No living creature, no matter how resilient, can do much after being almost surgically bisected through its brain and spinal cord.
When the giant body fell at length, I finally got a good look at the swordmaster responsible for his defeat—and I admit to feeling shocked. As if emerging from a nightmare about medieval Japan, a thirteen-foot-tall suit of samurai armor was meticulously wiping an interminable blade with a handkerchief, cleaning off its enemy’s blue lymph.
It appeared that the blade really was steel, after all.
My eyes were incongruously focused on the twisted expression of sorrowful ferocity on the Japanese warrior’s masklike face. It seemed to be saying, “this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.” Not the most reassuring message to be sending. Just in case, I began to reach with my one remaining hand for my gun….
“Shit, that animal nicked my blade,” I heard him say, and then I relaxed, though in disbelief. The mysterious samurai was none other than Old Man Slovoban. No one else could have made himself comfortable in armor of those dimensions. I put aside for later the inevitable question of how he’d rescued himself from the massacre of the Estrella Rom. “A work by Masamune himself, a dai-katana worth more than its weight in platinum, and to bring it here and mess up the blade like an idiot on the spine of a creature like this… ” and he kicked the fallen Colossaur with fury. Only then did he seem to notice my presence. He bent down, picked up my detached arm, which still grasped the maser in its hand, and passed it to me with his own hand, long and fine as the claw of a bird of prey despite the armor in which it was encased. “Are you all right, pozzie? You couldn’t have thought I’d miss the final showdown with Makrow. I’m sorry I didn’t get here earlier. I was so close, in Module 15, but Makrow’s and Vasily’s powers made things… a little difficult for me. That must be what’s slowing down your friends now, I suspect. Anyway”—and he kicked the defeated Colossaur again—“one less. I’m afraid we’ll never even learn his name. Now we’re three against one. Things are looking up, aren’t they, buratino? I admit, my idea had been to help El Afortunado first, but since you seemed to be in deeper trouble…. Besides, for now the kid looks like he’s holding up pretty well, don’t you think?” He calmly pointed over his shoulder. “In any case, I don’t think it would be easy to get close enough to lend a hand. Honestly, pozzie, don’t you notice anything odd?”
I took the hand he offered me and stood up—after first prying back my own fingers (not a very pleasant experience) and retrieving my weapon. The ancient Romani’s hand turned out not to be the limp squidlike thing I had expected; on the contrary, it seemed to be pure bone and tendon. I understood then that the samurai suit was not mere armor but a full exoskeleton. Without the help of servomotors, with his jellied bones and almost complete lack of muscles the Old Man would have found it impossible not only to handle a sword as expertly as he had done, but even to walk under gravity.
Makrow and Vasily were still facing off. But now they had abandoned any illusion of taking cover and stood literally face to face. Neither was firing at the other anymore, however. Either they had finally realized that it made no sense to try, regardless of how they aimed, or else they had mutually disabled each other’s arsenals with their Psi powers.
I had seen a couple of holovideos of duels between Psis, and what we saw here did look a little like a battle between telepaths. If you squinted, you could also catch a glimpse of the tremendous mental energies at play—something like thin colored veils swirling around the contenders. Psi fields.
It looked to me like Vasily’s field was navy blue, almost black, while Makrow’s was pinkish white—which for some reason I found almost shocking. Wasn’t the purest color supposed to be for the good guy? It’s hard to put any credit in archetypes after a surprise like that.
It also reminded me a little of a battle between psychokinetics. All sorts of objects were flying around the two rivals: broken boxes, an arm torn off from a victim of the human-bombing, a number of hats (including my own badly damaged fedora). None of it ever so much as touched either of them, though.
But the real, absolute novelty was the other thing. And I mean, a genuinely new thing. New to me, to Slovoban, and I imagine to almost every living creature in this universe. After all, it isn’t every day that two such statistically rare Psis fight face to face.
Revolving slowly around Makrow and Vasily and spreading out over the veils of their Psi fields, a structure of translucent blades was spreading, widening as the blades grew from the double center where they were being generated. And on those blades….
No. It wasn’t anything you’d like to watch. I don’t know what sort of effect it had on the hardened old Romani, but as for me, for once in my existence I felt that if I had any hair, it would be standing on end.
Destruction. Crowds of wrathful Grodos scuttling about the Burroughs destroying everything in sight. War. A contingent of Colossaurian assault troops disembarking on Earth. Chaos. A hail of
