Now as I spoke a swift order we were picking up speed again, our cruisers accelerating once more to their former velocity. I knew that we must be very near the southwestern coast of England. Our course lay high above that coast, taking us along a line that would lie midway between the two mighty air-cities of London and Paris, avoiding both purposely on our great flight toward the mightier air-city of Berlin. Soon, I knew, the great air-fort chain that guarded the whole western coasts of Europe would be drawing within sight, and intently enough we were peering forth in search of it, but though that must be passed still we had won through apparently, the outer patrols, without discovery.
"It's hardly likely that they'd have a second line of outer patrols out," I said to Macklin, as we peered together through the dim night from the bridge-room of the rushing ship. "And once we get past the air-forts we'll have a good chance."
He nodded. "They'll never dream of us making a raid upon them tonight, and if we aren't picked up by the air-forts' cruiser-finders we can reach—"
He broke off, suddenly, and at the same moment as he, I gazed down toward the right. Another ring of moving lights was there in the darkness beneath, northward, too. But this one had paused for a moment and was slanting straight up toward us!
"Another patrol!" Macklin's cry was echoed into the distance-phone.
Another patrol—and it had seen us! And then, even as that patrol's twenty cruisers slanted up toward us, to challenge us, eighty of the cruisers of the lowest of our great triangle of ships had whirled like light down toward them, without command or formation, whirled down upon them massed together like a great striking thunderbolt of gleaming metal! For they knew, without need of command, that in an instant more the patrol-cruisers beneath would see and recognize the purpose of all our racing ships, would instantly with their distance-phones send the alarm spreading like flame over all the European Federation. And so our eighty down-rushing cruisers, massed solidly together, fired no guns and dropped no bombs, but simply flashed downward in a terrific ramming swoop and in an instant more had crashed their great mass squarely into the ring of the uprising European ships!
There was a rending crash of metal that seemed to split the air beneath us, and then in a great shower of wrecked and twisted cruisers the ships beneath were falling, tumbling down and vanishing into the vapors far beneath on their headlong fall toward the Atlantic! All of the twenty enemy cruisers, and about twenty-five of our own four-score that had crashed down into them, fell thus, annihilated almost by that terrific collision. It had been the one means, though, of instantly destroying their patrols without using our heat-guns whose detonations might give the alarm. And we knew that only that swift, unordered action on the part of our lowest ships had saved us. Then the fifty-five survivors had rushed up again among us, and then our ships that had slowed there for the moment were rushing still on eastward.
The Air-Forts
Onward we shot through the upper night, shaken still by that sudden peril and escape, and then I uttered a warning word into the distance-phone from our cruiser leading. For now, far ahead, we could make out great beams of white light that hung in a great row extended from north to south as far as the eye could reach, and that seemed like white fingers of light whirling and reaching through the air as they ceaselessly swung and circled. A full four miles above the earth, and more than that beneath the level of our own onrushing ships, hung this great line of restless beams, and we knew it, at once, for the great line of air-forts that guarded the western approaches of the European Federation. For the beams we saw were the great beams of the air-forts' mighty searchlights, and those swinging shafts of radiance were of such intense brilliance and magnitude that even at our greatest flying height we could not hope to pass over them undetected.