Through the Reality Warp by Donald J. Pfeil

Author:Donald J. Pfeil [Pfeil, Donald J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction
Publisher: Ballantine
Published: 2012-04-06T09:42:37+00:00

V

Billiard lay on the shelf of rock in front of the cave. From it, if the weather ever cleared, he would have a commanding view of the plain he and Santha had crossed the night before, and of the narrow belt of jungle separating the plain from the cliffs and the steep, rocky approach to their hideout.

Santha had barely made it to the foot of the escarpment before collapsing. After resting for a half-hour, Billiard had tied her to his back and begun the one-hundred-foot climb to a shelf he had spotted from the plain. The climb, a hand-over-hand crawl up seventy-five degree slopes and along occasional almost-vertical faces, had taxed him to the utmost. He had wondered constantly if his arms would hold out. They had. Now he waited on the shelf for the enemy with Santha unconscious in the cave behind him.

Billiard knew they were near. He had spotted a patrol out on the plain moving toward him before a drizzling rain moved in, masking the plain from sight. Later, he had heard the drone of a heavy transport floater; then he knew that he had more than just a patrol to deal with. Most likely there was a full company at least down on the plain now, and they knew exactly where he was. Before long they would be coming up to get him.

He lay on the rock, gathering strength for what was ahead, waiting with his weapons piled around him. Near his right arm were some field rations and a canteen of water, his last. He was wide awake and strangely peaceful. He and Santha had fought their way through some of the most impossible terrain on Thopt; he had taken on a Vwrung’n in hand-to-hand combat and had come out on top; and he and his gunner-lieutenant had made it halfway to the Goromi enclave. All for naught.

They had almost made it, he thought bitterly—running and hiding and fighting and running some more—when a simple line of rocks, so small they didn’t even show on the orbital map, had stopped them. Given climbing equipment and a couple of days’ grace, they might have made it across that line of cliffs. But they did not have the equipment, and the enemy was not about to give them a rest period to regain their strength. But from this shelf of rock to which Billiard had brought the two of them, he was going to make the Redhats and Lorian troops pay dearly for their victory. Victory not only over Santha and himself, but a victory over Earth—a planet they had never heard of—and, ultimately, a victory that would ensure their own destruction as well as the destruction of two universes that would soon begin tearing each other apart.

One of the ways Billiard planned to make them pay dearly was with another series of mines. After carrying Santha up the cliff to the cave, he had climbed back down again to retrieve the weapons he had left at the jungle’s edge.

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