Anxiously CB looked for Tomoko. They shouldn’t have gotten separated, but when that lizard spotted him he’d reacted as quickly as he could. He could not see her anywhere . . . what if they’d gunned her down? Tanks were exploding all around them as the papinium-fixing bacteria multiplied, sweeping through the blue metal and making it seethe as it dissolved, ripping great cavities in the walls and floors . . . suddenly he collided with Tomoko.
He put his arms around her. “Thank God, I thought you were totally history,” he said. “Where’s Matt? He’s with you, right?”
“I don’t know where he is!” she cried hysterically.
A lizard tumbled between them as they stood there, flailing around hideously as he died. “Grab his blaster!” he said.
She did so.
“A few of them must have antidote,” he said. A dozen or so of the aliens seemed completely unaffected by the exposure to the outside atmosphere and were marching around, methodically firing at whoever looked like he might fight back. “Watch out!” he screamed. One of them was aiming directly at where they stood and—
Tomoko fired. Blue light spurted. The alien toppled and died. The crowd stormed over his body. They were tearing him apart, rending the air with shrill cries of vengeance. “Medea and Dingwall . . . where are they?” CB said.
A laser blast speared the air. They ducked. CB fell flat on his back and saw the ceiling and— “Oh, Jesus . . . they’re up there . . . and Medea and Dingwall are almost on them now!” he screamed.
They got up. Tomoko fired covering shots. “How do you get up there?” she said.
“How should 1 know? Look—there’s Ambassador Andrescu—going into the part of the mall that was supposed to be still under construction? He looks real intent, you know? I bet he knows something. Let’s go!”
They ran from the chaos. CB had a terrible feeling about it all. Even though they were creaming the aliens with Setsuko’s new discovery, how could they reach Matt in time? He glanced overhead. The network of catwalks hung like a spiderweb over the entire mall. “We’ll never make it,” he thought. “We’ll never catch up with them.” Tears sprang to his eyes. He tried to blink them away as he ran, but they spurted down now, almost blinding him.
“Don’t give up,” Tomoko was saying, “think of your love for them . .
They sprinted now. Andrescu was disappearing into a doorway in an unfinished facade. They followed him. They ran as if possessed, heedless of the crowd’s screams of anger and bewilderment and the shrieks of dying men and aliens.
Chapter 26
Sir John Augustine managed to make it to the dais the two commanding lizards had just vacated. He crawled around, chasing the dropped microphone. Thank God it was still live! Sighing, and affecting his most diplomatic demeanor, he began to address the rampaging throng.
“Now look here,” he said, “let’s be civilized, shall we? It looks as though we’ve actually succeeded in stemming an invasion. There’s no need for any more vindictive slaughter, eh? Let’s get ourselves together in an orderly fashion now . .
He looked around him. His words were having surprisingly little effect. Nevertheless, a few here and there stopped to listen, and soon the word was spreading through the ranks. People were cheering, embracing each other. Someone was breaking down the window of a liquor store. Sir John started to say something, but the man shouted, “It’s all right, I’m the owner! It’s all on me tonight!” Whooping, the crowd surged past him. Sir John sighed, thinking of the old days when Virginia still
had stringent liquor control laws; of course, with the partitioning of America, such niceties had gone by the wayside.
I’ve done enough now! he thought with satisfaction. He turned to look for his old friend Andrescu, but saw him nowhere. What was going on? What was the old fellow up to?
Probably getting drunk somewhere, he thought. And he left the microphone to join in what was turning into quite a celebration.
“Wait for us!” Tomoko shouted as the old man moved doggedly up the steep steps of the stairwell.
Andrescu saw them, but did not stop. They ran up to him. He moved with surprising speed for a man so old. He was holding a sharpened stake in one hand and a mallet in the other.
“You’ll get killed,” Tomoko said.
“What is wrong with that?” the ambassador grunted. “My whole family was killed once
They got to the top of the stair and started to move gingerly out over the catwalk.
