One of the ships shot down to hover three feet off the ground ahead of them, and another dropped behind. Sawyer turned to the right. A third ship came down. He turned to the left. A fourth one blocked him. He stopped where he was, too proud to look farther for escape where he knew there was none. Burr and Twist stood with him. All three lifted their rifles and prepared to die.
Price had nothing in his hands. The bright hovering ships mocked him, their noise deafened him, the wind of their air-blasts tore at him with vicious force. He hated them. He had never hated anything so much in his life, not even the enemy he had fought in Korea. He groped among the rubbish around his feet, half-blinded by dust and a red haze that was of his own making.
A very loud metallic voice spoke to them from one of the ships. "Put down your weapons and stand together with your hands high. You will not be harmed." Sawyer laughed. He hunched the rifle to his shoulder and fired. The slug went splat! on the skin of the aerodyne, and dropped.
"Put down your weapons and stand together. We will count six. At that time we will fire. Six. Five. Four."
Sawyer laid his rifle into the dust at his feet and straightened, folding his arms. Twist and Burr did the same. Tears stood in Burr's eyes, tears of outraged anger.
And this was their city, Price thought. My city. Ours.
Men began now to jump out of the hovering aerodynes, Vurna with cropped silvery hair. They wore uniforms of dark green. This was not their city, it was not their world. Price's fingers closed over the end of an iron bar in the rubbish.
He sprang forward, holding the iron bar.
A beam of cold light, hardly visible in the sunshine, flashed out from the nearest ship. Price was running, and then he was not running, he was face down on the ground with the white dust in his hair. The bar spun out of his hand and fell with a faint clatter.