Still far away across the sloping floor of the great bowl, but rapidly
approaching from its center, moved a dust cloud. Beneath it, the
expiring sunlight glinted on the aluminum shells of at least a score of
the ground machines.
Dworn said grimly, "Might have expected it; they'll be coming to look
over the scene of action and pick up the pieces. We've one chance; keep
out of sight behind this little hill, and maybe they won't investigate
too closely."
Qanya nodded, biting her lip. She could reckon as well as he how much
that chance was worth.
* * * * *
The buzzing motors came nearer. The two cowering in the lee of the
mound, almost without daring to breathe, heard them halt, slow to idling
speed one by one a little way off, where the wrecked spider lay. From
that spot obscure sounds began rising, thuds and gratings and a shrill
hissing noise.
But then--the whine of a single high-speed engine rose again, clear to
their hearing. One of the enemy was approaching around the flank of the
sandhill.
They crouched motionless, frozen. No hope in either flight or fight; on
the open ground, they would be run down in no time, and they had no
weapons--even the notion of a weapon, as something apart from the
fighting machine that carried it, was alien to their thinking.
The enemy vehicle rolled into full view and nosed slowly along the base
of the mound; its motor whining questingly, only a few yards of gentle
slope between it and the huddled pair. Its vision-ports glinted redly in
the sunset glow, and Dworn could almost feel the raking of murderous
eyes from behind them.... Like the other machines of this kind he had
seen it was small and without armor--it couldn't weigh more than a
couple of thousand pounds, and it carried no guns. From the vantage of
his armed and armored beetle, he had regarded its like as flimsy and
harmless-looking.... But now he realized for the first time how helpless
a mere human was against such a thing, and, with an irrepressible
shudder, how easily the grappling and cutting-tools this one was
equipped with might be employed for--dismantling--flesh and blood.
The machine paused momentarily. Then its engine revved up again. It
rolled on past, giving no sign of excitement, and vanished beyond the
hillside.
"Dworn, Dworn, it didn't see us!" Qanya was sobbing with relief.
Dworn was staring after the enemy, brows puzzledly drawn downward. The
sounds from the other side of the mound went on uninterrupted--a clangor
of metal, the prolonged shrilling of a cutting-torch, where evidently
they were at work breaking up the smashed spider-vehicle.
He said huskily, "Something's very queer about them.... Wait. I've _got_
to take a look."
Qanya glanced at him in quick alarm as he started wriggling to the crest
of the sandhill. Then she followed silently, and peered over the top
beside him.
Twilight was descending, but they could still see easily enough what
went on out there. Not a hundred yards away, the little machines swarmed
about the spider, bringing their various wrecking equipment into play to
dismantle it rapidly under the watchers' eyes. Torches flared, winches
tugged at fragments of the shattered monster. An aluminum cylinder with
a serrated alligator snout rolled triumphantly away, bearing aloft the
shank of a great steel leg....
But Dworn's attention was riveted by what was happening closer at hand.
Here, near the tunnel-entrance that opened just below their observation
point, lay the two crawlers which the runaway spider had disabled. One
of these, the one which had merely been overturned and severely dented,
was already being dragged away, wheels still helplessly in the air, by a
towing-machine. The other had been smashed beyond repair. Around it
several of the new arrivals were busy, callously and efficiently
beginning to take it apart.
Dworn watched them at it, and the dreadful suspicion that had budded in
his mind ripened into a monstrous certainty.
Aluminum skin was swiftly stripped away; frame members of the same metal
were clipped neatly asunder by a machine armed with great shearing jaws.
The engine came loose and was hoisted aloft carried dangling away by
another specialized machine. In an incredibly short time, little but a
bare chassis remained, and that too was being attacked by the salvagers.
And Dworn knew at last beyond all doubt, what manner of things these
were.
Beside him he heard a sharp gasp, and turned to put a warning finger on
Qanya's lips. He drew her gently back with him, out of view of the
activities on the farther side of the mound.
"You understand what _that_ means?"
The girl nodded soberly. "We have the tradition. I think that must be
one tradition that all the peoples have in common."
"Then you know what we have to do."
She nodded again.
Between them the word hung unspoken--a word not to be uttered lightly,
so awful was it in its connotations, freighted with memories of a terror
rooted in the youth of the world.
