flashed up and out of sight, our fighting-ships were flashing upward with the three hundred fighting-ships of the serpent-creatures racing down to meet us. Then, before we could swerve aside from their mad downward charge to pursue the attraction-ships, they had met us, and in all the world about us there was nothing for the moment but crashing and striking ships. Even as they had flashed down upon us, and we up to meet them, the invisible shafts of force from our cylinders had stabbed up and crossed their downward-reaching death-beams, so that scores of their own ships had crumpled and collapsed in the instant before we met them, scores of ours in turn driving crazily forward and sidewise as the pale beams wiped all life from them in that same moment. As we met them, though, it seemed that our ships and theirs were all to perish alike in crashes in mid-air, without further need of weapons, so terrific was the impact.

All about us in that moment I glimpsed ships smashing squarely into down-rushing serpent-ships, while our own craft spun and whirled as racing ships grazed along its sides. Then, hanging in the air there a scant mile above the ground, we whirled and grappled with the serpent-craft in a fierce, wild struggle. Their whole aim, we knew, was to keep us occupied long enough to permit the escape of their attraction-ships with our own sun-swinging craft in their grasp, while our object, in turn, was to brush aside these serpent-ships before us and race in pursuit of the attraction-ships. Charge and struggle as we might, though, in the moments following we could not break loose from the fury of the serpent-creatures' attack, who drove toward us with death-beams whirling in all the mad recklessness of despair.