fell under a swarm, the knives ran with her blood. I swept the M-3 sub-machine gun from its place on the truck and blasted the little fiends off Kyra. And now Tanil was covered with the leaping things where she stood on the hand truck beside her "damper mech." She beat them down with one hand while she held the other firm on the controls that kept off the blighting blue rays. Tanil kept screaming. "Shoot the priest! shoot Nueces! That will end it!"
AT LAST when I was going down myself, bleeding from a hundred tiny wounds and a score of them leaping upon me, clinging to me, trying to trip me, her words percolated my thinking skull. I turned the scatter-gun on Nueces, across the great chamber. One of the torpedoes got the idea, too, surprisingly, and together we emptied our weapons toward the robed figure crouching behind the shielding bulk of the great old doll-mech. He had to show part of his body to keep his fingers on the controls that activated the little dolls. His face was a contorted mask of effort as he strove madly to get the last ounce of energy into the swarming bodies of the tiny ro-dolls.
One of the slugs nicked Nueces, he staggered back from the mech—which probably saved his lousy life, for the other slugs had found and torn into a great power cable at the base of the giant mech. Weird blue and red lightning flashed upward in a fountain of terrible light-sparks clear to the shadowed ceiling—a volcano of sudden lightning—and Nueces flung up an arm and fled blindly, his face burned and scarlet. His long legs leaped bare and ugly and hairy under the flying skirt of his robes.
The little dolls dropped over, suddenly lifeless around us, a horde of battered little bodies as weirdly lifelike in death as in their pseudo-life.
I picked up Kyra, found her crying and alive, her body scored with a hundred tiny punctures; no way to know if any were serious. Perhaps due to the fact that the dolls were essentially brainless and not calculating, she was unhurt in any vital spot I could see.
Tanil, still upright on the low truck by her mech, was bleeding from scores of little wounds in the legs, but they did not seem to have hurt her in the body. The two big-bodied torpedoes lowered the smoking guns, inserted fresh long clips of .45 A.C.P.'s.
Tanil cried:
"After that long-legged skunk, and kill him. Don't let him get away. He can make more trouble for us yet!"
They both lumbered off, but I could see they would not overtake the high-jumping lean figure of Nueces. Tanil leaped down from the truck, ran like a deer to the great smoking doll-mech and got down on her knees at the source of the smoke column that told me its mighty anique power supply was shorted and arcing down there somewhere.
She rose swiftly to the wall panels, pulled the master switch. The arcing splutter ceased. I had approached. She seized my wrist, placed a kit of electrician's tools in my hand. She pointed at the big shattered cable, composed of many smaller wires, saying fiercely:
"Splice, Kent, splice as fast as you have ever done. Our lives depend on how quickly you get that mech working again. It has a weapon ray hidden in its complexities that Nueces did not know, or we would all be dead. I will see about another ray to trace him so that we can kill him when you fix that cable. He is even now racing toward another ancient ray mech down the unused corridors."
I hunkered down, ripped the cable loose, cut back the lead, and color on color, swiftly replaced the burnt and torn wires in place, twisting them savagely together, taping, replacing, over and over, as fast as I could drive my hands.
Tanil came back, looked, hurried away, her usual self possession was now a very worried woman's face. It would be five minutes yet before I was through. At the other side of the room, weird green lights flickered as Tanil sent power into another black metaled ancient machine. A ray leaped from its myriad incomprehensible coils out and down the corridor. The trail of footprints left by Nueces and the two torpedoes glowed greenly visible. Unused corridor after dusty corridor appeared and disappeared as she sent the ray sweeping after the crazy priest who had nearly killed us all.
As I saw the two women working frantically with the ancient mech, I could not but wonder who were these supposed supporters, the "Hidden Ones," who could
