She gave him a fleeting, wide-eyed look. The mound's low swell could
furnish no shelter for the towering spider, and the tunnel mouth was of
course much too small to enter. But she veered without slackening speed
in the direction indicated.
Dworn abandoned the useless guns. The mound, with a gleaming line of
crawlers still parading out of it, swept closer; and at the same time
the desert echoed back the screaming onrush of the two new attackers.
Dworn wrenched open the cabin door with one hand. His other arm circled
Qanya's waist, dragged her away from the controls. She cried in
uncomprehending shock as he swung her before him into the open doorway.
They swayed there, high above the speeding ground, wind whipping at them
as the spider pounded blindly on.
The mound loomed immediately at hand. Dworn prayed that he had judged
the moment right, and with a mighty leap launched both of them out into
space.
A pistoning steel leg barely missed them. Even as they fell, the air was
torn by explosions as the swooping fliers opened fire.
* * * * *
Dworn hit the ground with almost stunning force. His hold on the girl
was broken and he was rolled helplessly over and over by his own
momentum. But he fetched up on hands and knees, bruised and breathless
but unhurt.
From the corner of his eye he saw Qanya sitting up dizzily, half-buried
in the drifted sand that had broken their fall. Apparently she too was
uninjured, but she was staring in horrified fascination after her
runaway machine.
The spider careened onward, no hand at its controls. It hit the line of
crawling little machines coming from underground; it knocked one
spinning end over end, and stepped squarely on another, stamping it
flat. It recovered its balance amazingly, and loped on, even though one
leg was buckling beneath it--
Then it was hit dead-on by what must have been at least a hundred-pound
high explosive rocket.
The winged killers shot low overhead with an exultant whoop of jets,
peeling off to right and left of the column of smoke that rose and
towered where the spider had been struck. Out of the cloud, metal
fragments soared glinting upward and arced back to earth, and on the
ground, amid smoke and dust, a metal limb was briefly visible, flexing
convulsively and growing still.
Dworn heard a smothered sound beside him. A tear rolled down Qanya's
smudged cheek, and Dworn thought fuzzily, _Even spiders can cry_.
_Only_, he corrected, _she's not a spider any more she's now just a
ghost like me_.
If he hadn't been a ghost already, if he hadn't lost his own
machine--the idea of jumping clear and saving both their human lives
while letting the spider be destroyed would never have occurred to him.
He came to himself, hissed, "Down! Keep low and maybe they'll overlook
us!"
They huddled together on the slope of the sandhill, while the victorious
flying enemy circled round in a miles-wide sweep and began descending
toward their base again, wing-flaps braking them for landing.
And on the ground meanwhile, the crawlers which had come from the tunnel
were proceeding on their way, leaving two of their number behind with
strange indifference to their own casualties.
"What'll we do?" quavered Qanya.
Dworn had time to take stock of the situation. The tunnel-mound was, as
he had seen before, the only cover--and that a poor one--for a
considerable distance. It was all of a quarter mile to the edge beyond
which the cliffs fell away.
He tried to sound hopeful--whether for Qanya's sake or to keep up his
own courage, he could hardly have said. "I think we'll have to stay
here, and hope we're not noticed, until it gets dark. Then, maybe--"