Blade shook his head. "Not yet. We still need to find out how well they can shoot."

Several miles up, the rocket curved over and began a downward plunge toward its target. At the last moment, when it was obvious that he was that target, Blade swung the machine out of sight behind the building. With a roar and a howl of torn air audible even inside the machine, the rocket plunged down the last few hundred feet and exploded in the street.

The heavy war machine bounced up and sideways like a floating log hitting rapids. One corner slammed into the building, sending everybody except Blade sprawling. Then he dove toward the street without waiting for people to get settled again.

At street level he turned to the team. "Everyone all right?"

Apart from bruises, everyone was. One of the men couldn't help asking, "Are we going to be doing this again?"

"Quite a lot of it," said Blade calmly. "We have to make them decide to move in close. Otherwise you won't get a chance to do any fighting." Several people looked as though they really wouldn't mind that much missing their chance.

Blade kept the machine darting in and out of the towers of the city for nearly half an hour. Every few minutes he would make it do the equivalent of jumping up and down and thumbing its nose at the distant Looter machines. They would reply with a rocket. The rockets came in unguided, blowing large chunks of real estate to bits but not doing a thing to Blade's machine. Even the attack team members were beginning to look more cheerful, although a couple of them got airsick from the rough ride.

After the seventh rocket there was a long pause. Then the large machine in the center fired another rocket. This one climbed in a straight line until it was directly over the city, then exploded. Blade watched the smoke cloud drift away on the wind. He thought he saw something small and gleaming standing still in the air where the smoke had been. Not a war machine-it was far too small. What was it? There was only one way to find out-the same way as he found out everything else so far.

Once more a move into the open drew a rocket. The Looters obviously felt there was some good reason for not moving in close now. The ninth rocket rose on the beginning of a normal flight-then straightened out and came whizzing straight at them.

Blade dove and ducked behind the nearest building, as usual. But this time on the screens he saw the rocket waver in flight, rise in a sharp climb, then turn and plunge back down at him.

Chara gasped and turned pale; half the others cried out loud. Blade's teeth clamped together as he swung the machine around toward the other side of the building. The rocket plunged straight toward the side they had left, looking as though it would keep right on going and explode against the building.

At the last second it swung clear, vanishing around the opposite side of the building. Blade pulled his machine to a stop in midair. A moment later the rocket appeared on the upper screen, climbing upward again. It wavered, nosed over, and plunged back down at the machine again.

This time Blade was the only one in the cabin who didn't shout out loud. He was too busy with the controls, swinging the machine sharply up and to one side. The rocket howled downward past them. Its smoke trail blanked out the screens for a moment. Blade dove for the street again. A moment later a thunderous explosion from below told him that he didn't need to worry about that rocket any more. Its controller hadn't been able to pull it out of that last dive.

"What-what were they doing with that last one?" gasped Chara.

For a moment Blade was too busy with the controls to answer. The machine leaped upward. As they cleared the towers of Miros, he checked the screens. There were the Looter machines, exactly where they had been. High above the city the same small metal shape glinted against the blue sky. Blade watched it grow on the screens from a point to a dot to a small solid sphere. Good. It was no more than four feet across. Nothing that size could be heavy enough to damage the war machine.

"Hang on!" Blade shouted again. This time it was a needless order. The others were all clinging to something solid as if this was their only hope of life.

Crrrannnnnngggggg! A sound like a ten-ton hammer hitting a stack of tin cans placed on a twenty-ton anvil. Metal belled, boomed, and crushed. The shock threw Blade's hands completely off the controls for a moment. He grabbed the controls again and put the machine into a dive. As the towers below grew rapidly larger, he s.n.a.t.c.hed a glimpse at the screens. Trailing smoke and bits of wire, the metal sphere was falling along with them. But it wasn't a sphere any more. The collision with the war machine had half-flattened it.

