“Thus to the foul urchins!” he shouted. “The red plague rid the hagsons!”
We plunged on, through the besieging army, steering for a weakly defended path running beside a low cliff. We were firing steadily now, our screens glowing pale blue as they re-radiated the vast energies they were absorbing. We veered sharply left and right in a random evasive pattern to confuse the alien tracking circuitry. Rock glowed red along the trail of near-misses that followed us as we thundered into the black shadow of an upthrust fault-line, then on, hugging the bluff, under the guns of the aliens. Individual foes surged forward to give chase, but found their way blocked by others charging in on converging courses.
Far ahead now, I saw indications of hasty organization, as frantic Centurions marshaled their moron machines to cut us off.
“Take over my fire-control circuits,” I called to my partner. “I’m going to try to complicate the picture for them!”
“Work all exercise on ’em, my lord! Stab the hag-born whelps of Sycorax i’ their sulphurous entrails! Plague ’em wi’ cramps! Rot-spot ’em as e’er cat o’ mountain!”
“I’ll do my best!” I reached toward the massed battle-units a mile ahead, probed through the clutter of many minds, singled out the Centurion and locked his volitional center in a paralyzing grip.
“Where is the Place That Must Be Defended?” I demanded.
My captive squirmed frantically, waves of shock and hatred radiating from the trapped mind like breakers pounding a stormy beach. I pressed harder.
“Where is it? What bearing? How far?” I slammed the questions relentlessly at the creature, caught fragmentary glimpses of a memory of dark caverns, towers, a high crater wall . . .
“Quickly!” I buffeted the thing, and it raged in blind ferocity. “Where?” I shouted.
Abruptly I felt the personality break, flee screaming into dark corridors of mindlessness. I dropped my control, scanned the fast-cooling memory cells—and as the last shapeless wisps of thought-stuff faded, caught an image of a broken horizon, the setting planet.
I withdrew then, reached farther out, and touched the minds of the leaderless alien Brigade. I ordered them to reverse their guns, fire on their own troops. Then I resumed control of my own circuitry. I saw the mass ahead dissolve into a raging fire-fight as the slave machines turned on the astonished loyalists, driving them back. A lane opened up, and we slammed through, passed the hulks of burning machines, churned through a dust cloud shot with fire. We emerged into open ground, raced out into the clear, then circled and drove for the point of rendezvous.
“They’re slow,” Joel said. “By the time the Centurions figure out what we’re up to and get orders out to their Brigades, we’re doing something different.”
“That’s the price they pay for using brainwashed troops,” a veteran of Korea said.
“Sooner or later they’ll realize all they need do is stand off and pound us, and we’ve bought the farm,” a former RAF pilot said.
“We’ll take ten of the beggars with us for every man,” Major Doubtsby commented. “Damned fine show, by God! Wouldn’t have missed it for a knighthood, damme if I would!”
“We lost sixteen men breaking out of the crater,” said a Wehrmacht feldwebel who had seen service under Rommel. “What have we gained?”
“The freedom of the plain,” the Spaniard Bermuez answered.
“What do we do next, Jones?” Joel’s voice came to me through the talk. “We got to move on.”
I scanned the plain, estimating the numbers of the loyalists. They had withdrawn to ten miles now, the bulk of their force out of sight over the close horizon. The full planet hung like a vast moon just above ragged peaks. It stirred a wisp of memory, a fleeting sense of having known such a scene before: the setting world, behind the high peak flanked by two lower ones . . .
“Joel!” The memory snapped into clear focus—the momentary mental image I had seen in the mind of the Centurion. The Place That Must Be Defended!
“No wonder they’re cautious! We’ve been driving straight for their holy of holies, without knowing it! They’re trying to herd us—letting us alone as long as we don’t threaten the home office, and holding their forces massed in that direction to protect it!”
“Yeah? Maybe if we head the other way, they’ll let us go, and give us a chance to locate a hideout someplace and work on picking up recruits.”
“We got to work closer than this if we want to bring over any new men. I tried to make contact just now; too much interference. I couldn’t do it.”
