Larshel's body heaved itself out and stood beside him. Reena was already dragging him across to the hatchline of the booster cradle.

They were right underneath, and the booster, fifty feet above their heads, was live and ready to go.

This fact was announced by a sudden shriek of exhaust as the left side Mv-nozzle was tested. The air became harsh. Reena scouted the hatchline.

"How we get in?" Larshel said to Rhem. Rhem sensed his death was imminent, either way. He'd seen Larshel's body kill that hostess; he knew there'd be no mercy for Rhem Kerwillig.

"The hatches are code-controlled. Unless you can pull them open by main strength, I don't know."

A good look at the locking bars that ran from top to bottom on each of the hatches convinced them that there was no way in thus.

"We climb." The Larshel form indicated the exterior skin of the mitt-shaped frame of the booster cradle.

Rhem gulped. "Look, I don't have much of a head for heights," he muttered.

It grabbed him and pushed him up to the top of the nearest hatch. The Reena thing was already there.

There were hand-holds, and a ledge about waist high. And above that there was an instrument cluster.

Rhem climbed, pushed along from below.

With another shriek of exhaust the shuttle tested the right dorsal nay-nozzle. More exhaust gas fouled the air. Rhem coughed, until Larshel pushed him on, higher.

He was surprised at how quickly he went. He was also surprised to find himself still functioning. He'd thought he was going to collapse after that horrible climb through the tunnel.

But he'd found a second wind from somewhere.

He was going to need to lie down and sleep for a very long time soon, very soon.

Another attitude jet whooshed momentarily.

If he didn't get fried first, of course.

From this point on it became easier, since the trunk of the cradle joined the spreading "fingers" that held the shuttle in position. Between the fingers were wails of corrugated stretch-cover that were easy to climb. Then they were directly beneath the shuttle.

The Reena form was hurriedly searching the shuttle skin, looking for an access port of any kind.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR.

LONG BEFORE CHANG'S SHARK REACHED THE APPROACH PATH to Doisy-Dyan, it became apparent that there was something very strange going on.

The alien creatures were not keeping to the assumed plan. What was known of them had revealed a devastating military opponent that would attack relentlessly and aim for all the weak spots of a high-tech society.

But the attackers at the space base had suddenly faded away. A robot probe from Blake sent across the landing field drew no sniper fire. Blake reported this oddity at once to Chang, who urged a cautious continuation of the probe.

Then scouts went forward and reached the terminal buildings. They could see bodies scattered over the floors inside, but they found no sign of the creatures.

"They've gone," Blake reported.

"How?" Chang said simply. "Find out."

The Shark howled south, over the Ruinart Mountains and the bottomlands of old Pat-Do, Chang biting her nails with anxiety. The thought that these things might somehow escape her was too dreadful to contemplate. If everything was going to go to hell, taking her career with it, then she should at least get the catharsis of combat with these damn creatures.

Somehow it had all begun to seem like the perfect end to her career. A culmination of every stupid mistake she'd ever made. She'd go out in a blaze of gunfire, get a desk job, and live on her memories.

Now it seemed that even that was to be snatched away. Luisa bad to wonder if she was fated to die of chronic disappointment.

They were on the approach path now and Chief Hafka was calling urgently.

Luisa was surprised. The Committee for the Preservation of Society was after her scalp, and Hafka was in deep with them.

"Colonel Chang, I just heard that there's been some mayhem at the space base."

"Correct. We're trying to pin down the enemy right now."

"Is this Directive 115 stuff?"

"Damn right it is, Chief. I hope you can get your force mobilized and ready to assist us."

"I was asleep, they just called me. I don't even know what's been going on."

Chang brought him up to date. Hafka gulped.

"Then this bullshit is for real?"

Chang smote her forehead. "How many times do I have to tell you, Chief? I wouldn't call a Directive 115 emergency unless I was damn sure I was right about it. So get used to it, this is for real. There are up to ten enemy creatures on the loose in the space base. We can't find them and they've already killed maybe fifty people, maybe more."

Hafka was still groping; his mouth opened and closed but no words emerged.

Blake beeped in. The creatures had left the base by driving a fire truck through the fence on the city side of the base. They had forced the truck through and over the cars and ATVs that were still jammed there and then had taken it across country through woods and gardens in the direction of the river.

The fire truck had been found abandoned, in a rice paddy by the riverbank.

Doisy-Dyan was in view on the Shark's forescreen. Chang told Blake to follow the creatures and close up on them as fast as possible.

She brought up a schematic of that section of Doisy-Dyan. This was a suburban area, scattered with small hamlets of brown brick. Narrow lanes snaked through vegetable gardens and small fields. The highway into the city was fringed by hotels and large apartment towers, but behind these towers the settlement thinned out quickly.

To the west the river, to the south the city.

Where might they have gone? And why would they abandon the terminal, unless they recognized the danger that it, and they with it, would be burned or even nuked?