When they pulled out of the dive just below and behind the top of a building, Chara was able to find her voice. "Mazda, what-?"

"The Looters sent that sphere up on the rocket to float over the city and watch us. It would send a picture like the one on the screens back to the Looter in one of the big machines. Then the Looter would send signals to the rocket, telling it to follow us wherever we went. I have seen such machines during my travels. I knew we had to destroy the seeing machine, or sooner or later the Looters would hit us with a rocket."

Chara nodded, but her face was still bleached and drawn. "What happens next?"

"We have destroyed their seeing machine. With luck, they will come in close, where we can fight them as I have planned."

"What if we are not lucky?"

Blade kept silent, since there was no good answer to that question.

Chapter 19.

Blade knew the Looters' weapons. He knew their strength. He was certain that he faced living opponents. He was nearly as certain that they would move in to close quarters and fight him in the streets of Miros.

They would be fighting him with weapons that could rip apart his machine or demolish a building a thousand feet high. They would be fighting his small swift machine with larger, clumsier ones, in a rubble-strewn maze of streets he knew far better than they did. They would probably have no one to fight on foot, while he had six fighters whom he could hurl at the enemy when the time was right. Blade was certain that the Looters faced a memorable battle, and probably defeat. Whether he and his comrades would survive to enjoy their victory was another question.

Blade kept his machine under cover for a few minutes, to give the Looters time to react. When he did dart out to take another look, he was relieved to see the Looter machines creeping in toward the city. They were moving as cautiously as soldiers making their way across a minefield, but they were moving in.

It took the Looters nearly half an hour to get to within two miles of the city. During that time they ignored Blade-launched no rockets, fired no beams or rays, made no sounds, flashed no lights.

Two miles north of the city they stopped and divided. The three small war machines moved out and around to cover the east, west, and south sides of the city. The three large machines stayed where they were. Blade realized he was now nicely boxed in. If he tried to avoid action, the machines on his flanks and rear would beam him down or ram him out of the air.

The smaller machines weren't shooting at anything as they took position, as far as Blade could see. That meant that the rest of the expedition had either got clear or was being ignored. Blade had no doubt any more that he was the Looters' number-one target.

The three large machines remained motionless until the smaller ones were in position. Then they began to move forward again. Blade could now see that the center one differed from the other two. Its front end was rounder and topped by a dome of some gla.s.sy-looking material. At the rear was a tripod mast with anntennae and screens sprouting from it in all directions.

Good. Now he knew which one was the command machine, the one probably carrying the living Looters. Now he knew which machine had to be his number-one target.

A mile from the city the Looters unleashed their beam weapons. There was no warning, only a blaze of red light lancing out at Blade's machine. The core of the beam missed and slashed into a building. A section of wall fifty feet wide and three stories high scattered in glowing bits and pieces down into the street below, while smoke boiled up from the hole. But the fringe of the beam caught Blade.

For a moment all the screens went dark. Every dial and light on the control panels whirled and flickered hysterically. Blade heard Chara and the others screaming and bit back a gasp of pain himself. He felt as though a thousand red-hot needles were being jammed into every part of his body. He blinked, swallowed, felt blackness creeping up on him-then the pain was past and the screens were clear. A quick check showed no damage to either machine or people.

Vast clouds of smoke billowed up from the gaping hole in the building behind them. More rose from the rubble in the street below. Screened by the smoke, Blade dove the machine down to street level. Another discharge of the red ray ripped into the damaged building, but missed Blade's machine completely. More smoke boiled up and more debris crashed down, some of it hitting the machine. The metal hull boomed under the impact and Blade clung like a monkey to the controls to keep from being hurled out of his seat. The rest of the attackers tried to hang on as best they could.

They leveled out just above the ground and stopped. Blade saw that the street was blocked by smoking rubble piled two stories high. Thick smoke screened it to a height of several hundred feet. It was impossible to see the Looters through that smoke.

