Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/122

122 alive for the "fun" to follow. Swiftly the rays swept over the endlessly long columns.

DVANCE," screamed Saba over the great telemach with which Eemeeshee had maintained contact with the columns. It was their only salvation to pull forward those few feet needed for their beams to reach that center of the vast machines where sourced the beams destroying them.

As one man, the Indians, spurred to quick obedience by Saba's shriek, swung forward the levers of the anti-grav generators and the remaining few hundreds of ray-cars swept forward, down upon the flaming source of the death. Now their beams, weakened to less than effective strength, reached the chamber, but failed to stop the living, mutilated gargoyles within the chamber from their ray-driven robot work. On and on they plunged toward the death-dealing master-ray, and swiftly the great vibratory beams lashed at them.

Saba now pressed all the studs she knew anything about on the great organ-like keyboard of Eemeeshee's weapon car, and the beams reached out toward the war-ray chamber where the ray-ro toiled like maddened devils swinging the great controls of the master mech—for they were built for men three times the modern height.

Saba downed the "ro" at the great lever of the master-beam, one by one they fell as she flung back her hair from her flaming face and strained every muscle at the great machine's levers. Clumsily the huge beam swept about the chamber, striking the laboring ro more by chance than by skill. The whole smoking and scream-filled chamber fell into near darkness as the big human robots dropped in death and their weight, dropped releasingly from the levers, let the great, whining dynamos slow into an idling hum.

Saba started her search of the whole area for the other war-ray posts which she knew must be manned; must be readying themselves for attack.

Following her lead, the red men at the smaller ray controls sent their beams lancing out in a terrific criss-cross of searching rays—for there were several hundred of them still in untouched condition. All about lay their comrades, some charred and still-smoking corpses, others in a trance like death from the concussion of the vibratory ray sat at their ray-mech switch-panels like frozen men, staring straight ahead, or slumped in retching paralysis from the effects of other beams.

Now, seeing the mighty mass of ray still searching for them, the Da Sylva ray-ro, stationed far above her chambers in desperation gave up their silence and darkness which had protected from this sudden assault and staked their chances on a sudden lashing attack with their long distance ray-needles. (These are very thin pencils of ray whose very narrowness makes the power needed to activate them much less, and the "carry" of the ray is much farther.)

These fiery needles of death reaching down at them from a half dozen points in the darkness overhead, began to pick off the red men one by one, the fiery needles searching swiftly through their bodies till a fatal spot was found. (The pain of such a death is excruciating, for the needles are not fatal unless they pierce the heart or cut the spinal column at the base of the brain.) Steadily these needles lanced through their flesh, searching inexorably for their heart strings; while Saba with Eemeeshee's master mech ray searched the miles of darkness overhead for the source of the needles.

One by one, under the fierce-eyed, sweating girl's swift desperate hands, the far, fiery lances of death ceased to plague them, and at last the whole area before their advance fell silent and dark.