It was the Infant who first found words with which to break the dreadful silence.
"Headquarters is gone," he said in a strange, dry voice, "wiped out! They must have got it! It looks as if we were on our own.
"Where are you going?" he asked. "It's your ship."
And Danny answered with a single word, though he added other for emphasis under his breath:
"Down!" he said quietly. "And be damned to them!"
Rolling smoke clouds came to meet them. Danny O'Rourke was watching his altimeter sharply as he neared the ground. But he glanced more than once at the smoke. It was shot through with tongues of flame as they settled down; that was only what might be expected. But Danny was puzzled by the gray-white whirls that rose through the billowing smoke, until he knew it for the dust of powdered masonry, and realized that below him, where great buildings had been, were tumbled ruins.
Beside his control board a radio warning was telling of approaching ships. Danny cut in on then on emergency wave-length, and found that two full squadrons of nitro-ships were at hand with others coming.
"Let them tend to it!" the pale-faced youngster beside him choked—one does not see his country's capital destroyed without a tightening of the throat. "They can cool it with CO_2 and put down a rescue squad, though what they can do in that furnace is more than I can see."
Danny nodded mutely; he opened the exhaust to the full, and the rocket-plane swept out on whirlwinds of raging fire, and smoke, whose flames reached up even where they flew and licked hungrily at their ship.