Flat on his belly amid this rubble that once had been a mighty city, the blue warrior let his head sink forward onto his arms. He closed his eyes, and weariness welled up in him, a dull, relentlessly-rising tide.
Pain throbbed along his whole left side, and blood still dripped from his numb left hand. Silently—absently, almost—he touched the shoulder-plate of his armor, probing the perforations and the wound.
Then a sound of spilling gravel came through the darkness. He looked up sharply.
A dozen yards to one side, one of the great scarlet beetles was clambering atop a heap of crumbling stone. Its wing-sheaths scraped harshly—a rasping, off-key note.
Kyla leaned close. Her words came, a fearful whisper, barely loud enough to hear: "Lift your helmet, blue man! Listen to the things the coleopteron tells—but carefully, lest its mind control should seize you...."
Cautiously, Haral tilted back his battered copronium headpiece. It had rendered strange service in its day, that scarred old helm; but none stranger than this. For by some weird clash between its metal and certain electrocephalic wave-pulsations, it guarded his brain from the probing beetle minds, just as Kyla's bucket-like Ulnese heaume—designed for the purpose—guarded hers.
Now, as Haral lifted the helmet, thought-vibrations washed in on him in throbbing waves: "Man-things, man-things! Find the man-things! Kill the man-things! Kill, kill, kill!"
A new vibration slashed through, fiercely urgent: "Blood! Blood! Here! They came this way!"
"Kill! Kill! Kill!"
Already the coleoptera were surging forward. Antennae outthrust like lance-points, Q-rays probing, they combed the murky waste—each rise, each hollow. Their feet slithered through the rubble with sounds like the writhings of Venus' great snake-things in dry leaves. The acrid stink of their hate crept on the breeze in biting tendrils.