When he woke me, it was deep twilight; the sun was gone behind the peaks to the west. The route ahead led up the side of a thirty-degree snow slope. There were enough outcroppings of rock and tumbled ice blocks to make progress possible, but it was slow going. The pack on our trail had closed the gap while we slept; I estimated they were ten miles behind now. There were about twenty-five of the things, strung out in a wide crescent. I didn’t like that; it suggested more intelligence than anything that looked as bad as the pictures I’d seen. Woola rolled her eyes and showed her teeth and whined, looking back at them. The giant just kept moving forward, slow and steady.
“How about it?” I asked him at the next break. “Do we just let them pick the spot? Or do we fort up somewhere, where they can only jump us from about three and a half sides?”
“They must come to us.”
I looked back down the slope we had been climbing steadily for more hours than I could keep track of, trying to judge their distance.
“Not more than five miles,” I said. “They could have closed any time in the last couple of hours. What are they waiting for?”
He glanced up at the high ridge, dazzling two miles above. “Up there, the air is thin and cold. They sense that we will weaken.”
“And they’re right.”
“They too will be weakened, Carl Patton, though not perhaps so much as we.” He said this as unconcernedly as if he were talking about whether tomorrow would be a good day for a picnic.
“Don’t you care?” I asked him. “Doesn’t it matter to you if a pack of hungry meat-eaters corners you in the open?”
“It is their nature,” he said simply.
“A stiff upper lip is nifty—but don’t let it go to your head. How about setting up an ambush—up there?” I pointed out a jumble of rock slabs a hundred yards above.
“They will not enter it.”
“OK,” I said. “You’re the wily native guide. I’m just a tourist. We’ll play it your way. But what do we do when it gets dark?”
“The moon will soon rise.”
In the next two hours we covered about three-quarters of a mile. The slope was close to forty-five degrees now. Powdery snow went cascading down in slow plumes with every step. Without the suit I don’t know if I could have stayed with it, even with the low gravity. Big Johnny was using his hands a lot now; and the dog’s puffing was piteous to hear.
“How old is the mutt?” I asked when we were lying on our backs at the next break, with my trailmates working hard to get some nourishment out of what to them was some very thin atmosphere, and me faking the same distress, while I breathed the rich mixture from my suit collector.
“Three years.”
“That would be about thirty-five Standard. How long . . .” I remembered my panting and did some, ” . . . do they live?”
“No one. . . knows.”
“What does that mean?”
“Her kind . . . die in battle.”
“It looks like she’ll get her chance.”
“For that . . . she is grateful.”
“She looks scared to death,” I said. “And dead beat.”
“Weary, yes. But fear is not bred in her.”
We made another half mile before the pack decided the time had come to move in to the attack.
20
The dog knew it first; she gave a bellow like a gut-shot elephant and took a twenty-foot bound down-slope to take up her stand between us and them. It couldn’t have been a worse position from the defensive viewpoint, with the exception of the single factor of our holding the high ground. It was a featureless stretch of frozen snow, tilted on edge, naked as a tin roof. The big fellow used his number forty’s to stamp out a hollow, working in a circle to widen it.
“You damn fool, you ought to be building a mound,” I yelled at him. “That’s a cold grave you’re digging.”
“Do as I do . . . Carl Patton,” he panted. “For your life.”
“Thanks; I’ll stay topside.” I picked a spot off to his left and kicked some ice chunks into a heap to give me a firing platform. I made a big show of checking the slug-thrower, then inobtrusively set the crater gun for max range, narrow beam. I don’t know why I bothered playing it foxy; Big Boy didn’t know the difference between a legal weapon and contraband. Maybe it was just the instinct to have an ace up the sleeve. By the time I finished, the pack was a quarter of a mile away and coming up fast, not running or leaping, but twinkling along on clusters of steel-rod legs that ate up the ground like a fire eats dry grass.
“Carl Patton, it would be well if you stood by my back,” the big man called.
“I don’t need to hide behind you,” I barked.
“Listen well!” he said, and for the first time his voice lacked the easy, almost idle tone. “They cannot attack in full charge. First must they halt and raise their barb. In that moment are they vulnerable. Strike for the eye—but beware the ripping claws!”
“I’ll work at a little longer range,” I called back, and fired a slug at one a little in advance of the line but still a couple of hundred yards out. There was a bright flash against the ice; a near miss. The next one was dead on—a solid hit in the center of the leaf-shaped plate of tarnish-black armor that covered the thorax. He didn’t even break stride.
“Strike for the eye, Carl Patton!”
“What eye?” I yelled. “All I see is plate armor and pistons!” I fired for the legs, missed, missed again, then sent fragments of a limb flying. The owner may have faltered for a couple of microseconds, or maybe I just blinked. I wasn’t even sure which one I had hit. They came on, closing ranks now, looking suddenly bigger, more deadly, like an assault wave of light armor, barbed and spiked and invulnerable, with nothing to stop them but a man with a stick, a worn-out old hound, and me, with my popgun. I felt the weapon bucking in my hand, and realized I had been firing steadily. I took a step back, dropped the slug thrower, and palmed the crater gun as the line reached the spot where Woola crouched, waiting.
But instead of slamming into the big dog at full bore, the pair facing her skidded to a dead stop, executed a swift but complicated rearrangement of limbs, dropping their forward ends to the ground, bringing their hindquarters up and over, unsheathing two-foot-long stingers that poised, ready to plunge down into the unprotected body of the animal. . . .
I wouldn’t have believed anything so big could move so fast. She came up from her flattened position like a cricket off a hot plate, was in mid-air, twisting to snap down at the thing on the left with jaws like a bear trap, landed sprawling, spun, leaped, snapped, and was poised, snarling, while two ruined attackers flopped and stabbed their hooks into the ice before her. I saw all this in a fast half-second while I was bringing the power gun up, squeezing the firing stud to pump a multi-megawatt jolt into the thing that was rearing up in front of me. The shock blasted a foot-wide pit in it, knocked it a yard backward—but didn’t slow its strike. The barb whipped up, over, and down to bury itself in the ice between my feet.
“The eye!” The big man’s voice boomed at me over the snarls of Woola and the angry buzzing that was coming from the attackers. “The eye, Carl Patton!”
I saw it then: a three-inch patch like reticulated glass, deep red, set in the curve of armor above the hook-lined prow. It exploded as I fired. I swiveled left and fired again, from the corner of my eye saw the big man swing his club left, right. I was down off my mound, working my way over to him, slamming shots into whatever was closest. The scorpions were all around us, but only half a dozen at a time could crowd in close to the edge of the twelve-foot depression the giant had tramped out. One went over, pushed from behind, scrabbling for footing, and died as the club smashed down on him. I killed another and jumped down beside the giant.
“Back to back, Carl Patton,” he called. A pair came up together over a barricade of dead monsters, and while they teetered for attack position I shot them, then shot the one that mounted their threshing corpses. Then suddenly the pressure slackened, and I was hearing the big man’s steam-engine puffing, the dog’s rasping snarls, was aware of a pain in my thigh, of the breath burning in my throat. A scorpion jittered on his thin legs ten feet away, but he came no closer. The others were moving back, buzzing and clacking. I started up over the side and an arm like a jib boom stopped me.