The enemy was on top of them.
Horne looked up to see the pointed bottom of a one-man flier just above him, almost close enough to touch. Instinctively he ducked and it flipped away just microseconds short of a collision that would have wrecked both of them. Yso punched a firing-stud and a spurt of pinkish light a hundred feet long leaped out viciously toward the darting hull. But in the same second Ewan altered his own course with violent suddenness. A return beam, but smaller and shorter, flicked at them from the small flier. Both missed.
"You spoiled my aim,” said Yso matter-of-factly. “They're not police, that's’ sure. No insigne."
"Vellae?” said Horne. He was looking at Yso with considerable interest."
"Obviously. What's the matter, haven't you ever seen a woman fight before?"
"When I was in the Navy some of my best men were women. Are you Navy?"
"Skereth Planetary. We're not so big but we do know our business."
"Get that other one,” said Ewan sharply. “There. Can you do it?"
The other one-man flier and the big cone with four men in it had concentrated on the second cone, which had happened to come closer to them. They were leaping and bobbing all over that part of the sky, their bubble canopies flashing dull glints of gold and crimson from the clouds above.
Yso said, “Hold steady. I'll try."
CHAPTER IX
She led. The wicked pink beam lashed out from some orifice in the rim of the hull. The big cone shot aside and the beam flicked by and hit the one-man craft, burning viciously against its bull. Grav-shields crippled, it up-ended and plunged downward, but meanwhile the big cone got two shots in against the hull and canopy of the escaping craft. Horne heard them clearly like two cracks of an enormous whip. The one against the hull was glancing. The one against the canopy hit square. The plastic fused. The men beneath it took fire like torches. It looked like a cruel death and it was, but it was also very quick. The hull floated on, tilted drunkenly, a great cup holding flame and ash and bitter smoke.
Ewan said something under his breath, and Yso turned her head away, looking sick. But there was no time for mourning. The big cone had made a perpendicular leap straight up and was now high above them. The smaller one was down on the deck, almost brushing the long grass.
Ewan's hands moved fast on the controls. Horne felt himself pushed hard into the belt and then into the seat, his neck all but snapping as the cone skittered wildly in an attempt to break free. Twice he saw pink flashes in the air. Then something hit them a violent blow. They were all thrown forward and down. Horne's belt held him in his seat but his head just missed the corner of Yso's firing panel on its way down to hit his knees. When he got his breath partly back he saw that Ewan was lying on the control board and not sitting up. Their cone was spinning in a crazy spiral, going up and away to nowhere.
Yso mumbled something about, “They hit us.” She was dazed, but hanging on, trying to make sense. Horne unclipped his belt. The motion of the cone almost hurled him through the canopy but he clung to the back of Ewan's seat with all his strength and pulled himself over to where he could grasp Ewan's shoulder.
"Is he dead?” asked Yso.
"I don't think so. Banged his head—” Ewan was bleeding profusely from the nose. The controls were all slippery with it. Horne heaved Ewan out of the way and tried to remember which levers were which. He had flown these craft before, but not for quite a while. He pulled one and it was the right one and the spinning motion slowed.
"Make it fast,” said Yso flatly. “They're right after us."
It must have been the smaller flier's less lethal beam that had hit them glancingly from below. Now both it and the big one were closing in for the kill. Horne said, “Keep ‘em busy,” and began the business of getting the unconscious Ewan unbuckled and out of the operator's seat and himself into it.
Yso fired with the cold fury of desperation, lacing the sky with pink beams.
The Vellae cones danced up and out of the way and then came on again.
"Now,” said Horne, taking the controls in his hands, “I'm going to make a crash maneuver. Stand by."
"Standing by,” said Yso.
Their cone flopped and whirled groundward. It looked disabled, but Horne kept its motion so erratic and deceptively shifty that it was hard to hit. The little Vellae cone stayed off. The big one followed Horne down, impatiently waiting for a clear shot.
When he was about twenty feet off the ground, Horne said, “Here we go.” Their cone zoomed straight up at terrific speed. Horne could feel himself being flattened down into the seat while the air shrieked around the canopy. “Fire!” he shouted. “Damn it, fire!” The big cone was just above them, was level with them, was under them. Horne saw the faces of the men for one split-second, as they understood what had happened and what was about to happen. Then they disappeared in a blossom of pink fire and fell away fast, dwindling to a dark trailing smoke, and the clouds were getting close enough to touch.
Horne adjusted the grav-shields. The dizzy upward falling slowed gradually and stopped. They hung motionless under a great curved belly of red-gold cloud.
Yso said, “Did we do it? Are we still alive?"
Horne grunted. “I think so."
He shook his head to clear it and looked down. The wrecked cones, three of them, were sending up lazy ribbons of smoke from out of the tawny grass, far below. The one-man flier had pulled back to where it could run, if it wanted to. It mounted a lighter weapon than the big craft, but it was faster.
The communicator buzzed. Horne turned it on.
A voice said, “Horne?"
Horne stiffened. A great wave of heat passed over him and then he was as cold as a piece of steel.
"Ardric,” he said.
The one-man cone hung glittering in the distance, under the brilliant clouds.
"Oh, no,” said the voice from the communicator. “Ardric is dead. He died in the wreck of the Vega Queen, and his family put on mourning and cried."
Horne began to curse him in a voice that quivered. “You lousy, yellow-bellied—” He reached out suddenly and grasped the control levers. Their cone streaked toward the hovering flier.
The flier darted out of reach with mocking ease, and he heard sound of Ardric's laughter.
"Try again, Horne,” he said.
A kind of blindness came upon Horne, so that he could see only the small cone with its glittering canopy and nothing else in the world. He hunched over the controls and tried again.
The little cone skipped and darted and whirled as swiftly as a sunbeam and he pursued it, tantalizingly just too slow, maddeningly burdened with the extra size and armament of his craft. But he would not give up.
Yso had reached and shut off the communicator. She was talking to him but he would not listen.
In the narrow space of the cockpit floor, Ewan stirred and groaned and got to his knees.
Horne barely heard them. He said to Yso, “Ready now. I'll get him on the next pass."
I'll get him, he thought. I'll burn him out of the sky.
He started to shove the control levers for another pass and Ewan knocked his hands away and tried to push him out of the seat. Ewan had been talking to Yso and had heard her better than Horne did.
"Are you crazy, Horne? He's just playing with you, waiting for more of his men to come. We've got to—"
Horne pushed him away. “Let me alone. I'll kill him."
Ewan swore. He hit Horne alongside the head. The blow stung Horne but it neither dazed him nor shocked him to his senses. It merely made him turn around and knock Ewan back into the cockpit with the same casual anger he would have applied to a wasp or a bee. Then he returned to the business of Ardric.