Evil Star

wearing a white coat. Miss Klein. He remembered her from the hacienda and wondered why she was here. But Salamanda wouldn't have been able to track the satellite on his own. He had brought along his technicians to help.
    Almost idly, Matt wondered what would happen next. Salamanda reached the ground and stood, staring at him. He had something in his hand. A gun — of course. Did he really think he could use that against Matt?
    "Why are you here?" Salamanda screamed in fury. His face would have been contorted in anger except that it was contorted already and always had been. His eyes blazed. "How did you get here?"
    "What time is it?" Matt asked.
    Salamanda stopped. It was as if he had been slapped. "What. . . ?"
    "What time is it?"
    The man understood the question and why Matt had asked it. "It's five minutes to twelve!" he replied. "Five min-utes . . . that's all I need! Five minutes more!"
    He raised the gun and fired.
    The bullet exploded out of the barrel and began to travel toward Matt, aiming for his head. It didn't get any-where near it. Matt simply stopped it in midair and sent it spinning away into the night.

    Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star And at the same time, he pushed a little harder. Salamanda felt the waves of pure energy shimmer past him. He wasn't touched himself, hut behind him, it was as if the truck with its mobile laboratory had been hit by a nuclear blast. The whole thing was picked up and flung away like a toy in the hands of an angry child, somersaulting over and over again as it bounced across the sand. It traveled for a hundred meters and at last came to a stop, crumpled in on itself, and lay still.
    Salamanda stood where he was, out in the open, exposed. He had nothing to support him. The gun hung limp in his hand.
    “You think you've won," he said. "But you haven't. The world belonged to the Old Ones and it will belong to them again. It said so in the diary. . . ."
    "Maybe the diary was wrong."
    "It can't be."
    Matt gazed at the man who had caused him so much torment, who had tried to kill him and who had been responsible for the deaths of his friends. "Why did you do it?" he asked. “You're rich. You've got all these houses. You've got a huge business. Why wasn't it enough?"
    Salamanda laughed. “You're a child!" he said dismissively. "Or you'd understand. There's no such thing as enough." He fell silent.
    Nothing moved. The people inside the laboratory were either unconscious or dead. Still there wasn't a hint of a breeze. "Do you have any idea how much I hate you?" Salamanda asked.
    "Hate is all you have," Matt replied.
    Salamanda lifted the gun and fired the five remaining shots.
    Once again, Matt turned the bullets around and scattered them. But Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star this time, there were too many of them. He couldn't control where they all went. Three of them spun away into the night, but the two others smashed into Salamanda's chest. Salamanda was thrown off his feet and onto his back. Matt heard his neck break. The huge head rolled to the side. The eyes stared blankly up at the night.
    It was over.
    Matt let out a deep breath. He would go back to the helicopter and stay with Pedro until the morning if he had to. By then, Richard and the others would have arrived. They would probably be on their way even now. He shiv-ered. It seemed to him that it had gotten very cold. And there was something else. He hadn't noticed it before, but there was the smell of decay in the air. Rotten meat. He looked up, remembering the condors. There was no sign of them. But the sky had changed color. There was some-thing pulsating inside the blackness. A sort of dark mauve light. The stars seemed more intense than ever, unnatu-rally so. They were like lightbulbs that were about to fuse. Matt's head was aching. He looked over to the mountains. And there it was.
    A single, brilliant light was traveling horizontally across, making for a point between two peaks. It was very low in the sky. From where Matt was standing, it looked as if it were just meters above the ground. He knew at once that it wasn't a star. Nor was it a plane. It was the satellite. It had to be. With a terrible sense of emptiness, Matt thought back over what had just happened. Salamanda had lined up the satellite. He had been guiding it into position. Then Matt had arrived and destroyed the laboratory.
    But he'd been too late. It was as if he had destroyed a gun after the bullet had been