There was no further chance to talk. Pritchard and Sturgis gripped their separate toggles almost simultaneously and their jets roared into life, feeding power to their dives for a pull-out. The ground-contact alarm chattered its warning that they were coming too close.
As soon as the jets took hold, the pilots leaned back, pushing hard against the rudder bars. The tail elevators lifted into the slipstream, and the two silver beetles howled through a long pendulum swing that flung them far off into the sky.
But the trained eyes aboard them had ticked off the essential details of the amazing battle being waged through the tall grass toward the mountain.
"Holy rockets!" came from the blond head in front of Pritchard. "That's a regular battle line they're holding. Did you see those babies fighting!"
"Hey, chief," cracked Sturgis, "What goes on down there, anyway? Who's fighting whom? Or what's fighting which?"
Pritchard trimmed off into level flight before answering. "As far as I can make out, Cornelia Boyce's people are under attack, but I can't figure out who's doing the attacking. They're trying to hold that defense arc, but they're being snowed under. They're catching it from the air as well as on the ground. I recognize the animals inside that line. They're her people, all right. But I can't make out the attackers."
He banked the cruiser around toward that now miles-distant little spine of mountain.
Sturgis's ship followed him around as if fastened by a wire.
"They looked like reptiles and big insects."
"That's what they looked like to me. I don't remember seeing any of them yesterday—except for that bad dream I tried to shoot away from McManus."