He had no time for speculation. He was out of the cage, staring about. Old Pork and Dancer were not there. Could it be possible the girls had actually killed Char and escaped? Not likely! Not with this remote box in Terl"s possession.
Seconds were ticking away. Blast rifles were waiting.
He leaped on Windsplitter and dashed for the edge of the bluff. They started a small avalanche as they halted halfway down the slope.
Jonnie sprang off and made sure they were covered from sight.
The humming came to top crescendo. The strange quiver was in the air. He recognized the feeling.
The shipment had shimmered and vanished from the platform!
Chapter 4.
Now would come the usual minor recoil that followed a semiannual firing.
Jonnie counted the seconds. He was panting heavily from his sprint. Windsplitter beside him was blowing, trembling.
Suddenly the ground shook. The air was rent with a splintering crash. A flash lit the sky.
Recoil? Sounded more like the place had blown up!
Jonnie scrambled to the top of the cliff and peered over the edge.
Too much recoil!
By fuse the nuclear weapons should not have gone off on Psychlo for another ten seconds.
The operations dome was still in the air, flames geysering from it.
The network of wires around the platform was melting.
Machines in the area were sent skidding. Psychlo operators were tumbled to the earth.
Wild, aura-like, sheet lightning bloomed over the transshipment scene!
The compound domes were rocked but seemed intact.
The concussion was racketing across the plains.
It was too soon for the bombs to go off on Psychlo. What had happened? Had they missed their target and landed their lethal cargo on some nearer s.p.a.ce? Did this mean Psychlo armament from the home planet could still appear in the sky and crush them?
But right now the question was: had this messed up their a.s.sault plans?
He looked anxiously toward the row of battle planes. The instant after recoil was their cue.
He looked toward the nearby ravines. Scot teams in camouflage radiation dress were due to sprint out of cover and take position with their weapons.
That recoil might also be radioactive, and here he was with no radiation battle suit.
Yay! There went the battle planes! Sixteen of them had been manned, each with a pilot and copilot. They had hidden in the planes all night. Keys to them had been placed on each seat.
Up soared the battle planes! A blasting, combined roar of heavy motors. Thirty-two Scot pilots and copilots.
Fifteen planes peeled off and darted at hypersonic toward their destinations. One plane for each distant minesite on the planet. The mission was to batter and destroy them and prevent a counterattack here. One plane to act as air cover for this central minesite. Radio silence was the watchword. No warning!
Jonnie looked at the remaining planes on the ground to see whether they had been battered. He noted they were a bit turned. They seemed all right....
Wait! Something was wrong. There should be four planes left there. They only had thirty-two pilots and copilots. But there were three planes left, not four!
He raised himself above the cliff edge again and swept the scene.
And there it was.
The whole side wall of the morgue had been battered out, and the coffin with which it had been done lay in the rubble!
Terl had somehow come to life and hammered his way out of the morgue.
Jonnie looked up.
Where there should have been one battle plane up there for this minesite, there were two!
Jonnie grabbed for Windsplitter. Something was wrong. The horse had gone lame in its plunge down the cliff. It was three hundred yards to those planes.
With a glare at the sky, Jonnie was running down the hill, putting all his strength into it.
A blast rifle spat at him from the compound. He raced on through a cloud of dirt.
Where were the a.s.sault teams? Had they been knocked flat?
Racing, Jonnie headed for the nearest battle plane, shots streaking the air about him. More blast rifles were firing from the compound.
He got to the plane door and got it half open. A blast rifle shot slammed it shut. He dove under the plane and went in the other door.
The key. The key! Where had Angus put this plane"s key? He was scrambling through the edges of the seats. The recoil jolt had jarred the key off the seat. A blast rifle splattered a shot onto the windscreen. There was the key! On the floor!
The instant before he touched the starters, he heard the chunk of a bazooka go. Then the flailing chatter of a.s.sault rifles.
The motors barked and he raced his hands over the console. The plane flashed upward to two thousand feet.
He caught a glimpse of the attack groups moving in. Two bazooka teams. Four a.s.sault rifle parties. They had been protected in the ravines in which they had crouched all night, covered with antiheat shields.
Jonnie flipped on the viewscreens. Where was Terl?
Chapter 5.
A few miles to the north, Terl and the minesite cover plane were engaged in a dance of battle.
Jonnie slammed his battle plane toward the two ships. Suddenly they moved farther north. One plane was running away to the north. The other took off in pursuit. Two Scots running away? No! Jonnie suddenly understood what was happening. It was a trick! Terl was pretending to run away to lure the Scots into a trap maneuver.
Radio silence. d.a.m.n radio silence!
The Scots fell for it.