_Drones._
* * * * *
In the beginning--said the stories--there were the ancients, who were
great and powerful beyond the imagining of the latter-day peoples. But
the ancients were divided among themselves, for some of them were good
and some of them were evil.
So they fought one another, with the terrific weapons of devastation
which they owned. And the good triumphed in the end, as it must--though
at terrible cost, for in those wars the earth was stripped almost
lifeless; searing flame, plague, climatic convulsions wiped out the
varied life which once populated the world, and finally there remained
only the peoples of the machine, all of whom--diverse though their ways
of existence had become, and for all that they lived in ceaseless
conflict with each other--were descended from the victors in that primal
struggle of men like gods.
But the evil old ones, though they were vanquished and their seed
utterly annihilated, had nevertheless found a way to perpetuate their
evil upon the earth. For before the last of them died, as a final act of
vindictive atrocity, they created the drones....
Qanya was shivering uncontrollably. She whispered, "No one remembers
when they last came. Some thought there were none left in the world."
"It's the same among my people," Dworn said hushedly. "There's no record
of the drones' having appeared in the time of anyone now living.... But
here they are."
From out of sight came the rattle and clank and whine of machines at
work. And from farther away, from the direction of the great windowless
buildings, there were hootings and throbbing sounds, and from time to
time a deep rumbling that shook the earth.
Those noises were somehow unspeakably horrible now--now that they knew
there was no one there. No one--nothing but the machines, without
feeling or thought, without life, with only the blind meaningless
activity of unliving mechanism set in motion and made self-subsisting a
thousand or two thousand years ago....
With infinite caution the two humans peeked once again over the summit
of the mound. Out there on the flat, the little wingless drones buzzed
to and fro with their false seeming of animation, finishing their work.
From around the great buildings, whose interior no living eyes had ever
looked upon, lights winked oddly blue through the thickening dusk. They
caught glimpses of immense moving machinery, and heard mysterious
sounds. Once and again, it seemed that in the open space before the
structures a great door opened in the earth, and against a blue light
that streamed upward they saw a vast winged shape rise majestically from
underground and roll slowly forward into the shadows to join others
already ranked there.
"What are they doing?"
"I don't know...." Dworn reflected, grasping at memories of the
legends, the traditions he had heard. What he recalled was ominous. "I
think I can guess, though. I think they're getting ready to swarm."
Her stifled exclamation was sign enough that she understood.
If the guess was right, the danger was on the verge of being multiplied
many times over. Soon now, a swarm of queen ships would take to the air
and fly in all directions, sowing the seed of the robot plague broadcast
far and wide; one such colonizing vessel, no doubt, had founded this
great hive only a few months ago. The things worked fast....
And Dworn's duty, and Qanya's, became all the more clear and urgent.
Duty to spread the warning, at whatever risk to themselves. In the face
of that, Dworn's mission of personal blood vengeance became
unimportant--even if it had been possible to take such vengeance upon a
foe with no life to forfeit.
He whispered to Qanya, "The ground machines are about to leave. When
they're gone, we'll have to make a break for it." For some reason, as he
pondered the distance they must cross to reach the Barrier cliffs, he
recalled the strange revolving thing atop the central tower off yonder,
turning constantly with its air of restless searching.... He swallowed
painfully, repeated, "_Have_ to."
The girl nodded silently. Impulsively Dworn put his arm around her; she
pressed close against him. They huddled together like that, finding in
one another's living warmth some measure of encouragement against the
terror of the falling night in which nothing moved but the lifeless
machines.
* * * * *
They watched while the lights glimmered far off across the flats; while
a flight of fighter drones took off from there and howled away into the
dark on some roving patrol; while, at last, the salvaging machines
finished their work and rolled loot-laden away one by one.
More than once while they waited, other columns of the wingless drones
entered or emerged from the tunnel mouth at the base of the mound. The
tempo of activity in the hive was, if anything, increased as night came
on. In the deepening darkness a faint blue glow streamed from the tunnel
mouth.
As the whirring of the last salvager receded, Dworn got cautiously to
his feet. He said between his teeth, "We'd better move fast, now--"
"Wait," said Qanya tensely. "They'll sight us in the open, and then what
chance will we have?"
Dworn tried to make out her expression, but in the darkness her face was
only a white blur. "We've got to try. There's no other way."
"Perhaps there is. What about the tunnel?"
