Good! Harry told it. Now get up there with your ugly twin and help him tear those enemy flyers out of the sky.
Let’s all assist them, came Karen’s mind-call, as her beast commenced climbing a spiralling wind off Starside to where the invaders seemed to sit among the stars.
And rising up towards the armoured flyers of Shaithis and Shaitan within their arrowhead formation of hissing, throbbing warriors, Harry queried: Where’s our warrior number three?
Dead on the ground, Necroscope, Karen answered, grimly. Crushed by the most terrible construct I ever saw. In the old days, even to conceive of such a beast would have meant automatic banishment. The old rule was simple: never bring to being anything which might prove difficult to put down. For even the feeblest brain will eventually learn tricks of its own. As for these things which Shaithis and Shaitan have devised – especially that one -why, can’t you feel their evil intelligence? They are abominations!
Harry looked all around in the sky, finally glanced down through a thousand feet of dark, empty air and saw what followed on behind. And: I see what you mean, he said.
What he saw was this: rising alongside Karen and himself, in the same section of the spiral, the warrior he had ordered aloft dripped fluids from an underbelly whose scaly armour had been breached. Plasma gouts gleamed red as a ruby necklace where metamorphic tissues were already at work healing deep neck wounds. For the present the warrior’s propulsors blasted as before, but Harry fancied he could detect a sputtering even now.
A little higher than he and Karen and climbing that much faster, the unscathed warrior she’d launched from the crags vented propulsive gases in a fury. It snorted like a dragon where it made an all too obvious beeline for the alien flyers and their riders overhead. Responding like monstrous automata to the threat, the trio of escorting warriors turned inwards and began to converge, lost a little height, then fell like stones with their vanes angling them towards their target.
All of this registered in a moment: the fact that here in the middle air and overhead, Karen and the Necroscope were already gravely outnumbered. As for the situation below, that was worse. The enemy warriors which had given Karen’s creature a mauling at the back of the garden had launched themselves into the same updraught and were gaining; and coming up even faster behind them was that destroyer of her third creature, which she’d described as the most terrible warrior she ever saw. No expert in such things, still Harry had to agree.
It had squidlike lines . . . which was where any comparison with creatures of previous knowledge must break down. Gigantic, it was flesh and blood, cartilage and bone, but it had the look and grey mottling of some weird flexible metal. Clusters of gas bladders like strange wattles bulked out its throbbing body and detracted from its manoeuvrability, but were necessary to carry the extra weight of its arms and armour. These were not additional to the warrior but integral; like a great thunder-lizard of primal Earth, its weaponry was all built-in. Except Nature in her wildest dreams had never equipped anything like this. No, for this thing was of Shaithis’s fashioning.
Well, Necroscope? Karen’s telepathic voice was suddenly shrill with alarm.
Running for it will simply delay things, he answered.
So? Panic was rising in her like the wind off Starside.
So let’s give it our best shot right here and now!
Overhead, a deadly arrowhead formation stooped on Karen’s warrior like hawks to a pigeon. Harry ordered his flyer, Stay with your mistress, then rolled from his saddle through a hastily conjured Möbius door . . . and emerged in the next moment on the scaled back of Karen’s warrior, where he could almost taste the hot stench of the incoming warriors. That close!
Sideslip! he ordered his startled mount. And conjuring a massive door, he guided the monster through it. The enemy trio slammed together in a snarling knot where Harry had been, but now he came squirting out of the Möbius Continuum far above them – on a level with the armoured flyers of Shaithis and Shaitan!