there would not be any bombs left inside the rooms in The Tree. If every bomb available was being carried by the winged defenders, then they would be expended when the carriers were expended. At that moment, the forces of the Dhulhulikh looked inexhaustible. There were sections of the sky which were black with them. Perhaps the estimate of the prisoners that there were sixty-five hundred warriors in the city was true.
The fleet and the massed winged men flew toward each other. The ships were just below the extreme height attainable by the Dhulhulikh, but before the first bat-men reached the ships, the ships rose, and then they were over the bat-men. Ulysses gave the order, and rockets with impact fuses soared out from the hatches in the bottom of the ships. They burst among the clouds of men, and tiny pieces of rock — shrapnel — struck the winged men.
Rocket after rocket flew out, but the ships did not exhaust their supply. They needed some for the landing — if they would be able to land.
Hundreds of bat-men were put out of action by the blasts and the shrapnel. They fell, their wings fluttering, and struck the branches or the vine complexes or dropped into the dark abyss of the lower part of The Tree. Many struck those below them and knocked them out or broke their wings, and these, in turn, fell into others below them.
The ships passed on at full speed and left the hordes behind them. They circled and came back again with the bat-men flapping desperately to get on a level with them. This time, however, they had put much space between the warriors to lessen the effects of the rocket blasts. Despite this, they lost several hundred.
The fleet left them behind, turned around and passed over. Now the rockets were spared, and a few bombs were tossed out from the bottom hatches or catapulted from the side domes. By then, about an hour of sunshine was left. The lower part of The Tree was already in night.
For the third time, the fleet came around, and now the noses of the ships dipped, and they slid down an incline of air. The Dhulhulikh commanders saw that the ships would pass under them. Doubtless, they wondered what madness had struck the invaders, but they intended to take advantage of it. They continued to fly around in descending and then ascending spirals, taking one spiral past the other to avoid collisions, the whole army presenting a seeming confusion of corkscrew formations narrowly missing each other, moving back and forth.
The flagship continued to lower and then, shortly before it reached the first of the defenders, it rose. When it ploughed into the front of the mass, it was on an approximate level with the highest of them. None of the bat-men were able to get above it.
But they were even with it, and they closed around it like a net.
Rockets burst among the winged men. Bombs, thrown by catapults, exploded among them. The air was filled with puffs of smoke, charging and falling bodies. A moment later, the flagship released part of its hawks. The birds flashed out from the hatches on every side and threw themselves into the faces of the nearest bat-men.
Four of the ships were with the flagship, and these had loosed a quarter of their hawks. The other five ships had continued descending, and such was the havoc caused by the explosives and the hawks, no Dhulhulikh bothered them.
Their motors going full speed, the five dirigibles passed the trunks in a circling movement and sped more rockets into the holes. Their heaviest concentration was on the huge hole, and a rocket must have struck a supply of bombs to judge from the series of explosions. The edges of the hole were ripped apart, and when the smoke had cleared, a gaping wound was revealed in the side of the trunk.
Ulysses grinned at this and then lost his grin. The last one in line of the five ships had burst into flames!
Suddenly, the ship was falling, its skeleton revealed through the burned away skin, and little bodies were dropping from the gondola and the hatches as the men jumped rather than burn to death.
White with the heat of burning hydrogen, the wreck crashed across a branch three hundred feet below the hole and there burned fiercely. The trees and vegetation growing on the branch caught on fire, and the fire spread along the branch. Through the smoke poured hundreds of females and children, forced out of a previously unseen hole. Many fell into the abyss, perhaps because they were overcome by the smoke.
Graushpaz had turned blue under his grey skin on seeing the holocaust. But it was he who first saw the hole above a branch. All the others had been below it, and this had frustrated Ulysses' intentions of landing troops. He needed a place where he could bring the dirigible down just before a hole and grapple the craft to the branch to discharge troops.
However, the air had to be cleared first.
He radioed orders, and the four survivors lifted and then began to swing around. The other five turned, and presently the two halves were moving toward each other. Ulysses spent a few minutes making sure that they were on courses which would not end in collision, and then he bent his efforts to the defence. His flight was still at a level with the upper echelons of the bat-men. These had restored enough order in their ranks to make formations which now attacked en masse. The hawks had either been killed or chased away, though at the cost of heavy casualties.
Now the second fourth of the birds was released. The hawks caused chaos and broke up the front ranks, but enough bat-men got through to the dirigibles. These were met by arrow fire, since the bombs could not be exploded too close to the ships. The bat-men were not inhibited by this, however, and they lit the fuses of their little bombs and lobbed them at the skin of the ships or the gun domes. Some actually struck the skin of the flagship and blew big holes in it. But none reached the big gas cells inside, and the leakage of hydrogen was so little that there was none in the effective range of the bombs.
The ships of each segment were close enough to each other to provide some crossfire of arrows and bolts. Warriors fell into the depths with arrows sticking from them, and many of these had not yet thrown their bombs. Ulysses saw a bomb explode while in the hands of a Dhulhulikh just hit by a crossbow bolt. The bomb blew him apart and sent two others spinning.
He gave the order to lift and increase speed. The winged men fell below and behind.
'Nesh!' Graushpaz said, and trumpeted. Ulysses turned to see a flaming ship in the other segment. Some bat-man had gotten in with a bomb, and it had set fire to leaking hydrogen or blown a gas cell open.
Slowly, majestically, the vessel fell, breaking in half even as it descended toward The Tree. White and red flames roared from it, and a great plume of black smoke followed it. Men were leaping from it, some of them afire. And many many blackened corpses of winged men fell past it. The ship had been the object of an especially heavy concentration of Dhulhulikh. It was this concentration that had enabled the bat-men to get their bombs to it. But there were so many around it, they died by the hundreds, caught in the blast of heat, skins cooked or their lungs seared.
Those some distance below it were diving away frantically to keep from being caught by the falling wreck. Most would make it, but the air space was so crowded that some could not get past their more fortunate fellows. The former disappeared into the flames and went on down with the vessel, though they may have been ashes before the fire-ravaged skeleton landed crosswise on a branch.
The vegetation growing on the branch burned fiercely. But The Tree itself, though its surface could be damaged by fire, would not burn.
Ulysses reassembled the fleet and put it into a formation that took it down toward the big hole just above a branch. The Dhulhulikh were in disorder, swirling around like gnats over a corpse. They did not seem to be so numerous now. They could have lost a fourth of their strength. That still left about forty-eight hundred, an appalling number against which to pit eight dirigibles.
Again, the ship came over the Dhulhulikh just above their flying range. They shot, not arrows, bombs or rockets, but clouds of smoke which enveloped the winged men. The ships threw a few more bombs from the stern hatches, hoping that the explosions in the midst of the blinding smoke would panic the Dhulhulikh.
The dirigibles turned again and came in lower, again laying down a thick level of smoke. The men in the cockpits on top and the domes on the side reported that a large number of bat-men had flown in out of the smoke and rammed against the ship. A few had struck so hard they had gone through the skin, but these were knocked unconscious or crippled, and the crew seized them, cut their throats, and threw them out through the hatches.
When the ships had left the second and lowest level behind them, they turned again. This time four stayed on the same level to lay another cloud, but the flagship and three others went down under the slowly drifting cloud. The sun was finally setting; in sixty seconds it would be below the horizon.
TheBlue Spirit plunged into an immense alley of trunks and branches about a thousand feet below the city and several miles south of it. It was so dark there that Ulysses had to turn on the searchlights of the ships. He did