Blade and his three opponents skirmished through the streets of the dead city with grim caution for half an hour. The Looter machines were certainly under living control. Blade was also beginning to suspect that those living beings were getting nervous. Several times he heard the crackle of the red ray many streets away, as the Looters fired at phantoms of their own imagination. The crackle was always followed by the crash and rumble of falling wreckage and new billowing clouds of smoke.

That was fine with Blade. He knew the streets of Miros as well as he knew the West End of London. If the Looters wanted to make it even harder for them to find their way around a city they didn't know in any case, that was their problem, not his. He was the hunter; he could choose his own time to move out.

At the end of the half hour Blade decided the time had come. Half of the city's streets were fogged with gray, brown, and black smoke. Piles of rubble that offered concealment lay almost everywhere.

Like a prowling cat Blade's machine glided through the smoky streets, only a few feet above the ground. He headed for one of the Looters' flanks, to slip around and come in behind them.

Suddenly a ma.s.s of gleaming metal shone through the smoke a hundred yards down a street to the right. Blade sent his machine darting for cover as the red ray crackled past. The people felt only a mild p.r.i.c.kling as the fringes brushed them. But thirty feet of pavement and the front of a three-story building rose into the air and came down in a rain of smoking bits and pieces.

Instantly Blade was heading back out into the street, into the smoke boiling up from where the ray struck. The gaping front of the building loomed through the smoke. Blade swung the machine inside and perched it precariously on the heaped-up rubble fallen from the upper floors.

"We'll need somebody to go outside for the next move," said Blade. He explained briefly what he wanted. Naturally all seven immediately volunteered. Blade picked out one of the men and gave him the signal baton, then opened the hatch briefly. Smoke swirled into the cabin, setting everybody coughing. The man slipped out into the street and was gone.

A moment later Blade had the machine in motion again, backing away into the building. A few hard shoves against the rear door enlarged the opening until the machine could slip through. Once back out in the street, Blade swung around until he was back in the first street, where the Looter machine stood. He was able to sneak into cover behind the smoke and the wall of piled rubble. But the observer high in the building they had left could see the Looters, and signal their movements to Blade.

Flick, flick, flick went the baton. Two Looter machines were coming straight down the street. They were getting rattled if their tactics were becoming this sloppy.

The baton flicked downward. The first Looter machine was pa.s.sing the observer's position, only a hundred feet away. Blade wanted it to get still closer. He used two of the tentacles to grasp two large chunks of rubble.

Now the first Looter machine was practically on top of them. Blade's hands danced over the controls and his machine rose into the air only yards in front of the first Looter machine. As it rose Blade sent the tentacles whipping about, hurling their hundred-pound missiles at the second machine behind. They sailed through the air, dropped toward the street, and disintegrated in smoke and dust as the red ray caught them.

But they didn't absorb more than a small fraction of the red ray's power. The second machine's ray tore with deadly force into the first one. The ray turret on top flew off its mounting and crashed into the street. Antennae melted like candy canes in the sun. Metal buckled and bulged and gaped, letting out vast clouds of smoke from burning and exploding machinery inside. Blade backed hastily away as he saw molten metal beginning to ooze from the Looter machine.

The red ray wasn't quite as hard on Looter machines as it was on Tharnian buildings. But that first machine was no good for anything now except sc.r.a.p metal.

Blade continued to back away until he was several hundred yards down the street and completely invisible behind clouds and piles of rubble. By that time the cheering had died down and Chara had stopped trying to throw her arms around him.

"Mazda, you have done it! You have done it! It is dead, and we have won!"

"No," said one of the other women. "There are two more of the big ones, besides the small ones. Mazda will not rest until he has destroyed all of them, or he is dead."

Blade nodded. He headed down a parallel street until he reached the point for picking up the observer. He saw the man run out of the smoke and leap on the platform. The hatch opened for a moment and the man darted inside. Then Blade lifted the machine again and headed away through the smoking streets of Miros, once again on the prowl.

