Spotty stared at the two of them. “They will do this—thing as soon as they can?” She didn’t understand anything about the weapon, but the idea of throwing lightninglike spears into the hearts of demons was good enough.
“Yes, they will, dear,” Kat replied.
“Then we cannot wait for nightfall. We must go now or we will not be able to make it to the top. The demons are most active at night, and they must expect something. No matter how we feel, we must go now or remain right here until it finishes.”
She was right and they knew it. All those survivor’s instincts and upbringing in a world of constant threat made her the expert. Both offworlders suddenly realized that they had been treating the girl like some poor native guide in a bad play. They were in her world now, and she was the expert, the natural leader, among the three of them.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Harker said, and they rose to go.
They had to move as much as possible through the overgrown sections, and they had to keep down in what appeared to be slowly increasing activity at the Titan base, so it was nearing sunset when they reached the point where the Grand Highway rose gently to reach the low pass between the hills.
Even before darkness fell, there were loud noises coming from the Titan base, and lights and energy tendrils were everywhere. Harker was nervous about climbing up in the face of it, but he saw no choice. “If that thing explodes or whatever, it’s going to at least take most of this coastal plain with it. We have to be over the summit!”
“I don’t understand why a race that sophisticated didn’t pick us up when we came in,” Kat commented. It had been bothering her from the first. “We can set up defenses even i cockroach can’t get through.”
“Not true,” Harker told her. “Otherwise there would be no more cockroaches. They would have gone extinct when Earth became uninhabitable. We can set up a general roach barrier that works most of the time, but not if we’re targeting individual roaches. In this case, we’re the roaches, and I don’t think they can comprehend total individualized behavior. No, they’ve been waiting for us to reappear all right, but what tips them off is the roach with the electronic implant. Its the only reason Jastrow got in and out, the only reason we got in and out.”
“Yeah, but if somebody’s getting nervous down there, they might be looking for another candidate,” Kat suggested nervously. All she wanted to do was get out of there.
Using the windswept trees as cover and the light reflecting from the great Titan base, they managed to get almost halfway up before the rains rumbled in, the low hills being no barrier to them.
Even knowing that the rains were more than mere rains, and noting their altered behavior, Kat and Harker couldn’t help themselves. When the rains rumbled, they broke cover and went out nearer the road and sat, exposed, so that they could be fully bathed. It wasn’t something they thought about or something they could fight. It was an irresistible impulse even as their minds told them it was not the thing to do.
From the Titan base below, the electronic thumping noise that they’d heard before, with a varying pace that rose and fell but still seemed to go right through them, was particularly loud and active. There was no question that their position could be detected; it probably could be detected at any time via the grid. The problem for the Titans was that they could not tell humans apart unless they had been selected and marked in the data stream. And if you weren’t theirs, you were just one of the mass.
After the storm passed, there was always a feeling of wellness accompanied by lethargy; the trained guards were always able to overcome this, but most never fought it. Now, though, it was taking all the willpower of the exhausted trio to keep going, to keep from settling in, from finding a spot for the night and sleeping.
“Is it particularly strong because we’re so close or because they just did something?” Kat wondered.
“It doesn’t matter,” Harker told her. “We have to push on if we can, we have to fight it. And if they did anything extra, or if two baths this close to the source of the programs did an extra job on us, we’ll have to live with it, too. It’s done. Right now we just need to run.”
Nobody was up to running through that brush up the rest of the hill, but walking was something they could force themselves to do.
Something down there was more excited than usual, and the energy tendrils from the various facets on the base seemed hyperactive. They would sweep not only the plain but also up the hills as well, and it was getting difficult to dodge them.
Now, though the trio, worn out, barely able to think, was nearing the summit of the pass. A few hundred more meters and they’d be on the other side, able to rest, as protected as they could be under the circumstances. Now they did find that last bit of adrenaline, and they started to move fast.
Leading, almost at the very top, Harker was struck by a flickering pastel red tendril of energy from the base.
“Gene!” Kat screamed. He was suddenly frozen in place. Then he turned and started looking straight at the base, where new sounds began to pulse, sounds like they hadn’t heard before. Like electronic whistles punctuated with a twanging noise, and the tendril seemed to be pulsing in time with them.
Kat Socolov fought down panic and summoned up rage. She raced up to the zombielike Harker, hauled off, and punched him in the jaw with every bit of strength she could muster.
He went down, and the tendril broke off and seemed to flail away in midair for a moment, then began a new pattern to see if it could find him again.
By this point Kat and Spotty had dragged the unconscious Harker back into the underbrush and out of a direct line of sight with the base.
This was as far as they were going, that was clear. Whatever was going to happen, they couldn’t drag the man that last measure to and over the top. They could only hope that he had been merely tagged and that the aliens had not yet received any data they could understand or use.
It was only a single plate for a genhole that would have been assembled in space out of such plates and that would have eventually been large enough to swallow a full-size spaceship, but the mentat thought it was sufficient and they weren’t going to argue with such a machine.
The trick was to get up on the catwalks and pound on one end of the damned thing so that it was in position to do maximum damage. The giant crane had been frozen in place for decades and could not be powered up. However, to minimize potential damage it held the plate at just one central and balanced point. That point, effectively a ball joint, did not want to move after so long, but Littlefeet was very strong. He managed to budge the thing, much to his surprise and delight.
“The direction is now within acceptable limits,” the mentat told him. “It won’t strike dead center, but it will strike the main complex and it will do damage. You’ve done very well, my boy.”
“I’d like to see it,” Littlefeet told the computer a bit wistfully. “I’d really love to see it hit the demons. Nobody has ever seen demons die.”
We do not know what will happen, or even if it’ll work like this, but I agree with you,” the mentat told him. “Besides, perhaps there should be someone to sing the legends of Colonel N’Gana’s grand last stand.”