Administration.
Horne took a deep breath and turned to his tensely waiting alien followers. “Well,” he said, “we, might as well go.'
They crowded in and Horne pushed the button. The round chamber dropped with vertiginous swiftness down the shaft.
When Horne heard the first whine of the air cushion he said, “Come out with a rush and arm yourselves as soon as you can.'
D'quar said, “What if the others do not come?'
'Then,” said Horne, “we'll just have to hold on until they arrive.'
Brave words, he thought. The only trouble was that he didn't feel that way at all. He had been forced to do more fighting the last few days than he had done in his whole life, but he still didn't like it and didn't think he ever would. They were committed now and he might as well put on a good front.
The lift slowed and stopped and the door slid open.
There was a narrow corridor in front of the lift, with rows of identical doors on either side of it. There was nobody in the corridor. Horne led the way swiftly to the end of it.
Here a round space perhaps three hundred feet in diameter and almost as high had been hollowed out of the very heart of the mountain. Buildings of steel and glass filled all the circular space except for the center and the streets that radiated from it, dividing the buildings into separate blocks.
The streets, Horne knew, connected with the entrances from Rillah and the private base where the Vellae ships landed with slaves, and also with the galleries and work-centers around the periphery of the brain. It was from one of these streets that the other slaves led by Yso and Ewan, were supposed to pour in to the attack.
There was no sign of them yet. But some sort of alarm had roused the center. Behind the glass window-walls of the buildings, technicians at the many input-output devices of the brain were turning from their work and peering out into the plaza. Here there was a noise and men were running, technicians and scientists hurrying for cover, red-uniformed guards coming from various directions and disappearing along one particular street that lay to Horne's left.
A number of them were coming out of a building with a sign that said,
All Horne's muscles tightened and the old hate burned up in him so strongly that he felt invincible.
'Ardric's there,” he said to his companions. “Let's get him.'
He ran out across the plaza.
There was a sudden cessation of movement among the people as they became aware of him in his red uniform and then saw the monstrous group that followed him. Somebody shouted in a voice of panic that the slaves were already here. The unarmed, non-uniformed men began to run away, spreading wild confusion around the plaza, and the guards stopped going wherever they were headed and swung around to shoot at Horne's little mob. But they could not fire effectively for the moment without killing a lot of their own people. They hesitated and, in the meantime, Horne had reached the door of the Guard Office and pushed it violently open and gone through it into the place beyond, with the aliens pouring in after him.
The Guard communication center was here. Operators bent tensely over their instruments, listening to a bedlam of voices, transmitting orders and instructions given by their chief.
The chief, wearing the red guard uniform but otherwise unchanged since the last time Horne had seen him aboard the
Horne sprang, just as Ardric looked up.
CHAPTER XV
Horne had a brief glimpse of Ardric, startled, forming a name with his lips, reaching for his gun. Then he was toppling over among the astonished operators and Horne went with him, his hands, his knees, his whole body savagely engaged in paying Ardric some small part of what he owed him.
They rolled and thrashed in fierce silence on the floor, among the frantic legs of the operators and the leaping forms of the aliens who were subduing them. There was a frightful noise. Voices shouted metallically from the communicators, demanding to know what was happening.
D'quar picked up a microphone and roared in his hoarse, heavy voice, “We have the Center, that's what's happening. You're caught between us—” and he howled his triumph and his hate at the unseen guards who were fighting his fellow-slaves somewhere in the outer galleries.
Horne, only dimly aware of these extraneous things, thought that D'quar was exulting too soon. But he didn't care. All he cared about was that at last he had Ardric in the grip of his two hands.
Ardric was fighting back. Horne's mouth was full of blood and his face was cut and his body was bruised, but that was all right too. It was good. He had Ardric's neck finally in the bend of his forearm and was pressing back, pressing back—
Two enormous hairy hands opened Horne's grip as easily as if he had been a child. A second pair of hands extracted Ardric and held him, half-conscious, the skin of his cheeks already mottled blue.
Horne looked up a little dazedly into the face of Lurgh and his fellow giant, and Lurgh said, “You wanted this one alive. Remember?'
Horne staggered up, still dazed. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, see that he doesn't get away.'
The communications center was a shambles. The operators were wounded, dead or escaped. About half the aliens were armed now and the others were searching the inner rooms for weapons. D'quar was still roaring his defiance, his gargoyle face unrecognizable now, and Horne made a frantic effort to quiet them down, to get them into some sort of order before the inevitable happened.
The guards outside began their counter-attack.
The great front window burst in a shower of glass. Instantly there was a scramble for cover. Red-uniformed shapes poured in, firing their weapons. Horne, behind part of the communications equipment, fired back and so did every alien who had a gun. Searing beams flashed and cracked. The room was filled in seconds with smoke and a smell of burning. The slaves who had been searching the inner rooms came back with guns and fired from the shelter of the doorways. But they were using unfamiliar weapons and the guards, trained fighting-men, outnumbered them.
Ardric, pinned down by the great bulk of the hairy alien from Allamar, said with vicious satisfaction, “My men will kill every damn one of you.” And Horne knew he was right.
Where were Ewan and Yso and the other slaves? What had happened in the outer galleries?
If they didn't come soon, they wouldn't need to come at all.
He fired at the red uniforms and choked on the smoke and the stench of the dying.
There came then a deep far sound like wind or the voice of the sea. It grew and grew swiftly, and the attacking guards heard it and became irresolute, and the fire slackened.
Half a dozen one-man cones and two larger ones spewed in a line out of the street to the left of the plaza. The guards who had been attacking Horne's force ran out to meet them, waving their arms. Then more men in red uniforms came running out of the street. Some of them were wounded. Others kept stopping every few feet to turn and fire and then run again. They mingled with the other guards and they all milled around for a moment and the cones hovered overhead. The two armed cones fired back also along the street.
A beam shot out from between the building and knocked one of the cones reeling back, its grav shields fused. There was burst of sporadic firing both in the air and on the ground. Then the red-uniformed men broke and ran and the cones followed them, and out from the street came the two-man cone with Yso at the controls, her yellow hair flying and Fife crouched beside her over the weapon-panel, firing like a demon and missing more often than not. After her came a string of wobbly cones manned by creatures of every sort sufficiently humanoid to fit them, and a flying cluster of green furry balls with weapons in their tentacles.
On the street below them came the army of the slaves, an outworld legion of incredible, beautiful, ugly,