Chapter 20.

If the Looters had been nervous before, now they would probably be scared stiff. Blade had half a dozen other tricks up his sleeve. If he could move fast, before the Looters decided to bring the smaller war machines into the city, he could press home his advantage.

The machine darted through the streets at high speed. In a few minutes Blade knew he had come far enough to be behind the second Looter machine. He wanted to pick it off first, then move in on the command machine with fewer worries about his flanks and rear.

Blade landed on a roof surrounded by high walls that kept the machine entirely hidden from below but provided excellent perches for observers. This time he stationed four observers on the walls, one looking in each direction.

In five minutes the second machine stopped beside a damaged building less than three hundred yards away. Apparently the Looters had realized that roaming around the streets of Miros might not be the wisest thing to do now. The command machine was nowhere in sight. Had it left the city?

Another five minutes pa.s.sed. Blade knew he couldn't safely wait any longer before launching his attack on the second machine. He called in the observers and lifted off the roof, heading for the building beside his target.

One particularly wild ray-blast had chewed out a three-story hole in the building nearly five hundred feet above the street. Blade's machine darted from the cover of one building to the cover of another, moving across the city street by street. At last he landed on the roof of a building across the street from his target, a roof almost on a level with the gaping hole. He waited until the wind sent smoke swirling more thickly than usual across the street. Then he sent his machine plunging out across the street and into the hole.

They landed with a crunch. Blade felt the floor sag and groan under the weight of the machine. He would have to work fast. He backed well inside the building, swung the turret to the rear, then ordered everyone to hang on tight. Then he slammed the machine sideways into the outer wall of the building, the wall directly above the Looter machine on the street below.

The building shook and the machine vibrated like a drum. The wall showed no sign of damage. Fortunately neither did the machine. Blade drove it sideways again. This time the wall showed cracks, and bulged outward at the bottom. A third time, a fourth, a fifth. The wall was unmistakably weakening, but it was still there. Blade was beginning to wonder whether the wall or the machine would give up first.

A sixth time. Now he was. .h.i.tting the wall higher up, to distribute the impacts evenly. A seventh. An eighth. Backing off and going in for a- Crrunnnnk! Almost elegantly, seventy or eighty feet of wall detached itself, sagged outward into thin air, and vanished from sight. The floor under it began to crumble away, then the ceiling began to sag down.

In seconds Blade had the machine racing out through the hole into the open air, so fast that he nearly rammed the building across the street. He swung up over the roof with feet to spare. A ray blast crackled through the air just below him, a wild shot that chewed away much of the wall surrounding the roof but didn't touch Blade's machine. Then the falling piece of building came down on the Looter machine.

The Looter machines were built strongly, but they weren't built strongly enough to stand a direct hit by a twenty-ton slab of building falling five hundred feet. The machine quivered, vanished in a cloud of dust and smoke, then seemed to burst apart in flame. The spare rockets exploded, shooting up huge gouts of yellow orange flame and spraying bits of hot metal in all directions. The top of the machine opened up like a sardine can and more explosions sent more bits flying. High above, Blade felt his machine rock from the concussion.

The blast must have also been the final blow to the tall building, already torn by the ray and by the impacts of Blade's machine: Slowly its top three hundred feet leaned forward, crumbling away at the bottom as it did. Then suddenly gravity took a firmer grip and the whole ponderous ma.s.s plunged downward. Blade darted clear a moment before the falling ma.s.s came down on the building across the street like a piledriver. The second building seemed to burst outward from the impact, pieces as big as small houses flying in all directions and crashing through the walls of its neighbors. Rubble poured down, more smoke and dust rose up in a cloud that swiftly blotted out the whole scene, and the world was filled with thunderings and crashings that rose to an ear-splitting roar.