Dworn was brought up short; that idea hadn't occurred to him at all. He
said slowly, "I see what you mean, It's only big enough for one-way
traffic--and the drones evidently have some system of remote control, so
that outbound expeditions aren't using it at the same time as returning
ones...."
"So, if we wait till some of the wingless ones enter from this end, and
hurry through the tunnel close behind them--" Qanya left the sentence
uncompleted. Dworn knew she could imagine as well as he what would
happen if they failed to time it right, and met a drone column coming
from the opposite direction. Still, the sound sense of the girl's ideas
was obvious.
"All right," he said. "We'll try it that way."
It was another nerve-fraying wait until a file of ground machines came
winding near and vanished one after another into the tunnel.
The two watchers gave them a little time--not too much--to get clear of
the entrance. Then Dworn clasped Qanya's hand tightly in his own, and
together they plunged down the sliding slope of the sandhill. The tunnel
mouth yawned in its side, the bore on which it opened slanting steeply
down into the earth, inwardly lit with eery blue light.
Hearts pounding, they raced into the tunnel.
It was an unreal, nightmare flight. The blue shaft curved and descended
endlessly. Endlessly ahead of them echoed the snarling of drone engines.
They ran with lungs near to bursting, through air heavy and foul with
exhaust gases--trying frantically to keep close behind that engine
noise, while it receded inexorably before them. And once and again, amid
the tricky tunnel echoes, Dworn was almost sure that other drones had
entered and were descending the narrow way behind them, and before his
eyes flashed hideous visions of the two of them overtaken and run down,
here where there was scarcely room to turn, let alone fight or hide.
The featureless walls were pressing inward to crush them, swimming
before eyes filmed with exhaustion, in the blue shimmer which no doubt
sufficed for the perceptions of the drones but which hardly served
human vision....
The tunnel was in fact perhaps a thousand yards long.
But it seemed as if they had been staggering for a lifetime through the
nightmare, through the blue glow, and it scarcely seemed real when a
patch of night sky showed through the exit before them, and when they
stumbled panting out into the clean cold air of the mountainside, and
saw the white radiance of moonrise over the Barrier cliffs above them.
They sank down to catch their breath on a rock not far from the tunnel.
They'd made it none too soon--only a minute or two had passed when the
night once more buzzed with motor noise, and a column of foraging drones
rolled up the trail and plunged at full speed into the mouth of the
shaft.
Qanya buried her face against Dworn's shoulder.
"Easy, now," Dworn whispered, patting her with clumsy gentleness. "The
worst's over. We made it ... Qanya, darling, we made it!"
She looked up at him and by the moonlight he saw her smile tremulously.
She said breathlessly, "Would ... would you mind saying that again,
please?"
* * * * *
The moon was already high as they trudged across the rolling desert
beyond the foot of the great landslip.
After the tunnel, the rest of the descent had been relatively easy;
they had followed the trail used by the wingless drones, being forced
off it only once by the passage of a cavalcade of the little
marauders. And they had discovered, to their surprise, that the human
physique--inferior though it might be to machines in ruggedness, speed,
and other respects--was better equipped for traversing rough terrain
than the most ingenious vehicle ever constructed.
But both of them, unaccustomed as they were to walking on their own
feet, were dead weary. They tramped on doggedly, searching the shadows,
hoping to come upon some living machine-creature--of what race, didn't
matter now.
So far they had seen only abundant evidence that the drones were abroad
in force tonight, preparing perhaps for their swarming time. Drones in
the air and on the ground, and once the burnt-out shell of an
unidentifiable machine with a crew of the wingless salvagers worrying
it, and once the light of fires afar off where the winged ones had made
a kill....
Qanya stumbled, and Dworn caught her round the waist as she swayed.
"Tired," she gasped in a little girl's voice, then stiffened her back
with a resolute effort.
"We'd better rest--"
"No," she said shakily; and then abruptly: "_Listen!_"
Not very far away, lost somewhere among the tricky moon-shadows, there
was a stealthy crunching. It was coming nearer.
With instinctive caution the two hugged the pool of shadow beside a
boulder.
"Spiders!" Qanya recognized them first.
They came prowling out of the shadows, crunching rhythmically across an
open moonlit space towards a hollow beyond. One, two, four of them,
moving with furtive caution through the perilous night.
They had to be intercepted, the warning given. But it was a critically
dangerous moment--suspicious and on edge, they might fire at the first
movement they saw.
