Evil Star

gunshot, but outside the room. Matt looked up.
    The Incas had blown up the radio mast. How they had done it he would never know, but it was clear that they had come to the compound with more than bolas, spears, and the rest of it. One of them must have brought a quan-tity of plastic explosives. Matt saw it quite clearly through the glass dome. There was a great flash of light as the steel mast was cut in half. Flames leaped up. And then the top of the mast came loose, separating from the bottom. Taking three of the satellite dishes with it, it keeled over to one side. And suddenly the very top of the mast, where it tapered to a point, was traveling down like a spear thrown from the sky. As Richard and Matt dived to one side, it smashed through the glass and kept coming. All of Rodriguez's con-centration had been on Matt. He had been perhaps half a second away from shooting him. He hadn't seen what was happening until it was too late.
    Half a ton of steel girders, cables, and satellite dishes crashed into the room. Rodriguez was directly underneath the dome. He didn't even have time to scream as a massive pile of metal and glass slammed into him, obliterating him utterly. Matt hit the floor and kept sliding. It seemed to him that the whole room had exploded.
    The noise was deafening. A hundred splinters sprayed into his shoulders and back. He could smell burning. Everything had gone dark.
    Silence.
    Weakly, he tried to stand up and found that his leg wouldn't obey him. For a moment he was terrified. Had he been crushed under the Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star weight of the radio mast?
    "Richard . . . !" he shouted.
    "Over here!" Richard sounded a long way away.
    Matt slowly picked himself up. Apart from a few super-ficial cuts and scratches, he hadn't been hurt. Richard was also getting to his feet. He was covered in glass. It was in his hair and on his shoulders and there was a cut on his fore-head. But he was all right, too.
    The door opened and Pedro came running in. He had his slingshot in one hand. There was a ferociousness in his face that Matt had never seen before. Atoc was with him. Matt was relieved to see that both of them were uninjured.
    "It is over," Atoc said. "Salamanda's people have run. The mast is down. There is no more they can do from here."
    "Then we did it!" Matt said.
    "We have won!" Atoc smiled tiredly.
    “You're wrong. ..."
    The voice came from the middle of the wreckage. Matt looked past the dead body of the police captain and saw Fabian, painfully trying to ease himself into a sitting position. He was very pale. It was impossible to say how much blood he had lost, but most of his suit was crimson.
    "I was trying to tell you," Fabian said. It was as if he were talking to a very young child. The words came out very sim-ply. Perhaps he knew that he had only moments to live. “You were wrong from the start," he went on. "The swan ..." He gulped for breath. "They controlled it from here to start with. But when it came in range . . .
    Salamanda took over."

    Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star
    "Where is he?" Matt demanded.
    "At the place of Qolqa. He has a mobile laboratory. He's in control.
    Look. . . ."
    Miraculously, although the plasma screen had been damaged, the black dots were still there. And the single dot was still moving. It had traveled almost halfway across the screen. Soon it would be at the bottom. The digital clock showed 22:24:00. Ninety-six minutes until midnight.
    "I'm sorry," Fabian whispered. "But I told you. It was always true.
    You could never win."
    His head fell sideways, and Matt knew that he had died.
    "What does he mean?" Atoc asked.
    "It's not over yet," Matt said. "Salamanda is in the des-ert. He's controlling the satellite." He pointed. The dot had only half a meter to travel. How many miles? Matt could imagine it edging ever closer to its destination between the mountains.
    "We must be able to stop it," Richard said. "We can't have done all this for nothing. ..."
    "How far is he from here?" Atoc demanded.
    "I don't know. A hundred miles. Not more than that.. ."
    "There's a helicopter. ..."
    • • •
    The helicopter was a two-seater.
    Richard, Matt, Pedro, and Atoc had emerged from the control center Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star to find that a new sort of silence had descended on the compound. It was the silence of death. There were bodies everywhere, some of them Inca, but the majority were Salamanda's men.