Ahead, Tomoko could see that Medea and Dingwall had already reached Matt and the blue ninja, that the ninja had drawn his sword, flashing in the gloom. “No!” Tomoko screamed. Medea, blaster drawn, was caught off guard. She whirled round and fired, missing Tomoko by a hair’s breadth.
“Keep low,” CB whispered. “Matt can take care of himself for a few moments. Then we’ll give them a surprise.”
Tomoko trembled. She was dizzy. She looked down; the crowd swirled as the doll-sized people rushed in all directions and the smoke from seething papinium tanks tendriled about them . . . I’m falling! she thought, her mind reeling from vertigo. She clutched the railing. The metal webbing of the catwalk floor clanged as she stumbled forward. “It’s okay,” CB said. “Just inch your way slowly, until you get used to it.”
Ambassador Andrescu moved implacably towards the two lizards, who were squaring off with the blue ninja and Matt.
Suddenly the blue ninja slumped forward, uttering a sharp cry. “Hold on!” Matt said. “Are you hit?”
“It’s nothing ... the red dust ... go on without me . . . .”
Medea and Dingwall were advancing now, a constant stream of blue light bursting from their blasters. The ninja’s suit—it was shimmering. The metal bound into its fabric was dissolving as the rapidly multiplying bacteria reached the upper levels of the shopping mall!
“No . . . antidote . . .” said the blue ninja. “Take . . . my sword . . . .” He fell against the railings.
“Crawl to higher ground!” Matt whispered harshly. He pointed to the opening in the ceiling which led presumably to the secret skyport.
Then he seized the sword from his old friend’s outstretched hand and whipped around just in time to deflect a killing ray and send it slicing through the dark air. Ahead, he could see CB, Tomoko, and Andrescu approaching. The blue ninja, weakening, had worked his way over to the short flight of steps that led up into the skyport, but had collapsed against the metal bars.
Medea laughed. “I have you now, Matt Jones!” she squealed. “You’ve been such a nuisance to us. But not for long.” She fired at him.
He leaped up. The blast tore a piece of skin from his leg. He tried not to feel the pain. CB reached them at that moment and tackled Medea, sending her sprawling. Matt landed on top of her. Her face was ripped by the impact and he could see the green scales beneath, glistening with foul rheum. She roared and staggered up. He spun around in time to kick Dingwall, who elbowed him out of the way and made for the skyport entrance.
Medea pushed him against the railings, laughing demoniacally. He pushed back. Tomoko stood by with her blaster upraised. She couldn’t shoot. He could see she was scared of killing him by mistake.
“Just shoot!” he grated. “Better to kill us both than not to get her!”
She just stood there. CB grabbed the blaster out of her hands, ran forward and bashed Medea on the head. Snarling in surprise, she released Matt. They were all clustered around the skyport entrance now, and the blue ninja was gasping, choking, clutching at his throat—
CB had Dingwall at laser-point, backing him against the railings!
“Let me at him!” the ambassador said, brandishing the stake. He leaped on Dingwall and with one stroke of the mallet pounded it into the lizard’s heart. Dingwall screamed and flailed, his arm smashing into Andrescu’s face and sending him sprawling onto the railings. Dark, foul-smelling lizard blood spurted.
Medea twisted away and ran up the steps, and he followed, and she was just reaching the airlock of t
he skyfighter—
“Let her go, Matt!” CB shouted from the entrance. “Dingwall’s dead, the invasion’s over, let’s go home—”
Something flew out of Medea’s uniform and rolled onto the floor of the skyport.
An ampoule of antidote!
And the blue ninja was dying, the alien who had saved Matt’s life so many times. He had to get the antitoxin. He had to save him. As CB screamed for him to stop, Matt lurched forward and threw his body over the ampoule. A blinding laser blast . . . there was so much pain he couldn’t even comprehend it, so much pain, so much pain ... a roar and a crash as the skyfighter took off.
CB ran to Matt. “Don’t die, don’t die, Matt.. . you’re my best friend ... I love you, Matt.”
