slow arc and heard the purr of its motor. It was tracking. But what was it locked onto? And why had no energy bolt stabbed forth?
“He’s not fixingto shoot up the camp,” Karlsarm muttered. “That’d be ridiculous. He couldn’t get off more than two shots before he was dead. But what else?”
“Should I rush?” Evagail asked.
“I think you’d better,” Karlsarm said, “and let’s hope the, damage hasn’t already been done.”
He must endure the agony of a minute or two while she gathered the resources of her Skill—not partially, as she often did in everyday life, but totally. He heard a measured intake of breath, sensed rhythmic muscular contrations, smelled sharp adrenalin. Then she exploded.
She was across the open ground in a blur—Ridenour could not react before she was upon him. He cried out and ram She overhauled him in two giantess bounds. Her hands closed. He struggled, and he was not a weak man. But she picked him up by the wrists and ankles and carried him like a rag, doll. Her face was a white mask in the starlight. “Lie still,” she said in a voice not her own, “or I will break you.”
“Don’t. Evagail, please.” Noach dared stroke an iron-hard arm. “Do be careful,” he said to Ridenour’s aghast upside-down stare. “She’s dangerous in this condition. It’s akin to hysterical rage, you know—mobilization of the body’s ultimate resources, which are quite astound. ing—but under conscious control. Nevertheless, the personality is affected. Think of her as an angry catavray.”
“Amok,” rattled in Ridenour’s throat. “Berserk.” He shivered.
“I don’t recognize those words,” Noach said, “but I repeat, her Skill consists in voluntary hysteria. At the moment, she could crush your skull between her hands. She might do it, too, if you provoke her.”
They reached the gun. Evagail cast the Terran to earth, bone-rattlingly hard, and yanked him, back on his feet by finger and thumb around his nape. He was taller than she, but she appeared to tower over him, over all three men. Starlight crackled in her coiled hair. Her. eyes were bright and blind.
Noach leaned close to Ridenour, read the terror upon him, and said mildly, “Please tell us what you were doing.”
In some incredible fashion, Ridenour got the nerve to yell, “Nothing! I couldn’t sleep, I c-came here to pass the time—”
Karlsarm turned from his examination of the blaster. “You’ve got this thing tracking that ship in orbit,” he said.
“Yes. I—foolish of me—I apologize—only for fun—”
“You had the trigger locked,” Karlsarm said. “Energy was pouring out of the muzzle. But no flash, no light, no ozone smell.” He gestured. “I turned it off. I also notice you’ve opened the chamber and replaced the primary modulator with this little gadget. Did you hear him talk, Evagail, before you charged?”
Her strange flat tone said: “‘—entire strength of the outbacker army on this continent is concentrated here and plans to remain for several days at least. I don’t suggest a multi-megatonner. It’d annihilate them, all right, but they
“Her Skill heightens perceptions and data storage too,” Noach said in a shocked, mechanical fashion. “Well,” Karlsarm sighed, “no real need to interrogate Ridenour, is there? He converted this gun into some kind of maser and called down the enemy on our heads.”
“They may not respond, if they heard him cut off the way he was,” Noach said with little hope.
“Wasn’t much noise,” Karlsarm answered. “They probably figure he did see somebody coming and had to stop in a hurry. If anything, they’ll arrive as fast as may be, before we can disperse the stockpiles that’ll give a scent to their metal detectors.”
“We’d better start running,” Noach said. Above the bristly beard, his nutcracker face had turned old. “Maybe not.” Excitement rose in Karlsarm.
“I need at least an hour or two to think—and, yes, talk with you, Ridenour.”
The Terran straightened. His tone rang. “I didn’t betray you, really,” he said. “I stayed loyal to my Emperor.”
“You’ll tell us a few things, though,” Karlsarm said. “Like what procedure you expect a landing party to follow. No secrets to that, are there? Just tell us about newscasts you’ve seen, books you’ve read, inferences you’ve made.”
“No!”
Roused by the noise, other men were drifting up the hill, lean leather-clad shapes with weapons to hand. But Karlsarm ignored them. “Evagail,” he said.
Her cold, cold fingers closed on Ridenour. He shrieked. “Slack off,” Karlsarm ordered.
Ridenour broke. Karlsarm did not despise him for that. Few men indeed could have defied Evagail in her present mood, and they would have had to be used to the Mistresses of War.
In fact, Karlsarm needed a lot of courage himself, later on, when he laid arms around her and mouth at her cheek and crooned, “Come back to us, loveling.” How slowly softness, warmth and—in a chill dawnlight—color reentered her skin: until at last she sank down before him and wept.
He raised her and led her to their cave.
At first the ship was a gleam, drowned in sun-glare. Then she was a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand. But swiftly and swiftly did she grow. Within minutes, her shadow darkened the land. Men saw her from below as a tower that descended upon them, hundreds of meters in height, flanks reflecting with a metallic brilliance that blinded. Through light filters might be seen the boat housings, gun turrets and missile tubes that bristled from her. She was not heavily armored, save at a few key points, for she dealt in nuclear energies and nothing could withstand a direct hit. But the perceptors and effectors of her fire-control system could intercept virtually anything that a lesser mechanism might throw. And the full power of her own magazines, vomited forth at once, would have incinerated a continent.
The engines driving that enormous mass were deathly quiet. But where their countergravity fields touched the planet, trees snapped to kindling and the lake roiled white. Her advent was dancer graceful. But it went so fast that cloven air roared behind, one continuous thunderclap between stratosphere and surface. Echoes crashed from mountain to mountain; avalanches broke loose on the heights, throwing ice plumes into the sky; the risen winds smelled scorched.
Emblazoned upon her stood
Already she had discharged her auxiliaries, aircraft that buzzed across the lakeland in bright quick swarms, probing with instruments, firing random lightning bolts, shouting through amplifiers that turned human voices into an elemental force: “Surrender, surrender!”
At the nexus of the cruiser’s multiple complexity, Captain Chang sat in his chair of command. The screens before him flickered with views, data, reports. A score of specialist officers held to their posts behind him. Their work—speech, tap on signal buttons, clickdown of switches—made a muted buzz. From time to time, something was passed up to Chang himself. He listened, decided and returned to studying the screens. Neither his inflection nor his expression varied. Lieutenant-Commander Hunyadi, his executive officer, punched an appropriate control on the communications board in front of him and relayed the order to the right place. The bridge might have been an engineering center on Terra, save for the uniforms and the straining concentration.
Until Chang scowled. “What’s that, Citizen Hunyadi?” He pointed to a screen in which the water surface gleamed, amidst green woods and darkling cliffs. The view was dissolving.
“Fog rising, sir, I think.” Hunyadi had already tapped out a query to the meteorological officer in his distant sanctum.
“No doubt, Citizen Hunyadi,” Chang said. “I do not believe it was predicted. Nor dor I believe it is
