Now moving at a less tiring pace, and with a great load lifted from their minds, Jan and Petra renewed their attack on the tangled vegetation, clearing the way with smooth sweeps of their grey blades. Relying on their sense of direction, they veered their course to the south. Once they had neared the site where the development team had landed they knew they would soon be able to find their way to the Seeker. And within seconds of reaching the rocket ship they would be soaring up through the clouds, on their way to safety.
A few minutes after the change of course they reached a clear, shallow stream which flowed in a generally southerly direction. Mindful of how dangerous the waters of the dark moat had been, they inspected the stream carefully, but it looked as innocuous as a similar waterway on Earth.
Reassured by what they saw as a good omen, Jan stepped into the stream. “Come on in—the water’s lovely.”
“Very original remark,” Petra said as she stepped down into the stream.
“It was the best I could do in the current circumstances,” Jan replied. “Do you get it? Water…current…”
“I got it, but I didn’t want it.” Petra was glad to see that Jan was regaining something of his boisterous spirit, and she also enjoyed the coolness of the water as it seeped through her boots. Now that they no longer had to slash their way through dense vegetation progress was much easier and faster, but they had been following the course of the stream for only ten minutes or so when she thought she heard a disturbing sound. She stopped, frowning, and cupped a hand to her ear.
“What’s the matter?” Jan said, moving closer to her.
Petra signalled for him to stop swishing his feet through the water. “Listen!”
Jan halted, straining his ears, and immediately identified the source of Petra’s alarm. The sound of the tanks and other vehicles battering at the jungle’s defences had been steadily fading—but now it appeared to be increasing in volume again.
Baffled by this new development, they turned their heads this way and that. An extra-loud series of crashes told them that some large trees had been brought down by sheer mechanical brute force. Birds squawked raucously in the distance as their habitats were destroyed.
A second later Jan and Petra heard the now-familiar clanking and shrieking of unlubricated machinery in motion.
“I’ll try to have a look.” Jan stepped out of the stream, ran to a tall yellow-leaved tree and swarmed up its trunk until he could see a considerable distance through the mist and gloom to the south.
What he saw brought a painful prickling of cold sweat to his forehead.
“Can you see anything?” Petra shouted.
Jan nodded silently, not yet trusting himself to speak. All the bulldozers and earth-movers which had belonged to the development team were ranged line abreast and were heading towards Petra and him!
“Jan!” Her voice was insistent. “Have I got to climb up there as well? What can you see?”
“The bulldozers…and all the other machines…they’re coming this way…they’re battering down the trees.”
“But we thought they couldn’t do that.”
“We were wrong,” Jan said, gazing at the scene with grim fascination.
The vast machines—each weighing many thousands of tonnes—were travelling fast, driven by the fearsome alien power, and were flattening the jungle before them. Together they formed an irresistible force which nothing could halt. The continuous rank they formed barred the way back to the Seeker.
Lightning flickered through the murk on all sides as though trapdoors to hell were being opened, emphasising the demonic nature of the energies which were being unleashed by the juggernauts’ alien overlord.
Jan worked his way down to the ground, sagged against the tree trunk and gave Petra a troubled stare. “The rotten bloody monster has us beaten. I don’t see how we’re going to get out of this.”
“We’re bound to be able…” Petra let the sentence tail off, aware of how hollow words of optimism would have sounded. In spite of her resilient spirit she was beginning to feel overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the forces opposing them.
This was yet another cruel reversal of their fortunes. Each time it had seemed that events were going to swing in their favour, a malignant Fate had stepped in and turned the tables against them. It looked to her as though they had only been given hope so that the subsequent despair would be all the greater. The difference this time was that the reversal was final. The alien adversary was making its ultimate move against them—and there was no prospect of escape.
Jan bowed his head and remained in the attitude of defeat for several seconds, unable to face a continuation of the unequal struggle—then a private miracle occurred.
Hatred—pure, cold, unadulterated hatred—came to his aid.
The alien invader lurking at Verdia’s north pole might have physical superiority over any human being, but he was never going to give in to it—not ever\—because that would be betraying his own brother and all the others who had perished on this world. It was tragic that Petra too was almost certainly doomed—but it was beyond his power to do anything about that—and the thought of her death served only to strengthen his resolve. If he and Petra had to die anyway, they were going to die in one last act of defiance against the alien monster.
And the message to it would be: Enjoy your triumph while you can, alien, because our kind will not tolerate your existence. Sooner or later—we will destroy you.
Jan raised his head and saw Petra gazing at him with a peculiar, bleak-eyed intensity. Again there was a moment of near-telepathic understanding, and he knew at once that her thoughts had been running in the same direction as his.
“We’ve decided, haven’t we?” she said in a deceptively casual voice. “We go for the kill.”
Jan nodded slowly. Together they stepped into the stream and began to retrace their footsteps—heading due north.
Chapter Nine
Trying to strike a balance between moving quickly and conserving their strength, Jan and Petra maintained their distance from the advancing bulldozers. The crash of falling trees from behind them mingled with the rumbling of thunder.
As they walked through the humid gloom they kept a close check on what was happening to their left. One of their principal worries was that some of the tanks might have battered their way through thinner parts of the jungle, blocking the way to the north, but there was no sign of them and nothing to be heard from that direction.
“It’s almost too quiet up ahead,” Jan said uneasily.
“The monster seems to have every confidence in the bulldozers,” Petra replied. She refrained from adding that such confidence seemed justifiable—the line of terraforming machines which were steadily smashing their way through the trees constituted a terrifying and unstoppable force.
After some twenty minutes the stream began to meander away to the east, ceasing to be of value as a jungle pathway. Jan consulted his tiny compass.
“The needle’s standing on end,” he said. “It looks as though we’ve come as far north as we need.”
Petra noticed a low place in the left bank and led the way out of the stream. The fern-covered ground sloped upwards for some distance, blocking their view to the north, but they both knew that from the top of the gradient they would be able to see the enigmatic tower which housed their enemy. The time for the final conflict had almost arrived.
Jan summoned up a humourless smile. “It looks as though this is where we go…What did they call it in all the old war movies?…over the top.” Petra returned the smile. “I always preferred comedies.”