"One problem with that," Grant told her. "We can't ride those things."

  "They're well-trained," she said. "They know how to keep riders aboard. Hurry!"

  She led them off along the north edge of the promontory. Not running—that would attract attention, as Kane knew well, quite possibly even provoke some kind of predator chase reflex among the attackers. Or mebbe even our guys, Kane thought grimly.

  The melee was concentrated more on the southern side right now. Team Phoenix joined up with Pine and their fellow Terrans. They stationed themselves on the inland side, as if pulling flank security. Kane caught Grant's eye; the big man shrugged. Neither of them felt like arguing about who would be closest to danger right now.

  For the moment danger seemed eerily, almost surreally absent. Mostly what the Terrans had to contend with were huge swirls of dust and smoke that stank brutally. They had to duck stray beams periodically, but the two alien factions were so engrossed in trying to kill each other they really did seem to have little attention to spare the Terrans. There seemed to be more of the robed defenders battling with the attackers from the sky than Kane could remember seeing before. Maybe some of them had been out on the plain pulling perimeter security and pulled back to fight the most immediate threat. Whatever, he thought, they're keeping the bad guys off us.

  Robison and Weaver had picked up alien weapons, Robison a bulky space-kangaroo handblaster like the one Kane had. Weaver characteristically chose one of the long-blasters of their rescuers. Looked at up close, it seemed to be made out of some kind of glass that glinted purplish in the light of death beams. It was exceedingly skinny and had strange nodes like swellings at seemingly random intervals.

  As Kane watched, Weaver stopped, snugged the weapon's butt—conventional enough, if widely flared—to his shoulder, triggered a quick yellow pulsation. A figure standing away off high on the rocks above where the riding beasts were milling and tossing their heads flared and fell, a blaster of some kind falling from its hands.

  They reached the animals. Kane thought he felt a sense like passing through a very thin, weak membrane as they approached. Maybe it was a field of some kind that kept them constrained. Mebbe it's just my imagination.

  Some of the animals were still saddled. Kane didn't need Pine's direction to see the rigging straps behind its high backboard. He swung off his heavy pack, threw it over and lashed it down. He did need the girl's help, momentary, with the fastening: simply pressing the ends, which were capped in what seemed black plastic, against patches of similar material on the back skirt-flap of the saddle itself. They fused at once and took up slack.

  "Nifty," he said as she moved on to help the others. He swung aboard his chosen mount. It tossed its big head and made constipated-sounding moans, sidestepped a little, but did not fight him.

  Domi forked another creature not three yards away. She held a sort of foot-long bar in the middle of what seemed to be a conventional set of reins. Kane saw a similar arrangement looped over the neck of his own mount.

  "Can't be this easy," the albino girl cried. "Never this easy!"

  "Where do we go from here?" Major Mike Hays called out from his own prancing, jittering beast. He still, incongruously, held his FN-MAG by the rear pistol grip, with a cartridge belt looped over his arm. It made him look like Lawrence of Hell.

  "Damned if I know," Kane said.

  "That way!" shouted Pine, who had materialized beside him. She pointed for the rocks off which Weaver had picked the enemy sniper, now forty yards distant. They were more big elongated chunks, which looked more jagged than the smooth sandstone boulders that palisaded the end of the bluff. Maybe granite—Kane was no geologist.

  "They're just rocks, lady," Sean Reichert called. "Just go!"

  "Look!" Brigid pointed toward the rocks. A rider was there, right at their base, gesturing unmistakably for the humans to bony.

  Kane looked to Grant, who had mounted up next to Domi. "Your call, point man," Grant said.

  Kane tipped an extended forefinger of his brow. "Classic one-percenter," he said.

  When he picked up the bar the beast suddenly quit dancing and seemed poised. A slight twist one way brought its head around. Holding back an urge to boot the thing massively in the slats—which he suspected might provoke it to launch him up into the hills headfirst—he nudged its sides gently with his heels.