"Stay here," said Dworn shortly. He thrust Qanya back into the shadows,
and walked steadfastly out into the clear moonlight, in the path of the
walking spider machines.
He raised one hand on high, palm outward in an immemorial gesture that
he could only hope would be seen. He shouted at the top of his voice,
"Stop! Don't shoot! I come in _peace_!"
His heart leaped. The leading spider ground to a halt, and the others
behind it. He saw a dim figure move atop the foremost towering machine;
and before he could speak again, heard the rasping voice of the Spider
Mother herself.
"You! The one who got away--and who seduced one of _us_ from the ways of
her ancestors--? What peace can there be between you and us?"
"I bring," cried Dworn clearly, "warning of the Drone."
There was stunned silence.
Dworn sensed the other spiders watching from the height of their
machines; and he guessed something of what must be going on in the mind
of the fierce old woman staring down at him. She would be wondering if
an alien, a mere beetle, would be so far without honor, so anxious to
save his own skin, as to lie in such a matter.
Then he felt Qanya's hand in his, and heard her cry out, her voice
vibrant and assured: "It is true, Mother! I have seen them too. The
night-fliers, the raiders--they are the evil things our legends tell
of!"
The great machine took two steps forward and knelt low to the ground.
"Come here!" rasped the Spider Mother, and when the two advanced till
she could look into their young faces--"You swear to this?"
"We swear!" they said at the same moment.
The Spider Mother's face was like iron. She looked from one to the other
slowly.
"Then," she said stiffly and formally, leaning over to extend a wrinkled
hand to Dworn, "let there be peace between us ... between me and mine
and you and yours, and among all living peace ... till the evil is no
more!"
Dworn took the hand, and answered, hurriedly recalling ancient custom:
"Till the evil is no more!" And heard Qanya echo the words.
* * * * *
All night the desert was stirring, with a feverish hastening of
messengers. These were at first spiders--then, members of a half dozen,
a dozen other races, as the word was passed from one people to
another--as tribe after tribe of hardbitten, suspicious warriors,
fingers, fidgeting on triggers at the open approach of their hereditary
mortal foes, heard and were electrified by the news--
_The Coming of the Drone!_
And hand gripped hand, all feuds were forgotten, the peoples mingled in
a common effort of hurried mobilization. The desert land below the
cliffs crawled with them, a mixed multitude of constantly increasing
numbers, girding themselves for war.
Ferocious predatory machines--spiders, wheel-bugs, scorpions--formidable
in their armor and bristling with guns, lay alongside the more pacific
slugs and caterpillars and snails which in ordinary times were their
natural prey, and were freely fuelled and provisioned out of the stores
which normally their possessors would have fought to the death to
safeguard against the despoilers....
In the presence of the drones, there were no more natural enmities. For
the drones were the Enemy. Their coming meant that all life was kindred;
deep in the heritage of every people was the almost instinctive
knowledge that, if the drones were not checked as tradition decreed,
their blind automatic propagation would end by sweeping every living
thing from the face of the Earth.
Toward morning, the chiefs of a score of tribes held council of war in
the very shadow of the Barrier. Their consultation was brief; there was
no arguable question of what must be done, only of how. And if the
drones were about to swarm, they must act promptly. No time to wait for
the gathering of more distant peoples; no time to send word to the wasps
or the hornets and gain aerial support. They must strike with what they
had.
* * * * *
Dworn started awake as a hand touched his shoulder. He sat up, angrily
flinging a coverlet from him.
"I didn't intend to sleep!" he muttered, rubbing his eyes and realizing
where he was--below ground in the spiders' colony, whither he and Qanya
had been taken and where he had been persuaded to lie down and rest a
little while the warning was carried by others.
The tall blonde spider, Purri, was grinning maliciously down at him.
"Hear the beetle talk! I suppose, after a day spent in what, for you was
comparative idleness, you felt like doing something really strenuous ...
say going out and demolishing the drones' hive bare handed...?"
Dworn climbed to his feet. With a violent effort he kept from wincing at
the protest of stiffened muscles and yesterday's collection of bruises.
"What's going on out there now? Where's Qanya?"
"There's really nothing more _you_ can do, you know. I merely woke you
because I thought you'd want to hear that your beetle-folk have been
contacted--they'd holed up to lick their wounds about twenty miles south
of here--and have joined the fighting force that's getting ready to
attack the drones at dawn. As for dear little Qanya, she's sleeping
angelically in the next chamber...."
