Land Beyond the Map

But Crane, backed off against the far wall, riveted his eyes on the lone Loti, sitting his chair, immobile and silent in his tomb of crystal.

“Look closely, Crane. For you gaze upon the arch-traitor in person — that is Trangor!”

Without thought the rifle jerked in Crane’s hands. How many rounds he fired with that feather-touch trigger jammed solidly back he didn’t know. But light and smoke and the fury of ripping explosions thundered over the crystal screen. When at last he let his finger slacken, and let his breath out in a great sigh of defeat, the crystal wall stood firm and unmarked and flinging back its shards of reflected light.

“Mere force of that nature will never break down the shield Trangor left around his body.”

Varnat moved his chair and skimmed away. The last Crane heard of him, he was whispering: “Trangor must return here for his body, Crane. That is why I brought you here. Now… everything rests on your shoulders….”

The thought of putting a shell into McArdle’s hide sustained Crane in that eerie pit in the other earth beneath a tottering pile of masonry threatened by a man driven mad with dreams of avarice and power beyond the wildest schemes of all the dictators of earth rolled into one. The earth shook and more black earth sifted from widening cracks. Crane pushed back against the wall and leveled the rifle. When McArdle and his tanks and digging machines broke through he’d be met by a blast of his own death — destruction spitting from a weapon he’d fashioned himself. Crane liked the thought of that.

A hundred feet away the wall bulged outwards. It looked exactly like a house of cards toppling to destruction. With a roar that echoed in ear-punishing clangor up the corridor the wall splashed across the floor — and a vermilion body rolled through.

The tank had been fitted with a bulldozer shovel and immediately it began clearing a way through the piled wall debris. Crane blasted it into a heap of mangled wreckage.

The junk began to move, to jerk forward, slewing as a ruptured jag of hull caught against debris. A glimpse of vermilion metal showed behind as the second tank pushed its shattered brother out of the way. Crane blasted that one, too.

More sections of wall fell. More Wardens, hastily fitted for underground boring, waddled through. Crane fired with snap precision. He tried to clobber the tanks in the openings so they would hinder those behind. Smoke roiled in the close confines of the corridor. Heat built up so that he sweated, his face a shining mask, his chest beneath the shredded shirt shining slickly.

The noise and confusion of the battle dinned confusingly in the corridor. A sense of occasion swept over him, a realization that he fought what might be the great and decisive battle for two worlds, and had his temperament been different he might have sung an exultant battle song, there in the smoke and fire of conflict. There was no doubt he took glee in the fight. His regret lay in the unpalatable fact that McArdle was sending his tanks to fight for him and there seemed no chance of centering that dark sardonic face in the telescopic sights and blasting it to shredded destruction as he had promised.

Tanks broke through from the tunnel’s opposite end, behind him, and he had to whirl and fire two ways, taking it in turns, clearing his ground as tanks broke and buckled beneath the fearful ferocity of the rifle’s blast. Slowly, working to a pattern, the breakthroughs closed in on him. He was pressed back until he found a niche, little more than an eroded slit beneath the far wall, directly opposite the crystal-walled tomb of the empty husk that was Trangor’s body.

A flailing-armed clanking monster bore down on the piles of wreckage, flinging smashed tanks left and right. Crane sighted briefly and expertly on the tank’s vermilion hide and pressed the trigger.

The rifle did not fire.

He pressed again, harder, fiercely, willing the rifle to spit its orange tongue of death. Nothing happened.

He could never have fired through five thousand rounds.

But then, he had only McArdle’s word as to that — and a voice boomed from the shadows beyond burning tanks, magnified, distorted: but recognizable. McArdle’s voice, gloating in the moment of victory.

“You fool, Crane! Did you think I would let you loose even when doomed to capture by the Loti with a fully charged weapon? Numbskull! Your time is come… Now you die!”

A clanking monster closed on him. He scrabbled up, the rifle held by the muzzle slashing out in a rending blow that caromed from the monster’s shielding arm. A grapnel-claw seized him, thrust him back and down. Writhing like an insect on a pin he fell below the tank, jammed between tracks and the wall.

Through bloated eyes he saw a chink of light under the tank’s tracks, saw McArdle’s feet and legs walking cockily down through the sprawled mass of wreckage. McArdle was anxious, eager. He ran straight towards that crystal wall.