It was midnight on the part of Mars where the Sirians first struck. The fleet of the Solar System was massed there to meet them. They seemed headed for the mighty gleaming city of Metal, below. Dornalus, the second city of old Mars; was there, and they seemed bent on reaching it. As the Sirians drew near they threw forward a great shield of the torpedo-ships; then the great generators on the Solarian fleet forced tremendous etheric currents into space, and waited to see the motions of the tiny ships become erratic, but they darted about as steadily, as easily as ever. These Sirians must be small men! And they must be from a massive world, a world that had accustomed them to great accelerations. Below them the city was deserted except for vision projector machines that hummed steadily, automatically, from a thousand points. They were broadcasting the message to the worlds and to the commanding officers on the other side of Mars. These men had direct control of the battle. They could not control it from Earth, for radio waves travel too slowly. Twenty minutes each way the waves took and in forty minutes the battle was more than over. It lasted only fifteen minutes--minutes of terrific carnage! As the two great fleets came into contact, the Solarians drove into the mass of tiny ships, their Dis rays flashing in every direction. They had one advantage in that they sprayed nine streams of death from each of their craft; but the torpedo-ships were so unbelievably fast that it was nearly impossible to hit them. And they seemed to have no compunction about raying one of their own ships if a more than equal amount of damage was inflicted on their enemies. Logical, no doubt, but how inhuman. The sky above the city became a blazing hell of Dis rays, heat rays, and exploding shells. The explosives were not safe, for they threw great flying fragments that could pierce the wall of a ship and send it down. They damaged friend and foe alike. The Solarian fleet had a solid projectile of a single giant crystal of copper that was immune to the Dis ray. It could penetrate the walls of a ship and bring it down. But the explosive bombs were more often than not exploded or merely disintegrated before they reached their goal. A crystal of any sort was immune to the Dis ray, but it was not a protection against it. There was no known way of deflecting the Dis ray except by that special electrical field that directed it, and that could not be made to surround a ship. The copper crystals were used mainly to destroy the Dis ray projectors of the enemy. They were fired at the faint glow, and with luck they would hit the machine and instantly wreck the projector. More than one machine disappeared as its own Dis ray projector, wrecked by the fifteen-inch copper crystal, suddenly spread in all directions. The sphere and its escort of transports hung back, surrounded by a great number of the torpedo-ships. They did not join in the fight.