Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/127

Rh from the far-flung frontiers of her holdings to take their place in the battle line, were now equal to their own. And their inexperience proved no match for the mindless ro, who under control from the many control beams from the cars of Da Sylva's henchmen, were each as capable in handling the ray as the veterans controlling their thought.

Steadily their losses grew, car by car they fell into smouldering wreckage, faster and faster the panic stricken Red Men fled before them.

Silently Lane cursed the non-existent spine of the great old bag of wind, Eemeeshee.

"Breath-Master" indeed! He must have gotten that name from bragging of exploits he was too timid to have done, or from his short-winded and continual puffing over the augmented telaug beams, heard by the Indians of the surface long ago, rather than from any mastery of the winds of fate and the heavens as he had supposed.

Death flamed after them from near a thousand lances of the red-flaming dis-needles, and ever and again one of his loyal Red Legion shrieked as the needles sought through his body for a fatal spot. On they fled, the levers setting the anti-grav beams into the forward-driving slant in the last notch. Nothing but the auto-ray eyes controlled them from plunging into the curves of the cavern ways. The silent, gleaming dust-laden beauty of the mighty, earth crust supporting pillars of the hardened rock of the Elder's creation fled past them in terrible rushing rows, the eye could not follow the whirling march of the pillared, time-heavy vastness past into the dark.

Steadily Lane searched the backward trail with his beam at full extension focus, firing, firing, and at every blast some car of Da Sylva's flamed into hurtling fiery death, left a smouderingsmouldering [sic], crushing wreck against the cavern wall. Lane thought, each car he destroyed, what a surface engineering corporation would pay for just one of the gadgets with which those cars were crammed—and he had to destroy the invaluable ancient work to live on, to save anything for future man. He must live. This destroying nemesis behind them must die.

But they had one ace in the hole which Lane was counting on Da Sylva having failed to note. Before leaving their own area, Lane and Saba had posted some thirty men and the remainder of the women in their own master ray chambers. These great beams, which they knew would cover some fifty miles of their route at full extension, constituted a place to run to very definitely. As they neared these caverns which were familiar, near to Eemeeshee's home, Lane sent his telaug beam far ahead, kept screaming a warning to these few remaining stay-at-homes, who were their last resort now. Their children, their women, their homes, and this home-guard ray, were their last hope. As he flashed past an outpost of this small force—one John Flannery, a half-breed Indian of Irish parentage—Lane shouted at him, where he crouched over the ancient mech.

"Give them the works, John, in the fourth passage."

There were four main highways from the north, their flight and attempts at evasion had taken them into the third of these, while Da Sylva had continued with her main force down the fourth, which in the end reached the same goal. Lane had often speculated on the "age" of this fourth passage, which seemed of different and older construction than the other three; was perhaps the first of the many great borings made by the elder race in this area.

Flannery, big red-haired and high-cheek-boned, his blue eyes flashing a reassuring message to John as he flashed past, began at once to fire upon the Da Sylva cars. His great old stationary mech gave off a ray of vastly greater potential of destruction than their own portable weapons, and his solid, unshifting base of rock made his fire more accurate. Lane shot on down the great tube of rock toward the central ray chambers to make sure the force there was made aware of the turn of events.

But there was no need. They had been watching, holding their fire until a sure kill was in order; and at Flannery's attack upon Da Sylva, the vast old central mech began to flame with power, over their heads into the far ways flashed the mighty shafts of death, and within minutes Da Sylva and all her gang were things of the past, smouldering piles of debris upon the forgotten floors of the Titans' highways.

ABA, taking no chances, ordered at once a return to the Votan caverns. Reduced to a fourth of their original number by the reverses they had suffered, they were not happy as they returned toward Montana's under-rock.