“You got us hidden, Madame?” he asked.
“Yes,” she replied faintly. She had said hardly a word since their safe return.
“Claude! You ready?”
“Whenever you give the word, son.”
“We’re on our way!”
A split second later, the belly hatch rolled smoothly back. They hovered motionless above a patch of microscopic jewels, shaped roughly like a tadpole with its tail joined to the eastern bank of the Rhine.
“Why, it’s on the Kaiserstuhl,” Claude said to himself.
The patch grew, spread, its star-cluster blur clarifying into twinkling lights as the flyer dropped, subsonically this time, and stopped dead in the air about 200 meters above the highest eminence of the Tanu city.
“Give it to ’em,” said Richard.
Claude horsed the great Spear into position and took a bead on the line of fiery dots marking the Rhineside wall. Somewhere in the graying mists of the river waited a flotilla of Firvulag boats loaded with human and exotic troops.
Keep her depressed, old man! You don’t want to boil your own folks out of the water!
He raised the caplock and swung it aside. There, right there. Touch the second stud.
A thin bar of green-white lanced without sound.
Down below, a tiny orange flower bloomed, but the line of dots atop the wall remained unbroken.
“Shit!” Richard exclaimed. “You missed! Elevate!”
Calmly, Claude took aim once again, pressed the stud. This time there was no burst of orange fire, only a dull-red glow. Perhaps a dozen of the rampart lamps were swallowed by it.
“Hee-yow! Gotcha!” screeched the pirate. “Make a one-eighty, Claudsie-boy! Ready for the back door!”
The flyer spun on its vertical axis and Claude found himself aiming at a point near the base of the shining tadpole’s tail. He fired and missed… high. He fired and missed again… low.
“Jesus, hurry it up!” urged Richard.
The third time, the blast struck the wall squarely, melting it at a point where the causeway of the peninsular neck met the extinct volcanic mass of the Kaiserstuhl proper.
Madame moaned. Claude felt dragon talons grip his guts.
“Are they coming?” Richard demanded. “Hang on, Madame! Sweet Christ, Claude, get on with ft! Never mind zapping the Tanu buildings. Go for the mine!”
The old man wrestled the Spear around, a sudden bunt of sweat greasing his hands and making them slip on the weapon’s glassy butt. His tensed-up muscles trembled as he tried to bring the weapon to bear upon the small blue constellation that marked the mine workings. He could not depress the Spear sufficiently to bring the target into range. “Quick, Richard! Take her a couple of hundred meters south!”
“Aye,” growled the pirate. The flyer changed position in the twinkling of an eye. “That better?”
“Wait… yes! I’ve just about got her. Have to do this right the first time. Only have one blast at full zap…”
“Merde alors.” Madame whispered.
The old woman staggered away from Richard to crash against the right bulkheads. Fists pressed to her temples, she began to scream. Claude had never heard such a sound from a human throat, such a distillation of anguish, horror, and despair.
At the same moment, something flashed past the flight deck port. It glowed neon-red and was shaped like a mounted knight.
“Oh, God,” said Richard flatly. Madame’s screams cut off and she fell senseless to the deck.
“How many?” asked Claude. He tried to get a grip on himself, tried to steady the heavy Spear on target, prayed that his damned old body wouldn’t betray him at this last extremity. They had almost done it! Almost…
“I make it twenty-two.” Richard’s calm voice seemed to come from a considerable distance. “The whole Round Table circling us like Sioux around a wagon train. All scarlet except the leader, and I’d put his spectral class somewhere in the BO range, look out!”
One of the figures, the blue-white one, soared down and took a position immediately below the flyer. He drew his glassy sword and thrust it upward. Three Roman-candle globes of ball lightning left the tip and soared rather slowly toward the open belly hatch. Claude dodged, pulling the Spear out of the way, and the things flew into the aircraft, where they began caroming off the panels and decking, hissing and emitting a fearful smell of ozone.
“Shoot!” shrieked Richard. “For God’s sake, shoot!”
Claude took one deep breath. He said, “Steady, son,” and aimed, depressing the fifth stud of the Spear of Lugonn just as the little blue lights centered themselves in the weapon’s sight.
An emerald bar jabbed once at the spangled earth. Where it struck, the rock went white, yellow, orange, roiling crimson like a flame-armed starfish. Claude fell sideways and the Spear clanged to the deck. The belly hatch started to close.
Lightning balls bounced and crackled. The old man felt one of them strike him in the back, rolling up his spine from buttocks to the base of his neck, burning all the way. The interior of the flyer was filled with smoke and a smell of burnt flesh and fabric. There were sounds, too, Claude discovered, as he studied the scene from afar, a sizzle as the remaining two energy balls sought their targets, curses and then a thin scream from Richard, a whimpering sob from Angélique as she tried to creep toward him over the smeared deck, someone breathing in and out in harsh, rhythmic persistence.
“Get it away from me!” a frantic voice cried. “I can’t see to land! Ah, dammit, no!”
A jarring crash and a slow tilt to one side. Claude felt a breeze (amazing the way it seared his back) and the hatch opened. A peculiarly angled surface of grassy ground, gray and dim in the first light of morning. Richard sobbing and cursing. Angélique making no sound. Voices shouting. Heads poking up through the hatch, again at that odd angle. Wails from that silly youngster. Old Man Kawai. Amerie’s familiar tones: “Go easy. Go easy.” Felice spitting obscenities when somebody said she was going to get her armor all messed up.
“Put himover my shoulder. I can carry him. Stop your wiggling, Claude. Silly old fart! Now I’m going to have to walk all the way to the war.”
He laughed. Poor Felice. And then his face was upside down among her green skirts and he was jouncing up and down and he screamed. But after a little bit the movement stopped, and they laid him on his stomach and something touched his temple, making the pain and the rest of it grow muzzy.
He said. “Angélique? Richard?”
Unseen, Amerie replied, “They’ll recover. You all will. You did it, Claude. Sleep now.” Well, how about that? And for a moment he saw the fiery starfish again, but with crimson and gold limbs expanding, branching out among the hapless helpless firefly patterns of Finiah streets in the instant before the hatch of the flyer slammed shut. How about that… and if the lava kept oozing out of the old Kaiserstuhl volcano for even a little while, it was going to be a long time before they mined any more barium in the regions around there.
“Don’t worry about it, Claude,” Felice said.
And so he stopped.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Half-dozing in the dead hour before dawn, Moe Marshak and the other human troops on duty in Finiah had mistaken the first blast of the photon weapon for a lightning stroke. The thin green beam had lanced out of the stars, barely missing the Rhineside wall that the gray-torc garrison manned and demolishing an adjacent mess hall inside the compound. Marshak was still gaping at the flames consuming the wreckage when Claude’s second shot struck the Number Ten bastion squarely, breaching the fortification not a dozen meters from Marshak’s station. Great blocks of granite flew in all directions and the air boiled with smoke and dust. Oil tubs that held the watch fires spilled in the concussion and sent blazing rivulets racing down the cracked walkway.