A whistle shrilled and those Copreons who could still move were away at a run to throw themselves behind the barrier of the horseshoe console spread. The guard commander had lost half his men and reckoned he needed more instructions. Laser flares seared briefly from behind the generator cowlings. Two Copreons, who had been coming up at a jog trot in its wake, found that it was bearing down on them and scattered. The truck was poised on its inside wheels and Helena Russell leaned out as a counterweight. The medical trolley, bouncing on the fork arms, went solo, following the logic of mechanical laws, with its bottle flailing like a bolas. Without slackening speed, Sandra heaved over the driving bar for a tight turn and the truck tried to spin in its own length.

Once the message was processed by her overstrained computer, action was instantaneous and almost fatal. Helena Russell was shouting, with no regard for refined usage, ‘It’s them! They blasted a way in. Helena’s voice in her ear was so much gobbledygook, until a highly emotive name tripped a relay and it all made a kind of sense. She had been aiming to run down the guard before he could fire and, being directly in line, she knew that he was aiming at the power pack and not at her vulnerable chest. She had only registered the diversion in the rear as some kind of bonus. Teeth clenched and dark eyes enormous, Sandra was out of communication, on a one-to-one link with her control gear and self-hypnotised to get the clumsy truck up the ramp and out. Helena Russell was thumping the driver’s arm. Koenig was sitting cross-legged, swearing in a monotone and shoving a pad inside his jacket. Then he was on his knees beside the Alphan commander. A thump like a mule kick hit the Alphan high in the left shoulder and spun him round.Īlan Carter, who had followed Koenig to the same cover, raked the Copreon from navel to throat and saw him reel off the edge, a bisected man. A guard who had run up the ramp to the hoist platform, saw the move and fired from the hip. Koenig waited a fraction overlong to see him fall. The Copreon pitched down face forward, fingers tightening on the trigger of his carbine for a long continuous burst that loosed a swarm of ricochets round the set. Standing up and using his left hand to steady his right wrist, he fired half the length of the cavern, aiming for the centre of the target. From where he was he could see the exit, where a guard was taking aim down the aisle at the oncoming truck. Koenig threw himself behind the cowling of a generator and took stock. Ricochets from the rock face notched up the noise level.

Android Planet by John Rankine