"No, she isn't," said Qanya from the doorway.
"You, too?" said Purri with irritation. "And what do you want,
scapegrace?"
Qanya's black eyes narrowed dangerously. She moved forward to Dworn's
side and took a grip on his arm. "I might ask what you're doing here
disturbing--"
"Both of you, you're wasting time," growled Dworn.
He'd heard with a queer pang that his people--those who remained
alive--had been located. Not that it made any real difference, of
course. His father was dead, and he, Dworn, was dead too as far as his
own kind was concerned. Nor, in this world, was there anywhere else he
could turn.
For the present, under the threat of the Drone, that didn't matter. All
laws of all peoples were in abeyance for the duration of the great
emergency. But once the threat was dissolved, and the old laws resumed
their force, the plight of Dworn and of Qanya also would be what it had
been--that of outcasts in a world where an outcast had no chance of
survival.
Well, it was no use thinking of the future. Dworn said determinedly: "I
want to see the end of this business, at least."
"And I!" declared Qanya. "We've earned that right."
Purri eyed them sourly, shrugged. "As you like. I'm in command here
while the Mother's busy at the front. I'll see you get transportation up
there." Turning toward the door, she glanced sidelong at Dworn....
"You'll have to go separately, since a spider will only carry two. I'm
leaving right away myself; _you_ may come with me in my machine--"
"No, he won't," declared Qanya with finality, tightening her hold on
Dworn's arm. "He can ride with old Zimka."
Purri stalked through the doorway before them, grumbling to herself,
"Why is it the best ones always get away?"
* * * * *
Earlier in the night, climbing spiders--the only machines which could
manage the ascent of the toppled Barrier--had scouted the periphery of
the drones' fortress, and discovered the sole possible approach to it.
At a single spot above the slide, a low ridge made it feasible to
surmount the rim and steal out onto the table-land beyond without coming
in direct view of the enemy's installations.
Once that was known, the council of chiefs decided on a daring strategy.
Up the thousand-foot slope of tumbled rocks below that one vulnerable
point, a fantastic supply line was established. One by one, machines
from among those massing on the desert below toiled upward until wheels
or treads could carry them no further; then they were hoisted bodily
over the precipices by the invaluable spiders, who anchored themselves
firmly in place with the powerful steel cables they ordinarily used for
snaring prey, and used other such cables as pulleys.
Through the remaining hours of darkness the joined forces labored with
Herculean devotion to accomplish the seemingly impossible task. There
were brushes with the enemy, for the wingless drones still came and went
about the mountainside and from time to time their winged kindred flew
overhead. But strict orders had gone out to all the allied
peoples--avoid opening fire, avoid precipitating a general engagement,
and freeze motionless whenever the fliers passed over. This last
instruction rested on the observation that the robot predators, with
whatever sensory devices they used, apparently had difficulty in
spotting anything but a moving target.
In this wise, when dawn began to break, close to three hundred
first-line fighting machines of a dozen different species had been
raised to the summit of the Barrier. Thence they filtered cautiously out
across the plateau, in a great arc moving to enclose the hollow of the
drones.
* * * * *
The sky was lightening when Dworn and Qanya settled themselves to watch
from the crest of the rocky ridge which had shielded the attacking
forces' deployment not far from the brink of the cliffs.
Behind them, the spiders which had brought them here melted stealthily
away toward the east, going to take their places in the battle line.
The two were alone once more, looking out over the vast circular
depression infested by the enemy, just as they had yesterday at sunset.
But today, as the sun rose, the situation was very different. For miles
around the circumference of the great hive, there were furtive
stirrings, last-minute movements of preparation for the imminent
assault. From behind every outcropping and fold of the ground, grim
gun-muzzles pointed inward, ready to begin spitting fire when the zero
second came.
From here the central buildings of the hive were plainly visible,
standing out against the sunrise. Around them moved many of the tireless
worker machines; and the parked aircraft seemed more numerous than they
had been the night before. Among them a score or more of winged shapes
loomed conspicuous for their great size; when you made proper allowance
for the distance, you realized that they were immense.
Those would be the queens--loaded and ready to take flight on their
one-way journey to found new colonies wherever their evil destiny might
lead them. The time of swarming was near.
