Star quest

to his right and saw Fish grabbing at the air, his arms stroking as if he were swimming through very thick water. Then he fell, burning, rolled several times, and was still.
    Tohm looked at his watch.
    At first, nothing seemed to focus. Then his vision cleared through sheer willpower. There were still ten minutes until the Old Man arrived. Ten minutes, he realized, as Seer lost his head in a blaze of purple light and crashed to his knees, would be much too late. Much.

Chapter Fourteen
    THEY WERE BEHIND a ridge of sand, firing at the mass of Romaghin guards that had collected in the windblown dunes ahead. It was only a matter of minutes, Tohm knew, until the officers would direct their flanks to spread out and surround the Muties. And worst of all, they were too outnumbered to do anything about it. Far away, the roar of a desert tanker droned steadily forward, closer, louder. When the tanker moved in between the Romaghins and Muties and began lobbing shells, they would be dead to the last. He realized that the guards would not risk their own lives when a deadly and efficient machine like the tanker could kill for them.
    Mayna was crying about Seer and Fish. It was the first time he had seen her cry real tears.
    Corgi was cursing the oncoming artillery.
    Just that suddenly, the thought of artillery reminded him of Jumbo Ten. Somewhere in his brain, a memory was dug out of storage and dusted off. The small communications bulb in his ear! He lifted a finger to the fleshy lobe. The bulb was still there, a little lump in the fat. He pressed it between two fingers, smashed it, activating the chemical broadcasters. Instantly, J-10 would be firing loose of the sands, homing in on the beam. Eight hundred miles at 24,000 miles an hour top speed. That meant it would be there in—he began doing some swift calculations…
    But before he could even decide on a relative arrival time, he heard the roar of the mighty engines, the whine of the air being squeezed out of the way, rent in two like an old, rotten curtain. The retro-rockets fired a hundred miles off, lighting the sky. Then, abruptly, the giant machine .was crashing down a hundred yards ahead, blocking his view of most of the Romaghins.
    The tiny, sonic scope twiddled about, hunting his voice which it had recorded on its memory bank tapes.
    "Behind and to the right," he said. "Kill those soldiers."
    The Jumbo readjusted its position. The Romaghins, thinking at first that it was their own machine sent somehow, miraculously, to aid them, stood and began running toward it, laughing. Most ceased chuckling and guffawing when their first ranks were gunned down with laser cannon. They turned to run. But cannon beams and gas shells tore up the sand and the men indiscriminately. The armored tanker, seeing the gargantuan robot, wheeled about, tried to retreat. It made a dozen yards before the laser cannon melted it into slag.
    The Muties were cheering. Babe had hold of Tohm's neck and was nearly strangling him with one arm while clubbing him with the cast of the other.
    "Yours?" Corgi shouted.
    "Mine!" He turned to Jumbo Ten which sat with all weapons ready. "At ease."
    The humming softened.
    "We'll walk before it to where we meet the Old Man. We keep that Jumbo," Corgi said excitedly. "We may need it before this is all over."
    "Hey!" Mayna shouted, pointing toward a sled that had drifted in low from the gate. There was a single figure on it. Small. As it came closer, Tohm could see that it was the boy with the white eyes, the albino who wasn't an albino.
    Tohm!" Hunk shouted. "Order the Jumbo to-"
    But then there was no Jumbo.
    There was nothing for Tohm for one split second, then:
    A lightningbolt smashed
!
    Another blasted down!
    And yet another!
    And out of the mists of their ozone clouds she came, faceless, moving easily, graceful, slinking…
    But no face
…
    And no name
…
    He concentrated on her face, on what it should be, on what he knew it must look like…
    Green eyes…
    Green, green, greengreengreen…
    Lips bursting with sweetness: a tiny, pink tongue licking little teeth in show of passion…
    Hissing…
    There was a scream that was not part of it. For a moment the dream cleared and he felt himself gaining control of his body again. Then the dream clamped down tighter than ever:
    A
lightningbolt smashed
!
    Another blasted down!
    And yet another!
    Hissing…
    He placed his hands upon her breasts, looked into her faceless face
…
    Another scream. It was very close