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"That hole leads back up to the gorge," he said.
"So?" Brigid inquired anxiously.
' 'Even if we managed to get up there without being eaten, we'd still have
those damn things on our trail."
"Unless," Grant declared, "we get them off our trail and get out of here at
the same time." From the pouch on his EVA suit, he removed one of the
de-molition disks.
"My thoughts exactly," Kane said approvingly.
Brigid looked toward the lights again. They were no longer so distant and had
resolved themselves into several bobbing balls of yellow-white luminescence.
They were obviously attached to helmets, and she counted at least ten of them.
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Grant placed the disk in a narrow gouge that ran like a fault line across the
breadth of the ledge. "I don't know if there's a timing sequence after the
but-ton is pushed. I don't know if it works at all."
"What do you suggest?" Brigid asked.
Grant gestured to the deeply fissured wall. "You two go first. I'll keep the
droids back. Once you're up there, I'll make the climb and you can keep those
damn hounds from snacking on my ass. When I get to the top, I'll shoot the
detonator."
Neither Brigid nor Kane felt inclined to question his confidence about making
such a difficult shot. The man's marksmanship was uncanny, as they both had
reason to know.
"A sound plan," said Brigid.
"Not quite as crazy as I'd like," Kane commented with a wry grin, "but it'll
dp."
Without hesitation, Brigid began clambering up the rock face, her gloved
fingers seizing handholds.
Aided by the lighter gravity, she literally swarmed up the stone wall.
Slinging his subgun over his back, Kane climbed after her. Some of the
handholds were mere cracks in the porous stone, but he wedged his fingers in
and pulled himself along, the top of his helmet only inches from the soles of
Brigid's boots. Encumbered by his helmet, he couldn't turn his head to see if
the car-
nobots were making an attempt to scale the ledge af-ter them. He guessed not,
since Grant's respiration hadn't changed. Still, he asked, "Anything going
on?"
"The droids are just sitting there, watching you," Grant replied flatly.
"They're not moving." He paused and a moment later said, "Something I can't
say about that patrol. They see us, too. They're spreading out.
Maybe you two ought to speed up your progress."
Kane straightened swiftly, planting the top of his helmet firmly against
Brigid's backside. She started to voice a protest but he said sharply, ' 'Just
go in the direction I'm pushing, Baptiste."
"Where have I heard that before?" she muttered, but she did as he said.
Working in tandem, the two people heaved and scrabbled their way upward. The
pressure on top of
Kane's helmet disappeared, and he dragged himself over the rough edges of the
opening. He glanced quickly around at their surroundings, seeing the walls of
the gorge rising steeply on either side, then he hitched around. Panting, he
lay on his stomach, peer-ing through the hole back into the cavern.
Grant was backing slowly toward the rock wall, his attention fixed on the
figures flitting like shifting shadows through the gloom. "Come on," Kane
urged.
Wheeling, Grant suddenly kicked himself up from the shelf of rock and began
scaling the wall with al-most frantic haste. As if his movement had been a
signal, a carnobot lunged up from the cavern floor, pulling itself atop the
ledge. Kane squeezed off a shot with his Copperhead, the round striking the
mecha-
file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%2...er%2000%20-%20Devil%20in%20the%20
Moon.html (117 of 127) [12/28/2004 3:52:10 PM]
James Axler - Outlanders - Devil in the Moon noid with a flare of sparks. The
creature kept coming. Another droid appeared.
"Hurry!" Brigid cried, panic thick in her voice.
Grant snarled wordlessly, twisting so he faced the cavern. He held onto the
wall with one hand while he pointed the subgun down at the demolition disk.
"No!" Kane shouted. "You're too close!"
He threw the upper half of his body into the hole, groping for Grant's hand
just as the man fired a single shot. The demolition charge erupted in a flash
of or-ange flame and white smoke. Although he heard noth-ing, the concussion
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shoved Kane backward out of the opening and against Brigid. Ugly black cracks
spread out in a spiderweb pattern around the cleft. Then the entire cliff face
appeared to be in motion, collapsing in on itself.
Brigid and Kane kicked themselves backward as a seething avalanche of rock
slabs and lunar dust cas-caded down the steep face of the gorge wall. Their
surroundings gave a convulsive lurch like a ship's deck during a gale at sea.
Kane heard Grant's sharp, startled shout. It was drowned by the crunching,
grinding and groaning of rock, and a low rumbling from the sublunar depths.
Then he was pitched head-long to the gorge floor and the ground heaved beneath
them. He heard the rasp of panic in Brigid's respira-tion as she tried to
clutch a spike of rock. She strug-gled to her feet, only to be hurled down
again.
As Kane reached for her, his ears rang with the clangor of rock striking his
helmet. A huge slab of stone crashed down from above, and from beneath it
spread a pattern of cracks in the gallery floor. A broad black fissure opened,
and desperately, like mountain climbers on a crumbling precipice, they tried
to hold their balance. In silent horror they watched the fissure widening and
spreading out, and then the ground col-lapsed beneath their feet. Kane heard
Brigid's cry and he felt himself falling.
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