***
Kit knelt in the shadows under the flyer’s fuselage, finishing the job of fastening the kekuah bomb to the laser cannon. She pushed the button on the box at the end of the cylinder and the green light came on. Surprisingly, the Kra numbers immediately began flashing through their countdown to detonation. A jolt of adrenaline rushed through her. She and Chase only had ten minutes to escape with their lives! She was about to move back toward the opening in the stalactite wall when a bedlam of shouts and ripping laser fire replaced the sound of the temple drums. An alarm blared. The guards immediately went on alert and began searching the hangar. One of them spotted Kit in the shadows. Uttering a reptilian hiss, he dashed toward her with his companion following a few paces behind.
Kit got up and sprinted for the rock wall. “Chase!” she shouted. “They’ve seen me.”
By the time she reached the stalactite wall, the Kra were almost upon her. She leaped at the opening and began clawing her way through. Chase grabbed her hand and pulled. But at the same time she felt taloned fingers grasp her ankle and drag her back toward the hangar. There was a fierce tug-of-war between Chase and the Kra with her as the prize, but the two Kra outmatched Chase’s strength and dragged her backward. As she slid back, Chase’s curse of frustration told her he would be no further help. She clutched at every possible handhold in the rock opening, but a stalagmite broke off in her hand and she tumbled onto the hangar floor.
One Kra leaned down to grab her but the broken stalagmite offered one last hope. Using it as a club she caught the creature with a sharp blow to the head. He reeled backward and went down. She got up and dashed behind a thick stalactite column.
A desperate game of cat-and-mouse ensued, in which she dodged between columns with the second Kra in pursuit. She eluded him until the first Kra got up and joined the chase, coming at her from a separate direction. Working together, they managed to corner her against the flowstone wall. She raised her stalagmite club to defend herself.
“Who wants it first?” she shouted bravely.
Chortling with fierce glee, the two Kra closed in slowly with clawed hands raised…
Just then a heavy thud made the wall lurch behind her. She and the Kra froze momentarily. A second, heavier concussion ripped the wall open, sending her and the guards sprawling in separate directions as chunks of flowstone clattered all around them. When a fighting machine stepped through the opening, the Kra assumed it was friendly and cackled a greeting. Before they realized this was no friend, the quahka leveled its laser arm and killed them with two quick shots.
The canopy raised and Chase sat at the controls, grinning. “Well,” he said, “don’t just stand there.”
Kit quickly climbed aboard the fighting machine and threw her arms around Chase. She began covering his face in kisses, but he had no time for formalities. He pushed her unceremoniously into her seat and pointed at the aircraft. “Aren’t we due for an explosion soon?”
“Sooner than you think!” she cried. “The timer’s been running quite a while.”
Chase slammed the canopy down and steered the machine back through the hole in the wall. He floored the foot pedal and the machine sprinted along the tunnel going back the way they had come. Still hampered by inexperience, Chase negotiated the turns more by careening off the walls than by driving. A wrong turn slowed them among unfamiliar tunnels where Kra bearing tintza rifles and other weapons rushed past in all directions. Somehow, Chase eventually reached the final straight stretch leading out of the mountain. A circle of starlit sky was visible ahead.
“Why are you slowing down?” Kit demanded when Chase backed off the throttle.
“Those.” He nodded toward the circle of sky, which wasn’t entirely empty. Silhouetted against the sky glow, two shadowy Kra fighting machines stood at the entrance, facing inward.
“Any bright ideas?” Chase asked. He let up further on the foot pedal and the machine halted twenty feet from freedom. Over the wail of the alarm siren, a loudspeaker from one of the Kra machines projected a string of harshly cackled orders. The guard seemed to be saying, “Halt, who goes there?”
“We haven’t got time for Twenty Questions,” Chase muttered.
Both Kra raised their laser arms and leveled them at Chase’s machine. Then the tunnel floor beneath them rocked from an explosion in the bowels of the mountain. The bomb had detonated.
“What do we do now?” Kit cried.
“This!” Chase yanked the right-hand control and the machine’s laser arm swung up and fired off two shots in quick succession. One Kra machine, hit directly under the fuselage, burst into flames and toppled. But the second quahka was struck a glancing blow that ricocheted off its canopy. Its driver returned fire and hit the laser arm of Chase’s machine. “Uh-oh,” he muttered in dismay as it sparked and dropped uselessly to the side.
Seeing they had no weapon to fight with, the Kra moved its laser arm slowly and deliberately, taking careful aim.
At the crucial instant when the Kra fired, the ground shook violently from a second detonation. The Kra’s shot went wide and Chase let out a maniacal howl. Pushing the foot pedal far forward, he raced his machine straight at the Kra before it could aim its laser for another shot. Simultaneously, the pressure wave from the second, much more powerful explosion struck from behind. The blast was so forceful that their fighter was picked up like a leaf and thrown face-first into the Kra machine. A hurricane-like blast propelled both machines out of the tunnel and cartwheeled them through the air. Kit and Chase were thrown about madly as their quahka hit the ground and tumbled down the mountain slope.
When it finally stopped moving, the quahka lay in a heap at the bottom of the slope with its arms and legs tangled. Kit and Chase climbed out through a split in the canopy and ran a few paces, diving to the ground when the shattered machine exploded in flames behind them.
The Kra machine lay nearby, as badly mangled as their own. The driver lay beside it, crumpled and motionless like his vehicle.
“Look at that!” Chase cried, pointing into the air above them. A mushroom cloud of incandescent orange flame rose above the peak of Sandstone Mountain. The entire mountainside was enveloped in smoke and flame and the ground trembled from the force of more detonations raging below.
“It’s a chain reaction,” Chase suggested, “tearing the guts out of the mountain.”
Kit got to her feet. “I expected fireworks, but not like this.”
The inferno within the mountain cast a red glow onto the bottom of a dark anvil-shaped cloud that towered into the sky, blotting out the stars.
Chase stood, rubbing at a sore spot on his flank. “You all right, Kit?”
She felt herself all over for injuries. “Some bruises and scrapes, but no serious damage. The worst is a banged-up knee.” She tried gingerly putting her weight on the sore leg and it seemed okay.
“Come on then,” said Chase, offering an arm to steady her. “Let’s get moving. It’s a long way back to the house.”
“Hoo-ahh!” Suarez cried, looking through his infrared night scope. The screen amplified the heat rising up from mountain until the triangular peak looked like a volcano.
“Man, that’s what I call sabotage.” He watched the billows surging up into the heavens for a while. Then he spotted two human figures, a man and a woman. He was walking, she was hobbling fast, silhouetted by the infrared light. They skirted his tank on the right, heading in the direction of the ranch house. Moments after they passed, Suarez saw something disturbing. A group of Kra fighting machines emerged from the portals and fanned out across the prairie as if searching for the source of their troubles.
“We’ve still got to lie low,” he said to his crewmates. “It’s like a stove-in hornets’ nest out there.”