Above the Enemy
These were the doubts that assailed me as our triangle of cruisers throbbed on and on through the upper night, but resolutely I thrust them away, remembering what our attack, what the crippling of our enemies' great and mysterious preparations, would mean to our American Federation. Then I turned as Macklin pointed silently to the glowing-figured dial of our distance-log, and saw by it that while I had brooded there at the window we had swept far out over the Atlantic at our tremendous speed. Within a short time, I knew, the European coasts would be beneath us, but during all the course of our flight so far we had sighted no other ships whatever, all merchant-traffic over the great ocean having been swept from the air by the first alarms of war, while we were still too far to the west to be meeting the far-flung patrols of the European Federation forces.
Soon, though, these would be coming into sight, I knew, and the result of our daring expedition depended upon our success in passing them unobserved. If we were seen by them, a minute would suffice for the patrols to give the alarm by distance-phone, and then from all the European air-cities ahead, from Stockholm and London and Berlin and Marseilles and a hundred others, numberless patrol-cruisers would be swiftly converging upon us in answer to the alarm. And the European battle-fleet itself, we knew, in Berlin, the air-city we had come to attack, would be swift to answer also, so that never could we hope to win through if we were but for a moment detected.
But still we were rushing westward through the night, my cruiser in the lead, and still as Macklin and I peered intently ahead and below, Hilliard having taken up his station beneath, we could make out nothing but the chill masses of the great vapor-layer far beneath us, and the gleaming, rushing shapes of the cruisers behind us. Then, I peered ahead and down toward the right, with body tense, and in the next moment had snapped out the green guiding light at our cruiser's stern, and had uttered a quick order into the distance-phone before me.
"European Federation patrols ahead and beneath!" I warned quickly. "All cruisers reduce to quarter-speed!"
Instantly in obedience to that order the triangle of rushing ships behind was slowing, each cruiser swiftly reducing speed, the great drone of their motors dying to a steady hum. Moving forward thus, as slowly and silently as possible, I pointed downward, Macklin's eyes following my pointing finger.
"The patrols!" I whispered to him. "There beneath us—moving northward!"
Far beneath us indeed they were, a little circle of moving lights that hung just above the great vapor-layer and that was moving steadily toward the north, from our right to our left. Some twenty or more of those white lights there were, moving smoothly along in the same ring-like formation, and though we could not see the shapes of the cruisers from which those lights gleamed up through the night, we knew that they could be only one of the enemy's westward patrols, flying in the familiar European Federation circular formation. Watching them, Macklin and I unconsciously held our breath, while from our ship and from all the ships behind there came no sound other than the low hum of the motors. Slowly beneath those motors' lessened power our cruisers were moving forward through the upper darkness, while beneath the little ring of lights were still holding toward the north. Our presence far above them was apparently unsuspected by them.
I knew, though, that if they were to turn toward us by any chance the great cone-shaped cruiser-finders which are set in the sides of all war-cruisers and air-forts and air-cities, that we would be detected soon enough, since undoubtedly the patrol-ships beneath carried them also. Those great cone-like instruments, when turned in any direction can detect by means of super-sensitive induction-balances the operation of any electrostatic-motors. Fortune favored us, though, for without dreaming of our existence there above them the ring of patrol-cruisers, the circle of moving lights, moved smoothly on to the north while we held eastward until they had vanished behind us.