It Took the Strange-Winged Craft Amidships.
The Martian vessel stopped and bent up. They saw human figures more than half as large again as men inside her staring at them through the windows in the sides. There were others at the breaches of the guns in the act of turning the muzzles on the Astronef; but this was only a momentary glimpse, for in a second the Astronef's spur had pierced her, the Martian air-ship broke in twain, and her two halves plunged downwards through the rosy clouds.
"Keep her at full speed, Andrew," said Redgrave down the speaking-tube, "and stand by to jump if we want to."
"All ready, my Lord!" came back up the tube.
The old Yorkshireman during the last few minutes had undergone a transformation which he himself hardly understood. He recognised that there was a fight going on, that it was a case of "burn, sink and destroy," and the thousand-year-old Berserker awoke in him just, as a matter of fact, it had done in his lordship.
"They can pick up the pieces down there, what there is left of them," said Redgrave, still holding Zaidie tight to his side with one hand and working the wheel with the other, "and now we'll teach them another lesson."
"What are you going to do, dear?" she said, looking up at him with somewhat frightened eyes.
"You'll see in a moment," he said, between his shut teeth. "I don't care whether these Martians are degenerate human beings or only animals; but from my point of view the reception they have given us justifies any kind of retaliation. If we'd had a single port-hole open during the first volley you and I would have been dead by this time, and I'm not going to stand anything like that without reprisals. They've declared war on us, and killing in war isn't murder."
"Well, no, I suppose not," she said; "but it's the first fight I've been in, and I don't like it. Still, they did receive us pretty meanly, didn't they?"
"Meanly? If there was anything like a code of interplanetary morals or manners one might call it absolutely caddish. I don't believe even Stead himself could stand that—unless, of course, he wasn't here."
He sent another message to Murgatroyd. The Astronef sprang a thousand feet towards the zenith; another touch on the button, and she stopped exactly over the biggest of the Martian air-ships; another, and she dropped on to it like a stone and smashed it to fragments. Then she stopped and mounted again above the broken circle of the fleet, while the pieces of the air-ship and what was left of her crew plunged downwards through the crimson clouds in a fall of nearly thirty thousand feet.
Within the next few moments the rest of the Martian fleet had followed it, sinking rapidly down through the clouds and scattering in all directions.
"They seem to have had enough of it," laughed Redgrave, as the Astronef, in obedience to another signal, began to drop towards the surface of Mars. "Now we'll go down and see if they're in a more reasonable frame of mind. At any rate we've won our first scrimmage, dear."
"But it was rather brutal, Lenox, wasn't it?"
"When you are dealing with brutes, little woman, it is sometimes necessary to be brutal."
"And you look a wee bit brutal right now," she replied, looking up at him with something like a look of fear in her eyes. "I suppose that is because you have just killed somebody—or somethings—whichever they are."
"Do I, really?"
The hard-set jaw relaxed and his lips melted into a smile under his moustache, and he bent down and kissed her.
"Well, what do you suppose I should have thought of them if you had had a whiff of that poison?"
"Yes, dear," she whispered in between the kisses, "I see now."