straight ahead, bathing the tank in fire. The flame splashed off the tank,
but here and there it caught. A tiny tongue of orange licked out of the
deck behind the turret. It spouted thick black smoke and grew larger. The
tank stopped and the tongue turned into a gout of orange and black as
something in the machine’s engine compartment caught.
Meanwhile Karin had dropped to her knee and fired another arrow at one of
the robots. Again her aim was true and again the robot continued to
advance apparently unheeding.
Karin tried to run again, but as she rose she got tangled in the lower
limb of her bow and went sprawling into the sand. She rolled to the side
and threw her arm up in a futile attempt to shield herself from the
advancing robot.
The robot never noticed. It continued unerringly straight toward the place
where she had been. Then it emitted a despairing whine and toppled into
the sand beside her.
Karin looked up, shook sand from her eyes and tried to locate Mick and
Stigi.
Mick’s sudden dash had attracted the attention of two of the robots and
now he was frantically dodging blasts of energy from their snout cannon.
By a combination of broken field running and dive-and-roll, he had managed
to stay ahead of them so far, but the robots had split up and they were
coming at him from different directions.
Karin grabbed another arrow, but Stigi reached Mick first. With a roar,
the dragon charged full on into one of the robots, catching it at knee
level in a way that would have earned him a clipping penalty if they had
been playing football. The robot lurched forward onto its snout, then got
its feet under it and tried to rise.
It got halfway up when a whipping blow from Stigi’s tail hammered it to
the ground again. This time the robot didn’t try to rise. It swiveled its
body around to face the on-rushing dragon and let loose with a bolt from
its cannon.
Fortunately energy cannons don’t work any better than regular ones when
the barrel is full of sand. There was a muffled “whump” and the cannon
barrel glowed cherry red and went limp. Stigi grabbed the
fifteen-foot-tall robot in his powerful jaws and shook it the way a
terrier shakes a rat, slamming it into the ground and tossing it into the
air until pieces began to fly off.
Meanwhile, Karin’s arrow had found the third robot. It took two more steps
and collapsed with the iron arrow sticking straight out of its back.
Craig frowned at the glowing display. He had sent a light scout force
scooting along the southern edge of the play area to try to get behind his
opponent’s main body. Now something had knocked them out.
Sending a stronger force south to engage whatever his scouts had hit was
bad strategy. It would dilute his main strength. He decided to send a
recon flier south to check it out. Then he turned his attention back to
the battle that was shaping up between his warbot columns and his enemy’s
main force. If he worked quickly enough he might be able to catch them in
a pincer.
“Mick, are you all right?”
Gilligan put his hands on his knees and bent forward to take deep, heaving
breaths. He was too winded to talk so he shook his head and made a waving
off motion to Karin.
Mechanically, Karin walked over to the third robot and pulled her arrow
out of its back.
“Stigi, release!” she commanded. With a clank and a clatter, the dragon
reluctantly dropped its much-mangled new toy so Karin could retrieve her
arrow.
By this time Mick had gotten enough breath back to stand up and look
around. Off in the distance he could see plumes of dust rising into the
burning sky. Karin was staring intently at the flaming mass that had been
the tank.
“Come on!” Gilligan grabbed her arm.
“But my arrow!”
“We don’t have time,” he panted. “Let’s get the hell out of here before
reinforcements arrive.”
She nodded and they set off, Karin at a fast walk, Gilligan at an