The Fugitive Worlds (39 page)

From the corner of his eye Toller saw a flicker of white as
an alien appeared beyond one end of the battle line and ran
towards the rectangular shape of the impeller. Toller broke free and ran on a course which enabled him to intercept the
Vadavak about halfway across the margin of safety. The alien slid to a halt in the grass and turned on Toller, the milky marbles of his eyes gleaming beneath the rim of his
helmet. He was holding one of his enervator rods as though it were a sword, darting and slicing with the glowing tip,
striving to make contact with the skin of Toller's sword arm.

Toller dealt with him by making a sideways flick of his blade which lopped the end off the menacing rod. The alien
threw it down, transferred his remaining rod into his right
hand and resumed the duel, apparently quite unafraid. Toller
—acutely aware that he was within the impeller's radius of
death—decided to end the matter speedily in a rain of
unstoppable blows. He was on the point of lunging forward

when he heard a sound close behind him. He spun around just in time to see a second Vadavak thrusting an enervator rod into his midriff. Toller did his utmost to twist clear of the spitefully gleaming tip, but it made contact with him and pain fountained up through his chest. He fell to his knees, gasping for breath, and his two opponents—now moving at a much more leisurely pace, apparently relishing their moment of victory—closed in on him with black rods upraised.

A second touch from one of the red tips would bring about his death, Toller had been warned, and it was obvious that the Vadavaks intended to make sure of him by administering multiple contacts. But he had no intention of accepting death so easily, not with so much at stake. In spite of the debilitating pain which was washing through his body, he made a despairing effort to raise his sword to fend off the descending rods —and was thrilled to find his arms responding with close to normal speed and control.

The Vadavaks, abruptly realizing their peril, stabbed at him with their enervators, but his sword was now moving swiftly in a near-visible defensive arc. The black rods were destroyed and scattered in an instant as Toller rose to his feet. One of the aliens got away from him by sprinting off to safety; the other was transfixed as he turned to flee. Toller withdrew his sword from the twitching body and ran back to rejoin the main battle. He noticed a soreness in his legs for the first few paces, but it quickly faded and he deduced that a Dussarran enervator was a fairly inadequate weapon when used against a large and healthy human.

That seemed a favorable omen, but when Toller reappraised the continuing struggle he saw the situation had altered for the worse in the brief time that he had been sidetracked. One of the women was on the ground and surrounded by Vadavaks who were jabbing at her with red-glowing enervators. Fearing that the inert figure might be Vantara, Toller pounded his way towards her attackers with a hoarse cry of rage. He reached them simultaneously
with Steenameert, taking them unawares, and in an imposs
ibly short space of time—a time of raging red mists speckled
with seething bright-rimmed corpuscles—the two humans
had reduced at least five of the enemy to a bloody mass of
carrion.

The woman on the ground was revealed as Corporal
Tradlo. An enervator had been driven down her throat, her
blonde hair was matted with blood, and it was obvious that
she was dead.

Toller raised his eyes from her and saw that the remaining
four women had split into pairs, each of which was busily
engaged in close combat. To his left, Jerene and Mistekka
had taken on four Vadavaks and were giving every appear
ance of being able to deal with the threat; to his right,
Vantara and Arvand were almost hidden by a larger group
of aliens who were pressing in on them from all sides.

Marveling at the aliens' carelessness over the essential
matter of guarding their flanks, Toller nodded to Steena
meert and they flung themselves at the milling group of
white-clad figures. Again they wrought a fearful slaughter in
the space of a few heartbeats, inflicting terrible gouting
wounds which either leveled the recipients at once or sent
them staggering blindly away to sink down and expire in
pools of blood.

Other aliens were coming forward to take their places,
but Toller was beginning to sense a change in the overall
situation. The Vadavaks, possessing not even a rudimentary
battle sense, were pressing their attack with undiminished
fervor in spite of conspicuous lack of success—and their
forces were rapidly being depleted. Snatching a quick glance
around the complex scene, Toller guessed that less than half
of the Vadavaks were still on their feet, and a proportion of
those were becoming slow and uncertain in their movements.

It had to be less than a minute until the impeller unleashed
the energies which would displace the planet, and from that time onward Director Zunnunun's warriors would—

presumably—have no reason to continue the struggle. They
should be well content to withdraw at that stage and limit
the number of their dead. Feeling a resurgence of optimism,
Toller risked looking in the direction of Greturk and his
fellow Dussarrans, hoping for an indication that the machine
was about to function. He felt a dull shock when he saw that his allies had disappeared—the only sign that they had ever
been present being a fast-fading tinge of green in the morning
air.

