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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.
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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.
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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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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