Out and over--and now as we soared upward into the rarefied levels of the air like a shooting-star, our cruiser was driving outward over the cities, stabbing westward through the air, literally chasing the sun that had disappeared hours before. From Berlin behind us there rose a hundred cruisers, soaring in swift and deadly pursuit! But so swift had been our rush, so tardy had been the alarm of our escape, that before the great batteries of Berlin could blast us from the air we were beyond them; and before the other massed air-cities over which we were rushing could receive that alarm we had split the air westward above them, and had rushed out from over the last of their titanic floating masses and into the night! "We're clear of the cities!" I yelled to Hilliard over the thunderous droning of our motors and the roar of winds about us. "If we can shake off these pursuing cruisers we'll win back across the Atlantic yet!" "But their whole battle-fleet is rising now!" cried Hilliard, gazing back. "And now all their air-cities are beginning to move westward too--_all their hundred air-cities are moving west to the attack_!" Across the Atlantic Despite the wild peril of our rushing ship, I felt for a moment all the blood congealing around my heart as Hilliard yelled those words, and I looked backward for one last glimpse. For there, behind us, behind the hundred ships that were pursuing us, the whole two thousand cruisers of the European battle-fleet had risen and were coming westward also. They were not pursuing us so much as they were speeding westward according to their plan, moving after us in a great crescent formation! And, behind them, we could see now all the hundred gigantic air-cities of the European Federation, massed there in a colossal circular formation about their central city of Berlin; moving westward also behind the crescent of their fleet, they were flashing with terrible majesty through the air in their circular-massed formation; at a speed that mounted swiftly to two hundred miles an hour! The great attack had begun! Only a moment I gazed back upon that colossal spectacle never seen by man before, and knew that in that moment, far on the world's other side, the hundred great air-cities of the Asiatic Federation would be rushing eastward; the two great forces of hurtling air-cities were converging upon the American Federation. Then, as we shot forward with our own greater and terrific speed, the vast massed cities and the fleet before them had passed from sight behind us and only the hundred grim pursuing cruisers were visible in the night as we hurtled on!