"All right," Snow Leopard ordered, "let it go!" We eased off on the cables and the boat splashed into the lava. The bow disappeared immediately under a wave of glowing red lava. For an instant I thought it would go under, then the bow popped up again, shedding streams of liquid rock. The aft remained secured to our launching site by scavenged power cables. The boat floated, buffeted back and forth in the flow, lava breaking over the sides and oozing over the decks, spitting and hissing. It was my idea but I could hardly believe it. It was floating!
"It's working!" Priestess exclaimed.
"Lord! I thought it would sink like a stone!" Warhound said.
"It's floating—look at that!" Psycho seemed delighted and amazed.
"Deadman's death! It's working!" I confirmed. I was just as amazed as Psycho.
"Tenners, get the equipment on board," Snow Leopard ordered. "We're moving out!"
###
I leaped onto the metal planking, supercharged with adrenalin, the last one on board. Redhawk lay on the deck, conscious and raving, with Priestess on her knees, holding him down. Our gear surrounded them. Snow Leopard held the tiller. Psycho and Warhound wielded long metal poles, on their knees, arms wrapped around the railings. The boat lurched and jiggled shakily as I played out the last cable securing us to the shore.
Snow Leopard shouted, "Cast off! Let it go!"
I released the cable. It slid out of my grasp and snapped loose. The boat lurched away from the jagged shoreline and into the center of the river. I dropped to my knees—loose, free, floating, a chip of life on a river of death. Now we moved with the lava. A great groaning assailed our ears. A sudden eruption from the river showered us with flaming debris. Sparks filled the air. The boat lurched and shuddered. Snow Leopard squatted by the tiller, leaning first one way, then another. The island disappeared behind us. Psycho and Warhound tested the poles, and soon they glowed. I seized another one.
"Make for the shore!" Snow Leopard ordered.
"Watch that rock!" I said. A huge, rolling, glowing boulder of half-solidified lava bore down on us like a titanic floating mountain. A fireberg! Warhound and I reached out and touched it with our poles. The poles sank into the soft rock.
"Careful!" Snow Leopard warned.
"We're sinking!" I shouted.
"Going under!" Warhound confirmed it.
"Move to this side!" Psycho urged us. One side of the boat went under, waves of lava pouring over the edge. We shifted to the other side and the lava slid off and the boat stabilized. The mountain floated off to one side—we now moved at the same speed, and it no longer seemed a threat. We drove our poles into the molten rock of the lava river, searching for bottom.
"All right, head for the shore," Snow Leopard ordered, "Now! Otherwise, we take that drop into the lake!"
Two black furry shapes flashed over us.
"What was that?"
"Look out!" Another, a flickering, snapping blur, whistling through the air just above our heads. And another, shooting right past my faceplate, lost in the shadows.
"It's a bird!"
"A bat!"
"It had wings!"
Volcano birds! Satan's vultures, the Deathbirds, looking us over. My skin turned ice cold.
Irritated, Snow Leopard cut us off. "If you're all through nature watching, we've got a problem. The pressure is too strong. We can't control the boat."
It was bad news, but true. I had just about reached the conclusion myself that the poles were useless. We couldn't find the bottom.
We floated downstream, helpless. We kept trying, but our efforts to control the boat were futile. I knew what it meant—we were headed for the falls I'd seen just before we crashed, a great lavafall where this hellish river made a sheer drop into the lava lake. Six lost souls, drifting on Death's Road.
A hot wind suddenly struck us from above, a high pitched whining, the lava river rippling from the pressure. I looked up. A great starship passed slowly over us, hovering, a blunt triangle of blackened metal, scarred and burnt by many fiery drops. I recognized the type immediately. "Class Z Omni starship," Sweety announced. "This type is a troop carrier capable of softlanding downside."
Oh no, I thought. Where did it come from? Are the O's landing more troops?
"That's an O starship!" Snow Leopard shouted. "Psycho, tacstars! Get 'em! I want that ship!"
Psycho raised his Manlink and let loose a sharp volley of tacstars. The micronukes burst on the underside of the O ship amidst a violet haze as the ship's force field reacted. White-hot tracers ricocheted everywhere. The O ship continued on, ignoring us.
Redhawk shouted, hallucinating from his medication. Priestess tried to comfort him. Psycho shot off another volley to no avail. The starship glided serenely over the lava lake ahead of us, hovering slightly, nearing the shore. A Legion fighter shot out of the clouds and unleashed a tremendous barrage of opstars, then darted out of sight as the O ship's counterfire activated in a shriek of antiship missiles. The opstar mini-nukes detonated like Armageddon, bracketing the O ship, then writhed upwards as glowing fireballs, riding a lightning storm. The power of these opstars dwarfed Psycho's tacstars but as the fireballs dissipated we observed the undamaged starship touch down on the far side of the lake. The ship was beautiful, I had to admit, shimmering a cloudy agate and glowing a faint violet haze from the mag field as it set off a windstorm of ash and pumice on the shore below. Beautiful, indestructible…gigantic! As it hovered there, I peered at it in awe through the E's scope. I noted a long boom jutting out from the nose, capped by a bulbous tip. The ship was a brutal, chilling, perfect tool, built by an alien race of merciless extremists to hammer the galaxy into submission. It was absolutely lovely!
An O starship! What a prize that would be! We knew very little about them. The Legion had never captured an O starship. It was tops on Starcom's list of Things To Do Today. The O's must be desperate to risk a starship downside in the midst of a Legion attack. Maybe we hurt them after all! Maybe…
"I want everybody on image and record!" Snow Leopard said. "Nobody's been this close to an Omni ship!" I was not sure who was going to see these images, but Sweety had been recording since it first appeared.
"We're approaching the falls, Snow Leopard!" Priestess warned.
"Look at that!" I said. The O ship had dropped a ramp. There was movement on the shore. Suddenly a long line of O's hustled out of an entrance in a cliff wall I hadn't noticed before, heading for the shuttle.
"They're extracting their guys!" Warhound exclaimed.
O's! I had never seen so many! I don't think anyone had ever seen so many—and lived. There must have been ten, twenty, more, running in their peculiar armor, individual force fields activated. These were humanity's sworn enemies. They were huge, strong creatures, long spidery arms and legs with joints in all the wrong places, bulbous helmets hiding their awful split heads. The individual details were hard to make out at our range and the swirling violet force fields made it harder. They were swarming like ants! My skin crawled at the sight.
"Commence firing," Snow Leopard said, snapping his E to his shoulder. "Xmax and laser. Don't worry, I think they're beyond psych range for now. Psycho, keep firing tacstars at the ship, you might get lucky. Let's see what we can do."
Don't worry! Yes, sir! The falls roared ahead of us. I thought briefly that we were certainly insane. But at least we'd go out fighting—the Gods would not deny us that! I fired auto xmax and walked it down the line of fleeing O's. Some of them had already made it to the shuttle. A few went down under my x but they all got up again, apparently unscathed. Nobody was shooting back at us—they were busy! I tried laser—it simply ricocheted off the force fields. They were ignoring us! I raged, "Come on, Deadman! Give me a kill!"