weapon drawn.
'Fled, with his men, in two of the land speeders/
'And the daemonhost?'
'I don't know. It seemed to just vanish. Maybe it had a displacer field.'
I started to ran back into the site, though my body was burning with pain. Aemos cried out after me.
Most of the vehicles were smashed or overturned, but a couple were still intact.
I scrambled into a small, black speeder; a sleek, up-hive sports model that had presumably belonged to Vassik. I cued the thrasters, lifting off before I'd even strapped on the seat harness.
The craft was powerful and over-responsive. It took a moment to master the lightness of touch needed to accelerate without sudden blurts of speed. I turned it unsteadily in the air as I climbed too fast above the blasted site. Below, I could see Nayl, ragged and bloody, shouting up at me to come back.
Banking out of the cone of smoke at a hundred metres, I got my hearings. On every side, the acreage of the chew-after spread out until it became lush greencover again. There was the mainhive, looming in the distance. Where were they? Where were they?
I saw two dots in the air three kilometres to the west and gunned the machine after them. Heavy land speeders, making towards the bulk of the nearest harvester factory.
I pushed the turbines to their limit, coming in low and fast behind the slower lift-machines. I knew they'd seen me the moment autofire chattered back in my direction, wildly off target.
I began to jink, the way Midas had taught me, before they got their aim in. I thought about shooting back at them, but it took both hands on the stick just to keep the sports speeder level.
We were passing over green crop land now, an emerald sea that raced away below in an alarming blur. More tracer shots howled back past me.
A big shadow passed across the sun.
'Want them splashed?' crackled from the vox.
Downjets flaring, the streamlined bulk of my gun-cutter settled in beside me, matching my speed. It seemed huge compared to my insignificant little speeder; one-fifty tonnes, eighty metres from beak nose to finned tail, landing gear lowered like insect legs. I could see Medea grinning in the cockpit.
I daren't lift my hands from the jarring stick to activate the vox.
Instead, I opened my mind directly to hers.
'Ow!' answered the vox. Warn me next time you're gonna do that.'
The great bulk of the cutter suddenly surged forward, afterburners incandescent and landing gear raising, and banked away to the right. Its thrust wake wobbled me hard. I watched it turn out in a wide semi-circle, low over the crops, furrowing them with its downwash. It looked like a vast bird of prey swooping round for the kill.
With its interplanetary thrust-tunnels, it easily outstripped the racing speeders, and came in towards them, head on.
I felt a surge of psychic-power. My enemies had nothing but their minds with which to combat the gun-cutter.
The cutter suddenly broke left, dipped and then righted itself. They'd got to Medea, if only for a moment.
She was angry now. I could tell that simply from the way she flew. With a wail of braking jets, she turned the cutter on a stall-hover as the speeders flashed past.
The chin-turret crackled, and heavy-gauge munitions tore the second of the two speeders into a shower of flames in the air.
Hitting the throttle, I zipped in behind the hovering gun-cutter, chasing down the other speeder.
The remaining speeder was close ahead now. I could feel Lyko's mind aboard it.
He was closing on the armoured bulk of the harvester, which now dominated the landscape ahead. It was a giant, six hundred metres long and ninety high at the peak of its humped, beetle-back. It was kicking a vast wake of sap-spray and smoke out behind it. The rattle of its threshing blades was audible above the scream of my speeder's engines.
My quarry dipped, and flew in along the spine of the huge factory machine, heading for a rear-facing docking hangar raised like a wart on the
hull's back. Warning hails were beeping at me over the speeder's vox-set, the alarmed challenges of the harvester.
The heavy speeder braked hard and landed badly in the mouth of the docking hangar. Turning in to follow it, I saw figures scrambling out. They disappeared, into the hangar, all except one man, who dropped to his knees on the approach slip and began firing back at me with his autocan-non.
Streams of high-velocity rounds whipped past on either side. Then a bunch of them went into my port intake with a clattering roar that shook the speeder and threw shards of casing out in a belch of sparks.
Warning lights lit up across the control board.
I dropped ten metres, put the nose in.
And bailed.
I broke my left wrist and four ribs hitting the topside of the harvester. With hindsight, I was lucky not to have been killed outright, lucky even to have hit the harvester's hull at all. It was a long way down. I managed to grab a stanchion cable as I began to slither down, and wrapped my right arm around it.
My speeder glanced once off the approach slip, and bounced up again, tail up, beginning to tear apart. Trailing debris, the machine cartwheeled in, vapourised the gunman, hit Lyko's parked land speeder, and shunted it right into the hangar, which exploded a second later in a sheet of fire and metal.
I limped along the approach slip, sidestepping chunks of burning wreckage, and climbed over the smashed, smouldering speeders into the hangar. Impact klaxons were rasping out, and automatic fire-fighting sprays were still squirting out dribbles of retardant foam.
At the back of the hangar, a hatch was half open, next to the cages of the service and cargo elevators.
I pushed through the hatch. A metal staircase descended into the factory. At the bottom, it opened out into a companionway that ran the length of the harvester. Stunned work-crews, most of them twists in sap-stained overalls, gazed at me.
I produced my rosette.
'Imperial Inquisition. Where did they go?'
Who?'
'Where did they go?' I snarled, enforcing my will without restraint.
The effect was so powerful, none of them could speak, and several passed out. All the others pointed down the companionway towards the head of the factory.
Another hatch, another staircase. The noise of the internal threshers was now shudderingly loud. I came down into the vast internal work line, a long chamber that ran the length of the harvester. It was a huge, deafening Place, the air thick with sap mist. A massive processing conveyor carried the harvested produce along from the reaping blades at the harvester's
mouth, at a rate of several tonnes every second. Twist workers in masks and aprons worked the front part of the line with chaintools and cutting lances which were attached to overhead power systems by thick rubber-trunked hoses. They sorted and cut the larger sections of root and stalk before the crop went through the great vicing rollers and stamping presses into the macerating vats further back down the