The Shark swooped down over the paddies. On infrared it scanned the canals, the small, hive-shaped rice granaries that clustered on the lanes, the groves of panumpey and oak. A few specks were turned up, but they proved to be animals, children, and an old man shuffling along with a pole and two fifty-pound sacks of rice over his shoulders.

Chang told the Shark to get down low; it dropped to treetop height and whirred down winding lanes.

A chemo-tracer picked up some blood in the air. The Shark shifted to follow the trace.

Weapon pods unsheathed as the Shark got ready to do its thing. Fifty-millimeter cannon, called "people-mushers" by Shark skyjocks, swiveled in their mounts.

Ahead the hamlets gave way to a sprawling slum.

There was something big happening in that slum; it was apparent to everyone aboard the Shark.

Small-arms fire echoed from the slum alleys. A ferocious battle was going on in the streets there. The locals here were relatively well armed and living on hair-trigger emotions in light of the worldwide panic over alien beings.

The Battlemaster bad not taken into account the native Wexel passion for small arms. The arrival of the battleforms had produced a stupendous gun battle up and down the main street.

Three of the things had been shot down and literally shot to fragments right on the street. Thousands of rounds of ammunition poured down on them.

Maybe a hundred people bad lost their lives, mostly from getting shot by other people on the other side of the street or even blocks away.

The surviving battleforms pressed on, in a stolen truck, heading into the city of Doisy-Dyan.

Behind them the gunbattles raged on, however.

Chang circled in the Shark.

The sight of the big ITAA gunship aroused several people down below to open fire at once. It was a reflex; everyone hated the ITAA anyway. Bullets whanged off the Sharks tough hide.

Hopester kept ducking, not having the same faith in the ability of ITAA bulletproofing as Chang, who managed to do no more than wince occasionally when something hit the windscreen.

Finally the Shark's automatic missile defense activated, and it destroyed an incoming guided missile.

Luisa told it to get down lower. It kept requesting the opportunity to return fire until Luisa told it in a loud voice to shut up and it did.

Blake and his team were using small VTOL jump platforms, and they arrived on the scene not that long after.

By then Chang had released a couple of floaters, which, dodging bullets on sparrow-sized wings, were zipping through the slums up ahead and sending back video data.

It became apparent that there were only humans involved in the shooting.

"They've gone," said Chang, taken by surprise.

"Leap-frogged it and hit the city, I bet."

"After them."

"What are they up to?" Blake said.

"Well, it doesn't seem to be the spaceport, so the directive briefing is a complete screwup."

"What's next, Colonel?"

"Maybe their plans didn't work out. Now move out."

Blake barked orders to Cormondwyke and the rest. With the whoosh-crack of the jumpers filling the air with sound, they took off, heading low and fast around the neighborhoods involved in the gunfighting, which was now dying down as people came out of that first screaming fit of fight-or-flight shooting.

Miraculously no one shot at the troopers on the VTOL jumpers.

The Shark was first on the scene, of course, and this time there was much less firing as the Shark roared by overhead.

The streets below were normal, except for the hundreds of anxious upturned faces as people gazed up at the terrifying mass of the Shark patrolling past on thunderous rotors.

"i'm here and lm not seeing anything but shoppers," Chang told Blake. "Fan out behind me, check areas to the side. Maybe they're trying to regroup before returning on the spaceport."

"Colonel, maybe we should just abandon the briefing."

"Captain Blake, better minds than ours have worked on this stuff, and they show that the spaceport has to be the number-one target for this enemy. Nothing else will do. Remember Saskatch."

"I don't know, Colonel, I think they're up to something."

"Get a move on, Captain; let's find the damn things, shall we, before they kill too many more people."

Chang cut out. She scanned the data the Shark was picking up. Nothing out of the normal struck her eye.

Then the Shark sensors picked up audio on gunfire ahead. "Downtown," Jean Povet said. "There's fighting in the Medina."

Once more the Shark lifted and swooped ahead of Blake and the troopers on the jumpers.

There, amid the towers along the Medina, rose smoke. Glass was shattering off a facade and falling into the street from machine-gun lire.

The Shark had identified several targets. It displayed them on the screen.

In recesses, in doorways, beneath cars, behind a wall of furniture in a smashed storefront, crouched things that were not human. They exchanged gunfire with several small groups of Regulators who were ensconced in buildings with windows along the street.

A few bodies were scattered beneath the buildings. A fire was going in another one.

The computer images were windowed onscreen for Chang.

Darel Hopester came forward and sat beside her.

"There we are, Mr. Hopester, that's Directive 115 as we live and breathe."

The creatures bore a weird caricature of a human face, compressed and narrowed and rendered almost canine. They shifted position with a rapidity beyond the human. Fluttering from their foreheads were growths that looked like flowers.

Hopester licked his lips. "What can we do?"

Chang shrugged. "Kill them." She slapped the Shark's instrument panel.

"Permission to engage the enemy?"

"Given," she said.