Herbig-Haro

He heard shouts through the turmoil: the harsh yells of the Zanat and different cries, high thin wails that rose and fell in weird ululation. The wails grew ever louder and ever closer. The Zanat had not bothered to disarm him. He belted on his pistol, dashed to the window and looked out. Carbon arc lamps on tall poles spread a hellish blue glare over the spaceport tarmac; the shadows of the figures dashing across it were black and sharp as if cut from dies. Most moved with a sinuous grace the Zanat did not possess.

A machine gun chattered from a gun pit. spitting flame. Ru

The scout pilot had no way of knowing. Some of the graceful ru

Crump! Front the great cloud of smoke that shot up. it was a black-powder explosion. primitive but effective. An arc-light support tottered, swayed, fell with a heavy boom. A moment later another lamp was taken out, and a quarter of the field plunged into twilight. The Slayor yowled in triumph. Not all of them toted only their native arms. A burst of half a dozen bullets thudded into the wall near Chang's window. He hurriedly pulled away. That had to be a captured gun.

Another explosion was followed by the iron clang of a starship smashing against concrete. Chang's gut clenched with fear. If Praise of Folly went down under the locals' attack, he was marooned as inevitably as if the Zanat smote her with a nuclear warhead,

The Zanat inside the spaceport buildings had not been taken entirely by surprise. The sentries were alert, and the species as a whole was not so sunk in sleep of nights as Terrans would have been. Alarms yammered. There were shouted orders in the next room, a tinkle of glass as a window was broken out, and a rattle of rifle fire. "That got a couple of the motherless fargs!" a trooper shouted. But the Slayor must have been building their attack in secret for months, maybe years. They were throwing everything they had at the hated invaders from the stars. Somehow they had even hauled one of their clumsy field-pieces to the edge of the spaceport to oppose Zanat artillery. Back at his window. Clang saw the muzzle flash and belch of smoke. A solid shot smacked into the building. The Zanat, though, had built to withstand a lot of that kind of pounding. And when the natives tried to force the stout door through which Chang had entered, they were bloodily repulsed. The Zanat raked their retreat with fire. The scout pilot thought the assault had been wrecked. But it was only a diversion, to draw the enemy's attention while a squad of Slayor set a charge against the far side of the port building, lit a fuse, and fled.

The blast hurled Chang from his feet. He rolled into a tight protective ball. The floor lurched beneath him. The noise was stu

He staggered upright, dazed, half-deafened. Faintly, as if through roaring water, he heard injured Zanat screaming. The air was thick with the smell of smoke and blood. There were other screams too, of wild excitement. The Slayor were in the building.

The door burst open. Only wan auxiliary lights burned in the hallway. but they sufficed to show Liosh and a pair of soldiers with rifles. The contact officer was limping; someone had slapped a rough bandage on his lower leg.

"Come on!" Liosh barked at the scout pilot. "We'll get you away. We may not hold here, and you're too precious to leave for the savages to butcher."

Chang agreed with that, though for reasons very different from the Zan's. Yet being taken from the neighborhood of Praise of Folly was the last thing he wanted. When he hesitated, one of Liosh's troopers hefted his gun menacingly. He yielded.

Liosh made no concessions to his wound as he hurried through the maze of corridors, picking his way over rubble and corpses. Chang saw his first Slayor, dead, a slim, gray, hairless being still clutching a large musket. Neat bulletholes stitched its chest; the exit wounds chewed its back to red ghastliness. The contact officer followed his eyes. "They are fools, brave fools but fools. They do not see they will be better off once we pacify them and bring them into our Sphere." The Romans had sung that song in Gaul. Cluing thought, and the British in India. and the Americans in Indochina, and the Confederacy on Epsilon Eridani I. Sometimes they turned out right in the end, sometimes not. Either way, a lot of people got killed finding out.

A live native poked its head round the corner, let out a yell, and charged. It was armed only with a rapier. A burst of fire from the Zanat chopped it down.

Behind them, a gun spoke, the dull report of Slayor powder. One of the troopers with Liosh pitched forward on his face. A squeal of agony said the local had not enjoyed its victory long. Liosh knelt, asked the wounded soldier a question too low for Cluing to catch. The answer came in a choked grunt. Liosh drew a knife across the Zan's throat in a quick, practiced motion, touched the ears, eyes, and nose of the body in turn, then straightened and hurried on.

He led the remaining trooper and Chang to a door, "In here," When his companions were through, he dogged it shut behind them. "Now down, all the way." On the spiral stair his injury did trouble him. His thin, dark lips ski

There were no Slayor in the sub basement, not yet. Even the auxiliary lights failed, though, as Chang emerged from the stairwell. Before he could think of escape, the two Zanat had electric torches out. Liosh went ahead with such confidence that he hardly needed light. At last he came to the door he was seeking. "Escape tu

The passage was several hundred meters long, with only thin orange beams of light stabbing into the blackness ahead. Then the scout pilot smelled fresh air ahead, night-cool and moist. Liosh swarmed up a metal ladder. "You next." he called. Very conscious of the trooper's rifle at his back, Chang climbed. A belt of thick, shrubby vegetation had hidden the vehicle park from the spaceport. Two or three pieces of heavy armor still sat there, squat and deadly. but most were already in the fight; their passage had flattened wide swathes of the native plant life.

Liosh ignored the behemoths, heading instead for lighter, swifter transport. A military historian would have called it an armored perso

The trooper scrambled into the driver's compartment. Liosh and Chang went round to the rear of the vehicle. The Contact officer turned to open its double doors—and Chang, at last unwatched for an instant, drew his pistol and sapped the Zan behind the right ear.

Liosh fell bonelessly. The scout pilot raced back to the trooper, who was cursing as he tried to coax the machine's engine to life. The sight of the handgun froze him. "Out." Chang ordered. He clubbed the second alien into unconsciousness.

He paused for a moment over Liosh, pistol in hand. But shouts came echoing up from the mouth of the tu

He dug his handset from a pocket. "On my way!" he shouted.

"Took you long enough," Praise of Folly sail tartly. "Things have been lively out here." That, the scout pilot saw as he emerged from the undergrowth. was putting it mildly. Several armored vehicles blazed on the tarmac; they and the burning port buildings gave all the light there was. Chang ran past corpses of Zanat and Slayor flung every which way in death, past wrecked spacecraft. He knew a moment's relief when he realized the Praise of Folly had been away from the worst of the fighting. Then a bullet whistled past his ear and another sponged viciously from concrete, and he realized that the greater distance did nothing for his safety. Still, he was only one more shape moving through darkness, not likely to draw much fire and not a good target if he did. Praise of Fully stood tall a couple of hundred meters ahead. He did not spy the Slayor until almost too late. The local slashed at him with a sword—no rapier this, but a great two-handed claymore. The blow went wide. Chang fired a point-blank range. and also missed. He threw his pistol in that native's face. The Slayor went down, keening. Chang did not look back. He flew up Praise of Folly's boarding ladder three rungs at a time.