An instant later Toller paid the price for allowing himself to be distracted from the deadly conflict all about him. Pain
exploded through him as something touched his left shoulder,
and an instant later the sensation was repeated again in the
region of his left hip. He had twice been hit from behind by
enervators, but this time—miraculously—the effect was less
devastating than before and he was able to remain on his
feet. His attacker, who had clearly expected a quick and easy
kill, was still gaping at him in astonishment when Toller
swung an ill-controlled blow which was intended to sever the alien's neck. The strike was slightly lacking in reach, because
of Toller's partial immobility, and the sword tip reached no further than the Vadavak's throat, slicing cleanly through his
windpipe. He clapped a hand to his throat and backed rapidly
away, only to be impaled from behind by a sword held by
the tall, dark-haired figure of Mistekka.

"These large bodkins are quite fun," she called out to
Toller, her brown eyes glinting as she casually pushed the dying alien away. "I'm beginning to see why you always
carried one."

"Just don't get careless!" No sooner had Toller spoken
than he heard Steenameert give a bellow of pain. He turned
and saw that his friend was surrounded by four Vadavaks who were jabbing at him with their enervators, at least one
of which had found its mark.

"Stay on your feet, Baten!" Toller shouted. He threw
himself forward, closely followed by Mistekka and the stock
ier figure of Jerene. They descended on Steenameert's attackers in a murderous swoop which, again in what seemed the blink of an eye, had a significant effect on the balance of forces. Steenameert had been hit with enervators several times and was sinking to the ground in spite of Arvand's attempts to hold him up. But when Toller took a broader view he was uplifted to see that the humans were running out of live opponents. Of the original attacking force only two were on their feet in the immediate vicinity, and they were being competently dealt with by Jerene and Mistekka.

Three other Vadavaks, having faced strong and well-armed enemies for the first time, were withdrawing in dismay, fleeing across the plain towards the point where they had materialized. The only other movements among the aliens, Toller noted with an exultant feeling of relief, came from the white-and-crimson carpet of the wounded. It was a tragedy that even one of the Kolcorronians had been lost, but. . . .

"Behind you, Toller!"

Jerene's warning shriek came too late. Toller heard the sudden movement shockingly close behind him, and realized at once that he had become too complacent, too certain that the diminutive Vadavaks had none of the tenacity of a genuine warrior. Now he felt a curious, unmanning sensation in the calf of his left leg. There was no pain to speak of, and yet he had just received the most serious injury of his life. He looked down and saw that a Kolcorronian sword, almost certainly Tradlo's, had gone to the bone in his leg. He struck backwards at the wounded Vadavak who had been lying on the ground, feigning death and awaiting his chance to strike. The alien sighed and rolled away to meet the point of Jerene's sword.

"We must finish the lot of them," Jerene shouted. "Show no mercy!"

"Keep everybody well away from the machine," Toller said to her, wondering why Vantara was not more in evidence

in her capacity as Jerene's commander. "It is bound to detonate, or whatever it does, any second now."

Jerene nodded and signaled for the combatants to move
farther away from the box, which was now glowing like fresh
snow in the light of the rising sun. "And we had better take
a look at that leg of yours."

"I'll be. . . ." Toller glanced down at his leg and felt a moment of giddiness as he saw that a grinning red mouth
had opened right across the calf. It was spewing blood down
his ankle on to the grass, and in its depths he could see the
gleam of bone. When he tried to move the leg his foot
remained obstinately on the ground.

"That has to be stitched here and now," Jerene said in a
hard and unemotional voice. "Somebody give me a held kit."

Toller allowed himself to be lowered to the ground beside
Steenameert, who was beginning to show signs of regaining
consciousness. He felt nauseated, and was glad to surrender all responsibility to another for a period, even when the pain
of the stitching began. With his chin resting on folded hands,
Toller clenched his teeth and distracted himself from the
pain by thinking about the impeller. What would the crucial
moment be like? Would they hear great explosions or be
blinded by flashes of lightning? And why was the cursed box
taking so long to unleash its power?

"Surely more than four minutes have passed since we arrived in this place," he said to those who had clustered
around to watch his leg being repaired. "What say you? Can
you see anything happening?"

Steenameert, who was lying with his face towards the sky,
startled Toller by answering his question as though he had
never been unconscious. "I don't know about our wonderful
white box, Toller—but I think something very strange is
happening up there."

He pointed straight up to the zenith and others followed
his example. Toller twisted his upper body around, grunting
as he involuntarily disturbed the work being done on his leg,
and looked into the center of the sky. The vast disk of Land was divided equally by the terminator, and mounted exactly on the central line was the pulsing yellow star the watchers knew to be the Xa. But changes had taken place since Toller had first looked at it.