The pounding roar of the first shot resounded from inside the cracked-open sphere, and the nigrescent space thudded with the rutilant explosions of needlecraft. The three other pulses hit in quick succession. One of them banged into the horizon of the sphere and gored a hole in it, clouting nearby jumpships with molten fragments. One hit a jumpship broadside and blasted it and the four around it into blazing dust. The last missed entirely and boomed a long way off among the circling scrag.
Two nearby jumpships were left unscathed and they swiveled in the direction of the firing, scanning for targets.
To draw .their attention away from Carl, Allin signaled his band to advance, and they dropped from their balled-up coverts and slid along the fallpaths curving down into Galgul.
Carl was a whip of arms and legs, still whirling from the ungrounded' recoils. Allin, swooped over to him and grappled him in a steadying bearhug.
One of the jumpships had spotted the band, and the blue light of its laser cannon trembled along the grinning seam of its prow. With Allin stabilizing him, Carl aimed and fired again. The direct hit inflamed the dust-shadowed sky.
Allin whooped with excitement.
An orange, searing bolt of laser light cut the air a meter away, and he cried out again, in alarm. The stormy smell of burned air billowed over them, and Allin swung Carl about to face the jumpship that was diving toward them. The craft was too close for a gravity burst. Carl snapped the lance into laser, mode, hot
enough to cut open atoms, and fired a steady stream of white starfire. The beam hit the black metal hull in a wincing flare of vaporizing plasteel, and the jumpship screamed and swooped toward them. Carl didn't flinch, and Allin held him tighter. The chief's eyes were big with alertness as he watched the black skin - of the jumpship peel away like burning wallpaper.
\ The wail of laser-slashed metal bowled them backward the instant before the jumpship's tormented hulk freight-trained by them, almost within reach. The drag of the plummeting craft whipped Allin and Carl after .it, and they toppled behind.
Squealing with sparks and smoke, the jumpship plunged toward Galgul and splattered into a firestrewn smear across the curve of the metal horizon.
Carl flapped for balance, and Allin gripped him by the collar and, straining every instinct from a lifetime on. the fallpath, tumbled, rolled, and sledded with Carl through the stinging smoke into the grotto of the fractured sphere.
The squad was watching them from the torn edge of the massive stock chamber. A honeycomb of capsuled Foke dangled toward the interior of the sphere. Allin jumped with Carl, and they tumbled onto the buckled plasteel ledge. Carl swayed to his feet with the help of several Foke and glanced around at the crystalfaced shelves of inanimate figures. The weapon whined with the release-signal the Rimstalkers had programmed into it.
Warming lights came on, lighting up the grotto, and all the capsules opened with a collective sigh.
"Allin!" Carl pulled the chief away from his amazement at the sight of thousands of stirring Foke. "We have to move quickly and get the Foke to the Cloudgate. The zotl's whole army must be on the way by now. I won't be able to hold them off for long. Take them out
that way" He pointed through the glowering embers of. the shattered jumpship cordon. "That'll keep this sphere between us and the rest of Galgul."
. "But that'll leave us wide open out there," Allin complained.
"We should travel along the edge of the fallpaths."
"That'll take too long," Carl said. "You have to go straight across the clearing. That's the fastest way to the Gate. Don't worry about the zotl. Leave them to me. just get the Foke moving."
Carl turned away from Allin and let the lance's slow humming guide him in the direction of Eva& She was downward from where he was, and he scampered over the warped surface of the ledge to the sinuous, metal-coil scaffolding the zotl used as catwalks. On the way down, he looked across the bowl of opened sleepunits and saw scattered skirmishes where zotl guards with lasers in their pincer grips were attempting to herd the Foke. But the humans outnumbered the guards. From the upper ledges, Allin and his group were lighting naphthal flares to guide the crowds toward the nearest jump points for the fallpaths.
The hum in Carl's lance led him onto a level packed with Foke bustling to get out. He shouldered his way in the direction the hum pointed until the bobbing heads and unfamiliar faces suddenly hazed out of focus around a coraline-stitched black robe hooding a cat-angled face with wide graygreen eyes. Carl's blood turned to electricity.
The next instant, Evoe saw Carl. Moments ago she had been dreaming that she was old. In that dream, she didn't know what was happening to her. She thought she was sick; she had never felt such impuissance. The desire for rest seethed in her. Then Carl's face appeared, sweet as bread. They made love in a jasmine-fusky grove.
And when they were done, she was herself again, lavish with energy. The dream had burst into the grim waking reality of Galgul. At first she thought the zotl had come for her. But the chamber ceiling had been blown away, and she could see the nests of fire and coils of smoke from the battle.
She emerged from her sleep capsule with a shivering heart and was shocked to see everyone moving. She moved with them, toward, the torn-open wall of the sphere where Foke were waving flares. At the sight of Carl, her whole body pulsed. They shoved through the crowd toward each other and collided into an embrace that locked out the Werld.
"Carl," the spice of her breath whispered along his cheek.
"I had the most wonderful dream of you. I knew you would come back for me."
Carl soaked up the ferny fragrance of her. This was the pearled moment he had lived for. The feel of Evoe against him was lustrous, and his heart warbled with jubilation. Everything that was driven in him yielded. He stopped. It was not even necessary to go on living, repeating the farewell. This was the tip of being. From here he reached out with his soul and felt the empty spirit, the vacant poise of everything. He could die here.
Tears welled in them to the very brink of their eyes. "Evoe" He searched for some scrap of language to dress his naked feelings.
Screams and the scuffle of a fight pulled. his attention from her. A zotl guard was flying over the crowd, shooting its laser wildly. Carl fired from the hip and smashed the thing to a fireclot.
He took Evoe's arm, and they moved with the crowd toward the naphthal flares. Needlecraft slashed overhead, and he unloosed another gravity pulse, dropping this one deep into the sky so that the implosion would pull the needlecraft away from the sphere. The
earnumbing thunder of the pulse roared hearing to a muffed, bulging silence, and the encroaching needlecraft went off like flashbulbs.
The peristalsis of the crowd squeezed them up a wobbly rampway to the melted-lookirfg edge of the sphere. The jump point was before them, but Carl held back. He had to get everyone out to complete the symmetry of his joy. While Evoe used the naphthal flare to direct the crowds, Carl watched the ash-choked sky. The flightlanes lifting away from Galgul toward the Cloudgate beyond the rubble were crowded with Foke. Needlecraft occasionally darted in from over the horizon of the sphere to strafe the exodus, but Carl stabbed at them with laser bolts and brought some of them down.
After a while, the air attacks stopped. Allin had come down from the crest of the stock chamber, his body sparking with sweat. "We're all out," he announced.
Some dim explosions sounded from within the building.
"Those are the plastique traps we set on the access ports. The zotl are coming in from the back of this chamber. They'll have lasers."
Carl hugged Evoe. "Go with him," he told her. "I'll be right behind you."
"No." Her eyes were certain as a staring angel's. "I'm not leaving you again."
At the far end of the chamber, sparks flurried, and the wall crumbled like incandescent cheese. The opening writhed with the arachnid shapes of the zotl, and spurs of crimson laserfire flicked across the chamber at them. One bright bolt scorched the ground nearby and skipped vaporing plasteel between Allin's legs. He stood firm, but his whole body grimaced, anticipating the fleshmelting impact of a laser bolt.