"We're going to break up the Neptunians' circle in the only way it can be broken up!" he cried.
As his order sounded the thousands of our space-fliers were obeying it, were massing compactly together at the center of the Neptunians' mighty circle. Thus massed, they presented for the moment a perfect target for our enemies' rays, and for a moment those rays stabbed thick toward us from all sides. In the next moment our massed space-fliers were shooting their great propulsion-rays outward, outward in all directions around us, outward toward the Neptunians' encircling ring! As those rays shot out, they pressed with terrific power against that ring of cylinders about us, and since our own fliers were massed together and thus braced against each other, it was not they that moved but the cylinders, their great ring instantly broken up, disintegrated, as those cylinders were hurled out into the void from us by the pushing power of our great propulsion-rays! For the moment they were broken up completely, their formation entirely shattered, and before they could reform, there had come another order from Marlin and in a compact formation ourselves, our space-fliers were leaping upon their shattered masses!
To right and left, like light, drove the deadly weapon-rays of our massed space-fliers as we seized the opportunity and leaped upon the Neptunians. Ample was the revenge we had upon them in that moment, since the concentrated rays tore through and wrecked hundreds of their own cylinders as we sprang upon them! Fleeing from before us for the moment, flashing away toward giant Neptune's tremendous green disk ahead, they strove to reform while we leaped after them and harried them with every weapon-ray which our space-fliers could emit. Swiftly, though, even as they rushed onward before us, the Neptunian cylinders were drawing together into a great mass again, into a great column-like formation, and as our own column-mass drove beside and after them with weapon-rays stabbing, their resistance abruptly stiffened, and they were racing in close formation once more beside our own mighty fleet, grappling once more with it in space as both rushed toward great Neptune. But we had struck a mighty blow at their disorganized masses in the moment of our opportunity. Fully two thousand of their cylinders had been swept to death by our rays before they had been able to mass again, and now but six thousand or less cylinders remained, racing ahead with our own four thousand or less fliers!
The great green sphere of Neptune was looming colossal ahead and slightly beneath our two oncoming fleets, with behind and above it the bright little disk of Triton. It was toward Triton even in that wild moment that all of us were gazing, toward the source of the giant sun-ray that we must, somehow, halt. But now the battle around us had become so furious that we could spare no thought to aught else, since the two mighty fleets, stabbing ceaselessly at each other with their slender rays as they slowed their flashing progress forward, were rushing into the outer reaches of the atmosphere of huge Neptune! Its air was roaring about our whirling space-fliers as we shot through it, but as we shot on we saw that the Neptunian cylinders were going into annihilation swifter far than were our fliers! For they had formed and were racing beside us in their half-circle formation, while our own fliers at Marlin's command had leaped forward in a long column that could concentrate all its fire of rays upon the side of the Neptunian formation nearest us! And though slender rays tore lightning-like through fliers here and there across our own column, we saw that their cylinders beneath our fire were being wrecked in scores, in hundreds! In that vast running fight we were fast evening the odds against us!
Marlin's eyes were gleaming with excitement as we saw the Neptunians thus falling beside us under our concentrated fire of rays, and Randall and Whitely and I were almost beside ourselves with exultation. Faster were falling the Neptunian cylinders beneath our rain of rays, the rays of their farther cylinders being held from us by their own cylinders in their fatal formation. Already, as we thundered through the mists of mighty Neptune and low over its gleaming surface, we saw that the Neptunian cylinders had been reduced by that deadly fire of ours to hardly more than three thousand, to hardly more than our own fleet of fliers, which had itself lost its hundreds in that vast running battle. As our rays tore into and through their shaken mass hundreds upon hundreds of their cylinders had been cloven through, had been reduced to whirling wreckage, and we had evened the odds in our raging battle at last!
Even as we cried out in triumph, the Neptunians must have seen that to continue in that running fight longer was suicidal for them. They could not change formation during that flight without exposing themselves to worse peril, so in desperation they did a completely unexpected thing. Their enormous mass of cylinders, battered out of its half-circle formation by our terrific fire of rays, suddenly swerved in toward our own fleet as the two great armadas rushed forward above Neptune, and then that Neptunian fleet of cylinders had crashed obliquely with immense power into our own space-flier fleet! The next instant it had so merged with it that the two fleets ceased instantly to exist as such and for the moment became one colossal, swaying, reeling mass of cylinders and space-fliers in utter merged confusion, striking and soaring and smashing each other!
As that great cylinder-armada crashed thus into our own it had seemed to me that the air all around us was filled in that instant with colliding space-fliers and cylinders, and with a hell of slender pale and deadly concentrated rays that raged thick in whirling death about us! I saw before us two onrushing cylinders, whirled the flier up to avoid that imminent collision, and then as they passed beneath us, saw Randall send our rays driving down and cleaving through them, saw them whirl in wreckage into which a battling cylinder and faceted space-flier had crashed themselves in the next instant! I heard Whitely's shout of alarm in the next split-second, instinctively flung the flier sidewise through the boiling ruck of the battle, just in time to escape a pair of stabbing rays from a cylinder beneath, and then saw those rays stab on up and strike another cylinder and destroy it! And even as I whirled the flier sidewise, Randall was driving our rays to right and left against other cylinders rushing upon us!
The air about us seemed filled in that moment with a single wildly-swirling mass of cylinders and space-fliers, grappling with each other there in countless individual combats inextricably intermixed, their weapon-rays going out in destruction through the craft that whirled upon them, their propulsion-rays driving the ships about them crazily to right and left! With inconceivable fury cylinders and fliers soared and fought and fell above great Neptune's roof, the air filled with falling wreckage, our great battle reaching now an undreamed-of phase of intensity, as gleaming cylinders and faceted ball-like space-fliers were annihilated alike by hundreds! That giant merged combat of the two fleets had in minutes taken toll of half the force of each, and I wondered dimly even as I whirled the flier up and back through the wild, annihilating battle how either men of Earth or disk-bodied Neptunians could cling to a battle of such suicidal nature! Then suddenly from Marlin had come a hoarse exclamation, and I saw in that instant all the Neptunian cylinders intermixed with our space-fliers rising upward, as though in answer to a single command!
"Up!" cried Marlin. "The Neptunians are over us! They're going to——!"