“I fancy they must have seen us at last. Three ships are coming up on this side as if they wanted to investigate.”
Alan crossed over and soon picked out the Russian vessels rising in long spiral sweeps from the earth about three miles to the northward and coming up very fast.
“They seem to have learned something in tactics during the year,” he said. “They evidently know better than to rise perpendicularly while they suspect we are up here. They think they’ll be much more difficult to hit coming up like that.”
“Yes,” said Cosmo. “But we can soon show them the mistake in that idea. What are you going to do with them?”
“Destroy them, of course,” replied Alan. “It doesn’t matter about giving the alarm now. I think it’s pretty certain that the Russians are going to concentrate at Kieff, Vitebsk, Dünaburg, and Vilna, and those four squadrons down there are intended to cover them. We’d better let them concentrate, and make the fighting as short and sharp as possible. It would be a waste of time to destroy them here in detail, and the moral effect wouldn’t be anything like as good. What do you think?”
“I don’t think there’ll be any fighting,” replied Cosmo, “unless between the air-ships. The most hardened troops of the nineteenth century would have broken and run like a lot of sheep under our shells, and these poor fellows, who have never seen a battle in their lives, will do the same.
“I don’t believe we shall have any land fighting at all to speak of during the whole war. There will be nothing but massacres from the air on both sides. Still, I think you’re both wise and merciful in waiting until you can hit hard, though perhaps from the strictly military point of view we ought to have Moscow in ruins by sundown.”
“I won’t do that,” said Alan, shaking his head decisively. “There are three or four millions of women and children in it who have done no harm, and I’ll shed no more blood than I’m obliged to. We had better destroy those fellows, however, before they get too close. You know what to do.”
“Very well,” said Cosmo. “You’ll take the deck, I suppose?”
Alan nodded, and Cosmo saluted and went into the conning-tower. The Avenger now altered her course, so that her circling flight took her to the northward, above the three Russian air-ships that were sweeping round and round so fast that it would have been impossible to train a gun upon them.