"Masks on! Up the shaft at full speed! We must not allow a single Martian to reach the surface!"
Swiftly the Earth-soldiers fastened their masks and took off straight upward. Each one of them clung to their precious lumps of tridium, and in a short time the dark shaft presented an extraordinary spectacle. Each of the twenty-odd humans was bathed in his own ghostly envelope of light, and the fleeing Martians, looking downward, must have felt as if they were being pursued by a squadron of giant fireflies.
The survivors of the massacre below had a head start of their pursuers, but being so much lighter in weight, their gravity-repellors could not push them up through the atmosphere as fast as the humans could go. Gradually they were overtaken and destroyed by Dynamon's force—the last Martian being caught just at the upper mouth of the pit.
Dynamon quickly gathered his men about him while he took stock of the situation in the valley. The three Carriers were in the same position as they were before, but there were no Earth-soldiers left standing. A little circle of fallen bodies offered mute testimony to the hopeless battle put up by the force of three decuria which had made that ill-fated sortie from the Carrier. Now, the Martians from both of the red ships—excluding, of course, the group that had been cut to pieces in the pit—were gathered in a body near the Earth Carrier. Dynamon guessed that they were waiting to see what the Earth people were going to do next. They would soon find out, the centurion thought grimly. Even though there were probably close to two hundred of the evil little creatures down there, they would be no match for the brawny humans insulated against the Photo-Atomic Ray.
Swiftly, Dynamon formulated a plan of action. His first consideration was to try and seize both Martian Carriers. If possible, they must be prevented from leaving the ground and carrying back to Mars the warning that, at last, the humans had found a defense against the Ray. With that in mind, the centurion divided his little force in two. One decuria with its decurion he put under Mortoch, and the other, he commanded himself. Each group was to strike boldly at one of the Martian ships, Mortoch, the nearer one; himself, the farther one.
Dynamon issued his commands by signs, hoping to remain unnoticed by the enemy if he refrained from using the radio-phone. But as he led his group off along the hillside, a sudden activity among the Martians in the valley told him that he had been sighted. They came streaming across the valley floor toward the heights on a shallow crescent, each wing spreading to perform an enveloping movement.
What an unpleasant surprise the nasty little devils are going to get, thought Dynamon, and he switched on his radio-phone. "Follow me, now, on the dead run!"
He dug his toes into the yielding gray sand and ran along the hillside, bending low into the wind. It was heavy going, but the humans were able to make faster progress than their enemies because of their greater weight. Dynamon saw that he and his group were outrunning the Martians and would probably reach their objective sooner. Two thoughts arose in his mind to worry him. One was, that the Martians inside the red ships might lock their doors and take off before he and Mortoch, respectively, could reach them. The other was the fear that Borion, inside the Earth-Carrier, not knowing of the new defense against the Ray, would sally out in a desperate attempt to save—as he might think—the two isolated detachments of humans.
However, Dynamon reflected, those were eventualities over which he had no control. All he could do under the circumstances was pray for good luck.