They took their own special route back to the garden.
Warriors had already landed below the cliffs fronting the wall, where the Lady Karen’s creatures were now locked in hellish combat with them. Their shrieking and bellowing alone was deafening. Other warriors circled, looking for an opening in the ultraviolet searchlight beams which swept the sky and seared their hides.
Up on a certain peak, mirror-weapons blinked out as Lesk the Glut deliberately crashed his flyer down on the Travellers who sweated and swore and died there. But they’d seen him coming; before his flyer struck they had turned their shotguns on it, pumping shot after shot at both beast and rider right to the end. Lesk, wounded and more dangerous than ever, goaded his half-crippled beast to slither free of the peak, directed it in an insane suicide dive on the heart of the garden.
He was seen; smoking ray-beams converged blindingly on him; his flyer felt artificial sunlight eating at its hide, burning in its many eyes. It reared back from its headlong dive, pulled up, swooped low over the garden. Then someone threw a grenade, which exploded directly in front of the beast. With its spatulate head blazing, screaming like a safety-valve under high pressure, it swooped to earth, struck the wall and carried a great section of it away, and with it several defenders. The creature’s huge manta body tore up the earth, somersaulted like a derailed train, hurled Lesk out of the saddle.
Other flyers swept down out of the darkness on the periphery. They crashed among the greenhouses and allotments, floundered in the pools. Down from their backs sprang lieutenants of Shaithis, Belath and Volse, to create carnage within the garden itself. Jazz Simmons saw them; he tracked them with tracers and streams of exploding shells. Two at least ducked away into the shadows and smoke, to commence their task of cold butchery on whichever Travellers or trogs they should come across.
Jazz saw Harry and his son on the balcony of the latter’s house. They watched the battle. He breathlessly called up: ‘How’s it going?’
In the glare and sweep of hot beams, the booming of automatic weapons, howling of monsters and cries of men, it was hard to say. ‘We should be in this!’ Harry said to his son.
‘No,’ the other shook his head. ‘We’re the last resort.’
Harry didn’t understand, but he trusted.
Zek came running, caught Jazz’s arm where he stood by The Dweller’s house. ‘Look!’ she cried.
High overhead a warrior dragged some bloated, puffing, incredible thing through the sky. A second warrior, higher, was similarly burdened. Scything searchlight beams cut across them and Zek gasped: ‘Gas-beasts!’
‘What?’ Jazz gaped. He saw the bloated thing cut loose, begin drifting like some obscene balloon down toward the garden. The thing drifted a little northward, over the wall, where the battery of searchlights was concentrated. The beams picked it out, centered upon it, and it began to smoke. Puffing black evaporation and clouds of steam, it settled faster toward earth.
Jazz saw the strategy. ‘AW he cried. Then he grabbed Zek, threw her down and hurled himself on top of her.
The gas-beast – a living creature, once a man – issued a hissing, high-pitched scream as its skin blackened and ruptured – and then it blew itself to bits with all the force of a thousand-pound bomb! The ray-gunners directly underneath it died instantly in the blast, their bodies and equipment flattened. At a stroke, one-third of The Dweller’s defences had been wiped out.
A foul, stinking hot wind blew across the garden, and when it cleared Jazz helped Zek to her feet. The Dweller’s house was still standing, but all of its windows had been blown in and half of its roof was missing. Harry and his son had ducked inside the space under the eaves in the moment before the blast; now they came out, white and shaken.
More warriors had landed at the back of the saddle. There they fought with Karen’s creatures, overwhelming and quickly silencing them. But there were Travellers back there and they were armed with grenades; lobbing their deadly eggs, they gave the warriors blow for blow.