Blade waited only long enough for the smoke and dust to clear away enough to give a good view. Both buildings had collapsed into the streets below, burying the Looter machine under a pile of rubble a hundred feet high. It would take a thousand men a month's work to dig out what was left of it.

Blade sent the machine spiraling downward. As it dove, he snapped out orders to Chara and the six members of the attack team. The Looters in the command machine should be hopelessly stunned and bewildered by what had happened. There would never be a better chance to attack them. He saw fierce grins on the faces around him as all seven started checking their weapons and equipment.

As the machine dove, Blade saw metal glinting through the smoke half a mile away. That would have to be the command machine! He headed for it as fast as he could twist and turn his own machine through the streets of Miros, only inches above the pavement. Several times they hit chunks of rubble with bone-jarring crashes. Blade did not stop or slow down. Nothing was more important now than speed and more speed. It didn't matter if his own machine didn't survive the coming battle. He and his fighters could evade the smaller machines and walk out. But they had to get the Looter commanders!

The machine plunged out into the open street. A hundred feet away stood the command machine, its turret with the ray-tube pointing away from them. Blade did not slow down. His machine bounced off a building across the street as it turned. But the impact and the controls hurled it in the same direction. The command machine's turret swung toward Blade. Before it could take aim, Blade's machine smashed down onto the turret.

Metal clanged and crunched and sparks flew as electrical equipment died spectacularly. The turret ground to a stop. Blade backed his machine away, one hand on the controls and the other furiously pressing b.u.t.tons to extend the tentacles. He hoped they still worked. For a moment he wished he had three or four extra hands.

The tentacles lashed out. The tentacle with the heavy sensor-k.n.o.b at the end snapped downward at the bubble dome at the front of the other machine. The transparent material shivered and cracked under the impact. A second blow and it splintered and smashed inward.

The other three tentacles swept across the top of the Looter machine, ripping the tripod signal mast free and hurling it to the street. More electrical fireworks. Then Blade wound all three around the beam tube and jerked them sharply upward. The ten-foot tube bent upward into a curve, then ripped free of the turret. A tremendous cloud of smoke spewed out of both tube and turret, momentarily blanking out the screens.

Blade didn't wait for the smoke to clear or bother retracting the tentacles. He drove the machine forward against the side of the other one, like a bull goring a farmer. The other machine slammed hard into the nearest wall. Bits and pieces showered down with clangs and thumps. Blade charged again. This time both the wall and the side of the other machine gave. Great slabs of wall crashed down on both machines. Two of Blade's screens went dead, and metallic screeches sounded as tentacles were ripped out of their sockets.

A third charge. This time it sounded as though the end of the world had come, in a hideous, ear-splitting din of metal twisting and crumpling and tearing apart. Something smashed into Blade's turret hard enough to dent the armor and send most of the fighters sprawling. A purple glare filled the cabin as the beam-tube shorted out. Pungent smoke followed it.

Blade cut off the power. The machine dropped with a final crash six feet to the street. Everyone who had stayed on his feet until then went sprawling.

Blade unbuckled his seat belt and sprang to his feet. For a moment he felt a little unsteady on his legs, and hoped that all his teeth and internal organs were still in place. Then he drew his sword and pointed at the hatch.

"Up and at them, oh people! Capture them if possible, for they may tell us even more than their machines!"

Chara stabbed at the hatch b.u.t.ton with the hilt of her sword. With squeaks and squeals the hatch slowly opened. Four people dove out through an opening Blade would have sworn was too narrow for one. No one was worrying about depriving Mazda of any honor now. They were all too eager to get at the Looters.

As Blade's feet hit the platform outside, something went pfffuttt from the Looter machine and something else went spannnngggg! beside Blade. One of the men let out a gasp of pain and clapped a hand to his thigh. A small metal dart gleamed there, the blood just staring to well out around it.

But the Looter machine was less than twenty feet away. Before the Looter with the dart gun could fire again, the other attackers converged on a hatch that gaped open below the nose dome. One of the women flattened herself against the hull, then threw a wad of blazing cloth in through the hatch.

