"Straight down to the central plaza, Macklin," I said. "The First Air Chief will be there and orders are to report to him first."
Macklin had already slowed our ship's speed, and now as we drove to a position beside the aspiring central pinnacle, with its clustered points, the city's static-tower, he turned the power of our motors completely from our horizontal tube-propellers, into our vertical ones, which held us motionless in mid-air. Then, as he slowly decreased that power, we sank smoothly down until in a moment more we had come to rest upon the smooth central plaza among a score or more of other cruisers. These rested in a great ring about the plaza's edge, their crews waiting within them, but at the center of that ring, beside the mighty static-tower's base, stood a little group of men, the First Air Chief, Yarnall, and his squadron-commanders.
As our cruiser came to rest I opened the door beneath the bridge-room, and stepped onto the metal plaza and across it toward that group. Around the great plaza, I noted, were vast, seething crowds, thousands upon thousands of the mighty air-city's inhabitants. Other thousands were gazing down toward us from the towers that soared around us into the golden afternoon sunlight. These people, watching us and the mighty fleet hanging grimly far above, were silent, but from beyond them there came to my ears from far across the air-city's mighty mass, the dull roar of millions of blended voices, in unceasing, excited shouts. Then I reached the First Air Chief and the group before him, my hand snapped to a salute, which Yarnall silently returned. And then, gazing for a moment in silence from one to another of us, his strong face and gray eyes grave, he began to speak to us.
"You, the squadron-commanders of our eastern forces," he said, "know why you have been summoned here, why I, under the orders of the Federation's Central Council, have summoned here you and all the cruisers that wait above us. The great European Federation fleet, twice as large as our forces, is rushing westward over the Atlantic toward us, and within the hour we must meet that fleet in battle."
He paused, and in the silence that ensued the dull, dim roar of the great city about us seemed suddenly infinitely remote from our ears. Then the First Air Chief went on.
"Within the hour we must meet that fleet in battle and as we go out to meet it our western forces will be going out from San Francisco, under the command of the Second Air Chief, to meet the Asiatic Federation fleet racing eastward toward it. And upon those two battles rests now the fate of our nation. If they are lost, if either of them is lost, within days our nation will be but a memory, our cities annihilated. If the two approaching fleets are defeated and beaten back, then we shall have won for ourselves a respite in which we can prepare to meet the great enemies that crowd now upon us. So I say to you, the Central Council says to you, that this battle must not be lost!
"The fleet that we must meet has twice the number of cruisers of our own, and there have been rumors of some new method being prepared by them with which to attack us, now or later. We have to aid us only the air-forts about this city, which have been equipped with a new device. I have ordered them to move east of the city to lie between it and the enemy. This great air-city itself, when we go out from it, will move inland at its highest speed away from the battle, just as Boston and Charleston and Miami and San Francisco and Los Angeles and all our great air-cities, north and south. There will be, therefore, none but our cruisers gathered above and our air-forts massing eastward to fight this battle upon which the Central Council has staked our fate.
"But great as these odds are against us, this battle must not be lost! We are the sons of the Americans who fought through the First and Second and Third Air Wars, who reared this nation out of the blood of a thousand air battles until now its hundred air-cities hold in their power a third of all the world. And now that the rest of that world comes against us, the Last Air War begins. My word to you is this: Fight only as those men before you fought, and before tomorrow the European Federation fleet shall have been beaten back—or the last of our cruisers and our air-forts and ourselves will have perished!"
There was silence as the First Air Chief ceased, and then from us assembled commanders there broke a great cheer, a cheer that was taken up by the massed thousands around the plaza and that spread like fire over all the great air-city about us. Then we all returned toward our waiting cruisers, the First Air Chief toward his own, and a moment later his cruiser, with its three parallel stripes of silver running from stem to stern distinguishing it from all others, was rising smoothly upward, followed by our own. Upward we shot, a vast roar coming up to us from the mighty floating city beneath us. Then our score or more of ships were taking their places each at the head of its squadron of a hundred ships, while the First Air Chief in his silver-striped flagship rushed to a position at the head of all. There we hung, the dull, great roar coming unceasingly up to us from the city below, and then as an order sounded from the distance-phones of all the fleet we were moving forward, eastward, out from over the great air-city, from over the green coastline, out over the gray expanse of the Atlantic.
With Macklin and Hilliard again beside me as our own cruiser moved forward at its squadron's head, we three turned to glance back. We saw New York, its mighty towers splendid against the descending sun, moving also, but slowly westward and away from us, away from the coming battle, dwindling to a dark spot and vanishing as we raced on outward over the gray Atlantic. Now we were racing above the great air-forts that had massed in a great double line a score of miles out from the coast, high above the waters. Over these too we sped, at steadily mounting speed, until with great motors droning, crews shouting as they ran our heat-guns out from tops and sides and keels, winds whining shrill about us, our great fleet reached its maximum speed toward that great oncoming battle by which our Federation was to stand or fall.