"Ready, my gallants?" she demanded, excitement in her voice.
"Ready," I confirmed.
"Ave, Imperatrix, nos morituri te—"
"Stop that, Rufo! Silence!" She began to chant in a language unknown to me. The back of my neck prickled.
She stopped, squeezed our hands much harder, and shouted, "Now!"
Sudden as a slammed door, I find I'm a Booth Tarkington hero in a Mickey Spillane situation.
I don't have time to moan. Here is this thing in front of me, about to chop me down, so I run my blade through his guts and yank it free while he makes up his mind which way to fall; then I dose his buddy the same way. Another one is squatting and trying to get a shot at my legs past the legs of his squad mates. I'm as busy as a one-armed beaver with paperhangers and hardly notice a yank at my belt as Star recovers her sword.
Then I do notice as she kills the hostile who wants to shoot me. Star is everywhere at once, naked as a frog and twice as lively. There was a dropped-elevator sensation at transition, and suddenly reduced gravitation could have been bothersome had we time to indulge it.
Star makes use of it. After stabbing the laddie who tries to shoot me, she sails over my head and the head of a new nuisance, poking him in the neck as she passes and he isn't a nuisance any longer.
I think she helps Rufo, but I can't stop to look. I hear his grunts behind me and that tells me that he is still handing out more than he's catching.
Suddenly he yells, "Down!" and something hits the back of my knees and I go down—land properly limp and am about to roll to my feet when I realize Rufo is the cause. He is belly down by me and shooting what has to be a gun at a moving target out across the plain, himself behind the dead body of one of our playmates.
Star is down, too, but not fighting. Something has poked a hole through her right arm between elbow and shoulder.
Nothing else seemed to be alive around me, but there were targets four to five hundred feet away and opening rapidly. I saw one fall, heard Zzzzt, smelled burning flesh near me. One of those guns was lying across a body to my left; I grabbed it and tried to figure it out. There was a shoulder brace and a tube which should be a barrel; nothing else looked familiar.
"Like this, my Hero." Star squirmed to me, dragging her wounded arm and leaving a trail of blood. "Race it like a rifle and sight it so. There is a stud under your left thumb. Press it. That's all—no windage, no elevation."
And no recoil, as I found when I tracked one of the running figures with the sights and pressed the stud. There was a spurt of smoke and down he went. "Death ray," or Laser beam, or whatever—line it up, press the stud, and anyone on the far end quit the party with a hole burned in him.
I got a couple more, working right to left, and by then Rufo had done me out of targets. Nothing moved, so far as I could see, anywhere.
Rufo looked around. "Better stay down, Boss." He rolled to Star, opened her medic's kit at his own belt, and put a rough and hasty compress on her arm.
Then he turned to me. "How bad are you hurt, Boss?"
"Me? Not a scratch."
"What's that on your tunic? Ketchup? Someday somebody is going to offer you a pinch of snuff. Let's see it."
I let him open my jacket. Somebody, using a saw-tooth edge, had opened a hole in me on my left side below the ribs. I had not noticed it and hadn't felt it—until I saw it and then it hurt and I felt queasy. I strongly disapprove of violence done to me. While Rufo dressed it, I looked around to avoid looking at it.
We had killed about a dozen of them right around us, plus maybe half that many who had fled—and had shot all who fled, I think. How? How can a 60-lb. dog armed only with teeth take on, knock down, and hold prisoner an armed man? Ans: By all-out attack.
I think we arrived as they were changing the guard at that spot known to be a Gate—and had we arrived even with swords sheathed we would have been cut down. As it was, we killed a slew before most of them knew a fight was on. They were routed, demoralized, and we slaughtered the rest, including those who tried to bug out. Karate and many serious forms of combat (boxing isn't serious, nor anything with rules) -- all these work that same way: go-for-broke, all-out attack with no wind up. These are not so much skills as an attitude.
I had time to examine our late foes; one was faced toward me with his belly open. "Iglis" I would call them, but of the economy model. No beauty and no belly buttons and not much brain—presumably constructed to do one thing: fight, and try to stay alive. Which describes us, too—but we did it faster.
Looking at them upset my stomach, so I looked at the sky. No improvement—it wasn't decent sky and wouldn't come into focus. It crawled and the colors were wrong, as jarring as some abstract paintings. I looked back at our victims, who seemed almost wholesome compared with that "sky."
While Rufo was doctoring me, Star squirmed into her tights and put on her buskins. "Is it all right for me to sit up to get into my jacket?" she asked.
"No," I said. "Maybe they'll think we're dead." Rufo and I helped her finish dressing without any of us rising up above the barricade of flesh. I'm sure we hurt her arm but all she said was, "Sling my sword left-handed. What now, Oscar?"
"Where are the garters?"
"Got em. But I'm not sure they will work. This is a very odd place."
"Confidence," I told her. "That's what you told me a few minutes ago. Put your little mind to work believing you can do it." We ranged ourselves and our plunder, now enhanced by three "rifles" plus side arms of the same sort, then laid out the oaken arrow for the top of the Mile-High Tower. It dominated one whole side of the scene, more a mountain than a building, black and monstrous.
"Ready?" asked Star. "Now you two believe, tool" She scrawled with her finger in the sand. "Go!"
We went. Once in the air, I realized what a naked target we were—but we were a target on the ground, too, for anyone up on that tower, and worse if we had hoofed it. "Faster!" I yelled in Stars ear. "Make us go faster!"
We did. Air shrilled past our ears and we bucked and dipped and side-slipped as we passed over those gravitational changes Star had warned me about—and perhaps that saved us; we made an evasive target. However, if we got all of that guard party, it was possible that no one in the Tower knew we had arrived.
The ground below was gray-black desert surrounded by a mountain ringwall like a lunar crater and the Tower filled the place of a central peak. I risked another look at the sky and tried to figure it out. No sun. No stars. No black sky nor blue—light came from all over and the "sky" was ribbons and boiling shapes and shadow holes of all colors.
"What in God's name land of planet is this?" I demanded.
"It's not a planet," she yelled back. "It's a place, in a different sort of universe. It's not fit to live in."
"Somebody lives here." I indicated the Tower.
"No, no, nobody lives here. That was built just to guard the Egg."
The monstrousness of that idea didn't soak in right then. I suddenly recalled that we didn't dare eat or drink here—and started wondering how we could breathe the air if the chemistry was that poisonous. My chest felt tight and started to burn. So I asked Star and Rufo moaned. (He rated a moan or two; he hadn't thrown up. I don't think he had.)
"Oh, at least twelve hours," she said. "Forget it. No importance."
Whereupon my chest really hurt and I moaned, too.
We were dumped on top of the Tower right after that; Star barely got out "Amech!" in time to keep us from zooming past.
The top was flat, seemed to be black glass, was about two hundred yards square—and there wasn't a fiddlewinking thing to fasten a line to. I had counted on at least a ventilator stack.