much air this time, to supplement what his mask provided. There was more dissolved oxygen in this area.
Battle beams sizzled overhead again, and weak cries carried to him from the miniature war going on above. Twice, the water trembled from nearby explosions.
At least this time I don’t have to worry about being baked by the near misses, he consoled himself. All these stragglers have are hand weapons.
Tom smiled at that irony. All they had were hand weapons.
He had picked off two of the Tandu in that first ambush, before they could snap up their particle guns to fire back. More importantly, he managed to wing the shaggy Episiarch before diving head-first into a hole in the weeds.
He had cut it close. One near-miss had left second-degree burns on the sole of his bare left foot. In that last instant he glimpsed the Episiarch rearing in outrage, a nimbus of unreality coruscating like a fiery halo around its head. Tom thought he momentarily saw stars through that wavering brilliance.
The Tandu flailed to stay upon their wildly bucking causeway. That probably was what spoiled their much vaunted aim, and accounted for his still being alive.
As he had expected, the Tandu’s vengeance hunt had led them westward. He popped up, from time to time, to keep their interest keen with brief enfilades of needles.
Then, as he swam between openings in the weedscape, the battle seemed to take off without him. He heard sounds of combat and knew his pursuers had come into contact with another party of ET stragglers.
Tom had left then, underwater, in search of other mischief to do.
The battle noise drifted away from his present position. From his brief glimpse an hour ago, this particular skirmish seemed to involve a half-dozen Gubru and three battered, balloon-tired rover machines of some type. Tom hadn’t been able to tell if they were robots or crewed, but they had seemed unable to adapt to the tricky surface, for all of their firepower.
He listened for a minute, then coiled his tube and put it away in his waistband. He rose quietly to the surface of the tiny pool and risked lifting his eyes to the level of the interwoven loops of weed.
In his mosquito raids, he had moved ever toward the eggshell wreck. Now he saw that it was only a few hundred meters away. Two smoking ruins told of the fate of the wheeled machines. As he watched, first one, then the other slowly sank out of sight. Three slime-covered Gubru, apparently the last of their party, struggled over the morass toward the floating ship. Their feathers were plastered against their slender, hawk-beaked bodies. They looked desperately unhappy.
Tom rose up and saw flashes of more fighting to the south.
Three hours before, a small Soro scoutship had come diving in, strafing all in sight, until a delta-winged Tandu atmospheric fighter swooped out of the clouds to intercept it. They blasted away at each other, harassed by small arms fire from below, until they finally collided in a fiery explosion, falling to the sea in a tangled heap.
About an hour later the story had repeated itself. This time the participants were a lumbering Pthaca rescue-tender and a battered spearship of the Brothers of the Night. Their wreckage joined the smoky ruins which slowly subsided in every direction.
No food, no place to hide, and the only race of fanatics I really want to see is the one not represented out here in this dribble-drabble charnel house.
The message bomb pressed under his waistband. Again, he wished he knew whether or not to use it.
Gillian has to be worried by now, he thought. Thank God, at least she’s safe.
And the battle’s still going on. That means there’s still time. We’ve still got a chance.
Yes. And dolphins like to go for long walks along the beach.
Ah, well Let’s see if there’s some more trouble I can cause.
79
Galactics
The Soro, Krat, cursed at the strategy schematic. Her clients took the precaution of backing away while she vented her anger by tearing great rips out of the vletoor cushion.
Four ships lost! To only one by the Tandu! The recent battle had been a disaster!
And meanwhile, the sideshow down at the planet’s surface was bleeding away her small support craft in ones and twos!
It seemed that tiny remnants of all of the defeated fleets, stragglers that had hidden out on moons or planetoids, must have decided the Earthlings were hiding near that volcano down in Kithrup’s mid-northern latitudes. Why did they think that?
Because surely