"An ambush!" I cried. "An ambush in space—the Neptunians are pushing us in to Saturn—our fleet can't live for minutes then!"
An ambush in space! They were being pushed into Saturn.
"Try to bring our flier out of it—up out of their ray's push, Hunt!" Marlin shouted to me, and for a moment I worked frenziedly at the controls before me, but the rays I shot forward to push against Saturn, to hold us back or push us to either side were powerless against the vast pushing ray from behind! Larger and larger great ringed Saturn loomed ahead as our disorganized fleet shot on at awful speed toward it, pushed by the vast ray, and but minutes remained before we would have crashed to death in all our fliers against the mighty planet and its whirling rings and moons! The end of our fleet and the end of Earth's hope, crashed to annihilation by the Neptunian ambush that had been laid for us here in space!
The thought maddened me, and with a sudden desperate inspiration I ceased to direct our flier's rays ahead against Saturn in vain attempt to halt our reeling flash forward, but instead suddenly shot a ray back against the mass of Neptunian cylinders no longer visible in space far behind. As that powerful propelling ray struck their cylinders' mass, our reeling flier leaped forward with even greater speed toward Saturn, and as it shot forward thus faster than even the huge ray from behind alone could push it, it was slightly freed from that vast ray's pressure, and I could edge it upward a little from that great ray's path! Up—up—while Marlin and Whitely and Randall watched with white faces beside me, while our space-fliers and all the fleet's around and behind us came on at terrible velocity toward mighty Saturn that now filled the firmament before us. Up—up—and as I saw that we were winning gradually up from the great ray's path, I shouted to Marlin, heard him with his radiophone apparatus quickly order all the fleet's fliers to follow my example in an effort to win up from the great ray's pressure. Only the fliers uppermost in that ray's path, though, like our own, could hope to get clear in this way, but as we swept on, gradually our own flier and perhaps four or five hundred others out of our great mass of five thousand won thus upward until at last we burst up out of the vast ray's path and were out of its pushing pressure!
"Back to the Neptunian cylinders!" Marlin shouted into the mouthpiece before him. "Unless we can destroy the greater cylinders whose ray is pushing the rest of our fleet into Saturn, we're lost!"
And back now our flier and the five hundred others that were clear of the ray like it, were rushing, back away from Saturn, while the remaining thousands of space-fliers of our fleet, unable to get clear in that way of the vast ray's pressure, were being driven on by it with terrific speed and power toward annihilation against Saturn! We must destroy the greater cylinders that were sending forth that ray, we knew, before the mass of our fleet crashed into Saturn, and so our five hundred space-fliers, our own flagship at their head, went fast almost as light through the black gloom of space, back toward the two thousand or more Neptunian cylinder-fliers that were massed around those greater cylinders that were our object! Upward and backward we flashed, until in another moment it seemed that great mass of cylinder-fliers loomed before and beneath us in space, the score or more of greater cylinders that were pushing with their huge ray our fleet to doom. Before ever the Neptunians in those cylinders could see us we had rushed back high above them, and then, as Marlin gave a single order through the mouthpiece before him, our five hundred faceted space-fliers were diving through space upon that Neptunian mass of motionless cylinders!
Down like light we flashed upon them through the black gloom of space, and a wild exhilaration thrilled me through in that moment, as we flew downward. The immense blackness of empty space around us, the far fiery disk of the sun and the bright sparks of Jupiter and Neptune burning inward and outward from us, the vast ringed sphere of Saturn behind us—these seemed to spin slowly around our flier as with its fellows it dove down through the sheer darkness of the void toward the unsuspecting Neptunian cylinders below. Marlin was gripping the control-board's edge, staring downward with the radiophone mouthpiece close before him, Whitely at the other side gazing down with his calm eyes ablaze for once, while Randall grasped tightly, with his face set and stone-like, the two levers of our concentrated force-ray weapon, and while with my own hands I held the controls of the flier's propulsion-rays, and sent it swooping down out of the upper void now upon the Neptunians, even as the hundreds of our fliers around us swooped. Then, as those cylinders loomed greater close beneath us Randall had swung sharply the levers in his hands and as he did so there had emerged from our space-flier, and from all those about us, ray upon ray of concentrated, terrible force, slender and pencil-like rays of pale force, that crashed down with awful cleaving power through the massed cylinders beneath!