“Looky there! What in tarnation’s that?” an excited voice broke in. I switched focus to the rocky plain, saw a column of fountaining dust race toward our position from the northeast.
“It’s a subcrustal torpedo!” a heavily Scots-accented voice yelled out. “Aye, and it’s driving straight for us!”
“Good night, Jones! We got to roll out—fast!”
“We’ll split four ways!” I snapped. “Joel, take the north column; Doubtsby, the south; Bermuez, the east. I’ll head west. It can only track one of us!”
“Why not every man for himself?” someone yelled, even as the Brigade swung into action.
“And hit the enemy line single-handed? We’d melt like snowflakes on a hot plate!”
“Now we will strike as the lion charges,” a Zulu warrior chanted. “Our spears of fire will eat them up! Bayete! Swift are we as the water-buck and mighty as the elephant!”
Then I was hurtling toward the massed Brigades of the aliens, my forty-four armored fighters in an assault wedge behind me.
* * *
The planet had set, and I rested with the remnant of my detachment in a narrow ravine, watching the flash of distant fire against the glitter of the black sky.
“I spoke wi’ Bermuez but now,” my Elizabethan comrade said. “His bullies are hard-pressed. Can’t we to their relief, an’t please ye, milord?”
“Sorry, Thomas; our job is to survive, as long as we can, and go on fighting.”
“Where will’t end? Stap me, ’tis as strange a maze as ever mortal man did tread!”
“I don’t know; but as long as we’re alive—and free—there’s still a chance.”
“The rogues o’ernumber us a thousand to our one; we’ll but drown in a sea of ’em.”
“Hold hard, there, mates,” a Yankee seaman cut in. “Time to wear ship again, ‘pears to me! Here comes Ben splittin’ his skys’ls!”
I felt the vibration transmitted through the rock by hammering treads as the returning scout descended from the heights. He careened into view in the narrow way, braked to a halt in a shower of rock-chips.
“It’s like you thought, Cap’n: we’re flanked left and right—surrounded again,” the Confederate cavalaryman reported. “The other boys ain’t much better off. Doubtsby’s in a running fight to the southwest of us; he’s lost fourteen men, and they’re pushin’ him hard. He’s managed to pick up six recruits, but got no time to brief ’em. Joel’s holed up in a small crater twenty mile north o’ here; only twenty of his party got through, but he’s picked up a bunch of new men, and he’s freein’ ’em as fast as he can. Bermuez is in trouble; he’s surrounded, and takin’ a poundin’; dunno how many he’s lost.”
“What are our chances of picking off some new men from here?”
“Too fur, Cap’n. I tried from the highest spot I could get to, and couldn’t poke through the noise. The enemy’s clamped down some kind o’ rule agin’ talkin’, too; I think they’re catchin’ on that we been hearin’ everythin’ they say.”
“What’s the country like to the west of here, Ben?”
“Flat, mostly; a few bad draws. But they’s heavy enemy concentration thataway.”
My shrunken force of thirty units listened silently to the scout’s report.
“We’re losin’,” someone said.
“The dropsy drown the hagseed,” Thomas growled. “The devil take ’em by inchmeal.”
I called for their attention. “So far we’ve had the advantage of surprise,” I said. “We’ve hit and run, done the unexpected; they’ve milled around us like a herd of buffalo. We’ve managed to slice through them, pick off a few isolated units, capture a few more. But the honeymoon is about over. They’re standing off out of take-over range, and they’ve imposed communications silence, so we don’t know what they’re planning. They’ve caught onto the idea of flexible retreat before an inferior force, and they’ve contained two of our four detachments; three, if you count us. And it looks as though Doubtsby’s not much better off.”
“Like I said: we’re losin’.”
“Will we huddle here to be burned in our hall like Eric’s men?” Aethelbert boomed. “Is this the tenth deed I’ll relate to Thor in his mead-hall in Asgard?”
“We got to bust out of here,” a Sixth Armored man said. “And fast, what I mean.”
“We can keep hitting and running—and lose a few men each time,” I went on. “In the end we’ll be wiped out.”