  Like a rocking-horse responding to a rider's weight shift, it began to lope toward the cliff. Kane heard shouts and whistles from his companions as they got their mounts likewise moving and headed in the right direction. The lone rider awaited them. Its mount stood calmly, head up, as if watching the proceedings with active but mild interest. The rider raised an arm and loosed a ripple of yellow beads toward the southwest. Kane didn't bother looking around to see what he was shooting at. There were plenty of targets, and Kane was unlikely to pick his specific mark out of the shouting, shooting, dying scrum behind. Plus he was afraid of losing his seat if he got too creative twisting in the saddle. The beast's gait was unlike any horse's he had ever ridden, pitching up and down in an exaggerated motion at every stride.

  "Kane!"

  Brigid's cry made him turn despite his fear of falling. A surface craft had appeared at the promontory's far end. Although the manner of its coming made him wonder if outface was quite the right word: it seemed to rise straight up on an even keel, above a jut of boulders, and slide smoothly forward with no sign of jets or for that matter the dust-cloud of ground effect. Another appeared at once to its left. They looked nothing like the weird shiny-silver steam irons that had chased them earlier: they were low flat arrowheads, sinister and angular.

  But that, he quickly saw, was not what Brigid was trying to call his attention to. Pine writhed in the grip of a pair of the tailed aliens Robison had dubbed "space kangaroos." And Sean Reichert, whose call sign Lover boy was most appropriate, rode hell-bent to her rescue.

  Light flashed from the lead craft. An explosion erupted right under the forefeet of Reichert's mount. It smashed beast and rider savagely to the ground.

  Chapter 17

  The short-haired young woman made frantic efforts to struggle clear of her captors. It did her no direct good. They had her well and truly overpowered, and even as Kane approached at a fast gallop in darkness shot through with energies, it was pretty clear she'd never break free. But she was doing an ace job of keeping their attention. That couldn't last. The one on Kane's left noticed him. Even in this commotion, wrestling with a highly motivated human girl, there was only so long you could not notice a twelve-foot-tall two-ton creature bearing down on you at speed. Keeping a grip on a slim wrist with his left gauntlet, the alien pivoted away, bringing up his blaster. Kane was all over him. His own blaster was already extended alongside the beast's sweaty leather-skinned neck. He triggered a bolt that had to have struck something explosive strapped, not too wisely in Kane's view, to the being's chest. There came a huge flash and bang and the thing flew back in a flail of limbs whose very looseness told Kane that death was instant.

  Unprotected, Pine screamed as armor fragments and hot organic debris pelted her. Instead of bolting or fighting more effectively with her newly freed arm she covered up. A natural response, but thoroughly unhelpful.

  To Kane. Not to her remaining captor. He reeled her right up against his chest as a human shield and hunkered down, aiming his blaster toward Kane over her shoulder. "There was no way Kane could blast the monster without killing Pine, even laying aside the fact he knew nothing of what hellacious radiations the yellow particle beams emitted. His best shot was to get in close and try either for a shot or club at that round-skulled long-nosed head. But the alien wasn't going to give him that much slack, of course. It fired a bolt that cracked like lightning past Kane's left ear and made his head buzz and his vision momentarily swim. He ducked behind his mount's thick neck and hoped like hell that it would stop the alien's next blast— and that the beast's decapitated corpse might bowl the thing over and give Kane a crack at finishing his adversary. Instead, a quick spurt of beads of a different yellow pulsed back past Kane on a heading reciprocating the alien's bolt. I. head disappeared in a big white flare. In the process Pine's hood had been yanked up over her head; it seemed to protect her from the splash and scatter, but Kane didn't get much of a look as she fell like a pile of discarded laundry. He pulled back on the rein bar. To his amazement the creature put down its haunches and braked to a stop in such short order that he was slammed against the back of its neck. Good thing this saddle doesn't have much of a horn, he thought.

  He had to neither think nor look back to know who had fired the shot that killed the hostage taker. Iron Man Joe Weaver had slipped from his own mount to put a shot where it would do the most good, as if placing it with his own blunt, powerful fingers. Kane slid to the ground. Nobody else was near. Thought of the strange arrowhead wags that had blasted the hapless young Reichert gnawed at his mind. But only two were in sight, and everybody, bandits and sky kangaroos alike, seemed to be shooting at them. The one on the right, which had first appeared, now sat on the ground unmoving. Kane caught a few glints of red glaring out through slit openings. Back on Earth that usually meant a crew was roasting alive inside a buttoned-up steel crematorium.

