He stopped, frantic now, and looked back. Four of his former love-slaves were heading toward him, all armed, all grimly determined. From the opposite direction, Renard rushed past the women, pistol drawn.
Yulin opted for Renard. With a snarl he turned and ran into him; both went sprawling.
Yulin rolled, jumped to his feet, and grabbed Renard’s pistol. Smiling now, he passed the two women, grabbing another pistol, and backed along the side of the bridge.
The lights in the main shaft were flickering, and there were more rumblings and bangings from below.
“Standoff!” Yulin yelled at them over the din. “Let’s everybody stay calm!”
“Give it up, Yulin!” Nikki Zinder screamed, almost drowned out by the din from the shaft. The scene was eerily unreal in the dun and flickering light.
The minotaur laughed. “Just stay away” He continued to back along the shaft, and they continued to match him, coming warily forward.
Renard ran into the control room.
“We’ve got to get him,” Wooley called from in back. “If he gets to the ship we’re trapped—and he can build another Obie.”
But they were bunched a little too close. A single shot from him could take them, but not, perhaps, before one of them also fried him.
As Yulin said, it was a draw, and he was backing along the side of the bridge.
He risked a quick glance back. Almost across now. Once in the corridor, he could outrun them to the car. Just a little farther…
Suddenly an orange tentacle lashed over the side of the bridge behind him, wrapped itself around his neck, and pulled him with a jerk up and over, then let go. Yulin felt himself lifted, turned over, then dropped down into the shaft.
He screamed in horror for some time. But thanks to Coriolis effect, he was smashed to death against the shaft long before he struck bottom.
The Bozog climbed up and over the bridge and down onto it, the pale-red cloak of the Ghiskind following.
Wooley saw what happened and applauded. There was more rumbling, booming, and flickering, and she grew suddenly businesslike.
“Vistaru, Zinder, go with the Bozog and the Ghiskind! Get both elevator cars open and ready! Com’on, Star! Let’s help Renard get the others!” They ran back to the open, dark doorway.
“Renard!” Wooley screamed.
“Here!” he yelled. “Damn it! Come and help! I can’t see a blasted thing!”
They could, and Vistaru gently herded the confused and blank other women up the stairs and out the door.
“Come on!” she yelled.
“Mavra! We’ve got to find Mavra!” Renard screamed.
Wooley looked around with her exceptional night vision. “I don’t see her! Mavra!” she screamed. “Mavra!”
Suddenly the whole control room shook with a thunderous wrenching, and part of the far balcony collapsed.
Wooley grabbed Renard. “Come on! Get out of here!” she yelled at him. “We need you to get the others out!”
He looked desperate, tragic. “But—Mavra!” he screamed back.
“She’s got to be dead, or unconscious, or something!” Wooley snapped back. Another spasm shook them and the shaft lights stayed out. “Come on! We’ve got to get out of here or we’ll all die!”
With her deceptive strength she picked him up and raced up the stairs. At the top, she looked back, and there seemed to be tears in her eyes.
“Forgive me once more, dear Mavra,” she whispered, more to herself than to Renard, although he heard.
Then she was off across the bridge.
Both cars were packed with bodies, and they stopped and started several times and moved jerkily. Despite moments when they seemed stuck, doomed to die of asphyxiation, both made it to the surface.
Renard, though still in shock, realized it was now his show. “To the ship!” he yelled. Time for mourning later.
Aboard the Shuttle
The shuttle had originally been designed for humans. The Bozog engineers had adapted it for the flight from the Well World to New Pompeii—and though there were now eleven humans and only three nonhumans aboard, they managed. The shuttle had been designed for up to thirty people, and the rear area still had its seats—with two to spare.
The Bozog and the Ghiskind remained with Renard on the bridge. The Agitar struggled to get ahold of himself. “Ghiskind, look in back and make sure everybody’s seated and strapped down,” he snapped. The red specter drifted back, looked, came back, and its hollow-hooded head nodded.
“E-release,” Renard muttered. “Now—oh, yeah. Hold tight!” He checked his own straps and reached over to a keyboard, punching the code in.
Nothing happened.
He cursed, then thought a bit, trying to figure out what he had done wrong. Suddenly, he had it.
“E-lift,” he punched.
The ship broke free and rose at near maximum power.
“Code please,” a pleasant, mechanical voice came at them over the ship’s radio, startling him. “Correct code within sixty seconds or we will destroy your ship.”
“The robot sentinels!” he cried. “We forgot about them!”
But Mavra hadn’t. She’d had him program the entire sequence.
“The Decline and Fall of Pompeii,” came her recorded voice over the radio. It was, Renard thought with some relief, a truly appropriate title.
Now the ship slowed, came almost to a standstill. Before him, the screens showed a meaningless series of figures and lots of circles, dots, and other shapes.
The shuttle began to move forward again.
He sighed and relaxed. “That’s that for now,” he told the others. “She said it would be a day or two before we’d be in range of anybody, unless we run into someone coming our way first.”
He walked back to the passenger compartment.
“Goddamned bushy horse’s tail!” one of the women swore. “Feels like you’re sitting on a rock, and it’s so long you sweep the floor with it!”
Another laughed. “I guess we got off lucky,” she said cheerfully. “He hadn’t thought of the tails until he got the people in from the forest.”
Renard was confused. Except for slight differences in coloration, and the occasional tail, they all looked alike.
“Who’s who?” he moaned.
One laughed. “I’m Wooley, Renard, so relax. This is Star—ah, Vistaru, that is. And these two over here are Nikki Zinder and her daughter, Mavra.” She choked up, but recovered quickly.
He didn’t. “Nikki Zinder…” he mumbled. “Her daughter…”
The girl stared at him unbelievingly. “Are you really my father?” she asked.
He shook his head slowly. “No, somebody else was, somebody human. I have his memories, and his personality, but I’m something else now.”
That seemed to satisfy her, and Nikki, who’d tensed at the question, visibly relaxed.