My words had changed suddenly into that wild cry of warning, and as the others glanced up they saw above that which had brought that cry from me. Two of the patrol-cruisers of the enemy that were dashing about us still in futile attack as we started away had drawn back and had circled upward high above us. And now, without using heat-guns and for that reason not detected by us until that last moment, they had joined together and side by side were rushing straight down upon us like a great single projectile of flying metal! Were rushing straight down toward our cruiser, that sped in front of all the mass of our cruisers, identifying it in that way as the ship of our expedition's commander, and sacrificing themselves to destroy us in a headlong crash in revenge for our bombing of the city beneath! Even as I had glimpsed them, had cried out, they were looming just above us, rushing down toward us! Even as that wild cry had left my lips and as the others had looked up other cries had come from them, from Macklin and Hilliard. "_Over!_" I screamed to Macklin as his hands shot to the wheel, and in the next instant he was whirling the wheel over, to send our cruiser whirling sidewise to escape that thunderbolt of twin destruction from above. But in the next moment, before it could answer to the wheel, the down-thundering ships above had crashed squarely down into our own! We reeled there with them for a single instant, three twisted wrecks of metal hanging there in mid-air in that instant, and then theirs and our own wrecked cruiser were falling, were hurtling crazily downward through the upper night toward the giant radiant circle of the great air-city miles below! CHAPTER V Captured That mad whirl downward of our wrecked cruiser is now to me more of a memory of some strange and torturing dream than a memory of actual happenings. Flung sidewise and downward against the bridge-room's floor as our cruiser whirled over with that mighty crash from above, I glimpsed Macklin and Hilliard tossed about there with me, rolling over and over. The black gloom of night about us, the mass of our onrushing ships above, the colossal brilliant air-city beneath, the two wrecked cruisers that were tumbling downward with our own--all these things seemed to whirl about us like some great wheel of swift-succeeding impressions as we glimpsed them in that mad moment through the bridge-room's whirling windows.