Sweety had never stopped talking, almost frantic now, what was she saying…"pulse firing random auto biobloc, Thinker! Get your E up! Aim it! I am firing it! Another mag! Get up, soldier! Get up! Get up!"
An explosion, shot in the heart! I screamed. I jerked to my feet, fingers still on the torch. Blue-hot plasma danced before me. The O was an icy tornado backing away from me, bouncing off Snow Leopard, who was on his knees. Snow Leopard raised his E and fired laser, right into the O. The laser ricocheted off wildly, dancing along the ceiling. The O shrieked, freezing my blood. It twirled madly, long limbs whirling, a cyclone of icy air, thrashing back through the wreckage, suddenly gone.
Gone! A whirlwind of air swirled around us in its wake—gone! And I could breathe again, gasping, great gasps of air, my lungs still burning.
"Deadman! I dropped those nukes right on its head!" Psycho gulped, exhausted.
"The damned laser bounced right off it," Snow Leopard panted. "That's a first!"
"Enemy still retreating," Sweety informed me.
"Sweety saved us," I said hoarsely.
The O was gone. All the cubicles around us were also gone, vaporized, blown to bits, now eerie metal skeletons crackling in a sea of fire, black smoke swirling all around us. Shot-up equipment dangled from the tortured ceiling in a writhing mass of snake-like cables. Warhound lay face-down on the deck, his wrists still tied, the cold knife still clutched in his armored hands.
"Warhound! Are you all right? Deadman, who tied his wrists?"
"Water. Water!" Warhound called. I put my canteen to his lips and he drank greedily. His eyes were wild.
"Get his helmet on."
"What happened, Six?"
"It was the O," Warhound explained slowly. "The O. I had to kill you. I had to!"
"Explain, Six!" Snow Leopard was right beside me.
Warhound was in agony; the thoughts rushing through his mind reflected on the harsh angular features of his tortured face. "I got out of the lake—the lava. They…called me. I couldn't resist. They took it all. There was a passage, a crack in the cliff. It was dark—I could hardly see them."
"How many O's?"
"I don't know! It was dark…and after awhile I knew the Aliens were coming. And I had to kill you—all of you."
"The Aliens?"
"Yes," Warhound bit his lip. "You were the Aliens. We…we were the Aliens. And the Aliens were evil. I had no doubts. You all had to die."
"Persuasive creeps, aren't they?" Psycho was upset—his beloved Manlink had failed us for the first time.
"Your helmet, Warhound." Snow Leopard handed it to me.
"Can you untie my hands?"
"Yeah, sure." I hit the release.
"Alert! Life! Human! Legion! Beta Nine approaching!"
Adrenalin, again. I could not take much more of this. I raised my E.
"Priestess! I asked you to stay with the aircar!" Snow Leopard was furious.
"I'm sorry, One. I heard you fight with Warhound, and then the O. I couldn't stay there." Priestess approached us through the skeletalized cubes, her E at her shoulder. Black smoke swirled around her; flames still licked along the wreckage. We kept our E's trained on her, set to vacmin.
"Lower your E, Nine!"
"It's all right, Beta—I'm fine," she assured us, lowering the E. "Redhawk is guarding the Systie. Is everyone all right?"
"We're all right," Snow Leopard responded. "Now—Thinker, Psycho, what happened? This is very important. The O retreated. Why?"
"Warhound attacked him with a cold knife," I replied. "And Sweety stung me, and I triggered my torch, and the plasma hit the O, at close range."
"Negative, Thinker," Psycho interrupted. "It was Mother that saved us. My tacmod fired the Manlink by itself—full auto random pulse biobloc. One of the settings must have affected it."
"I fired your E as well, Thinker," Sweety said in my ears. "Auto random biobloc, unaimed. It is possible one of the frequencies upset it."
"Surely it wasn't the knife," Snow Leopard said. "Let me see it."
Warhound handed it over. The blade was wet and sticky.
"Deadman, what's this?"
"I stabbed it, One," Warhound replied. "I stabbed the O."
"How did you do that, Warhound? I thought it had you under mental control. Deadman! How can a knife penetrate the force field?"
"I don't know, One. I don't know."
"One!" I was on my knees, inspecting the deck. "Look at this!" There was some filth on the floor. Dark, slimy filth.
"Priestess," Snow Leopard ordered, "Take a sample of that, and don't lose it. And take the knife, too. Lord, I can hardly believe this! He brushes off tacstars and xmax and laser like gnats, and then we take him out with a cold knife and biobloc."
"Don't forget the plasma!" I reminded him. "I got the O right in the chest with the torch."
"So it might have been the knife…"
"Or the biobloc…"
"Or the plasma."
"Or maybe a combination! Let's get outta here!"
"I've got the samples," Priestess said.
"Get up, Warhound. Helmets—let's go, let's go."
We backed out slowly, back the way we had come, through a spreading fire. The complex shuddered again, and we could hear a tortured grinding. The lava was forcing its way into the starport. It was definitely time to leave.
"NOVA! NOVA! NOVA! ANY LEGION UNIT…WE'RE UNDER ATTACK!"
The alarm almost shattered our ears. It was a full power burst, a wild and desperate appeal for help, a frenzied, suicidal gamble. We froze, our own holocaust burning all around us.
"Full power! They've had it." Snow Leopard declared grimly.
"Who is it?" Psycho whispered.
"Home in! Sweety, did you get that?"
"Ten, Thinker! I have zeroed the site, as marked." It flashed onto my faceplate.
"NOVA! NOVA! GAMMA TWO FOUR…" It turned into a scream, a shriek of agony. It raised the hairs on the back of my neck. Then there was only dead air.
"Gamma!"
"Oh no…Gamma!"
"Do we answer?"
"Move it, Beta! We answer with our feet! Everyone in the area will be moving on that site. But there's a good chance that's only us."
"That's where the O came from!"
"Is anyone going to give me my E back?"
"Somebody give Six his E back." Snow Leopard led the way. We followed him, tracking the O like a pack of wolves. Further into the Camp of the O's. We would never get back to that aircar, I decided. Never. We would follow Snow Leopard to our deaths. We would die with Gamma, face to face with every O on the planet. We would die for the Legion, just as we should. We would die with our E's on auto xmax, we would die in a burst of our own tacstars.
We would die for Gamma.
Dead air. Only dead air from Gamma, hissing in our ears. A full-power Nova. Suicide—only a truly desperate sit would justify a full-power burst. The tacmap showed Gamma was in the heart of the starport, far far below us.
Deadman only knew how they had got in there. The entire starport was being slowly crushed as the magma forced its way in. I figured we had zero chances of surviving this one.
I tried not to think about Valkyrie—Gamma Two. I had once promised her—in a different life—that she would always have a call on me, no matter what the future brought. I had promised her that she only had to call, and I'd be there, no matter what. No matter what, I had said. Well, she had called. And we were coming—no matter what. It didn't get much clearer than that. You call a Nova and the Legion is going to respond—no matter what. That's the difference between the Legion and the rest of humanity. Try it sometime with your non-Legion friends. It's a very fast method of discovering Truth.
###
We cut our way to Gamma with plasma. As we got closer to the heart of the starport, the structural integrity of the base became worse and worse until finally we were just slicing our way through a massive tangle of compressed metal.