Matt could hardly feel anything anymore. With a supreme effort he rolled over and held up the antitoxin in his hand.
“Give it to him,” he whispered.
He couldn’t breathe very well, the blast must have torn into his ribs, there must be a piece of rib sticking in his lung. Tomoko was there now, kneeling beside him.
He said, “Do you remember? How the alien swordmaster died for us? But he never died. That day we practiced the ritual of Zon together, I saw
him in your heart. Be happy, Tomoko ... my gift to you ... a new love.”
Tomoko couldn’t speak. She took the ampoule from him, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“Don’t cry . . . it’s a victory . . .- isn’t it?”
“Yes. Yes.” She was sobbing bitterly.
CB said, “You can’t leave me . . . you can’t leave me, Dad.”
“Take care ... of your . . . mother, kid . . . .”
CB said, “I already lost one Mom and Dad. Before. Things were only just starting to be cool again. But now I’ll never be okay again, never, never.”
Tomoko kissed Matt very gently on the lips. Tears moistened the edge of his mouth. She whispered his name very gently. He said, “I know you love him. I saw it in your mind. It’s good, it’s how it should be. I’m happy.”
She looked at CB; she saw in his face a strange blend of grief and anger. She thought, How can the boy ever understand? He thinks he’s been betrayed for the second time now. . . every time he finds someone to love, that person is killed at the hands of the lizards.
She reached out to touch the boy. He flinched, and in his face she saw that he was trying to suppress a terrible fury.
But Matt said, “Don’t be angry, kid.”
And died.
Andrescu had come up to the skyport now. Gently he pried the ampoule away. “Or else he’ll die,” he whispered. And he took it down to the alien whom Tomoko had loved, the alien who had
once been Fieh Chan, the pitiless commander of the Far Eastern Sector of the alien empire; who had become Kenzo Sugihara, the gentle swordmaster, tireless in his battle for justice . . . who now had no name at all, and who lay dying.
She had been unable to choose between the two before. Of course she had loved Matt, but the alien had awakened in her new and more turbulent emotions. Now, once more, the choice had been made for her. And this time there was no turning back.
She hugged the corpse hard to her. It was still warm, but soon the chill of death would seep into the flesh.
CB said, his voice cold and unreachable, “He died for something good.”
They went down the stairs.
She looked out over the railing onto the scene beneath: the tanks melted into blue puddles, the people jubilant. Andrescu was waving and pointing. And then the diamond on which the orchestra had been playing tore asunder and yielded up more people. They wore chains. They clambered out of the labyrinth, hundreds upon hundreds, gaping at unaccustomed brightness. Emaciated people with whip-scars on their backs. Children who had been enslaved or kept in the pens for food. There was more rejoicing. Here and there someone was recognized and made much of.
“The bacteria must be eating their way all the way to the end of the tunnels,” she said.
They were joined by Setsuko and Dr. Schwabauer.
“It is the most wonderful thing!” Schwabauer was saying. “New life—a fresh start for the captives—the opening of the new mall was, after all, an event of vital importance.”
Setsuko said, “The bacteria are multiplying exponentially! In a matter of minutes, they will have fixed all the papinium in the tunnels, and then, for lack of sustenance, they will die out. The world will have been purged of a terrible curse.”
“Matt must be delighted,” Schwabauer said.
There was a dead silence.
The professor looked from one to the other. When he saw CB’s face, he understood what had happened.
Tomoko said, “The main reason Matt wanted to get out of the lizard-controlled world was the kid. I mean, he wanted him to have a normal life, not to have to live in fear anymore, to go to school regular times like normal kids. But for me ... I want to get out there and fight them. I want to learn ninjitsu. I’m not going to stand around in the background anymore.”
That was her great plan, to go off somewhere with Fieh Chan-Sugihara: to fulfill some wondrous fantasy of fighting evil. But she knew Matt wouldn’t have wanted the kid to do that.
It was Andrescu who proposed a solution. “Perhaps he could stay with me? I am a cranky old man, but to have a child would perhaps make me feel young again.”