Before Jonnie could get there, Terl had looped back and deadly fingers of flame were raking the Scots" ship.
The target flamed! It roared toward the ground.
Two men ejected, right and left, from the burning plane. Their jet packs smoked as they bit and arrested their falls. They were sailing some distance apart.
If Jonnie could get behind Terl while he was still concentrating on the plane...yes! Terl dove to shoot one of the pilots, unable to resist a s.a.d.i.s.tic touch.
The pilot was. .h.i.t and spun back upward.
Jonnie was right behind Terl. He pressed his gun trips and the artillery blasters knifed into the ship.
Then abruptly Terl"s plane was gone!
A quick glance at the viewscreens. Terl was above him.
But Terl didn"t shoot.
Abruptly Jonnie realized that Terl was going to ignore him and try to get back to the compound and shoot up the ground troops.
The keynote of Psychlo battle tactics was outguessing with a plane"s keyboard. The planes could dart so quickly and at such changing speeds that one had to divine what the other would do and do it first.
Jonnie snapped his battle plane in front of Terl"s. For an instant he could see the facemasked Psychlo through the armored windscreen. It was Terl. A madly efficient Terl, a Terl who for all his insanity was a past master at flying and a top marksman. Jonnie wondered whether he could match this maniac.
Terl went to the right. Jonnie had outguessed him and gone the same direction. Terl went farther right. Jonnie had outguessed him and was in front of him with ready firing guns.
Terl went up. Jonnie"s hands on the keyboard did not outguess him and Terl was almost able to dart past and return to rake the compound a.s.sault teams. Jonnie corrected and almost rammed Terl from below.
Why hadn"t he battered the monster"s head off in the morgue? But there had been no time.
Terl went low to the right, then to the left, then to the right. Rhythmical. Easy to predict. Jonnie was in front of him every time.
Too late, Jonnie realized it was a trap. The fourth time, Terl"s guns were firing at the place Jonnie was about to be. Only the slip of a finger on a key saved him from being blasted out of the sky.
Abruptly Terl seemed to abandon his effort to get through to the compound. He headed straight north.
Down below, the burning plane sent up soaring piles of black smoke.
Was this another Terl trick? Luring him off?
Ears blasted by the scream of tortured motors, Jonnie swept his eyes across his viewscreens. Where was Terl going and why? With a sudden hunch he flipped on a heat detection screen.
Chrissie and Pattie, riding to the north! Their horses" bellies to the ground as they raced along.
Leverage. Jonnie suddenly realized Terl was trying to get back his leverage! If he could recover his hostages he might bring pressure on Jonnie.
Jonnie flipped open the local command radio. Sure enough- Terl"s voice!
"If you don"t go down there and land, animal, I"ll kill them both."
Terl was right ahead of him, dropping down to about four thousand feet.
Jonnie hit his keys. He estimated exactly where Terl would be.
Jonnie"s battle plane slammed into the back of Terl"s. Jonnie closed the switch for the magnetic grips. The skids of his plane locked to the back of Terl"s.
Half-deafened by the thud of contact, Jonnie stepped up his speed control to hypersonic. His motors shrieked. He punched in coordinates to compare with six feet underground directly below them.
He glanced over the side to see that the riders were clear of that spot.
They were.
The motors of both ships were screaming in discord, fighting against one another in howling dissonance. They jerked and wrestled in the sky, suspended in s.p.a.ce. The motors began to get hot. Very shortly they would burn and explode.
Jonnie reached back for the jet packs. The straps had already been shortened. He shrugged into it. He made sure he still had Terl"s belt gun.
He took one final glance at the keyboard. Locked in. Six feet underground, directly below, four thousand feet down, speed control at hypersonic.
Jonnie dove out the plane door. The air bit at him as he plummeted down.
His jets barked alive and the descent slowed. By swinging his legs, he went up to a higher alt.i.tude.
He looked at the locked and fighting ships.
He had expected that Terl would bail out. The outcome was inevitable. The ships would explode. He was counting on Terl"s having no belt gun, and he intended to hunt him down in a jet pack or on the ground. But Terl didn"t bail out. Jonnie could see him battering away at his control console.
Jonnie, holding in s.p.a.ce with his backpack jets, had the sickening feeling he had made a mistake. Terl, after all, knew Psychlo tactics backward.
What Terl was doing in that jerking, fighting mess where one ship"s motors fought the other"s, was trying to outguess the settings of the plane that rode his back. If he could, both motors would agree. Possibly, then, a quick roll and reversal of the settings would throw the other ship off his back.
The smoke from those conflicting motors was already beginning to rise in the battle plane Jonnie had bailed out of.