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Jo
A group of Brigantes sprinted into sight on the other side of the compound, firing submachine guns as they came.
Jo
Terl in his cage had dropped down below the parapet that held the upright bars, lying flat to be out of the path of bullets. He raised himself cautiously now. It was the animal! He ducked back. At any moment now he supposed the animal would charge over here and riddle him. It 's what Terl would have done. He wondered whether he could get to the hidden explosive charge in the cave and make a grenade out of it, and then he saw he would expose himself if he did so and abandoned the idea. He lay there, panting a little in fear.
Taking advantage of trees and boulders, ru
The wind was rising. Thunder was sounding amid the gunfire. The slow-flying drone was very near overhead now.
Where, where was that Brigante?
Two mercenaries jumped into view in a door and bore down on him with Thompsons. A bullet flicked the side of his neck.
Jo
He snapped in a fresh magazine from the bag. The ape he was looking for must have taken refuge back of a wrecked tractor. Jo
Ru
There he was!
The Brigante ran away. Jo
Jo
The sound of the drone grew less. There was no thunder at the moment. Save for the moan of the wind it seemed strangely quiet.
Jo
A mercenary was crawling, trying to get his hands on a Thompson. Jo
He waited. There seemed to be no sound or movement in the area that would be dangerous.
Dancer had broken free in the firing and fled down the slope.
Jo
He went down the slope to Bittie.
Chapter 9
The little boy lay on the blood-stained ground, his head back and in the direction of the lower slope.
Jo
He felt awful. He knelt beside the torn boy. He was going to pick the body up and he put his hand under the head and lifted it slightly.
There was a light flutter of breath!
Bittie's eyes trembled open. They were glazed in shock but they saw Jo
Bittie was moving his lips. A very faint whisper of a voice. Jo
"I...I wasn't a very good squire...was I...Sir Jo
Then tears began to roll sideways from the boy's eyes.
Jo
Jo
You have just saved my life! But he couldn't speak.
The shock was wearing off in the boy; the numbness that had held back the pain vanished.
Bittie's hand, which had risen to clutch Jo
He was dead. No heartbeat. No breath. No pulse.
Jo
After a while, Jo
He went back and picked up the dead body of the Russian and carried it to the car and put it in.
Windsplitter had seen him from a distance and came up, and the other horses, over their fright now, approached.
Jo
It took them a long time to make the trip. Jo
A cadet sentry had seen them approach. In a little while cadets started to come out of the buildings. Word spread further and more came.
The schoolmaster, from an upper window, saw the crowd gathering around the ground car and went out. Du
Jo
Several truckloads of Russians suddenly roared up to a halt and they spilled out, joining the crowd.
Several cadets raced back to the armory and came out with assault rifles and shoulder bags of magazines and began to pass them around to men who were looking in the direction of the compound.
An angry mutter was rising higher and higher among them.
Several cadets raced back to their rooms to get personal side arms and came back, buckling on belts and loading magazines.
The thunder in the mountains reverberated now and then across the plain and an angry, cold wind whipped around the mob.
A truckload of Russians who had swung over by the compound arrived back and stopped in a geyser of dust. The Russians were shouting and pointing toward the compound, trying to say what was over there now. No one could understand them.
A small ground car raced up from the direction of Denver, spraying clods of dirt as it screeched to a stop. The pilot officer in charge of drones jumped out, a stream of drone printout pictures crackling in the wind as he forced his way into the crowd, trying to tell them it had all come through on a drone overfly, trying to show people what had happened. He had ripped the printouts and the discs out of the machines and come at once.
A Coordinator was finally able to make himself heard. He had gotten now what the single Russian truck had seen at the compound. “The Brigantes are all dead over there! A whole commando!”
“Is that Psychlo Terl still alive over there?” somebody shouted.
There was an angry roar from the crowd. Several surged forward to see whether Terl was visible in the pictures.
“He's still alive,” shouted the Russians' Coordinator who had gotten the information from the truck.
The crowd surged and some started to climb into the Russian trucks. The Russians had been drawn up in a line by a Russian officer and they were checking their rifles on command.
Colonel Ivan, who had come to stand near Jo
Jo
“No,” said Jo
"In that trench there, sixty-seven cadets died, fighting the last battle of the Psychlo invasion over a thousand years ago. When I first saw that trench, it gave me my first hope. It was not that they lost, it was that they fought at all against hopeless odds. They did not die in vain. We are here. We are fighting again. You and your fellow pilots control the skies of