CB said nothing.
“In time you will heal, boy,” said the ambassador.
They stood for a long time on the catwalk, not quite participating in the triumph, because Matt’s death weighed heavily on them all.
But at last CB spoke. “The kids that are climbing out of the labyrinth now . . . they’re the ones that Dingwall had in his dungeon. Look, they made it out.”
Tomoko looked down. There they were: children, limbless some of them, struggling as they helped each other climb out of the pit. Even from this distance Tomoko could see that joy was in their faces. Though some could barely walk, they were singing.
“They’re free!” CB shouted. “They’re free . . . like I promised them! I promised them they’d be set free and they have been . . . and we did it!”
You will heal, Tomoko thought. And she opened her arms wide to embrace the boy. We will all be healed.
She wasn’t afraid of the future anymore.
Chapter 27
The skyfighter threaded the dark night, its floodbeams sweeping over the Virginia landscape, lush, verdant, uninhabited, over the Blue Ridge Mountains, south toward no-man’s land and the empire of the Earth’s saurian conquerors.
Medea sat grimly at the controls. Now and then she could see a snake of seething Earth below, as though gigantic moles were burrowing through the Earth. Insufferable! The papinium tunnels must be dissolving everywhere; the entire network that had been so painstakingly built by the labor of thousands of human slaves, gone by a single stroke of biological warfare!
The thought of moles awakened her hunger once more. But she couldn’t stop to feed now. No. Not until she cleared the red-dust infested area completely. For her antitoxin was running low, and the precious spare ampoule had been lost in the scuffle at the shopping mall.
Diana appeared on the monitor screen. She was not pleased.
“Diana, I—”
“No more excuses, Medea! You didn’t even bother to report your failure to me. I was alerted by the failure of the papinium labyrinth’s computer system, which registered on our Mother Ship’s main computer. You little weasel! You rat!” Diana screamed, calling her by the names of some of her favorite foods. She winced at the thought of Diana’s fanged, venom-dripping teeth sinking into her neck. Cannibalism was not beyond that woman! Diana went on for a while, excoriating her.
Medea was sickened by her failure. There’d be a courtmartial for sure. Maybe they’d send her back planetside. Maybe they’d even execute her!
Dingwall had been lucky. He had died swiftly enough at the hand of that deranged human. Staked through the heart, indeed! How primit
ive! Medea hated these Earthlings, with their outlandish customs and their absurd, suicidal resistance to the Visitors’ will. And the fact that they could, on occasion, actually defeat the conquerors from Sirius . . . shameful!
She watched Diana rail for a while.
At length she said, “I’m tired of all this!”
She shut off the monitor.
It was a gesture of futile defiance. When she returned she would doubtless be called in for a trial. . . and she had ruined her chances of rising to the rank of supreme commander.
A little more defiance wouldn’t make any difference to her fate.
Sighing, Medea watched the landscape speeding beneath; her thoughts turned to revenge against the resistance fighters who had thwarted her plans so grievously . . . and finally to feeding her bloated paunch.
EPILOGUE
THE RETURN OF THE
SWORDMASTER
In the mountains: many months later
Snowfall: the treetops blanketed, the ground soft and white. It was Christmas.
Two beings sat around a fire: an alien and a human, a male and a female. They wore the pelts of animals. They warmed their hands.
The alien said, “We must go on with the training, Tomoko.”
Tomoko smiled, protested. “What? While the snow is falling? On Christmas Day?”
“Time is short.”
Tomoko complained for a few more moments. It was a game that the two of them played often. They had often been lonely, camping in the open, living off the land; but they had both agreed that they must seem to have disappeared from the face of the Earth. At least, until she finished her training.
Today he didn’t hand her the bamboo stave with which she had been practicing. Instead he gave her a sword.
“I’ve never seen this sword,” she said, wonder-
ing, feeling the metal and seeing it sparkle against the snow.
“I have been working in the village on it,” he said, “secretly. It is my gift to you. And now—”
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