  Most everybody was shooting at the float tanks. A yellow beam cracked over Kane's head as he knelt over Pine. A team of four tailed aliens trotted toward the rear of the promontory, as if looking to secure Kane and Pine, as well as the incapacitated Reichert.

  Yellow beams lanced to either side of the huddled humans. An alien went down with what Kane could only guess was a scream swallowed by its full-head helmet, throwing both arms up in the air so that its blaster catapulted backward into the night. Another folded around a shot to the groin that made Kane wince even though he had no way of knowing if these things were male, or for that matter wore their reproductive gear between their hind legs. Robison was rolling up toward the prone Reichert on a riding beast, firing captured handblasters with both hands. Kane helped out by pausing to put two shots into the alien nearest him. The last one threw up its hands, too, this time as if to seek the head that had suddenly gone missing as the methodical Weaver found the range for another target. Pine was already sitting up. Her hood half covered her short hair. Kane saw an angry dark splotch on her right cheek. "I am fine," she said as he reached toward her head. He instead grabbed a handful of robe and helped her to her feet. The fabric was thicker and heavier than he imagined. He wondered if it might serve as some kind of armor. Although she protested briefly, he boosted her into the big animal's saddle. "You know how to drive this thing," he said, clambering up to an uncomfortable and uncertain perch aside his own pack; he'd have jettisoned the damn thing if he knew how, but there was no time to screw with that now. To her credit the girl didn't argue, just turned the beast and sent it galloping back for the boulders where their comrades waited. Kane saw Robison helping a dazed but not totally unconscious Reichert onto the hack of his own mount. Covering fire stabbed from the back of the promontory as they rode fast for it. The hooded guide was still there, its mount sidestepping and tossing its head. Kane couldn't see the alien's face for its cowl, but it looked impatient at all this delay.

  Kane couldn't really blame it.

  The rider whirled its mount as Pine and Kane rode up. The girl called something to it that her translator didn't bother to translate for Kane. It sounded like a combination of gargling, choking to death and nasal humming. The rider didn't respond.

  The other Terrans were mounting up. "Just where are we going, anyway?" Kane asked his driver. "Those rocks are big, but don't look like they'd hide more than one or two people mounted on creatures this size."

  She flashed a quick, shy smile over her shoulder. The animal she had slowed to a trot. "Wait," she said.

  "Oh, a cave," Kane said. "I see" He didn't, exactly. No matter how big a cave it was, it wasn't going to stop the space kangaroos from coming in after them for long. Maybe there was some kind of extensive subterranean catacomb system.

  What do you want? his brain chided him. Safety? Security? Should've stayed in bed.

  A colossal blast overrode the clamor of battle. Kane looked back.

  The remaining arrowhead float tank erupted in violet-tinged white fire thirty yards into the night sky. High above it a strange shimmer of light was visible in the night sky like the trail of sunlight on water.

  A green beam stabbed down. A green fireball erupted from the ground where it struck. Kane could see bodies tossed away, ragged robed or tailed silhouettes black against the blaze. A half-visible craft floated over the promontory. And it seemed to be blasting everybody there—the rebels, the kangaroo creatures and whatever was in those float tanks. "Come on, big fella," Mike Hays called. He had his machine gun slung, and he urged his mount to a fast not toward the rocks.

  Kane saw Domi's mount disappear into a gap he hadn't noticed before between two tall standing stones. Hays followed.

  Pine, with Kane along for the ride, came right behind; she hadn't been in any danger of getting stuck gawping at this new, exciting menace from the stars. Damn. Kane thought. I wonder if this shit goes on all the time.

  Blackness swallowed them as they passed between tall rocks. He smelled cool stone. A cave for true, just like Earth. He couldn't hear any of his companions, though, not even the noises of their big animals panting.

  He was still wondering about that when a twisting dislocation seized him and turned him inside out in an all-too-familiar way.

