WITHIN an hour the wondering inhabitants of Alexandria saw the Russian fleet rise a thousand feet into the air and form in two columns of line ahead. Then the Aerian fleet ranged itself in two long lines five hundred feet outside them and a thousand feet above them. A time-shell from the Ithuriel gave the signal to start, and the two fleets leapt forward to the south-east at a speed of a hundred miles an hour, and in a few minutes had vanished over the desert. The speed was quickly increased to two hundred miles, and so they sped on all day and through the next night—the Russian ships being forced to show their lights while the Aerians remained in darkness—until, when morning dawned and Olga and her captains looked for Alan’s fleet they found that it had vanished, and that they were floating alone over the solitudes of the Southern Ocean.
They had been escorted like offending school children out of harm’s way, and then left to their own devices. It was a bitterly humiliating ending to an expedition which had really produced such important results, but there was no possibility of present revenge, and so Olga gave the order to proceed straight to Mount Terror, intending to begin there and then the working out of her part of the compact that she had made with the Sultan.
This arrangement was briefly to the following effect:—Olga placed at Khalid’s disposal all the necessary plans for the construction[216] of both air-ships and submarine vessels, and also supplied members of her own immediate retinue, well skilled in the work, to supervise the building, which was, of course, to be carried out with the utmost secrecy and speed, so as to guard, as far as practicable, against the possible destruction of the factories and dockyards by the Aerians.
The Sultan had engaged to find money and material for building a thousand air-ships, and the same number of submarine cruisers, within the year, and these were to be supplied with motive power at conversion-stations established at the dockyards under the exclusive control of certain of Olga’s lieutenants.
The secret of this motive power, which was identical save for slight differences in the process of conversion with that possessed by the Aerians—that is to say, electrical energy derived directly from atomised carbon and vaporised petroleum—was retained in her own keeping by Olga, who had simply promised that an unlimited supply of it should be forthcoming as it was wanted.
She had insisted on a strict engagement that no one not authorised by her should even approach the conversion-stations, and she had given the Sultan and his ministers distinctly to understand that any attempt to discover the secret of the process would terminate the alliance, and expose the cities of the Moslem empire to destruction.
At the expiration of the year of truce, the Sultan’s army and navy, supported by the immense aerial fleet that would then be in existence, was to be in complete readiness for any emergencies. Olga was to be proclaimed Tsarina in Moscow, and the House of Romanoff formally restored in her person. If any portions of Russia refused to receive her, they were to be terrorised into submission by the air-ships.
The tribesmen of Western and Central Asia were to be armed as rapidly as possible, so as to be ready to form a reserve force for compelling the submission of the Russians if they resisted the new order of things, and to participate in the invasion of Europe, which was to take place at several points as soon as[217] the Holy War of Islam was proclaimed, and Cross and Crescent once more confronted each other on the battlefield.
Meanwhile, too, the resources of the dockyard at Mount Terror were to be strained to the utmost, and the conspiracy in Russia for the restoration of Olga to the throne of the Romanoffs was to be developed by every means that money could purchase or skill devise.
The scheme of defence arranged by the Council of Aeria had already been completed, and it was to execute this that the Aerian fleet had left the Russian squadron during the night. Indeed, the Russians had been travelling southward alone for more than eight hours before they had discovered the fact. As soon as it became impossible for them to see the Aerian vessels these had stopped, in accordance with a prearranged plan, and had wheeled round and steered for London across the African continent at a height of about ten thousand feet.
Flying at the full speed of the smaller vessels, a twenty-hour flight carried the fleet over the eight thousand miles which separated its starting-point from the capital of the world, and about six o’clock in the evening of the 21st of May the fifty-two vessels, flying the Aerian and British flags, appeared in the air over the open space which is now called Hyde Park, and, to the amazement of the astonished citizens, dropped quietly to the earth and lay open to the unrestricted inspection of the thousands who speedily gathered in the park to avail themselves of the unwonted spectacle, and to learn, if possible, the reason of the unexpected visit.
No attempt was made by the crews of the ships to prevent the sightseers from seeing all they could of the exteriors of the vessels, which were arranged on the sward in two long lines, so that they could walk down between them and admire their beautiful shape and wonderful construction at their leisure. A sentry was stationed by each vessel to warn the sightseers not to approach too close to the wings and propellers, and that was the only precaution taken.
