When the clouds burst apart, they were within sight of Galgul. The roots of Carl's blood flinched at the dark sight of the City of Pain. Cindered debris plumed the sky casting a gravelly black pall over the remaining zotl spheres. And though this was the Welkyn, the light was dim and redlong.
The thornwing hauled Carl through one of the dusty flightlanes that unfurled in carbon-black arcs about the broken city. Galgul was bound in a knot of clogged sky cut by fallpaths. But in the interim since the gravity wave had ruptured these spheres, the fine dust had settled with the heavier mangled shards into. ribboning bands outside the free lanes of the moving fallpaths, and the thornwing could skim over the charred litter toward the core of Galgul.
Needlecraft cruised among the plasteel debris, but they were no threat. The lance alerted `him with tones to the approach of the zotl, and the thornwing was able to move with the streams of detritus closer to the cracked- open sphere.
As the shattered spheres neared, Carl glimpsed
through the cumbering fields of shrapnel one sphere that gleamed. His eyes strained, and his heart pounded with the effort to discern what was ahead, but the rubble had become too dense. The fallpath ahead grinded with orbiting gravel. The thornwing's flight faltered and stopped. It could carry Carl no farther.
Carl thought of clearing a path with the lance, but nixed the idea when he realized the next moment that it would draw the zotl to him. He would have to go on alone.
He reached out and took hold of a scorched boulder. The thornwing let him go, and he was left hanging on the edge of the fallpath with the other debris. His weight nudged the housesized boulder, and in the diminished gravity they began a slow rotation. The tumbleweed that was the thornwing rolled toward the clear flightlanes with a farewell squawk and banked out of sight.
Movement in the distant direction it flew caught Carl's eye.
He scrambled against the spin of the big rock and climbed to the turning edge where he could see human figures galumphing over the choked edge of the fallpath. Black dust swarmed about them like a haze of flies. By their silhouettes against the ,luminous blue shadow of the Welkyn, he saw that they were Foke and that they wore the black strider tunics of a suicide squad.
They were approaching, and Carl bent down and walked in synchrony with the rock's movement, staying in one place, .
ready to drop out of sight. The group bounded through the smoky air close enough for him to see their faces. They were strained with flight, eager to cover distance.
Carl's focus locked on the blackbearded, gangstergrim face of the chief: It was Allinl The thornwing had .carried Carl to Allin--by its own design or the eld skyle's, Carl had no time to guess. Allin rushed by meters away.
Carl moved to join them, and that instant the sky convulsed with the compression of a big explosion. A trollish cry gulfed hearing, and Carl threw himself flat. A tiny sun ignited from where the Poke had come, lashing the space around it with hot flechettes of slag. A needlecraft had tripped the Foke's plastique bomb. The jumpship it had been escorting veered sharply to avoid colliding with the fireball. The needlecraft trailing the jumpship spotted the fleeing Foke and broke off to run them down. Laserfire twinkled from the attack ships and thumped the rocks around the Foke to fiery bullets
Carl took aim with his lance and fired. A beam of soothing infrared streamed from the muzzle. He cursed and twisted the calibrated hilt until it clicked to -the setting that he had learned was gravity-sheathed laser bursts. He aimed again, and the first two bursts caromed off floating debris. The third hit the lead needlecraft by accident when it rolled into an evasive run, and it billowed into green fire and black smoke. The other needlecraft pulled away.
Carl turned the lance's wavelength cylinder to its longest extreme--gravity waves--and set the lance to fire a tightly compacted charge. He aimed at the black shining nacelle of the jumpship in the pinpointed distance and fired. He missed by a thousand meters, but it didn't matter. The immense shockwave of the blast flipped the jumpship out of the clearing and into a steel-strewn fallpath. The shock of its eruption ignited the needlecraft that had swung back to protect the ship, and the gray sky flared.
Recoil from the shot pushed Carl backward off the boulder, and he sailed into sight of the Foke. They were cowering behind whatever protection they could find, expecting the bowshock of such a strong blast to sweep
over them. Carl knew from experience that the lance's gravity bursts were shaped to scatter perpendicular to the line of fire. He curled to slow his recoil and used his fins to set him down on a chunk of blistered plasteel overlooking the Foke.
'Why are you wearing-a black tunic, Allin, if you're going to hide?' he called down to them.
'It's the dropping!' one of the band identified him.
Allin was too astonished to speak. He looked for the shockfront and saw far off the fire lickings where the jumpship and the needlecraft had been. He looked back at Carl agog.
'You came here to die,' Carl spoke to the band. 'And you'd be little more than seared meatballs now if I hadn't come along.' He held up the lance and manipulated the hilt so that the muzzle flashed once with starpointed radiance. 'The eld skyle and the Rimstalkers have given me this-a light lance. I want to use it to free the imprisoned Foke.' He pointed the whitesmoldering lance at the distant zotl sphere. 'Will you give me your lives?'
The Foke had floated out from their coveys, and they stared at Carl in his leather finsuit and scarred face with wonder-loud eyes.
Allin pulled himself up beside Carl. The Foke's dark-coiled bangles were pulled back from a face fierce as a Comanche's. He looked at the lance and into Carl's broad stare.
'You've just paid me for the lives you lost,' he said in his gritful voice. 'I will attack Galgul with you. But not for you. I go to this death for our Foke.'
He started to take off his holster, symbol of the band's leadership, and Carl stopped him. 'You'll lead the squad,' he told the Foke chief. 'I'll keep the zotl off us.'
Allin agreed, and he put a hand on Carl's shoulder. 'We'll die together.'
'Who said anything about dying? I just want a hit-and-run rescue.' Carl looked down into the squad's ferine faces.
