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kept climbing, feeling like a fly on a wall. He was eight meters off the ground now, and he didn't dare look down.
Had they seen him? Were they following? Keep climbing, damn it!
The bulge of die skirt armor rounded off, then curved in. He could climb faster now, without feeling like he was clinging to the bottom of a cliffside overhang. The sheer scale of the Bolo was daunting; his eyes kept telling him it was an unusually smooth mountain, ather than a very large vehicle.
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Lightning crackled below and behind him. He didn't see the bolt or where it hit, but he tasted the bite of ozone. He kept scrambling up the Bolo's side, a climb that seemed to go on forever, though the hole he was moving toward was only about twenty meters off the ground. Once he was clear of the skirt and track housing, the armored side sloped sharply inward, and the climbing became a lot easier.
The climbing rungs, unfortunately, missed the hole by fifteen meters. Shari and Alita were already moving toward it, hugging the slope of the armor as they edged crabwise across the sleek, black expanse.
There were hand- and footholds, thank God. The upper works of the Bolo were caked with hardened mud and clumps of dirt as hard, nearly, as rock. He wondered how so much earth could have landed this far up on the Bolo's surface but decided that this wasn't the time or the place for solving puzzles. As he left the ladder rungs and began inching his way across the rough, slanted surface of the Bolo's armor, he hazarded a glance back down the way he'd come.
They were coming up the rungs after him, six of them at least, floating erect in the air, but propelling themselves upward rung by rung by using their tentacles or, in one grisly case, jointed, metallic arms sporting freshly harvested human hands. Rolling onto
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his side, bracing himself against two convenient footholds of suns-baked earth, Jaime pulled the power gun from his waistband, took aim at the lead !*!*! floater, and fired.
His target was a patch of alien metal on the machine's side that had softened to extrude one of its tentacles. The beam flared blue-white, clawing. Another flicker, sharper this time, ran down the beam, and this time Jaime heard an urgent, thin beeping as the weapon warned of imminent power failure. There was a flash and the base end of the tentacle exploded in gobbets of silvery molten metal. Keeping the firing button depressed, he swung the beam to a second tentacle, then a third. The machine was frantically trying to grow yet another tentacle when its grip failed and it started to fall . . . slowly, to be sure, but falling nonetheless with the momentum of a half-ton vertical pillar of near-solid metal. It struck the machine climbing just below it, ripping tentacles free, and then both !*!*! machines were falling, tumbling wildly now as they avalanched into the other alien floaters further down the rungs.
Jaime didn't wait to watch the crash. In every direction, he could see other !"!*! machines converging on Overlook Hill, and some of those were fliers, not floaters, great, dragonfly-shaped monsters bristling with sensors and weapons, hovering on shrieking jet blasts. Rolling over facedown once more, he scrambled sideways across the sloping, dirt-caked armor.
The crater yawned like the entrance to a cavern, its edges smooth, like water-worn stone rather than jagged as Jaime had half expected. Alita had already ducked into the gaping hole, vanishing into the cool blackness inside. Shari was crouched at the caverns mouth, hesitating.
"Let's go, Alice," Jaime said. "Down the rabbit hole!"
"W-whatr
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"We've got bad guys coming. Get inside!"
She nodded, but she looked scared and seemed unwilling to let go of her grip on the craters rim.
With a banshee shriek, one of the insect-visaged fliers howled low across the hilltop, angling directly toward the two tiny humans crouched on the side of the Bolo mountain.
"Move!" Jaime screamed, grabbing Shari by the back of her neck and pushing as hard as he could, knocking her head-first into the yawning maw. Violet-white light glared across the armor surface like the rising of a new sun. A line of explosions flashed and seared across the armor as the flier loosed a rapid-fire energy weapon of some land. Jaime plunged into the hole after Shari just as the flier shrieked overhead in a whirlwind of heat-vented jet exhausts.
