Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 Part 11

Prester Kleig regarded the time. It had been half an hour since Moyen had spoken of attack, half an hour since the monsters of the deep had started the inexorable move toward land. On the screen the submarines were bulking larger and larger as the moments fled, until it seemed to the Secret Agents that the great composite shadow of them already was sweeping inland from the coast.

As the coast came close ahead of the monster subs the little aero-subs, to the surprise of the Secret Agents, all vanished into their respective mother ships.

"But they have to use them," groaned Munson. "For their submarines are useless in frontal attack against our sh.o.r.es!"

"I am not so sure of that," said Prester Kleig. "For I have a suspicion that those submarines have tractors under their keels, and that they can come out on land! If this is so the monsters can, guarded by armour-plate, penetrate to the very heart of our most populated areas before their aero-subs are released."

None of the Secret Agents as yet had stopped to ponder how the monsters had reached their positions, and why Moyen was attacking from the east, when the Pacific side of the continents would have appeared to be the obvious point of attack, and would have obviated the necessity of long, secret under-sea journeys wherein discovery prematurely must have been one of the many worries of the submarine commanders.

The mere fact of the presence of the monsters was enough. What had preceded their presence was unimportant, save that their presence, and their near approach to the sh.o.r.e undetected, further proved the executive and planning genius of Moyen.

Two miles, on an average, off the eastern coast the submarines laid their eggs--the aero-subs, which darted from the sides of the mother ships in flights and squadrons, made the surface, and leaped into the sky.

Five minutes later and the signal went forth to the phalanx of the volunteers.

"Take off! Fly east and engage the enemy, and hold him in check, and the G.o.d of our fathers go with you!"

One hour had pa.s.sed since Moyen's ultimatum when the first vanguard of the American flyers, obeying the peremptory signal, took the air and darted eastward to meet the winged death-harbingers of Moyen.

CHAPTER X

"_They Shall Not Pa.s.s!_"

Prester Kleig's heartfelt desire, as the American flyers closed with the first of the aero-subs, was to go out with them and aid them in the attack against the Moyenites. But he knew, and it was a tacit thing, that he best served his country from the safe haven of the Secret Room.

As he watched the scenes unfold on the screen of Maniel's genius, with occasional glances at the somewhat mysterious but profound and concentrated labors of Maniel, Charmion Kane rose from her place and came to his side.

Wide-eyed as she watched the joining of battle, she stood there, her tiny hand encased in the tense one of Prester Kleig.

"You would like to be out there," she murmured. "I know it! But your country needs you here--and I have already given Carlos!"

Prester Kleig tightened his grip on her hand.

There was deep, silent understanding between these two, and Prester Kleig, in fighting against the Moyenites, realized, even above his realization that his labors were primarily for the benefit of his country, that he really matched wits with Moyen for the sake of Charmion. Had anyone asked him whether he would have sacrificed her for the benefit of his country, it would have been a difficult question to answer.

He was glad that the question was never asked.

"Yes, beloved," he whispered, "I would like to be out there, but the greatest need for me is here."

But even so he felt as though he was betraying those intrepid flyers he was sending to sure death. Yet they had volunteered, and it was the only way.

Maniel, a gnomelike little man with a t.i.tan's brain, labored with his calculations, made swiftly concrete his theories, while at the Sound-and-Vision apparatus excitable General Munson ranged the aerial battlefield to see how the tide of battle ebbed and flowed.

That neither side would either ask or give quarter was instantly apparent, for they rushed head-on to meet each other, those vast opposing winged armadas, at top speed, and not a single individual swerved from his course, though at least the Americans knew that death rode the skyways ahead.

Then....

The battle was joined. Moyen's forces were superior in armament. Their sky-steeds were faster, more readily maneuverable, though the flying forces of the Americas in the last five years had made vast strides in aviation. But what the Americans lacked in power they made up for in fearless courage.

The plan of battle seemed automatically to work itself out.

The first vanguard of American planes came into contact with the forces of Moyen, and from the noses of countless aero-subs spurted that golden streak which the Secret Agents knew and dreaded.

The first flight of planes, stretching from horizon to horizon, vanished from the sky with that dreadful surety which had marked the pa.s.sing of the _Stellar_, and such of those warships as had felt the full force of the visible ray.

From General Munson rose a groan of anguish. These convertible fighting planes had been the pride of the heart of the old warrior. To do him credit, however, it was the wanton, so terribly inevitable destruction of the flyers themselves which affected him. It was so final, so absolute--and so utterly impossible to combat.

"Wait!" snapped Prester Kleig.

For the intrepid flyers behind that vanguard which had vanished had witnessed the wholesale disintegration of the leading element of the vast armada, and the pilots realized on the instant that no headlong rush into the very noses of the aero-subs would avail anything.

The vast American formation broke into a mad maelstrom of whirling, darting, diving planes. Every third plane plummeted downward, every second one climbed, and the remaining ships, even in the face of what had happened to the vanished first flight, held steadily to the front.

In this mad, seemingly meaningless formation, they closed on the aero-subs. Without having seen the fight, the Americans were aping the action of that one nameless flyer who had charged the aero-sub that had been destroyed.

Kleig remembered. A score of ships had been destroyed utterly above the graveyard of dreadnoughts, yet only one aero-sub, and that quite by chance, had been marked off in the casualty column.

Death rode the heavens as the American flyers went into action. For head-on fights, flyers went in at top speed, their planes whirling on the axes of fuselages, all guns going. Planes were armored against their own bullets, and they were not under the necessity of watching to see that they did not slay their own friends.

Even so, bullets were rather ineffective against the aero-subs, whose apparently flimsy, almost transparent outer covering diverted the bullets with amazing ease.

A whirling maelstrom of ships. The monsters of Moyen had drawn first blood, if the expression may be used in an action where no blood at all was drawn, but machines and men simply erased from existence.

Hundreds of planes already gone when the second flight of ships closed with the aero-subs. Yellow streaks of death flashed from aero-sub nostrils, but even as aero-sub operators set their rays into motion the American flyers in head-on charge rolled, dived or zoomed, and kept their guns going.

High above the first flight of aero-subs, behind which another flight was winging swiftly into action, American flyers tilted the noses of their planes over and dived under full power--to sure death by suicide, though none knew it there at the moment.

These aero-subs could not be driven from the sky by usual means, and could destroy American ships even before those planes could come to handgrips; but they, the flyers plainly believed, could be crashed out of the sky and so, never guessing what besides death in resulting crashes they faced, the flyers above the aero-subs, even as aero-subs in rear flashed in to prevent, dived down straight at the backs of the aero-subs.

In a hundred places the dives of the Americans worked successfully, and American planes crashed full and true, full power on, into the backs of the "flying fish." In some aero-subs the container of the Moyen-dealing agency apparently remained untouched, and airplanes and aero-subs, welded together, plunged down the invisible skylanes into the sea.

Under water, some of the aero-subs were seen to keep in motion, limping toward the nearest mother submarines.

"I hope," said Prester Kleig, "the American flyers in such cases are already dead, for Moyen will be a maniac in his tortures. Munson, do you hurriedly examine the mother-subs and see if you can locate Moyen."