Looters Of Tharn

Chapter 19

Blade knew the Looters' weapons. He knew their strength. He was certain that he faced living opponents. He was nearly as certain that they would move in to close quarters and fight him in the streets of Miros.

They would be fighting him with weapons that could rip apart his machine or demolish a building a thousand feet high. They would be fighting his small swift machine with larger, clumsier ones, in a rubble-strewn maze of streets he knew far better than they did. They would probably have no one to fight on foot, while he had six fighters whom he could hurl at the enemy when the time was right. Blade was certain that the Looters faced a memorable battle, and probably defeat. Whether he and his comrades would survive to enjoy their victory was another question.

Blade kept his machine under cover for a few minutes, to give the Looters time to react. When he did dart out to take another look, he was relieved to see the Looter machines creeping in toward the city. They were moving as cautiously as soldiers making their way across a minefield, but they were moving in.

It took the Looters nearly half an hour to get to within two miles of the city. During that time they ignored Blade-launched no rockets, fired no beams or rays, made no sounds, flashed no lights.

Two miles north of the city they stopped and divided. The three small war machines moved out and around to cover the east, west, and south sides of the city. The three large machines stayed where they were. Blade realized he was now nicely boxed in. If he tried to avoid action, the machines on his flanks and rear would beam him down or ram him out of the air.

The smaller machines weren't shooting at anything as they took position, as far as Blade could see. That meant that the rest of the expedition had either got clear or was being ignored. Blade had no doubt any more that he was the Looters' number-one target.

The three large machines remained motionless until the smaller ones were in position. Then they began to move forward again. Blade could now see that the center one differed from the other two. Its front end was rounder and topped by a dome of some glassy-looking material. At the rear was a tripod mast with anntennae and screens sprouting from it in all directions.

Good. Now he knew which one was the command machine, the one probably carrying the living Looters. Now he knew which machine had to be his number-one target.

A mile from the city the Looters unleashed their beam weapons. There was no warning, only a blaze of red light lancing out at Blade's machine. The core of the beam missed and slashed into a building. A section of wall fifty feet wide and three stories high scattered in glowing bits and pieces down into the street below, while smoke boiled up from the hole. But the fringe of the beam caught Blade.

For a moment all the screens went dark. Every dial and light on the control panels whirled and flickered hysterically. Blade heard Chara and the others screaming and bit back a gasp of pain himself. He felt as though a thousand red-hot needles were being jammed into every part of his body. He blinked, swallowed, felt blackness creeping up on him-then the pain was past and the screens were clear. A quick check showed no damage to either machine or people.

Vast clouds of smoke billowed up from the gaping hole in the building behind them. More rose from the rubble in the street below. Screened by the smoke, Blade dove the machine down to street level. Another discharge of the red ray ripped into the damaged building, but missed Blade's machine completely. More smoke boiled up and more debris crashed down, some of it hitting the machine. The metal hull boomed under the impact and Blade clung like a monkey to the controls to keep from being hurled out of his seat. The rest of the attackers tried to hang on as best they could.

They leveled out just above the ground and stopped. Blade saw that the street was blocked by smoking rubble piled two stories high. Thick smoke screened it to a height of several hundred feet. It was impossible to see the Looters through that smoke.

Blade and his three opponents skirmished through the streets of the dead city with grim caution for half an hour. The Looter machines were certainly under living control. Blade was also beginning to suspect that those living beings were getting nervous. Several times he heard the crackle of the red ray many streets away, as the Looters fired at phantoms of their own imagination. The crackle was always followed by the crash and rumble of falling wreckage and new billowing clouds of smoke.

That was fine with Blade. He knew the streets of Miros as well as he knew the West End of London. If the Looters wanted to make it even harder for them to find their way around a city they didn't know in any case, that was their problem, not his. He was the hunter; he could choose his own time to move out.

At the end of the half hour Blade decided the time had come. Half of the city's streets were fogged with gray, brown, and black smoke. Piles of rubble that offered concealment lay almost everywhere.

Like a prowling cat Blade's machine glided through the smoky streets, only a few feet above the ground. He headed for one of the Looters' flanks, to slip around and come in behind them.

Suddenly a mass of gleaming metal shone through the smoke a hundred yards down a street to the right. Blade sent his machine darting for cover as the red ray crackled past. The people felt only a mild prickling as the fringes brushed them. But thirty feet of pavement and the front of a three-story building rose into the air and came down in a rain of smoking bits and pieces.

Instantly Blade was heading back out into the street, into the smoke boiling up from where the ray struck. The gaping front of the building loomed through the smoke. Blade swung the machine inside and perched it precariously on the heaped-up rubble fallen from the upper floors.

«We'll need somebody to go outside for the next move,» said Blade. He explained briefly what he wanted. Naturally all seven immediately volunteered. Blade picked out one of the men and gave him the signal baton, then opened the hatch briefly. Smoke swirled into the cabin, setting everybody coughing. The man slipped out into the street and was gone.

A moment later Blade had the machine in motion again, backing away into the building. A few hard shoves against the rear door enlarged the opening until the machine could slip through. Once back out in the street, Blade swung around until he was back in the first street, where the Looter machine stood. He was able to sneak into cover behind the smoke and the wall of piled rubble. But the observer high in the building they had left could see the Looters, and signal their movements to Blade.

Flick, flick, flick went the baton. Two Looter machines were coming straight down the street. They were getting rattled if their tactics were becoming this sloppy.

The baton flicked downward. The first Looter machine was passing the observer's position, only a hundred feet away. Blade wanted it to get still closer. He used two of the tentacles to grasp two large chunks of rubble.

Now the first Looter machine was practically on top of them. Blade's hands danced over the controls and his machine rose into the air only yards in front of the first Looter machine. As it rose Blade sent the tentacles whipping about, hurling their hundred-pound missiles at the second machine behind. They sailed through the air, dropped toward the street, and disintegrated in smoke and dust as the red ray caught them.

But they didn't absorb more than a small fraction of the red ray's power. The second machine's ray tore with deadly force into the first one. The ray turret on top flew off its mounting and crashed into the street. Antennae melted like candy canes in the sun. Metal buckled and bulged and gaped, letting out vast clouds of smoke from burning and exploding machinery inside. Blade backed hastily away as he saw molten metal beginning to ooze from the Looter machine.

The red ray wasn't quite as hard on Looter machines as it was on Tharnian buildings. But that first machine was no good for anything now except scrap metal.

Blade continued to back away until he was several hundred yards down the street and completely invisible behind clouds and piles of rubble. By that time the cheering had died down and Chara had stopped trying to throw her arms around him.

«Mazda, you have done it! You have done it! It is dead, and we have won!»

«No,» said one of the other women. «There are two more of the big ones, besides the small ones. Mazda will not rest until he has destroyed all of them, or he is dead.»

Blade nodded. He headed down a parallel street until he reached the point for picking up the observer. He saw the man run out of the smoke and leap on the platform. The hatch opened for a moment and the man darted inside. Then Blade lifted the machine again and headed away through the smoking streets of Miros, once again on the prowl.