John watched the dark tide approaching the cliff entrance, from his observation slit high overhead. He leaned as close to it as his oxygen helmet would allow and spoke quietly into the transmitter.
"They're bringing up the Magnadons. I can see that there is a strange ape-like creature riding each one and steering it with some kind of a burning rod. These are about the size of men but they look small in comparison. I wonder if those apes are in communication with the ships, or just ordinary desert anthropoids."
He left the explanation to Zingar, back in headquarters, and continued to report the dawn approach. Overhead, almost a hundred ships hovered close above the seething flow of animal and reptile life. Several were near the entrance, and the defenders experimentally tried out their weapons.
The first barrage was from old explosive shell weapons. But as each shell flashed and roared toward the ships it seemed to hit an invisible wall of force about fifty feet from the hull where it exploded in empty air. The ships were not even rocked, but the Magnadons squealed in terror. Vibrations of the explosions jarred the door frame, even the cliff itself.
The disintegrator artillery scarred the thick hulls slightly but the invisible rays failed to penetrate far, even in a direct hit, and the weaving ships took most of these shots at glancing angles with no damage.
The defenders tried their thunder-spreading atomic cannon once. Its lightning flash struck one of the tiny ships full center and a gaping hole burst inward and out the rear section of the hull, so that the morning sky showed through. The defenders cheered when this was reported. The little ship lurched up into the air, and others drew near, grappling it with more tractor rays. John, could see the unconscious forms of old men carried past the ragged hole by helmeted figures and into another ship, through joined hulls. When the crippled craft was released it crashed quickly on the still frozen desert sand. Then it rolled over and lay still. But one shot from the atomic cannon took the force of one power jacket—and there were only nine jackets left!
Dr. Henderson ordered the atomic cannon withdrawn to the central defense area, against that time when the Martian ships would be flying down the high corridors, directing a river of snakes and flying lizards.
The battle went on with disintegrator rays dropping scores of the air-screaming, twisting Mars snakes, and one or two of the smaller group of Magnadons. But the Martian ships, finding that the atomic cannon was no longer in operation shielded one of the Magnadons with their hulls as the great beast approached and put its shoulders against the copper door. The locks held until the doors buckled in the center, as if hit by a giant battering ram. Air hissed out, and a moment later the gigantic beast burst through, only to fall trumpeting to the ground under a disintegrator ray. In thirty seconds it was dead.
But behind it slithered and ran the great snakes, with their gaping jaws and long dripping fangs. They seemed as numerous as the white flashing waves of an angry ocean shore. Overhead, the roof was black with flying lizards, bumping and crowding in the dim shadows, with ridiculous faint mewing sounds. Stone throwers dropped hundreds of these, and disintegrators stopped dozens more of the running snakes, until a wall of dead flesh protected the second defensive barrier.