'We wrecked the controls,” Fife said, “after he opened the switches, so they can't stop what's been started.” He rubbed his hands together, grinning.
The last of the alien slaves ran across the plaza. After them, close on their heels, came the first of the attacking Vellae.
Fife said, “It's time to go.'
They ran with the rest of the running slaves, at first firing behind them as they went and then just running.
In the great cavern now the balcony on both sides was filled with a grotesque stream of creatures hurrying into the two galleries. The place had taken on the eerie look of an inferno. Fire flashed and ran in the tubes, and now in some places the plastic tubing itself had begun to melt and burn. The cavern was thick with choking smoke. Frantic slaves crowded toward the tunnels.
Chell was hovering, holding Ardric tightly, and another one of his breed had picked up Yso and was keeping her safe from the trampling rush.
Horne coughed and fired at a red uniform dimly glimpsed in the street outside. “You did a good job,” he told Fife. “Too damn good.'
'Well,” said Fife, “it's too late now. If we live, I'll see you in Rillah!'
He ran off along the right hand gallery. Horne took the left. And they fled into the tunnels of the dying brain.
They ran, the unhuman, the semi-human, the light-footed and the huge, the fleet and the clumsy, along the narrow swaying catwalks. And around them and under them the brain died in convulsions of smoke and fire and arcing flame.
The bundled wires in the tubes heated as current from the unchecked generators poured into them, through the broken gateways of protective devices that no longer functioned. They heated until the insulation burned away and the fusing fire raced along the slender filaments. It raced through every branching nerve-path into the cells and chambers where the brain did its remembering, its computing and comparing, its almost human learning and associating. Circuits fused; arcs of blue fire leaped over the panels and the tube banks; holocausts of energy were released to fill the rocky chambers with destruction.
Horne ran, clinging to the handrail because he could no longer see, along the wildly swaying catwalk. Now and again, as they passed the mouth of some burning chambers, he could see through the swirls of smoke ahead the weird forms of the slaves running, leaping, shambling, striving in a desperate attempt to outrace the destruction that was following with such swiftness on their heels.
Because now the galleries themselves were burning. The plastic tubes, the network of suspension cables that held them, the very catwalk, were melting and crumbling behind them in the smoke and heat.
The Vellae who had followed them into the galleries were caught in that swift-racing destruction.
Horne heard the echo of a shattering explosion and felt the whole mountain shake, as though it felt suddenly the insecurity of its hollowed and honeycombed mass. A very great panic came over Horne and he ran with fire at his heels and the mountain shivering uneasily over his head, and smoke strangling in his lungs. Then there was a rocky corridor full of smoke but without fire, and a small barred opening through which another light shone — the light of sunset.
They cleared the bars away and fought madly out through the hole onto the mountain's flanks, while the mountain itself rocked and groaned around them and echoed with dim cracking sounds. The brain had calmly plotted the basis of its own destruction. Fife's reckless release of power had augmented it. The work of the Vellae themselves in constructing the physical housing of the brain and leaving little more than the shell of a mountain, was finishing it. It felt, and sounded, as though the galleries were collapsing inward by levels upon the huge hollow center of Administration.
Horne and his alien-bodied comrades ran, in the clear air and the sunset light, down the lower slopes toward the safety of the plain, and above them the face of the mountain changed.
CHAPTER XVII
The ships loomed along the spaceport in a long row, with lights and sound and movement around their bases but with their great hulls going up into the starless night. Toward them, in long shuffling files, went those who were to embark in them, shambling, hopping, or walking like humans. The lights glanced off hide and scale and wing, off strange faces, strange eyes. They moved into the ships silently, but with a straining eagerness. For these were the ships that were to take the humanoids home to a score of different lonely worlds far-scattered through the Fringe.
These were Federation ships. The power and authority of the Federation had come to Skereth in full force after the shattering revelation. And the people of Skereth had welcomed them, after learning of the things the Vellae had done, of the stealing of slaves and of the great brain inside the mountain that had been designed to give the Vellae weapons for war and conquest.
'I wish,” said Fife to Horne and Yso where they stood on the edge of the Skambar spaceport, “that we did not leave so many dead behind. Lurgh…'
Lurgh had died in the fighting in the tunnels. Other humanoids had perished in that battle, too many of them.
But of the Vellae, only a handful had escaped. Most, of them, including Ardric's father, had stayed in the Administration Center in a frantic effort to save some part of the vast thing they had labored on for so long, and had been trapped in the spreading fires and falling rock that followed the explosion of overloaded generators.
Horne said dryly, “I notice that you don't seem to include Ewan's death among your regrets.'
'He was a good man,” said Fife. “He fought with us well. It is not good that he died. But… he was human.'
Horne nodded. “Yes. And the ones who are going to take you home again are human, too. Remember it.'
D'quar said in his slow, rumbling voice, “Horne is right. Not all humans are evil, Fife.'
His purple gargoyle face was solemn. Horne thought, he looks like something out of a fairy tale about ogres but damned if I haven't learned to like him.
'True,” said Fife. “True. But whether they are good or evil I do not care. I only care that they leave me alone.'
'The Federation will see that they do,” Horne said. “And Fife, think about this in the long winter nights, if you have any on your world. In the Federation, human and non-human have managed to work together pretty well. The day may come when your world will want to join them.'
Fife's yellow eyes held a curious gleam as he answered. “Come and talk to me about it sometime, Horne. You and Yso. I may not listen, but I won't set the dogs on you, either.'
'That's a bargain,” Horne said.
They went away toward the ships, with D'quar towering over Fife, and Horne looked after them and said, “They're not human but they're two damned good men.'
He and Yso were walking away when, out of the darkness, a tall grim man in the uniform of a captain came to them.
'They told me you were here,” Wasek said. He jerked his head toward the looming row of hulls. “One of those ships is mine.'
Horne stood and looked at him and said nothing. The silence grew longer and finally Wasek said, “All right, all right,
Horne said, “Good.'
Wasek muttered something. He said, “They tell me you're all cleared.'
'All but the papers,” Horne said. He had handed Ardric over to Federation authorities as soon as the first ship landed, and, in the meantime, the Morivenn faction on Skereth had been busy. Ardric was still stubbornly and vindictively refusing to admit anything, but the simple fact that he was still alive was in itself a pretty good