The black smoke of burning teksin oil poured out of the hatch. A moment later came a raw-throaty gurgling scream. A human figure stumbled out of the hatch and fell to its knees, clothing and hair blazing. Somehow it lurched to its feet, one hand holding a small tube out in front of it. The tube spat out another dart-and this one took one of the women in the throat. She dropped her sword, swayed, and raised both hands to her throat. Then slowly she folded forward to the ground, kicked for a few moments, and lay still.

For a moment a red haze seemed to flicker in front of Blade's eyes. To bring the people so far, and now-! His breath stuck in his throat for another moment, then he charged forward.

He knocked two other fighters aside as he reached for the hatch. Both hands closed on the edge. It must have weighed two hundred pounds, but Blade ripped it free and hurled it away as easily as if it had been a playing card. Then he leaped through the opening, into the Looter machine.

Another dart clanged off the floor as Blade landed inside. He flattened himself against the forward bulkhead while his eyes adjusted to the darkness. Then he whirled around and sprang up into the c.o.c.kpit. A glance told him that it was full of strange shapes and strange instruments. But for the moment he didn't care about them. All that interested him now were the two remaining members of the Looter crew.

One of them was a woman. She was backing away into a corner as Blade entered. The other, a lean red-haired man, stood on one of the control consoles and aimed his dart-thrower at Blade with one hand while he drew a sword with the other.

Blade lunged forward and up. One hand chopped upward under the wrist of the hand holding the dart gun. Blade felt the other's bones splinter under the impact, heard the man scream, saw the dart gun go flying. He pivoted and drove his other fist into the man's stomach. The man doubled up and lurched forward off the console.

Blade caught him as he fell, grabbed him around the waist, and hurled him up and back as hard as he could. The man seemed to fly through the air, then jerk to a sudden halt. His mouth opened, letting out a scream and a spray of blood. His arms and legs waved frantically as he hung, impaled on the broken points of the canopy, then went limp.

Blade turned to the woman. She was still backed into her corner and had drawn a short sword. One of the people moved in with his own sword drawn. A flicker and a clack of teksin meeting metal. The attacker's sword went flying. He dove to retrieve it. The woman's sword slashed down at the back of his neck, and he jumped clear just in time.

Blade took a closer look at the woman. She was small and lithe, with curling brown hair piled on top of her head. Her eyes were wide, but with intense concentration on her opponents, not with fear. This was someone who meant to sell her life as dearly as possible.

"Don't kill her!" shouted Blade. The woman might not want to be taken alive, but she was the last chance for a Looter prisoner. He drew his own sword and moved in. The woman thrust, fast and well, but his own down-cut was faster and delivered with a much stronger arm. It beat down the woman's guard. Blade thrust high, aiming to smash the flat of his sword into the woman's head and stun her.

Instead she dropped under his thrust and came up with her sword darting at his groin. The point drove into his teksin loinguard and was held there for a moment. Blade's left hand chopped down at the woman's sword arm. She jerked it back from under the chop just in time. Blade's hand came down on the sword itself, knocking it out of the woman's hand.

Instantly she dropped into an unarmed-combat stance. One small booted foot darted out at Blade's chest in a high kick. He pivoted so that it struck his left shoulder. Then he clamped both hands on the woman's ankle and twisted, hard. The woman screamed but had to turn over on her face to keep her ankle from being twisted apart. The moment she did so, Blade lunged forward and brought the edge of one hand down across the back of her neck, just below the hairline. He struck with only a fraction of the force he could have used. The woman went limp, but a quick check told Blade that she was unconscious rather than dead.

Blade quickly stripped off the woman's belt and tied her hands tightly behind her back. He lifted her across his shoulders easily-she could not have weighed much more than a hundred pounds. Then he turned to the fighters behind him.