Urgent whistles blew, and now the civil police moved into the fray. The calots furiously attacked with bared fangs, and policemen with drawn sidearms opened fire. As the first reports of radium weapons were heard on the palace balcony, Lupo glanced at Slide. "Now the shooting starts."
Slide nodded grimly. "It sure does."
He wished he knew the name of the bridge. Whatever the outcome of the head-on confrontation, it would preserved in Extrosylvanian history for as long as Extrosylvania had a history. More workers were felled by the gunfire, but they were also arming themselves. Snarling calots were hacked to pieces. Policemen were effectively mobbed and their pistols taken from them. An eddy of mayhem could not be contained by the balustrade of the bridge. Steel and stone gave way, and two thoats and a dozen of more men and Martians plunged, arms and legs like windmills, to flagstones of the underpass roadway a hundred and some feet below.
"This is getting messy."
"Very messy."
Slide could see the eventual outcome all too easily. The cavalry and the police had failed to put the workers to flight, and were, in fact, barely holding their own. It could only be a matter of moments before the infantry square was brought into play, and orders were given for the redcoats to clear the bridge with withering volleys. As Slide figured it, the only thing holding back such a slaughter was the indecision of the officers at the scene, and the many police and cavalry in the line of fire. He suspected, however, that a reluctance to butcher their own would not remain a delay or consideration for very long.
Those on the bridge seemed to come to the same conclusion as Slide. In the center of the span, a lull had ensued in the hand to hand fighting. The pistols still barked, but both sides were falling back, regrouping as best they could, and using whatever cover the dead and the debris afforded. Orders were being shouted and the infantry were assuming formal firing positions, but then the loud voice of a Martian woman cut through the general din.
"Warriors of Mars! Warriors of Mars! Listen to me!
The pistol shots dwindled and heads turned.
"Warriors of Mars! Listen to me! When did you become the slayers of the defenseless?"
Consternation broke out around the Queen. General Cairngorm was demanding to know why the infantry had not commenced firing, but, down on the bridge, an eerie silence had fallen.
"Warriors of Mars! We are the workers! We are just like you. We labor in the foundries and the mills just as you serve in the ranks. Will you shoot us out of hand? Are we not tied by blood? The very blood that you are about to spill?"
An injured and bleeding cavalryman got painfully to his feet, started limping back towards where the infantry stood ready. The woman's voice gained strength. "Warriors of Mars, when did you murder your own people at the command of humans? When did you slay your own for no good reason? Are you no better than the calot that kills at the word of its master? Have you forgotten that your ancestors and our ancestors were the Great Jeddaks?"
An infantry sergeant-major attempted to drown out the woman by yelling at his troops in heavily accented Martian-English. Already the native redcoats were starting to look confused.
"Kill the loudmouth bitch, lads! Kill them all!"
No one fired. Lupo again glanced at Slide. "A moment of truth, I think?"
"Any second now."
But the infantry failed to open fire, and the woman made a final plea. "Warriors of Mars, don't do this thing!"
As far as Slide could see from a distance, the sergeant major flew into a sudden rage. He turned and shot the woman. This was too much for three of his men in the front rank, who immediately aimed their radium rifles at him. Slide could only credit the sergeant major with having more courage than common sense. He rounded on the men and screamed at them. "You bastards all know the penalty for mutiny!"
Lupo sighed. "Now?"
But, instead of being resolved, the conflict for the loyalty of the native troops was interrupted by a series of explosions that came from behind Slide and Lupo, from the other side of the city. The two turned and looked. Lupo sadly shook his head. "I fear the Martian revolution has come too late."
Four of the tall, tripod fighting machines of the Slimy Things were attacking the walls of the city with the scarlet wash of heat rays and the poisonous green pulse of particle beams. Maybe a dozen or more were striding over the Grand Canal, smashing the complex pipework in the process, causing jets of water to fountain high into the Martian morning. Air support came with the fighting machines in the form of streamlined metal ovoids flashing with electrical charges that, when they had risen to a sufficient intensity, arced jaggedly to the ground to cause fires and more explosions each time they struck. Once a section of the city wall was burned and bombarded to rubble and ash, the breach was filled with battalion formations of metalmen, the human-simulacra ground troops of the Slimy Things, who were far too wet and vulnerable to do any of their own fighting. With more courage than common sense, a crisp detachment of Martian cavalry attempted to confront a fighting machine, and was burned to a crisp in an X-ray moment for its bravado.
That was sufficient for Lupo. "I don't know about you, Slide, but I have seen enough cities fall in my time. I could miss the rest of this drama."
Slide glanced up. "I tend to agree with you."
High in the sky huge flying discs were converging to form a geometric hovering pattern.
"It looks as though the Slimy Things have acquired telezero technology from the Treens. Unless of course the Treens acquired it from them. It can get hard to figure who's doing what for whom, when time's up its own ass. "
As Slide had feared, a bolt of heliotrope energy flashed up from somewhere beyond the horizon and struck the discs. They in turn translated the dazzling light into a single, narrow-beam projection, directed down at the city. Where the beam touched, all was dematerialized, and it slashed the metropolis leaving scars of nothing over a hundred yards wide.
"Let's go while there's still some of this place left to leave." Slide avoided Lupo's eyes. "I hate to tell you this. Seeing as you're a vampire, and can't be too happy about all this exotic light radiation…"
"Tell me what, Slide."
"Getting out of here may not be exactly what you'd call simple without a howdy hole, which I don't think even existed this long ago."
Lupo looked old and dangerous. "So what are you telling saying, demon? That we're stuck here?"
"Unless we find ourselves a Carter machine or some good facsimile thereof."
Lupo blinked. "Well that's no problem."
Slide was surprised. It hadn't occurred to him that the Victorians had their own Carter machines, although it did make some sense. "It isn't?"
"There's the big one that brought me here. It's in a cental vault, deep under the tower, close to the stasis generator."
Slide blinked. "A Carter machine and a stasis generator in the same place? That's a wigged-out concept."
"Shall we go there instead of standing around discussing it?"
Slide nodded, and while Mina and her courtiers stood transfixed, watching the destruction of the city in horror, the demon and the vampire headed back inside the tower. Just as they were about to pass through the arch that led to the interior, Slide turned and gestured to the bridge on which the interrupted Martian revolution had been about to start. "You don't happen to know the name of that do you?"