'Look at that, coming in from the northern pass. It looks like a ground army and they are heading toward the southern valley, too!'
'Orin to Saberhawk, dust off immediately! I say dust off immediately! Enemy forces are closing rapidly on your position!'
'We've got to get down there to them,' shouted Tiet as he scrambled out of the room and down the corridor.
Orin followed, while still trying to get through to the ship, but there was only static.
Suddenly he heard a reply.
'Millo to Orin…are you there?'
'Yes Millo! I hear you! There are two different groups of combatants converging on your location. You've got to get yourselves out of there now!' shouted Orin into the headset as he tried to keep up with Tiet through the corridors leading to the surface.
'I've got them on scans already. Shields are at maximum and weapons systems have been armed. I'm trying to lift off but some of those drones are already within visual range and closing fast on us.'
'Do your best. We're on our way!'
When Tiet and Orin reached the main gate, they found it blasted almost completely away. As the pair emerged into the open air again they could already hear the noise of battle in the valley below. Many of the spheres were engaged in combat with the hovering Saberhawk. It appeared to be pinned down by the swarm of drones strafing at it with their energy weapons.
The other group of spheres landing in the valley threw large arms out of their sides that lifted their bodies and acted as legs to carry them and fight with. Blasters popped out of the tops to lay down laser fire against the masses of Horva.
The pass from the north to the southern valley was flooded completely with ground forces that greatly resembled the Horva, but Tiet noticed that these were different. They were dark skinned men like the Vorn but stronger looking and they wore uniforms and moved more like an organized fighting force; not like the brutes they had encountered back home at all. They were utilizing pulse weapons to fire on the sphere robots as the two sides of the struggle engaged one another.
The Horva were swarming in massive numbers upon the large robots, who in turn were spraying them with wave after wave of automatic laser fire. Tiet could see that the Horva were also using similar portable shield generators like the ones used by the Barudii.
They moved in close to engage the sphere robots with larger pulse cannons mounted upon hydraulic arms that attached to their vests. The pulse cannons were doing some definite damage to the hulking robots. It appeared to Orin as though the pulse wavelength was modulating continually to match the shield wavelengths of the robots, allowing them to penetrate.
All of the combatants were laying siege to the Saberhawk, even though the Horva and the sphere robots were more interested in each other. Tiet ran down the main path of the city toward the valley with Orin following hard after him. The Saberhawk was hovering about forty feet off of the ground but the sky above them was too congested with enemy vessels to get clear of the battle.
Tiet could see that the ship was returning fire in all directions, but it was greatly outnumbered on the battlefield. He knew that their shields were losing power reserves fast at this pace, and before long they would be taking hits directly to the hull and it would all be over.
Tiet was running with all his might to get to her; to protect her. He leapt away from the path from a nearby ledge that took a drop thirty feet down to the fighting already raging below. He landed right in the middle of a group of several Horva that were firing on a distant sphere robot. They immediately reacted to his presence, bringing their weapons to bear on him.
His kemsticks leapt to his hands as he landed among them. He sliced one rifle in two, severing its owners hand at the wrist while deflecting another shot at point blank range. He swept downward under the barrel of one of them who fired and killed another Horva that had been standing ready on the other side, and with a complete sweep of his kemstick, cut the Horva down at the knees. He wasted little time dispatching two others, and then quickly moved onward to try and get to the Saberhawk.
'WE'RE the biggest thing out here!' said Millo in frustration.
Dorian blasted away at the weapons controls while Millo looked for a clearing in the congestion overhead.
'If we're so big, then can't we just plow through those other ships?'
'After seeing those spheres ramming into the Vorn ships I'd rather not take any chances. I'm going to try and move us out of the battle at this altitude.'
'Well, you better hurry; our shields are already down to thirty percent power!'
The battlefield was overrun with Horva warriors, fighting furiously against the robots. Although the Horva were taking heavy losses, they continued to blast away at the automatons. For every twenty or more Horva getting killed, a robot was brought down. The Horva vastly outnumbered the robots and at least thirty thousand had rushed into the valley by now.
VALE and his doubles were fiercely engaged in the ground battle. The androids under Vale's mind were swiftly moving through the battlefield on foot toward the position of the Saberhawk. He knew that he had faced the Barudii warrior on the same vessel and had been defeated. He had no doubt that he could acquire his target there again. The triplet androids moved independently as though separate beings; yet all were under the one mind of Vale with the Sphere.
Combatant after combatant was cut down as they moved swiftly toward the Barudii ship; only engaging in close combat as necessary. Then Vale noticed that the ship was veering away from the fight and heading toward them, apparently trying to escape the situation.
Vales one and two quickly pulled hypermagnetic grapples and fired them at the ship as it passed low overhead. The third was still engaged with a Horva warrior as the hull-planted grapples pulled the other two androids up and away from the battlefield. Vales one and two retracted the grapple cables to bring themselves up to the hull.
Activating their hypermagnetic discs beneath their android skin, they each clung to the hull of the Saberhawk. The ship's shields did not prevent them since they only repulsed energy weapons. The two androids avoided any attempt to cut through the hull with Barudii blades as it would no doubt cause a repulsion charge from the shields that would fling them off the hull or vaporize them. They made their way quickly across the hull on their bellies as the shields snapped back energetically above them at the incoming pulse laser blasts from the battle.
They recalled the entry code for the outer hull hatch that Vale had gone through before and keyed it in when they reached the door. The door obeyed and both androids entered the ship without incident. Vale recognized the cargo hold as the place of his defeat at the hands of the Barudii warrior.
Wasting no time, the robots moved to the doorway of the cargo hold and found it locked. The second Vale brought his blade to bear on the door and proceeded to cut a portal through. The pair proceeded down the corridor toward the bridge, even as the ship shuddered under the enemy fire raining upon it from all directions. The bridge door was closed and the androids could hear voices from beyond it; a man and a woman. Without trying the lock, the pair sliced through the door.
Dorian whirled around, hearing the sound of ignited Barudii blades, and the crackling of molecular bonds bursting at their touch. From her hand flew a spicor disc toward the door and the android coming in through a newly cut hole. Trapped within the confines of the portal it had just cut, the first Vale caught the spicor disc in the upper torso. The tightly controlled burst pattern vaporized all but its arms above the waist.
Dorian quickly pulled her blade as the second robot moved in fast over its fallen twin. She could feel the pressure and the pain building in her fractured arm as she brought it to join the other on the hilt of her sword.
Millo looked back from the controls, as he heard the spicor explode behind him. The ship was still taking a beating from the sporadic weapons fire erupting from the battlefield below them; there was no way he could leave the controls. Vale pulled his pulse blaster with his free hand and sprayed laser fire in all directions across the
