Fleet hanging to fleet, the air between them thick with shining heat-shells, down we rushed until we were within yards and then feet of the ocean's tossing surface! But, still firing at each other steadily, they were swooping downward still until we were plunging straight down into the ocean's depths. For these great air-cruisers could move beneath water as well as through the air. Each opening in them sealed tight during flight, their air-supplies always automatically furnished by great tanks of liquid-air, their great tube-propellers sucking water through them at immense speed even as they did air, and hurling the cruiser on at a speed which while far less than that in the air was still great--with these features our cruisers were now down into the great waters of the Atlantic. "Hold steady!" I cried to Macklin as we swooped downward, and the waters rushed up toward us. "Keep in line with the First Air Chief's ship!" I saw his hands clench upon the wheel, and then the waters were just beneath us, were rushing nearer and nearer, while even then our ships and those about us were loosing their heat-shells upon the European fleet whose great column was plunging downward like our own. Down--down--and then with a shock our cruiser had plunged into the great waters, had rushed beneath the waves, and instantly the light of sunset all about us had vanished, had given way to the green translucence of the waters. Through that green obscurity there shot yellow shafts of revealing light, the underwater searchlights in the walls of our cruiser which I had snapped on. From all the ships before and behind us came other brilliant shafts. Our great fleet still grappled with the European fleet rushing down to our right, our heat-guns loosing their deadly shells still through the green waters toward each other's fleet! The great battle over the Atlantic was to be carried on in the great ocean's very depths! CHAPTER III Under the Sea Green depths that swirled about us, shafts of yellow light that swung and stabbed through them, rushing cruisers and detonating guns and drone of motors and wild shouts--all these merged and mingled in one great phantasmagoria of strange impressions in those first moments. I had shot under the ocean's surface in my cruiser many a time before, but never in battle. And now, with our two great fleets plunging down into those peaceful depths, all about me seemed for a moment a strange dream. Then I saw before us, the cruisers of the First Air Chief and those about him, dark long bulks that gleamed there in the depths beneath us as the yellow shafts of light struck and crossed them.