"Tollgamo has built them up to a range of three hundred feet."
There were about fifty of the small cylinder-boats; most of them to take two men. For battle tonight it was all Peters could assemble. But the cylinders were fleet as darting fishes. We had mobility, and courage, but with sinking heart I wondered if it would serve us.
And I also wondered what Tollgamo would have. Leh's information gave us little hint; and presently he, Allen and I took one of the larger cylinders.
We ran without lights. For a time all I could see was a turgid vista of dark-green depths. An abyss of water at times was beneath us. Then there were the tops of jagged mountain peaks, naked black needle spires rising in clusters out of the depths. Leh knew very well the oceanography here in this undulating terrain of seascape. We headed for the mouth of the inlet at the head of which Tollgamo's city was perched. But before we reached there, little lights down in the watery green haze suddenly appeared. An orange, blurred haze, separating in a moment into dotted points of light.
"Tollgamo's forces!" Leh murmured.
At perhaps a hundred feet of depth, we shut off our tiny rocket-streams of oxo-hydro fluorescence and hung poised. The three of us sat breathless, peering. Had our tail-stream been discovered? It seemed not. There was no undue movement of the Tollgamo lights. Just a slow-moving little string of them, ahead and below us.
I could see the bottom now, a great undulating spread here of dark surface. Rock, doubtless, with slime and ooze on it. The moving dots of light presently disclosed the blobs of enemy vessels. Ten of them, crawling on the bottom in a slow moving line. Cubes and oblongs of metal. Dwarfed by distance they were like struggling little bugs, with lighted eyes and tiny searchbeams waving like feelers before them. Metallic vehicles, perhaps with caterpiller tread, crawling on the bottom.
We drifted closer; almost over them for a moment so that I could guess that each of them was a hundred feet or more in length. Turreted oblong vessels, armoured; and armed with the three hundred foot rays. How many men were in them? Of this Leh had little knowledge, save that he thought perhaps a total of two thousand. Men and women, crawling along in the ooze of this sea bottom, tense, with minds only upon the kill.
"They're heading for Arron," Leh murmured. "In those big ships they surely must have a vast apparatus for land attack."