Then it seemed that Talon’s line was drawing back, a retreat northward. A yellow barrage went up to cover it. But Jim rushed it; the barrage vanished. With some great projector, Talon’s heads made a stand.
A great ball of fire rose into the heavens, a tremendous arc over Jim’s army, until it fell at the horizon. Fell on Kalima? I thought so; There was a glare against the sky over there. At five-minute intervals these fire-balls went up, bombarding the distant city.
Sonya was fifteen thousand feet over the channel when our second attack began. The storm was driving the girls back; the birds could barely hold against the wind. The sea far below was a turmoil of lashing waves.
Our boats in the east channel started forward to try and reach Talon’s rafts. But the rafts had blown ashore, were wrecked on the north rocky beach of the island.
Angry waves dashed over them. The heads and the brute-bodies were washed ashore with each white surge of the water.
Our boats saw it. They dropped back into the lee of the island, in the East Channel. The water was a little calmer there.
Close along shore they hovered, and began raking the island with their needle beams, a steady outpour of violet streams, and blasts from the blue fire-guns.
The island’s verdure shriveled, all along the east shore. Then Maxite ordered Jim to set a projector on the west bluff. It soon was sending a blue stream across the channel. The west side of the island was raked from end to end.
Sonya’s girls were scattered by the wind. But she saw some of them poised over the north end of the island where Talon’s men were trying to land from the rafts. The girls dropped a bomb, then another. The bombs were finding their marks.
Sonya urged her bird in that direction. But abruptly the thought of Altho came clear and vivid to her mind. She had long since given Altho up for dead, killed by our own weapons. But he was not dead. His thoughts came to her with sudden clearness.