Dworn scowled darkly, squinting against the light in an effort to judge
the enemy's numbers. He grunted, "I hope ..." and bit his lip.
"What's wrong?" said Qanya tensely.
"Nothing.... Only it would have been well if we'd had time to bring up
more reinforcements. But don't worry--we'll smash them." He was a little
surprised to note that he said "we"--and meant any and all of the
machine-peoples, united now in a common cause.
Dworn was bitterly wishing at this moment that he had had his
beetle-machine again, and had been able to take an active part. As it
was, he didn't even know surely just where in the battle line the
beetles had taken up their position.
A distant explosion, a single gunshot, rolled echoless across the flats.
It was a signal. Even as the shell hit the ground close to the ranked
drone aircraft, motors had begun to pulse and snarl all along the
farflung line. The desert began to spew forth attackers. A motley horde
of metal things, they darted, stalked, and lumbered from their
lurking-places, and as they advanced to the assault the firing commenced
in earnest, became a staccato thunder that blanketed but failed to drown
out the beginning alarm-wail of a huge mechanical voice from the
fortress of the drones.
The enemy was not slow to react. Almost as the first rain of projectiles
smashed down among them, jet engines began howling into life, and some
of the fighter craft rocked into motion, wheeling out onto the runways.
The encircling attackers well knew the peril of letting any of those
pilotless killers get into the air. Shellfire was being concentrated on
the airstrips, striving to block them, plow them up with craters.
* * * * *
A fighter drone came roaring out one of the runaways gathering speed and
beginning to lift. Dworn followed it with his eyes, feeling sweat spring
out on his forehead, repeating under his breath without conscious
awareness of what he was saying: "Stop him, _stop_ him--"
Then the enemy craft spun round in the air, belching smoke, came apart
and spilled along the runway for a hundred yards. A second, coming close
behind it, plowed into the wreckage of its comrade, rolled over and over
and became a furiously burning pyre. That strip was blocked.
All round the central hive smoke and flame were rising in innumerable
places, from the paved ways and from the open desert. On another
launching strip, just visible through the mounting inferno, one of the
big queen-craft had sought to take to the air, and had been knocked out
by heavy shellfire. Now its upended and blazing hulk tilted slowly over
and collapsed burying beneath it several of the little wingless workers.
In all the confusion these still scurried hither and yon, oblivious to
the bombardment, laboring frantically but futilely to clear away the
debris. Their efforts were useless, while the rain of explosives from
the tightening ring of assault forces continued adding to the ruin and
disorder within the hive....
Dworn sprang to his feet for a better view. He hugged Qanya to him till
she gasped for breath, shouted in her ear over the thunder of the
barrage, "_We've got them!_"
Close to the ridge where they stood a line of many-wheeled monsters
rolled past--scorpions, moving along the battle front and, whenever the
thickening smoke up ahead revealed a target, halting to wheel round and
discharge their heavy-caliber tail guns.
Dworn had never liked scorpions, but he watched these with heartfelt
approval.
Then he stared, bewilderedly aware that something had gone wrong. The
big machines had turned and begun heading toward the ridge, clattering
along at their top speed and no longer pausing to fire.
Within moments, Dworn perceived that all the other attackers were doing
likewise; everywhere on the blazing battlefield, they had ceased their
advance and were scattering to seek cover.
Only then, as the firing slackened, did he realize that the sky had
begun to echo with a spiteful screaming of flying things. Against the
brightening daylight hurtled some two dozen dark winged shapes ...
fighter drones.
Dworn realized they must have been out on patrol, and summoned back by
the drones' mysterious means of communication to defend the threatened
hive. Now the flight was splitting into groups of two or three, diving
to attack at one point and another and flitting away again so swiftly
that human reflexes could scarcely act to train a gun.
Dworn glimpsed Qanya's horrified face beside him, and the girl threw her
weight against him and dragged him down among the sheltering rocks.
Overhead, from out of the sun, shot three of the winged drones. They
passed over before the shrieking of their flight could reach the ears,
and Dworn caught a glimpse of bombs tumbling earthward. Thunder crashed
as the scorpions hugging the ridge threw up a vicious defensive barrage,
and was drowned out as the bombs landed all around. The rocks heaved,
and dust and splinters showered down from above.
