"Huh? I thought you were friends with them."
She shook her head sadly.
"Only a few now. The rest have grown to hate us. Come on."
They had covered several more miles when they were stopped. Susan's faint gasp sent Nick's hand automatically to his holster and he looked up to see three Martians emerging from a side tunnel just ahead.
He stared. They were the first living Martians he had seen at really close range, and the bodies of those hunted down by the patrols had always been as crumpled and collapsed as spiders caught in the flame of a blowtorch.
They were slightly taller than humans, with great glowing eyes in their bulging heads and thin, many-fingered arms that reached almost to the knee joints of their stubby legs. Their noses were almost flat and their mouths too small, and their heads were topped by erect crests of skinlike material. Two of them were a dull greenish color, but the third, evidently the leader, had a marked bluish tinge to his face. All three wore shapeless brown clothing.
The three made no threatening move at first, but training and the habit of self-preservation were still strong in Nick. He raised his gun.
Before he could fire something uncoiled itself from the shoulders of the leading Martian and flapped down the tunnel like an ugly, distorted bat. It knocked him off balance as it struck his head and shoulders and clung there, heavy and warm and alive. Numbness raced through his body wherever it touched. His muscles refused to respond when he tried to squeeze the trigger and his struggles only brought part of the thing around his throat in a powerful, strangling grip.
Susan called out something in the same language she had used to the cajora and took the pistol from his helpless fingers. But to his dismay she did not raise it.