Once we had decided, a desperate haste was on us. Midges were arriving here now from the Forest City. Some of them had seen the oncoming columns of Curtmann's men, down in the forest. They were more than half way from Shan. Occasionally their Earth-flash weapons would stab into the forest ahead of them.
Within ten minutes or so we were ready. I had sent a few of the swiftest-flying Midges back to the Forest City to tell Prytan what had happened. His young men were to arm themselves as best they could, and take position. In a ring around the city, prepared to make a last stand, if we should fail. All the Midges now in the Forest City were to arm themselves with the poisoned thorns, and come to join us in the battle as fast as they could.
Then Venta, Jim and I had donned the spacesuits. No need to inflate them now; we only needed the anti-gravity mechanisms, and the rocket-streams for balancing and for lateral movement.
We rose presently into the air, up into the starlight with the ruined piles of the broken buildings and the forest dropping away beneath us. At five hundred feet we poised. In thrumming groups the Midges, more than two thousand of them now, circled around us. Then, with Jim, Venta and me leading, our bodies in the baggy spacesuits poised almost horizontal in the air and the Midges strung out in long thin lines like insects behind us, we plunged forward to the battle.
V
"There they are!" Jim called.
Five hundred feet below us the forest tree-tops were a fantastic matted mass of vivid vegetation. And suddenly, down in a glade, the line of Curtmann's men was visible. More than I had thought—there seemed a full four hundred of them. In two columns they plodded slowly forward. With them was a great wheeled cart, like a clumsy barge. Evidently Curtmann had built it in Shan. It toiled forward, with the marching men in advance of it and behind it. We could see that it was drawn by harnessed lines of Midges—hundreds of the tiny figures plodding on the ground, bending hunched as they pulled the huge creaking vehicle. The top of the cart was uncovered and a dozen men were riding in it. Groups of them were seated, around a little raised platform on which was mounted what seemed a huge projector.
"Keep the Midges high," I called to Venta who was near me. "Wait until I give the signal."
Our Midges were circling, wildly excited now that the enemy was in sight beneath them. Jim and I had discussed our tactics. In groups of about a hundred we would send the Midges plummeting down. Each would try to stab one of Curtmann's men and then come up again. The enta-poison, Venta had told us, was deadly—sure death if enough of it got into the blood-stream. But it did not act at once; five minutes or more was necessary before the victim would feel its lethal effect.