Only a dozen yards away, a scorpion came rumbling up across the crest,
its many wheels jolting over the rocks, and halted there, its tail gun
weaving angrily as it sought vainly for targets in the sky. Along one of
its gray-painted sides was a long bright gash where something had barely
glanced from its armor. And Dworn saw, too, the black outline of a
mythological arachnid on its observation turret, which signified that
the machine belonged to a scorpion chief.
* * * * *
Scarcely knowing what he intended, he shook off Qanya's panic grip and
plunged recklessly toward the big machine. As he scrambled over the
rugged hilltop, he saw fleetingly what went on in the arena of
battle--the allied peoples were being driven back, forced to concentrate
their fire power on beating off aerial onslaughts. Meantime, the
wingless drones about their beleaguered citadel worked feverishly to
clear the way for their fighters that still remained undamaged on the
ground.... Within minutes, unless something happened to turn the tide,
there would be enough flying drones aloft to break the attack and
inflict terrible losses.
Dworn found himself alongside the scorpion, just as its tail gun fired
once more. The muzzle blast almost knocked him down, but he clawed his
way up the side of the machine and began hammering on the observation
turret hatch-cover.
"You in there!" he shouted. "Listen to me--"
The hatch cracked open and a grizzled head peered out, blinking at him
with bewilderment and an automatic fierce suspicion. But at a time like
this anything human was an ally.
"What's the idea?" demanded the scorpion.
The racket of gunfire and of jets made speech almost impossible. But
Dworn pointed out across the sink, shouted: "Fire on the buildings--the
central tower! They're controlled from somewhere--"
Luckily the scorpion leader--if that was who he was--was a man of quick
understanding. He nodded vigorously and dropped out of sight again into
the interior of his vehicle, bawling something to its driver. Dworn
dropped off the machine's side as it lurched abruptly into motion. He
watched, hardly breathing, as it slid to a halt at the bottom of the
hill beside another of its tribe, and with shouts and gestures the word
was passed on.
Inside a minute, all the nearby scorpions had begun banging away at the
structures some three miles distant. The heavy scorpion guns were quite
capable of carrying that far, and their shells had enough punch to do
much damage to the buildings or to the central tower which still loomed
occasionally visible through the drifting smoke....
But it was only a hope, perhaps even a forlorn hope. Dworn was fairly
confident of his guess that the drones possessed some sort of central
communication and control system--but it would take a lucky hit to
disable that nerve center in time.
Qanya stumbled to his side. She cried something he couldn't hear over
the continuous firing, tugged at him and pointed skyward with terror in
her eyes.
The flying drones aloft had suddenly abandoned their scattered strafing
attacks. With deadly machine-precision they wheeled into a single
formation once more, and the whole flight came diving straight at the
scorpion battery's position.
Dworn stood rigid, fists clenched at his sides, watching them scream
nearer.
He ignored Qanya's pleading with him to take cover. No point to
that--the drones' full force would blast the whole ridge to rubble and
blanket it with their liquid flame.
At least, the enemy's reaction proved his inspiration correct. He
noticed with fierce satisfaction that the scorpions were still doggedly
firing....
The foremost drone came on, slanting down the sky until the gaping
rocket-ports were plainly visible along its swept-back wings. But those
sports still spat no flame. And it came on. It cleared the hilltop by no
more than fifty feet, still diving faster than the speed of sound. It
hit the desert slope beyond and ricocheted like a great projectile,
bursting apart into fiery fragments that strewed themselves for a
thousand yards across the rolling plateau.
* * * * *
Dworn picked himself up from among the rocks where he had been flung by
the shock-wave of its near passage, and was knocked sprawling again by
the earthquake impact of a second drone that thundered headlong into the
earth a few hundred feet away, burying itself under a crater like that
of a huge bomb.
He glimpsed a third craft going down to the west of them, just missing
the rim of the Barrier cliffs and plunging out of sight without a sign
of coming out of its dive.
Those which remained in the air were flying aimlessly. Two of them
passed over side by side, gradually converging until, a couple of miles
away, they locked wings and went spinning down toward the horizon in a
deadly embrace.
On the ground, a like confusion had befallen the wingless workers. Their
scurrying suddenly lost all its busy, planned efficiency. Some buzzed
round and round in drunken circles; others ran head-on into one another,
or tumbled into shell-holes to lie futilely spinning their wheels.
A hush descended on the field of battle. After the fury of bombardment
and counterattack, the relative silence was deafening.
