The land forces were starting. Jim was leading this division: eight hundred men, most of them mounted individually upon the giant lops—a four-footed animal, more like a giant cat than anything I can name; handsome beasts, larger than an earth-horse, with great claws, a mass of shaggy red hair, and a tail like a plume of fur.
Each with a rider, they padded through the village streets. Some were harnessed to our larger projectors, and our wind device, which I planned to have Jim establish down the shore opposite the Virgins’ Island. With it, Jim could lash the narrow channel waters to a fury.
The small land force passed into the city and vanished. From the distant housetops I could see the waving crowd to mark its progress. I turned away. The boats on the river had started, a fleet of ten long, narrow, metallic boats, with insulated sides and shields, boats drawn by sea-like mammals, agile, swift, and intelligent.
There were some forty men and a few girls on each of the boats. A large long-range needle projector was mounted in the bow, behind the black screen.
It could throw an electrified, imponderable blade of metal over a curved path, with almost the speed of light for an effective distance of over a mile. And these boats had light-flares, wind projectors, and horizontal bomb projectors.
They sped down the estuary, with the mammals leaping like dolphins in the water ahead of them; then they stopped, circled, came back, and waited in a line in midstream. From the city a great shout of enthusiasm went up at sight of them. On one of them were Alice and Dolores.
Our three other flying platforms were long strings of birds, our longest-range rising, heavier, smaller platforms, each with weapons—a giant projector on each of them, with a few men to handle it.
Maxite said, “We’re ready for you, Leonard.” He had dropped, for the first time, my royal title. We stood, two friends, parting with a handclasp. His face was very solemn. I think he, too, was thinking of the homecoming. “I’ll follow you with the finders, Leonard. Keep voice connection if you can. Perhaps . . . I will see what you might overlook, and I can advise you.”
I nodded. A simple handclasp. He turned away, to watch our fate from his room beneath the castle.
My platform with the giant Frazier thought-beam we had constructed, was ready. I was to operate it alone. I had learned to fly its six birds. I clasped my black, cone-shaped robe about me. My black helmet dangled like a hood behind my shoulders.