Page:Robert William Cole - The Struggle for Empire; A Story of the Year 2236 (1900).djvu/216

204 noticed, or even suspected. But they found a fleet of war-ships close to the next planet, and preparations were made for an engagement. The Anglo-Saxons manœuvred so that they enticed their adversaries quite near to the planet before they came to close quarters. Then the fight commenced in real earnest, but the Electro-Ednogen apparatus was turned on, and ship after ship was hurled down to the planet. In vain the Sirian commanders fired their enormous guns and used all the weapons with which science had provided them; they found themselves slowly drifting towards the ground, then faster and faster, until they fell with a crash that dislocated their machinery and killed all their men. Nothing could check the unseen force that hurled them to destruction; for each war-ship was armed with dozens of the great cone-shaped reflectors, so that if one were damaged by a cannon-shot, the rest could still destroy. Some of the Anglo-Saxon vessels were torpedoed and other-