I ran down the castle stairway. From the city a roar of enthusiasm went up. I turned and waved a hand.
Departure for battle! The people expected a martial gesture, and I gave it to them. But within me was a shudder.
I leaped on the black platform. It was no more than six feet wide and twice as long, crowded with the projector, the batteries and intensifiers, and much other scientific apparatus.
I gripped the reins, shouted to the six birds whom I had trained to know my voice and respond to my commands.
My platform rose over the castle grounds. Around me, the girls and the other platforms circled. Down in the estuary the ten black boats were starting in a double line. Out beyond the city, on the road toward the sea, a thin black line showed in the yellow moon glow—Jim’s land division. The city beneath me was a frantic, waving mass of humanity.
I shouted through my aerial. The girls and the platforms broke their circle and started forward. With my platform leading them, we swept in a great arc over the city, and away into the moonlit sky.
XVII
THE BATTLE
The Warm Sea was a body of water some one hundred miles long by ten miles wide at most places. It lay in a bowl-like depression of rolling country. Bays and caves indented its shores in some places; in others cliffs came sheer to the water.
Kalima lay at what I might term its southern end. The sea broadened here into a sheet of water nearly twenty miles wide, which I had learned to call Kalima Bay. To the north it narrowed. The Virgins’ Island divided it, with a narrow channel on each side, beyond which it opened again.
To the left along the west side of the sea, the road from Kalima wound northward. The west channel of the Virgins’ Island was very narrow—two thousand feet at the utmost—but it was deep, with a sandy strip of beach on the mainland, a bluff of fifty feet, with the road on top. It was along the west side that Talon’s land forces were coming. And on the same road from Kalima Jim’s force was marching to oppose them.