They clambered up the ladder to the open port and slammed the lock behind them.
At the controls, Gary reached out for the warming knob, found that it was already turned on. The tubes, the indicator said, were warm.
He gunned the ship into the sky, centering the cross hairs on the wheel that shimmered above them.
They hit it head-on and the black closed in around them and then there was light again and the city of the Engineers was below them… a blasted city, its proud towers gone, great heaps of rubble in its streets, a cloud of stone-dust, ground in the mills of atomic bombing, hanging over it.
Gary glanced over his shoulder, triumphant at their return, and saw the tears that welled in Caroline's eyes and trickled down her cheeks.
"The poor thing," she said. "That poor old man back there.”
Chapter Sixteen
The city of the Engineers lay in ruins, but above it, fighting desperately, battling valiantly to hold off the hordes of Hellhounds, the tiny remnant of the Engineer battle fleet still stood between it and complete destruction.
The proud towers were blasted into dust and the roadways and parks were sifted with the white cloud of destruction, the powdered masonry smashed and pulverized to drifting fragments by the disintegrator rays and the atomic bombs. Twisted bits of wreckage littered the chaotic wastes of shattered stone — wreckage of Engineer and Hellhound ships that had met in the shock of battle and plunged in flaming ruin.
Gary glanced skyward anxiously. "I hope they can hold them off," he said, "long enough for the energy to build up.”