Adventure stories; Science fiction; Time travel -- Fiction
As we sped away into the darkness, I heard other crashes behind
me, and when I again turned the car, it was to see the last of the
Kanlar air-boats carrying those glowing circles go tumbling down to
destruction. For below us the Khluns had seen and guessed the meaning
of our attack, and had sped up to finish off those who had escaped us.
And with the destruction of that score of hovering Kanlar cars, the
strange glowing light that emanated from each of the Khlun cars ceased.
What that light was, we never knew. Undoubtedly the Kanlars had devised
some method of causing our own air-boats to become light-emitting,
while theirs remained dark. Possibly a ray like the fluorescent "black
light" of the World War, from which they had guarded their own cars
by special means. Whatever the nature of it, the light was a deadly
weapon in such a night battle, causing the Khluns' air-boats to stand
out as shining marks for the blue flashes, while the cars of the
Kanlars hovered invisibly about them in the darkness. But now, with
the disappearance of that light, the battle tipped in favor of the men
of Kom. Their deadly sound-rays filled the air with thrumming, and in
groups, in masses, the air-boats of the enemy disintegrated, broke up,
poured down to earth in a mixed shower of men and metal. Finally but
a scant thirty cars remained of the Kanlar fleet, while around them
circled almost two hundred of the Khlun air-boats, striking at them
with the deadly sound-ray.
As we hovered above the battle, a single air-boat drove up toward us,
and I saw that in it was Kethra. He stopped his car beside our own, and
I opened the door of our car, while Lantin leaned out and shouted to
him.
"You've won!" cried Lantin, pointing down to the night below us, where
the thrumming of sound-rays and jetting flashes of blue showed the
dwindling conflict.
"We've won," he replied, "but where is the Raider?"
"Lurking in the temple," replied Lantin, "and it is there we must go
now, to rescue our friends and destroy the Raider."
"We'll do that," replied Kethra, "but first--" Abruptly he stopped
speaking, and seemed to be listening tensely. I, too, was listening,
and over the crash of air-boats and the humming sound-rays a sound came
to my ears that beat in them like the drums of doom.
A little whisper of wind, a whisper that grew swiftly louder, that
shrieked, that roared, that bellowed. Up from beneath came a gust of
wind of such force that our car heeled around under it, and with it
came a piercing whistling to our ears, an eery chorus of wind-shrieks
that changed to a thundering gale. Then, a hundred feet below us, there
flashed into being--the Raider!
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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