“Come and cut the drive shaft loose, Connolly. Methinks, it’ll not jackknife so easily if it is hooked up.”
Chip concluded that he was probably right, and jumped down to help. Of course he was damned if he was going to say so to Nym. The rat was bigheaded enough about his mechanical genius.
It proved correct, too. The trailer was still tempted to go where its own inclination took it, but to a far lesser degree.
Three thumps, and a large section of the wall fell in. Most of the big bits missed them.
* * *
It was bliss to drive out into the open night air again, as the bats and rats set booby traps behind them. They’d moved a great deal farther into the spiral. The gap between arms was smaller, a mere thirty yards wide. Bats flew ahead to locate the next cross passage, as the tractor chewed along the muddy strip toward it. The bats set charges and they were in. Unopposed.
“Begorra. This is the way to fight a war, boyos!” said O’Niel, from where he reclined on the top of the trailer.
“I wish you hadn’t said that,” Chip muttered gloomily.
“Sometimes things must go right,” opined Ginny. But she didn’t sound very convinced.
“It is my contention,” Doc speculated, “that the Magh’ have never come across the military philosophy entrained in the word, ‘Blitzkrieg.’ ” He peered through his pince-nez at the empty passage ahead.
Chip snorted. “I dunno what that means, but if it means ‘things only go right so that they can get worse later,’ or ‘if one thing is going right, it’s only because another is going wrong’—then you’ve got it in . . .”
The rest of his statement was lost in a shrieking mechanical wail-gurgle. The noise could be described as a teething baby being drowned in shallow engine oil.
O’Niel proved it was possible to launch from flat on your back into powered flight in three microseconds. The shrieking came from inside his backrest. And then it stopped.
They were all silent. Edgy. Ready to jump. Then Ginny started to giggle. “This time it didn’t go wrong! It’s the pressure valve, on the trailer. Look at it! When you guys hooked the drive shaft up you must have started the pump running. You’re ready to start spraying your crops.”
“Dunno about crops, but there’s a cropper coming!” Chip pointed ahead. The group-mind had had its construction teams building earthworks. They’d arrived while the builders were still on the job. Chip lowered the blade to just above ground level and dropped the tractor into low gear. The ‘dobe was still wet. They plowed through it like . . . like a small vineyard tractor through sticky mud—with much slithering and near sticking.
Meanwhile, Ginny had clambered across to look at the pump. There was a galvanized pipe with a red valve handle. She moved the lever across, into line with the pipe, more to see what would happen than anything else. A thirty-five foot mist-wall of seventy-four percent alcohol is what happened, before she hastily turned it off. The Maggot-soldiers who had been waiting in the side passages charged straight into the mist. The tractor blundered on through the earthworks, speeding up now as Chip determinedly thrust it through gears. And then Behan took it into his head to fly back and fry a few more Maggots.
He never even dropped the Molotov, before the atomized alcohol in the air ignited.
WOOOOOMPH!!!!!!
The shockwave hardened slowshields. It spun bats from the air like autumn wind-torn leaves. It rocked the tractor. It fried hundreds of Maggots. It seared and panicked twice that number . . .
And it took Behan away to the great belfry in the sky.
“I killed him,” said Ginny, in a small wooden voice. “I killed him.”
Chapter 28: A romantic little place in the country.
The pager bleeped insistently. Fitz was glad to pull over to the side of the road. He was not relishing this little trip.
“Major Fitzhugh? It’s Henry M’Batha from satellite tracking here. We’ve just picked up another explosion. About five miles from the last one. They’re heading southeast and inwards, sir!” The technician sounded as pleased as if he’d infiltrated the Magh’ scorpiary himself.