platform. Then he was standing on a tiny island of ice that seemed to float high
in the air, nothingness yawned in front of him and on both sides. Groork’s
senses reeled. He recoiled instinctively from the drop, but something sharp
prodded him in the back. He looked back desperately. The Executioner had leveled
his lance, and behind him the stone-faced priests had closed ranks to the very
edge of the platform. There was no way back.
Goaded by another jab with the lance, Groork tottered a step forward and for the
first time found himself looking straight down the sheer cliff face. Far below,
the acid vat was foaming and boiling, with the last of the animals still
writhing and convulsing in their death agonies. Groork shook his head wildly in
protest. This would serve no purpose. It would achieve nothing. There was no
point, no reason. If he was going to die, he pleaded inwardly, let it not be for
no reason. “No!” he shouted. “This is not the Lifemaker’s will. This is
savagery! This—”
“Know all ye here that in this way shall all heretics and blasphemers perish!”
the Executioner shouted, and lunged hard with the lance. The landscape wheeled
around him as Groork pitched forward into emptiness. Brilliant violet lights
flared in the sky above, but Groork didn’t see them. A roar of voices rose to
meet him. He felt himself scream, but couldn’t hear. Land and sky spun together.
And in the same instant, something pointed and streamlined swooped down from the
clouds above the clifftop.
“Four-zero-zero on vertical boost. Gimme more flaps!”
“That’s one through four at full. Take it down! Take it down!”
“Harder to starboard! Faster with that line, Joe!”
“It’s at max now.”
“You’ve got it. Easy, easy! Coming round fine. Hold that turn, Clarissa. Hold
that turn!”
As the flyer dived out of the blackness and banked into the full glare of the
light from the flares, the net trailing on a line from its rear portside door
swung out in a wide arc and scooped the tumbling figure of Moses from the air.
The tangle of robot and net dipped low to swing past the base of the cliff, rose
again like a pendulum, and then swung back in a wide, rising curve as the flyer
began to lift again. The return trajectory carried back up to the ledge, where
robots were running to and fro in confusion and waving things in the air, with a
few—presumably the radiosensitive types that Dave Crookes had speculated about—
writhing around on the floor under the close-range influence of the flyer’s
mapping radar. Lower down, visible at the edge of the glow being generated by
the flares, the hillside opposite the cliff seemed to be alive with deranged
figures waving, running hither and thither, and throwing themselves to the
ground in all manner of agitation and commotion.
Then the swinging net caught on a construction of steel girders standing at one
end of the ledge, and the line tightened. Joe Fellburg, who was with Drew West
in the flyer’s opened aft compartment—both of them suited up, as were all the
flyer’s occupants—crashed the winding mechanism into neutral, and the power
winch whined in protest as it was jerked abruptly into reverse. “We’re caught!”
Fellburg yelled. “Level out and slacken it off for chrissakes!”
“Back it off, Clarissa!” West shouted, and Clarissa slammed into reverse thrust,
throwing everyone violently forward against their restraining harnesses. The
line went taut, yanking the winch off its mounting and trapping the line in a
mess of crushed supports, buckled floorplates, and a seized winding drum. “The
winch is wrecked!” Fellburg shouted. “Everything’s screwed up!”
In the copilot’s seat, Abaquaan increased vertical boost to provide lift while
Clarissa slowed frantically and banked into a tight turn to take the strain off
the line. “Christ, those missiles!” Abaquaan yelled. “We can’t hang around here.
You’ll have to cut the line.”
Zambendorf fought his way uphill across the tilted floor and pulled himself into
the aft compartment. “We can’t give up now,” he bellowed. “We’ve got him. Drew,
give me the end of that auxiliary line and then reel me out. I’m going down