a swivel-mounted head on top of its main shaft. It had been set there to act as a sentry to the entrance to the C-4 Pyramid, guarding against anyone making an unauthorized visit to the Labyrinth…or, just perhaps, something coming out of the pyramid.
Crouched behind the western corner of the pyramid, Verduin jabbed a forefinger on the keypad built into the right-hand bracelet of his skinsuit, tapping into Channel Four, the scanner’s frequency. Q: What is coming from the East? he asked.
The reply from the AI system immediately flashed in translucent green letters across his helmet’s heads-up display: 2 OBJECTS / IDENTITY UNKNOWN / NE 55.95 X 1200 M. / EST. VEL…
He didn’t read the rest, for he suddenly heard a high thin whistle, which sounded absurdly like the sound-effect one hears in a cartoon when a bomb is being dropped out of the sky. Verduin looked again across the plain at the distant mounds of the habitat. Oeljanov—no one else would be wearing that combat armor suit, so it had to be Oeljanov—and the two autotanks were still between him and safety inside the modules. But maybe, if he took advantage of the one-third gravity and discarded his ankle-weights which allowed him to walk normally on the surface, he could still…
Don’t even think about it, he told himself. You have several million tons of stone block between you and whatever is coming down from the sky. If you stay here, you have a chance, but caught out in the open…
Verduin grimaced and crouched lower behind the corner of the pyramid. He remembered stories his grandfather, who had been a child during World War II, had told him about cowering in his mother’s flat in Arnhem when the Nazi Panzer divisions were laying siege to the Allied Forces of the ill-fated Operation Market Garden. His grandfather had been among the few Dutch residents who had escaped harm when Arnhem was eventually leveled during the combat. To the young Paul Verduin, who was then devouring all the science books he could lay his hands upon, the Siege of Arnhem sounded as remote as the Fall of Ancient Rome to the Visigoths.
He had listened to the old man’s oft-repeated stories with little more than casual interest, being polite while he leafed through another astronomy text, but now he had a sense of what his grandfather had felt. A mechanized, faceless terror was descending upon him, and the only options he had were to run or hide…never to fight back.
The whistling grew louder. From his all-too-close vantage point, he could see the Russian autotanks tilting back on their legs as their ugly black machine guns simultaneously telescoped upward.
‘Damn you,’ he whispered in Dutch. ‘Get off this planet…’
Then, all at once, the fury of war was upon him.
The Unit One autotank opened fire first, followed milliseconds later by a continuous burst from Unit Two, the one closer to him. A dim staccato pappa-pappa-pappa-pappa was carried through the thin atmosphere as fire seemed to erupt from their machine guns, spent shell casings ejecting from the sides of the robots and falling, bouncing, to the desert floor. Verduin instinctively held his hands up to the sides of his helmet as he watched Oeljanov take one step forward, his own gun blazing away at something still unseen in the sky beyond the peak of the pyramid…
‘Get off my goddamn planet!’ Verduin shouted.
Something exploded between Unit One and Unit Two, sending up a shower of dust and pummeling Oeljanov to his knees. A fraction of a second later, Verduin caught the briefest glimpse of something streaking into Unit Two…
Then the Bushmaster went off like a bomb, its fuel tank detonating as an orange-red fireball, twisted metal debris spewing outward. Amid the muffled roar, Verduin saw something spiraling straight toward him; he threw himself flat on the ground, covering his head with his arms, and a moment later felt something heavy smash into the ground only a few feet away.
Verduin glanced between
Crouched behind the western corner of the pyramid, Verduin jabbed a forefinger on the keypad built into the right-hand bracelet of his skinsuit, tapping into Channel Four, the scanner’s frequency. Q: What is coming from the East? he asked.
The reply from the AI system immediately flashed in translucent green letters across his helmet’s heads-up display: 2 OBJECTS / IDENTITY UNKNOWN / NE 55.95 X 1200 M. / EST. VEL…
He didn’t read the rest, for he suddenly heard a high thin whistle, which sounded absurdly like the sound-effect one hears in a cartoon when a bomb is being dropped out of the sky. Verduin looked again across the plain at the distant mounds of the habitat. Oeljanov—no one else would be wearing that combat armor suit, so it had to be Oeljanov—and the two autotanks were still between him and safety inside the modules. But maybe, if he took advantage of the one-third gravity and discarded his ankle-weights which allowed him to walk normally on the surface, he could still…
Don’t even think about it, he told himself. You have several million tons of stone block between you and whatever is coming down from the sky. If you stay here, you have a chance, but caught out in the open…
Verduin grimaced and crouched lower behind the corner of the pyramid. He remembered stories his grandfather, who had been a child during World War II, had told him about cowering in his mother’s flat in Arnhem when the Nazi Panzer divisions were laying siege to the Allied Forces of the ill-fated Operation Market Garden. His grandfather had been among the few Dutch residents who had escaped harm when Arnhem was eventually leveled during the combat. To the young Paul Verduin, who was then devouring all the science books he could lay his hands upon, the Siege of Arnhem sounded as remote as the Fall of Ancient Rome to the Visigoths.
He had listened to the old man’s oft-repeated stories with little more than casual interest, being polite while he leafed through another astronomy text, but now he had a sense of what his grandfather had felt. A mechanized, faceless terror was descending upon him, and the only options he had were to run or hide…never to fight back.
The whistling grew louder. From his all-too-close vantage point, he could see the Russian autotanks tilting back on their legs as their ugly black machine guns simultaneously telescoped upward.
‘Damn you,’ he whispered in Dutch. ‘Get off this planet…’
Then, all at once, the fury of war was upon him.
The Unit One autotank opened fire first, followed milliseconds later by a continuous burst from Unit Two, the one closer to him. A dim staccato pappa-pappa-pappa-pappa was carried through the thin atmosphere as fire seemed to erupt from their machine guns, spent shell casings ejecting from the sides of the robots and falling, bouncing, to the desert floor. Verduin instinctively held his hands up to the sides of his helmet as he watched Oeljanov take one step forward, his own gun blazing away at something still unseen in the sky beyond the peak of the pyramid…
‘Get off my goddamn planet!’ Verduin shouted.
Something exploded between Unit One and Unit Two, sending up a shower of dust and pummeling Oeljanov to his knees. A fraction of a second later, Verduin caught the briefest glimpse of something streaking into Unit Two…
Then the Bushmaster went off like a bomb, its fuel tank detonating as an orange-red fireball, twisted metal debris spewing outward. Amid the muffled roar, Verduin saw something spiraling straight toward him; he threw himself flat on the ground, covering his head with his arms, and a moment later felt something heavy smash into the ground only a few feet away.
Verduin glanced between
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