The sergeant-squire forgot his worries. One finger stabbed at a button on the dash, and an automatic sender began to shout its “Red Alert” along a microbeam. A gyro-mounted blaster rose smoothly from his housing. And the squire, bracing himself against the hard sway of the car, collapsed the half-screen in front of him and started to hurl bolt upon bolt of blue-white flame into the misty sky above the village.
Three slim, black, delta-winged spacecraft whirled there in a light circle. A fourth, slipping and fish-tailing, rode its flaming under-jets down to the village green. Smoke trails of tracer and of guided missiles wove a lacy net of death across the sky; eyes accustomed to the cool morning light, of the dim forest trails were dazzled by the sudden hot brilliance of energy beams; ears which had heard nothing louder than a bird’s startled cry were assaulted by a shrieking, chattering din. And already, on the outskirts of the village, a gayly painted house had crumpled into crazy shards.
“Raiders!” groaned Duke Harald. “And the local baron is away! They’ll have only hand weapons in the village.”
Not that those were to be despised. Weight for weight they were more potent than anything the aliens had to offer, depending as they did on bombs and rockets and other packaged high explosive. But still, hand blasters against spacecraft!
“One away!” yelled the squire suddenly, without looking up from his compensating gunsight. The beams of the handguns, reinforced now by heavier fire from the scout car’s weapon, had met in fortuitous but deadly focus. And at that point of meeting there blossomed an expanding ball of flame—above it a black shape, driving a hasty and erratic course for outer space.
“He’ll not be back!” said Duke Harald, blasting the scout car down the last slope and into the final turn in a screaming power skid.
And then, ahead—too near by several score of feet—a free-ball bomb sheered the corner from the closest red-roofed house, skipped to the road before its fuse let go, and exploded in a cloud of flame and dust and flying debris. The sergeant-squire screamed once, wordlessly. Moving with deceptive slowness, a jagged rocky missile crushed his gun and made a bloody ruin of his face. He sagged limply in his safety harness. Duke Harald cursed, pumped his brakes and fought to keep his vehicle under control. Too late! Lurching, whipsawing, the car plunged broadside into the swirling cloud of dust. It bounced once, and then a second time on broken paving stone—and flipped over on its back.
(At this point, Duke Harald almost backed away from the memory. And the eidetic images began to fade. Sternly he fought them back again.)
Long minutes later, he remembered, he had dragged himself from beneath the shattered car. Dragged out his squire’s body too, useless gesture though that act was. The crater which had wrecked them had also, oddly, spared his life. For the scout car had alighted squarely within it, bridging the narrow bottom of the cone. And into that small space he dropped, when shaking fingers and dazed intelligence at last found strength and wit to release his safety belt.
Then, leaning against crumpled metal, breathing shallowly as knife-edge pain stabbed through his chest, Duke Harald squinted along the barrel of his handgun and poured useless flame and futile hatred after the black ships, departing now as swiftly as they had come.