Dworn got to his feet for the second time and helped Qanya up; he
grinned exultantly at her, oblivious of a trickle of blood running down
his face where a rock-splinter had hit.
The scorpion lying nearest the foot of the slope opened its hatch-cover.
A man climbed out, clasped hands together over his head and stamped on
the gray monster's back in an awkward impromptu victory-dance. Cheers
rang faintly from far off down the silenced firing-line.
Then--the spell of premature triumph was rudely shattered.
From the direction of the breached and smoking buildings, there rose yet
again the soughing roar of jet engines gathering speed. Onto the runway
to the west--the only one which the workers had managed to clear before
their central control was knocked out--came waddling an enormous winged
thing.
Its multiple engines screamed up to a frenzied pitch, and it rolled out
along the strip at increasing velocity. Its huge wheels narrowly missed
a dead fighter slewed across the way. Its tail went up.
Naturally, the queen ships wouldn't be dependent on the nerve-center of
the hive that had spawned them; for each of them carried within itself
the full-grown robot brain, the nucleus of a new hive....
Shooting began again raggedly, the gunners caught unawares. Perhaps the
great machine was hit--but to stop it would take more than one or two
hits.
It reached and passed the end of the runway, its wheels barely clearing
the ground as the paved strip ended. Black smoke belched from its
engines as it spent fuel lavishly, fighting heavy-laden for altitude. It
rocked with the concussion of shells bursting all around it, and then it
was soaring out over the Barrier, dipping and rolling perilously in the
downdrafts beyond the cliffs. But it steadied and flew on, out of range
of the guns, rising and dwindling until it was a speck, a mote vanishing
into the western sky....
But no more queens escaped that day. The cannonade resumed with
redoubled fury, and the guns did not fall silent until nothing was left
to stir amid the gutted and blazing wreckage that had been the citadel
of the drones.
* * * * *
Morning wind blew over the plateau, clearing away the reek of battle,
bringing air that was cool and clear as it must have been in the
morning of the world.
In that breeze like the breath of a new creation, it somehow seemed not
at all strange to Dworn that he should be walking in the open under a
daylight sky, among a multitude of excited strangers, men and women of
all races, who mixed and exchanged greetings, laughed, shouted, slapped
one another on the back ... then, perhaps, drew away for a moment with
eyes of wonder at their own boldness....
Nor did it seem strange that Dworn strolled round the smoldering drone
fortress hand in hand with a girl of the spider (who was by that token
his hereditary foe,) and that he turned and kissed this enemy on the
mouth, and she returned the kiss.
They stood with arms around one another, on the edge of the jubilant
crowd, and looked out across the vast litter of smoking wreckage where
scarcely a shell-holed wall stood upright now, from which the Enemy
would no longer come to threaten the life of the Earth.
"One got away," said Qanya soberly.
"Yes. Somewhere it will all be to do over again." Dworn glanced toward
the empty west, whither the queen flier had disappeared--where, perhaps,
by now it would have crash-landed two or three hundred miles away, to
spew forth its cargo of pygmy workers and (if the inhabitants or the
area where it descended didn't discover and scotch it in time) to
construct more workers, fighters, a hive no less formidable than the one
that had perished today.
Dworn said, brow thoughtfully furrowed: "But maybe there's a good
reason, even for the drones. Maybe they serve a purpose...." He
faltered, unable to phrase the idea that had come to him--a thought that
was not only unaccustomed but downright heretical. According to
tradition the drones were the spawn of ancient evil and themselves
wholly evil--but, Dworn was thinking, perhaps their existence produced
good if, once in a generation or in ten generations, they came to remind
the warring peoples that fundamentally all life was one in its eonlong
conflict with no-life.
But he sensed, too, that that idea would take a long, long time to be
worked out, to be communicated, to bear fruit....
Qanya's hand pressed his, and she said softly, "I think I know what you
mean."
On one impulse they turned their backs to the ruins and gazed out across
the throng of people, milling happily about, rejoicing, among the grim
war-machines that stood open and abandoned on every hand. Near by, a
crew of pill-bugs had tapped containers of the special beverage they
brewed for their own use, and were inviting all passers-by to pause and
drink.
"Your people are here somewhere," said Qanya. Her eyes on Dworn were
troubled. "Over there to the south, I think I saw some beetles parked.
Do you want to visit them?"