“Can’t we go forward?”
“No.”
From the boats down there I caught Alice’s voice, but her image did not
register; it was dark in the boat behind the black shields which
enshrouded it.
“Len, have you seen Talon’s rafts yet? Mett says he wants to know what
our boats are to do?”
“Nothing. Stay as you are.”
“Be . . . very careful of yourself, Leonard.”
“Yes,” I said. I cut off, urged my birds upward. At nearly ten thousand
feet I hung poised. Far up the Warm Sea, on the west road Talon’s
approaching force was visible. And on the water, I saw the black blobs
of his rafts, four of them, evidently huge affairs, crowded with men and
apparatus. One of them was in the yellow moonlit path. I could see the
swimming figures in the water, harnessed, drawing the raft slowly
forward.
The pink ball I had sent out passed Maxite’s. It sped toward Talon’s
rafts. On my grid I caught a glimpse of the wooden raft, with dead black
beams standing up from it vertically in the air. Hundreds of figures
crowded there. A black beam caught my whirling lens, burned it. The grid
went dark.
Talon’s land force was almost to the Virgins’ Island channel to the
north. The rafts were over near that shore. It was what I wanted to
know. Talon would use the west channel.
I dropped my platform downward, and adjusted my helmet, though I kept
its visor open. Talon’s land force would reach the channel before mine
could get there. I had hoped that Jim would be able to set up our wind
projector on the bluff there to command the narrow water. But Talon
would be there first unless I could halt him.