"The nearest cruiser there below!" he exclaimed thickly as he swung madly down after me. "We'll make it yet!"
But now the cry of our guards high above was being taken up and repeated by other voices in the great electrostatic tower. That cry was coming down through it from level to level, even as we swung from the last window to the level plaza. And, as we staggered across it, toward the open door of the nearest cruiser, there came a series of popping detonations from above and the next moment little flares of terrific heat were bursting all about us as the guards shot their heat cartridges down toward us! From their great height and through the dusk their aim was poor, and in a moment more we were at the cruiser's open door. But now the alarm was spreading over all the tower behind us, and at the same moment that we flung ourselves in through the cruiser's open door, slamming it behind us, we heard a wild clamor of voices from the power-tower's base!
The next instant, though, we were bursting up into the cruiser's bridge-room and for a moment of agony I fumbled at its controls, set differently from those of our American cruisers. Then the motor-stud had clicked beneath my fingers and, as the great electric motors beneath droned suddenly loud with the current rushing through them, I sent all their power into the cruiser's tube-propellers. Up it went rushing, up and away at terrific speed and at a steep slant, even as a mass of green-uniformed figures burst from the electrostatic tower into the plaza! Out and over that plaza at terrific speed we shot, out and upward at such awful mounting velocity that, before the great batteries of heat-guns around us could turn, before the alarm from the power-tower had time to spread, we were whirling up and through the dusk over all the massed towers and gleaming lights of the great air-city Berlin!
Out and over—and now as we soared upward into the rarefied levels of the air like a shooting-star, our cruiser was driving outward over the cities, stabbing westward through the air, literally chasing the sun that had disappeared hours before. From Berlin behind us there rose a hundred cruisers, soaring in swift and deadly pursuit! But so swift had been our rush, so tardy had been the alarm of our escape, that before the great batteries of Berlin could blast us from the air we were beyond them; and before the other massed air-cities over which we were rushing could receive that alarm we had split the air westward above them, and had rushed out from over the last of their titanic floating masses and into the night!
"We're clear of the cities!" I yelled to Hilliard over the thunderous droning of our motors and the roar of winds about us. "If we can shake off these pursuing cruisers we'll win back across the Atlantic yet!"
"But their whole battle-fleet is rising now!" cried Hilliard, gazing back. "And now all their air-cities are beginning to move westward too—all their hundred air-cities are moving west to the attack!"
Across the Atlantic
Despite the wild peril of our rushing ship, I felt for a moment all the blood congealing around my heart as Hilliard yelled those words, and I looked backward for one last glimpse. For there, behind us, behind the hundred ships that were pursuing us, the whole two thousand cruisers of the European battle-fleet had risen and were coming westward also. They were not pursuing us so much as they were speeding westward according to their plan, moving after us in a great crescent formation! And, behind them, we could see now all the hundred gigantic air-cities of the European Federation, massed there in a colossal circular formation about their central city of Berlin; moving westward also behind the crescent of their fleet, they were flashing with terrible majesty through the air in their circular-massed formation; at a speed that mounted swiftly to two hundred miles an hour!
The great attack had begun!