Yso fired with the cold fury of desperation, lacing the sky with pink beams.
The Vellae cones danced up and out of the way and then came on again.
'Now,” said Horne, taking the controls in his hands, “I'm going to make a crash maneuver. Stand by.'
'Standing by,” said Yso.
Their cone flopped and whirled groundward. It looked disabled, but Horne kept its motion so erratic and deceptively shifty that it was hard to hit. The little Vellae cone stayed off. The big one followed Horne down, impatiently waiting for a clear shot.
When he was about twenty feet off the ground, Horne said, “Here we go.” Their cone zoomed straight up at terrific speed. Horne could feel himself being flattened down into the seat while the air shrieked around the canopy. “Fire!” he shouted. “Damn it, fire!” The big cone was just above them, was level with them, was under them. Horne saw the faces of the men for one split-second, as they understood what had happened and what was about to happen. Then they disappeared in a blossom of pink fire and fell away fast, dwindling to a dark trailing smoke, and the clouds were getting close enough to touch.
Horne adjusted the grav-shields. The dizzy upward falling slowed gradually and stopped. They hung motionless under a great curved belly of red-gold cloud.
Yso said, “Did we do it? Are we still alive?'
Horne grunted. “I think so.'
He shook his head to clear it and looked down. The wrecked cones, three of them, were sending up lazy ribbons of smoke from out of the tawny grass, far below. The one-man flier had pulled back to where it could run, if it wanted to. It mounted a lighter weapon than the big craft, but it was faster.
The communicator buzzed. Horne turned it on.
A voice said, “Horne?'
Horne stiffened. A great wave of heat passed over him and then he was as cold as a piece of steel.
'Ardric,” he said.
The one-man cone hung glittering in the distance, under the brilliant clouds.
'Oh, no,” said the voice from the communicator. “Ardric is dead. He died in the wreck of the
Horne began to curse him in a voice that quivered. “You lousy, yellow-bellied—” He reached out suddenly and grasped the control levers. Their cone streaked toward the hovering flier.
The flier darted out of reach with mocking ease, and he heard sound of Ardric's laughter.
'Try again, Horne,” he said.
A kind of blindness came upon Horne, so that he could see only the small cone with its glittering canopy and nothing else in the world. He hunched over the controls and tried again.
The little cone skipped and darted and whirled as swiftly as a sunbeam and he pursued it, tantalizingly just too slow, maddeningly burdened with the extra size and armament of his craft. But he would not give up.
Yso had reached and shut off the communicator. She was talking to him but he would not listen.
In the narrow space of the cockpit floor, Ewan stirred and groaned and got to his knees.
Horne barely heard them. He said to Yso, “Ready now. I'll get him on the next pass.'
I'll get him, he thought. I'll burn him out of the sky.
He started to shove the control levers for another pass and Ewan knocked his hands away and tried to push him out of the seat. Ewan had been talking to Yso and had heard her better than Horne did.
'Are you crazy, Horne? He's just playing with you, waiting for more of his men to come. We've got to—'
Horne pushed him away. “Let me alone. I'll kill him.'
Ewan swore. He hit Horne alongside the head. The blow stung Horne but it neither dazed him nor shocked him to his senses. It merely made him turn around and knock Ewan back into the cockpit with the same casual anger he would have applied to a wasp or a bee. Then he returned to the business of Ardric.
Yso screamed at him, shaking his shoulder. “Look there to the north, Horne! There, there!'
She was so insistent and shrill that he took his eyes away, from Ardric's flier for a second. And in the north he saw a flight of five cones, coming fast.
Horne shivered and ran his hands over his face, like a man waking from sleep.
He sent the flier racing away.
The communicator made its signal and he opened it again. Ardric's voice said, “It won't do you any good to run. We have the best fliers on Skereth. But I suppose you won't make it easy for us.'
Horne did not answer. He did not have any words in him. He shut off the communicator. The cone fled through the brassy sky, above the yellow-tawny plain.
Ewan sat up, holding his injured face. “Head east as much as you can,” he said. “There are mountains there. We might be able to lose them.'
Horne angled east. The jet unit roared wide open, but the Vellae cones crept slowly, steadily closer. Here nothing depended on the skill of the pilot. It was a simple and unarguable matter of mechanical superiority.
A heavy shadow on the eastern horizon grew high and thick and became a mountain range.
Horne measured the distance to the mountains, and then he watched the Vellae cones for a while, estimating the rate at which they were overtaking him. He computed mentally, and he didn't like the results.
'We aren't going to make it, are we?” Yso said.
Horne shook his head. “It doesn't look too good. If we only had a storm or even a low cloud to hide in.'
But the storms were too far away and the clouds were all too high for the unpressurized, low-altitude cones.
Ewan said, “Let me back there.'
Horne surrendered the controls without argument. It was Ewan's flier. Maybe he could do something more with it.
He did a little more. He nursed just a fraction of extra speed out of it. The mountains rushed at them. The Vellae cones continued to overhaul them, but not as fast.
There were lower clouds now, over the crests of the mountain peaks. “If only I can get into one,” Ewan said. “I'll try dropping down in a valley somewhere beyond the ridge and hope they go over us.'
'Wouldn't it be better Yso started to say, and Ewan cut her short.
'You're about out of fuel. So that doesn't give us much choice.'
A minute later he said, “Keep an eye out for peaks. Here we go.'
The cone plunged into a mass of cloud and the whole world was lost beyond the thick dark mist.
Almost at once Ewan slowed his forward speed and shifted off on a sharp tangent. Horne and the girl sat tensely, straining their eyes for solid shadows in the mist. The Vellae cones had disappeared, along with everything else. Ewan jockeyed the flier through a broad gap of which both sides were invisible, between the peaks and crossed the backbone of the range. Then he began to drop with dangerous swiftness, looking for a place to come down.
There wasn't any.
Where the trailing cloud-mass thinned there were only sheer cliffs and sharp ridges, rockfalls and chasms that seemed to have no bottom. On this inhospitable mountain face there were not even any trees.
The jet coughed twice and died.
Momentum carried them a little farther, floating on anti-grav alone now and battered helplessly by every wind, blowing fiercely through the passes and around the slopes.
Horne said, “We might as well go down ourselves as get knocked down.'
'Either way,” said Ewan, “we won't like it.'
The cone dropped, wobbling down the lower slopes like a loose bubble while the wind tried to turn it over and smash it on the rocks.
Horne said suddenly, “I've got an idea.'
He told them his idea, rapidly. Ewan grunted. “A-hundred-to-one gamble. But we might as well play it.'
The clouds were still thick and low overhead and there was no sign yet of the Vellae cones.
'Can you bring her down there?” Horne said to Ewan, pointing to a ledge of rock halfway up an otherwise sheer cliff. The ledge slanted and a long crack full of rubble ran from the low end of it, angling down across a less precipitous shoulder of the mountain. It looked as though it might offer both shelter and a way down.
Ewan said sourly, “Of course, landing there without jets will be easy.” He started to play with the grav-
