In a moment Thorn emerged head first into the place where the five citadel drains converged into one big tube. Water was rushing down here, flowing down through three of the pipes that drained courts open to the raging storm.
"This is the drain that leads up to the space-ship court!” he cried, scrambling into the right-hand pipe.
As he crawled at the head of his comrades up this different pipe, icy floods of water from above smashed unceasingly into his face. The drain was almost full of down rushing water. Blinded, gasping, he fought upward through the tube until he glimpsed the grating above, outlined against terrific red lightning flares.
Thorn drew his gun and fired up at the grating through the rushing water. The whizzing flare of bursting atom-shells above was almost drowned by another appalling burst of scarlet lightning, accompanied by a tremendous shock of thunder.
He pushed on upward through the streaming water. His hands found the bars of this grating, loose where their ends had been exposed by burning away of the cement. With a convulsive effort, Thorn pushed the bars upward and scrambled up into the court.
The full fury of the tremendous Saturnian storm beat upon him in this open court. Rattling showers of big hailstones crackled like musketry, torrents of icy rain smashing down upon him from the black sky. Gunner and Sual Av were scrambling up out of the drain to his side.
Blinding red. lightning arced across the heavens in awful, burning splendor, and showed Thorn two small space-cruisers parked near the center of the court. It also showed him that a troop of guards was running hastily out from the other side of the court.
"They've guessed we'd make for these ships. Come on before they cut us off!” he yelled hoarsely to his comrades.
They plunged forward. The crimson lightning died, and in the succeeding thick blackness, the whole citadel rocked wildly about them to the deafening shock of thunder.
The Planeteers collided with a wet metal wall in the darkness. The side of one of the ships! Then another fizzing flare of fiery lightning showed Thorn the ship door, a few feet away.