... The creature's membranous air-scoop wings pounded at the air as if to bear it up, up away from its pain, which was inescapable. The thing skewed wildly to the left, tilted, allowed Nathan to see close up the damage his explosive bolt had done: the gaping hole that rained pink fluids, where the flyer's head and neck had been half-severed from the body. There was scarcely enough muscle left to hold the head erect, and nothing at all of strength or will.
The beating of the wings slowed to a quiver as the beast commenced a staggering, stalling glide. A tilting wing-tip got snagged between tall boulders, turning the flyer like a pivot. Its grotesque head sank down, touched crumbling earth, dug in and ploughed a furrow. The long neck concer-tinaed, buckled at the point of injury, and snapped with a soft cartilage crack! Dust rose in a cloud as the manta wings flopped uselessly and the carcass slewed to a shuddering halt.
Nathan looked at the weapon in his hand and felt awesomely powerful; he tightened his grip on it, shook it in the air, and shouted his triumph through bared teeth. His elation was shortlived, however; warrior stench thickened in a moment, and again a monstrously pulsing shadow blotted out the stars in its passing.
Trask and Chung emerged from their nest of boulders. Nathan saw the looks on their faces as they crouched down, shrank back, stared slack-jawed above and behind him. He spun on his heel and saw ... his worst nightmare. Throbbing obscenely in mid-air, a Wamphyri warrior!
With its air-trap mantle fluttering and its gas-bladders fully inflated, the warrior's sputtering bio-propulsors emitted clouds of stench-vapour as it turned and came pulsing and rumbling over the barren boulder plains. Like the two downed flyers this monster was 'small' of its kind; but despite that it flew, it was not a 'flyer' as such. In its delirious design it was not dissimilar to Sunside's small, lake-dwelling, harmless fresh-water octopuses: its body sack was rather more elongated, and its tentacles more properly launching thrusters than appendages for walking or groping for shrimp prey in the pebbles of a pool. But its principal dissimilarity lay in the eyes . .. their shrieking madness ... their malign intent... their number!
And in its size. For even a small warrior is not small.
Nathan recognized his error: one of comparison. Distance had fooled him, causing him to compare this Thing with a creature of Nature; distance and perspective. For the warrior was all of a hundred and fifty yards away, at which distance (and quite apart from its multitude of saucer eyes) the idea of it was still acceptable - barely. And given that the safety margin was narrowing even now, for a little while at least a man might retain sufficient composure to think of such a thing in terms of other animals. But as it pulsed closer ... there was no real comparison.
That a thing like this could lift its massive bulk even an inch from the earth, let alone fly, seemed patently impossible; yet here it spurted against the star-spattered horizon like an alien, aerial slug. Just looking at it, details were branded on Nathan's feverish mind:
Of grey-mottled flesh, with fish-scale armour gleaming metallic-blue in starshine ... of gas-bladder clusters bulging like strange wattles or nests of morbid tumors from both sides of the segmented, flexible spine, constantly shrinking and expanding, regulating the monster's balance ... of cartilage hooks and sawing appendages, and chitin grapples in the shape of crab claws. But over and above everything else, the evil pseudo-intelligence of its swivelling, searching saucer eyes, and their placement: in the sloping prow of the skull, the softer membrane of the undermantle, and flanking the propulsors in the anal region, where a spiked tail flailed like a mace and acted as a rudder ...
... It was only fifty yards away now, and it had spotted the three men. Propulsors blasting, the warrior lowered its head and zeroed in on them!
Crush them! Let their pulp stain those boulders crimson! Gorvi's mind-cry galvanized Nathan to activity. Jerking to his feet, he glanced at his crossbow, knew there was no time to reload. Then Ben Trask grabbed his elbow and Nathan jumped six inches in the air.
'For Christ's sake!' Trask yelled over the rumble of the warrior's propulsors. 'Nathan - get us out of here!'
And to one side, David Chung gasped, 'God! I just don't believe it!' Gorvi's lieutenants - their leather-clad bodies holed and both of them leaking red from a dozen wounds - had appeared from behind the clump of boulders, staggering but yet advancing on the three. Trask, on the other hand, had seen vampires close-up before, and he believed it well enough.
While overhead, leaning forward in the ornate saddle of his flyer, Gorvi himself stabbed a trembling, outraged claw of a hand at the three and commanded his warrior: Now! Crush them now! Aye, and those idiot, weakhng thraJJs of mine with them!
Chung was quick to get a grip of himself. Even as Nathan conjured a Mobius door, the Chinaman turned his machine-pistol on Gorvi's lieutenants; at point-blank range he literally tore them apart. His spray of bullets punched crimson lace-holes in their leather armour, across and back, up and down. They were swatted like flies, knocked flat on their backs on the stony ground.