I acknowledged his greetings. “Yes, but it isn’t over yet! You men get to your stations, and see that these gladiators have a place amongst you. A second group is cutting a path through the streets, bound for the shipyards. We may soon be joined by yet a second ship, manned by friends.”
In a trice we lifted from the corpse-strewn arena and rode the winds above the city. Zantor and his keraxians were halfway to the docks by now, having met with little, and disorganized, opposition en route. As they swarmed over the rail of the Xaxar and rapidly took up their accustomed stations, we lowered teams of axmen with instructions to do as much damage as possible to the pirate craft moored below.
It proved remarkably easy to put the enemy ships out of action. And, in this task, my fellow gladiators were very useful. For a burly tharian, armed with a thirty-pound mace of tempered steel, can chop a hole in a pirate hull in no time, releasing the buoyant vapors pent therein. And an ornithopter with a pierced hull and leaking gas is so much dead weight. By the time the Xaxar cut her cables and rose to join us aloft, not a ship in port was sky-worthy.
But not all of the Zanadarian fleet had lain in moorage; a half-dozen or more scout frigates circled the mountaintop city at various levels of altitude, and it did not take them long to learn the city was under attack. One swept toward us, lean prow cutting the windy sky.
“Now we shall see just how well my `secret weapon’ works in battle,” I remarked to Valkar. “Or have you already found occasion to give my catapult its baptism of fire?”
“Not yet,” he laughed. “But we shall see how well it works soon enough! Catapult crew―to your stations!”
The covering was shorn away and the giant bow unlimbered. Crewmen fitted one of the great, six-pound steel arrows into place and made ready to launch it at the enemy craft now swooping toward us. The effective range of the weapon was three hundred yards, but that is the outside limit, and, having flown that far, the barbed steel-bolts have expended most of their momentum and might not have enough force left to punch through the laminated paper hull. Thus Valkar waited until the enemy ship was within two hundred yards―which was dangerously close―before giving the command to release the catapult. The first enemy arrows were plunking into the decks about us as the mighty catapult discharged its first missile.
The steel arrow was a blur as it hissed through empty air to crunch into the hull of the corsair craft. My warriors raised a lusty shout of triumph as the arrow punched a gaping hole in the hull. A ragged cry went up from the decks of the foe, but it was drowned in the scream of escaping gases. Suddenly no longer buoyant, the corsair ship wobbled drunkenly and sank, passing beneath us.
But we had no time to trace its fall with gloating eyes, for the second pirate was almost upon us, followed closely by two more. Frantically, Valkar’s crew cranked the catapult up again until the taut bow sang with tension. One crewman gasped, and slapped at his upper arm, suddenly transfixed by an arrow from the approaching craft. He staggered back, his place eagerly taken by a broad-chested ex-gladiator. With a deep moaning whine we fired a second bolt from the giant bow.
Like a steel thunderbolt it slammed into the bow of the oncoming corsair and snapped the keel in two parts―an amazingly lucky shot, with the most unexpected results! This keel, you see, holds the fabric together. Once broken, the ship began to break apart under its own internal stresses. For while the ship has no real weight, because of the buoyant gas held under pressure in the double hull, it has mass and it is cumbersome due to its size.
The second ship literally broke in half in midair. Howling men fell over the rail, dwindling black motes that receded into the misty gulfs below. The ship sagged drunkenly and fell, crumbling apart into a rain of gigantic fragments. Again, my warriors raised a hearty cheer.
By this time the Xaxar was aloft, and Zantor had already engaged the third enemy ship, while we cranked up the catapult and fired another bolt at the fourth. But the Sky Pirates were becoming wary of my new weapon and veered aside just in time. The steel bolt hissed past their prow, narrowly missing it. This fourth ship, and a fifth one whose approach I had not noticed, began circling us, careful to avoid the catapult.
Zantor, of course, had only conventional weapons, but his knowledge of this new art of aerial warfare was superior to mine, and he dispatched his adversary in a novel and most decisive manner. I had wondered whether or not the gas trapped in the double hull of the flying galleons might not be flammable and even explosive, assuming it to be a gas like hydrogen. Zantor confirmed my guess by arming his men with fire arrows. Six or seven of their burning shafts sank harmlessly in the hull of the third Zanadarian craft before a lucky eighth shot penetrated the double hull and ignited the vapors in it.
The entire prow of the enemy ship vanished in a deafening thunderclap and a ball of blazing flame. The rest of the ship, a seething inferno, plunged to its doom.
Now we engaged our two wary adversaries with hastily devised fire arrows, which were ordinary shafts, whose barbed tips were bound with a bit of greasy waste, set afire by coals fetched from the galley. In no time a fifth ship went screaming down in flames. As for the sixth, it blundered within range of the catapult, and sank to crash on the fanglike peaks of the mountains far below, a gaping hole in its hull.
And thus the first aerial battle in the history of Thanator was concluded. In twenty minutes, or a bit less, we had downed six ships and cleared the skies of foemen.
In the engagement precisely one Shondakorian had been injured when an arrow pierced his upper arm. The shaft had been removed, the wound sponged clean and smeared with salve and bandaged, and the man was in good humor, joking with his comrades.
We circled the mountaintop city in preparation for our departure. And it was one of my former fellow gladiators who gave me the key to rendering the Sky Pirates helpless to avenge our attack. This fellow had been a slave in the gas mines before being condemned to the arena for striking a guard who had sought to whip one of his friends to death for some minor infraction of the rules.
He pointed out the gas mines to me; they were on the crest of the mountain, just below the peak where the arena and the palace citadel of the Zanadarian rulers were situated. It seems that the mountain held vast pockets of buoyant gas, which the Zanadarians had capped with massive iron valves. My informant did not need to point out what an excellent diversionary tactic to cover our escape it would be if we could knock off one of these valves and ignite the escaping gas.
The feat could best be left to a tharian. I explained the scheme to the assembled crew and called for volunteers from among the former gladiators. I was a bit disconcerted to see that it was my friend Ergon who was the first to step forward.
His great mace slung over his shoulder in a hastily jury-rigged baldric, we lowered him on a line to the row of stone chimneys, after first sweeping the scene with arrows, driving away the mine guards. With our hearts in our mouths we watched from the hovering ship as Ergon’s tiny figure clung to the top of one chimney, beating the massive valve askew with ringing blows of his great mace.
It seemed to take forever. ‘Darkness had already fallen, the swift quenching of the sourceless golden radiance that is the Thanatorian equivalent of daylight. The world was thrust suddenly into darkness, save for the dim, enormous globe that was the orange-banded giant planet Jupiter, thrusting his luminous orb over the horizon. In the sudden dark, enemy craft could descend upon us unseen. Our danger increased with every moment we remained here.