  IT SEEMED AS IF a glass tube with thick walls had been shoved into Gilgamesh Bates' face, covering his nose and mouth. Even as suction was applied, pulling all the breath from his lungs and threatening to rip his tongue out right across his teeth, he could see nothing.

  The compartment was dark but not totally black. There was nothing material touching Bates' face at all. But the force threatening to suck his guts out his mouth was as tangible as anything he'd felt in this life.

  The strange asymmetric black shape hunkered over a squat mechanism in the spill of dim amber light that was the chamber's main illumination emitted a very human- sounding cackle. Of course, it wasn't the being at all: it was a translator unit it wore, or perhaps was part of the great Paa space-dreadnought Compassion itself, flagship of the Circle of Life fleet.

  What wonderful toys these aliens have! The thought that he would soon possess them all—and wonders as yet unimagined—thrilled him despite the extreme discomfort of being suspended in midair, naked and spread-eagled, while some awful force sucked all the breath from his body until it felt his very cells would collapse.

  "It is a simple trick," the creature said in tones of crisp self-satisfaction. "Employing positive and negative gravitic effects—tractor and pressor beams. I form the repulsion field in a tube, and then use the attractor to apply pseudo-suction."

  The shape stirred in what for all Bates knew might have been an adjustment of the gravitic projector, an alien shrug, or just a tic. It had to have been the former: the terrible combination of pressure vanished instantly.

  Bates hung limp in the silvery alloy restraint cuffs joined to the gleaming ovoid ring of the torture frame by faint, wavering beams of pale green light. He sucked in an immense shuddering breath, shook his head, gasped.

  "You most get anything useful out of me using these crude means," he said. He was unable to keep an edge of chiding out of his high-pitched voice. For all that he'd schooled himself to take the measure and account of his fellow beings' emotions, almost as if they mattered, there were times he could simply no longer control himself. He hated to see a thing badly done.

  The creature cackled again. As far as Bates could tell in the uncertain and inadequate light, it had five limbs: bipedal hind legs and three tentacular arms, with some sort of face at the top of its torso hump.

  "Oh, it's not intended to," it said. "No indeed. This is therapy. It is intended to induce a state of willing compliance, and surrender to the will of the duly anointed representative of all of holy life—our own queen, Uvaluvu of the Paa."

  "You're torturing me to make me love you?"

  "Of course," it said. "How better?"

  Bates had to think about that He'd been known to try employing a variation or two of that. He'd learned well from his father.

  "I don't think it's working," he said.

  "Well, you know what we in the service of the Grand Council always say,' the pentapod said in an avuncular chuckle. "When force doesn't work, apply more force." It straightened somewhat; it appeared to have a permanently hunched posture. Its right-hand tentacle tip probed itself beneath the speech mouth, in a gesture entirely reminiscent of a fat man scratching his double chin.

  "Let us see." It picked up a small pad whose face glowed to bluish life. "I gather that these..." A green laser pencil stabbed from somewhere in its shadowy bulk to run a lascivious dot over Bates' exposed genitalia "—according to our expert xenologists, these constitute your organs of generation. My, my, what a ridiculously exposed place to put them. "Now, don't they look sensitive? It seems to me that a certain amount of both positive and negative pressure, applied right here—"

  The green dot came to rest on the hole in the tip of Bates' penis, which had shrunk up to scarcely more than a nub. He opened his mouth to explain that that very sort of positive and negative pressure, if in sparing doses, actually provided some of his life's more beguiling pressures. The chamber flooded with light. It exploded into the room from a sudden circle, over two yards in diameter, which had blinked into being to Bates' right and somewhat behind his torturer. The five-limbed alien turned, throwing up a tentacle to shield its face from the blinding glare. "What is the meaning of this?" it demanded.

  A white dazzle was its answer. The alien tormentor screamed and fell in a heap across its mechanism, smoking and stinking.

  A figure stepped through into the room from the shining circle. It was tall, almost as tall as Bates itself, bipedal. It had a furred, snouted face and big triangular ears. It looked like some kind of man-sized dog dressed up in a severely tailored uniform of midnight-blue jodhpurs and stiff-looking tunic.

 

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