***
Despite resolving to die bravely, Ogilvey found himself cringing under Oogon’s cold gaze. Trying vainly to wriggle his belly away from the jaws of impending death but held tightly in place by the attendant priests, he had no choice but to look up into Oogon’s baleful eyes. There was no escaping the fact that this demonically feathered monster would, in another moment, mete out a horrible death. He racked his brain for something to say, something in Kra-naga that would make the High Priest change his plans. But for once words failed David Ogilvey, both English and Kra-naga. His mind blanked with terror.
Oogon’s incantation seemed to go on interminably as the drumbeat swelled and the Kra horde chanted insistently. The High Priest delighted in orating about hoonahs being God-given food for the Kra. Meanwhile the miasma of smoke from the urns made Ogilvey dizzy and nauseous. At last Oogon pronounced the climactic incantation, “Jalah Eng-Kan!”
“Tooveet Eng-Kan!” the massed Kra voices replied.
Oogon raised his hands to the stone god, issued a ferocious cry and—
The drumming stopped.
Ogilvey’s heart pounded crazily. The awful moment of his death had arrived. But a commotion arose among the Kra at the far end of the chamber. Oogon turned his head and Ogilvey followed the High Priest’s gaze. A quahka had entered through a dark portal and raised its canopy. In the cockpit sat—
“Gar!” Ogilvey cried in disbelief.
Gar uttered a bold challenge. “Nesooka, Oogon-hoo! Toto neko han.”
Ogilvey silently translated. “Stop, Lord Oogon! Release my friend.”
But how could Gar possibly hope to succeed?
“Saurgon-hoo deesotoh,” Gar continued in powerful tones. “Lord Saurgon is dead. How else could the beam cease its work? And now your vote and mine are equal. As High Priest of Life, I say you must stop the killing. The hoonahs shall live.”
“Kreeteegah!” Oogon cried in a rage. “Never shall it be so! The hoonahs will die!” Swiftly, he ducked behind the altar and came up with a tintza rifle. He fired a shot that narrowly missed Gar’s head and chipped a shard of rock from a pillar behind him. Gar replied with a shot from his quahka’s laser that missed Oogon but hit one of the attendant priests. The other attendant and the guards scattered. Gar fired another shot, but Oogon was moving too quickly to make a good target. He leaped away from the altar as other Kra began firing tintza rifles at Gar. Caught in a quickly intensifying firefight, Gar closed his canopy but kept firing his laser. One Kra fell and then another in a bedlam of shrieking, roaring, and laser fire. Shots glanced off the machine from all quarters but none hit a weak point. Meanwhile, Gar’s cool and precise shots accounted well. In seconds, four Kra sprawled lifeless on the floor and the remainder scattered into shadowy doorways and niches around the temple. Those who had rifles fired sporadically and drew return shots from Gar.
Ogilvey suddenly found himself free, with one sub-priest dead and the other shooting at Gar from behind the altar. He tumbled onto the floor and his hand contacted, of all things, a tintza rifle dropped by the dead attendant. He quickly gathered the heavy contraption from the floor and did his best to level it at the second sub-priest. He pulled the trigger and a bolt of white-hot light ripped through the Kra’s breast armor and went out the other side. Letting out a short, shocked cry, the creature keeled over and was dead by the time it hit the floor.
Bolstered by success, Ogilvey stood and glanced around the room. Gar was under fire from all sides and sooner or later a shot would find a weak spot in his machine’s armor. Something else was obvious to the professor as well. Although the Kra were concealed from Gar, they were quite exposed from where he stood.
“Okay David,” he muttered to himself, “you can play peacemaker tomorrow.” He rested the heavy tintza rifle on the altar, singled out a Kra shooting at Gar from behind a pillar, aimed the weapon at him and squeezed the trigger. The creature fell dead with a hole blasted through its heart.
“Hah!” the professor exulted, taking aim at another Kra crouching behind an urn. “Like ducks in a pond.” He fired and the Kra fell with its head blown open. “This is against all my paleontological instincts,” he mumbled, choosing another Kra firing from a niche and pulling the trigger. “Destroying fine specimens. An irony of classic proportions,” he babbled as the creature toppled. “A paleontologist killing off dinosaurs rather than studying them!”
Then a thought struck him. Where was Oogon?
The High Priest had vanished from the altar but Ogilvey didn’t need to look far for him. He crouched behind the lower jaw of the stone idol, firing a tintza rifle again and again at Gar, the red feathers of his headdress dancing madly around his demonic face.
Reacting quickly, Ogilvey fired a shot that went over Oogon’s head and shattered one of the idol’s stone teeth. Oogon, seeing that he was out-flanked, turned and ran into the darkness beneath the idol’s chin. Ogilvey took another hasty shot but the chink of shattering stone told him he had missed his mark. The High Priest disappeared down a hidden passageway.
Not so, the other Kra. Ogilvey picked out another and shot it. Caught between his fire and Gar’s, more Kra fell. Finally, the survivors retreated through whatever exits they could find, leaving the temple empty except for Gar, Ogilvey, the soldiers, and a dozen dead or dying Kra.
Gar moved his machine to the soldiers’ cage and blasted the lock off the gate. The men cheered, burst out and scattered around the room picking up weapons of the fallen Kra. Now they had a chance. Ogilvey hurried to the fighting machine and Gar raised the canopy, cackling, “Good shoot, Ogil-vee.”
“Ih-hee-hee!” geezed the paleontologist. “I am a terror with a laser rifle, aren’t I?”
Gar turned his head, listening to a noisy clatter in one of the larger tunnels, heralding the approach of another quahka. He pointed to the rear of his cockpit and cawed, “Ogil-vee get in.”
The paleontologist climbed up the machine’s leg as swiftly as his short round body could manage and settled in behind Gar, who shouted to the soldiers, “Hoonahs! Follow us!” The soldiers gathered around the quahka, covering their retreat with captured Kra weapons as Gar steered the machine out the doorway through which he had entered the temple.