Alan learnt soon after landing that King Albert the Second, the fourth in descent from Edward VII., who was King during[218] the War of the Terror, was at Windsor, and that the House of Commons and the Senate, which for over a hundred years had filled the place of the old House of Lords, had dissolved for the spring recess, and would not meet again until after the General Election, which was held every 1st of June.
He therefore caused a message to be sent to His Majesty at Windsor, requesting him to name a time for an interview on the following day, and then, sufficient watches having been set on all the vessels, he and Alexis, with the majority of the crews, took a few hours’ leave, not a little glad of the opportunity of stretching their legs on terra firma, after their three days’ confinement to the air-ships.
The reply which he received from the King fixed eleven o’clock in the morning of the 22nd as the time of the interview for which he had asked, and, just as the castle clock was beginning to sound the strokes of the hour, the Ithuriel swept up out of the distance towards Windsor Castle, and, after hovering for a moment in mid-air, sank quietly down until she rested on that portion of the terrace which overlooks the Home Park. Her arrival had been announced to the King as soon as she hove in sight, and he was on the terrace ready to receive his visitors when she alighted.
Albert II., King of England, Emperor of Britain, and President of the Anglo-Saxon Federation, was a monarch only in name. Nothing but the trappings of sovereignty remained to himself or his station, and he would not even have retained these had it not been for the fact that, during its hundred years of actual rule, the Supreme Council had insisted upon the maintenance of the monarchical principle in those countries where it had obtained at the end of the nineteenth century.
The first formal greetings over, the King caused Alan to be escorted to his private apartments in the castle, and as soon as they were alone together in the room which he reserved for his own special use, he motioned Alan to a seat and, throwing himself back upon a lounge with an air of weariness which accorded but ill with the hour of the day, he said in a somewhat querulous tone—
[219]
“We are quite alone now and you can speak with perfect freedom. I am sure it must be important business that has brought you here with a whole fleet of your air-ships, and I shall be glad if you will tell me at once what it is. I hope nothing has occurred to imperil our peace and safety?”
“On the contrary, your Majesty,” replied Alan. “I regret to say that my errand is to tell you that, not only is that the case, but that it is a practical certainty that within twelve months from now the whole world will be plunged into war.”
“What! what!” exclaimed the King, jerking himself up to a sitting posture. “Surely you don’t mean that? I thought that no war would be possible without the permission of your Council. Surely you would not allow the nations of the world to go to war with each other again, and repeat all the horrors that happened a hundred and thirty years ago?”
“Your Majesty forgets that when we renounced the control of the world six years ago we gave back to the nations the right of making war upon each other, although we hardly believed that they would be foolish enough and wicked enough to exercise it. That, however, is beside the question, because war is now inevitable, and, what is even more important, the Council of Aeria is unhappily powerless to prevent it.”
“Eh! what is that?” exclaimed the King, this time rising to his feet and facing Alan with an air of petulant reproach. “Powerless to prevent it? You, with all your fleets of air-ships and submarine vessels? You, who have called yourselves the masters of the world for nearly a century and a half—you cannot stop war?”
“We cannot do so, your Majesty,” said Alan, also rising to his feet, “simply because I regret to say that we no longer possess the undisputed empire of the air, and therefore, in a measure at least, we have lost the command of the world.
“As for the responsibility which your words impute to us, I must tell you at once that it does not exist. The rulers of the world, and yourself among them, voluntarily and with full knowledge accepted perfect freedom, and therefore the individual responsibility that is inseparable from it. You knew that from[220] the time we resigned the world-throne you were free to make war upon each other, on land and by sea.
“It is your fault and not ours that you are now so defenceless that you have cause to fear the war against which you ask us to protect you. You have known for nearly four years that the Sultan of Islam has been creating armies and fleets, and diligently training millions of his subjects in that art of war which we hoped was to be forgotten for ever among men.
“Did you suppose, you Kings and Princes of the Anglo-Saxon Federation, that Khalid the Magnificent, a man of boundless ambition, was creating these armies and fleets simply to play with them? Could you not see that nothing but some dream of world-wide conquest could be inspiring him to do this, and do you need to be told that the realms of Christendom offered him the only possible area of conquest in the world?
“What have y............