Then the First Air Chief spoke a brief order and, as Connell beside him repeated it swiftly into the distance-phone (as he did with Yarnall's orders in all the combat that followed) the great fleet of cruisers hanging above us and visible in our top screen divided into two masses, of a thousand or more ships each, which swept swiftly to east and west. Beyond the great ring of air-cities they leaped, until they were far out; and each division then formed into a great curving line screening our ring of cities to east and west, facing the fleets rushing toward them from those directions. Then we were gazing again at the table-map before us, a deathly silence seeming to grip all the world. Upon that map we could see the European and Asiatic armadas were now within hardly more than a hundred miles of our own; and tensely we watched the east and western screens now, gazing out beyond our cities. "They'll use their cruiser-fleets for their first attack," Yarnall was saying as we gazed tensely forth. "They'll try to wipe out our cruisers before they bring their cities on to attack ours." I nodded. "It would give them a big advantage when the cities come to blows. But our cruisers beat them back once with the odds two to one, and now--" I broke off sharply, and at the same moment heard a low breath from Yarnall and Connell simultaneously, felt seemingly a low tremor that seemed to run instantaneously across all our massed air-cities. For there, far to the westward, black against the sky, there had appeared a line of far-flung black dots that were growing very quickly in size, and that were massed together in a crescent formation whose horns were toward us. It was the advancing cruiser-fleet of the Asiatic Federation forces. Tensely we watched it as it came on; then we looked to the east to see a similar crescent of advancing dots, the European cruiser fleet. On they came, smoothly rushing toward our own lines of cruisers, hanging to the east and west of our cities; and then for the moment we forgot them as we made out, to east and west, behind them, advancing toward us, great black masses that even at that distance seemed to fill the air. They were the two massed mighty armadas of the European and Asiatic Federation's air-cities, rushing to battle with our own! CHAPTER X The First Clash