e dust cloud cleared a little and the searchlights looked down on the
scene; no longer brilliantly white but shining through the red-black
lance tree ink as a blood red glow. A searchlight turret slid shut and
opened a moment later, the light wiped clean. The longbows immediately
transformed it into a red glow.

The beam of one of the turret blasters stabbed down, to blaze a trail of
death through the battle. It ceased as its own light revealed to the
Gern commander that the Ragnarok forces were so intermixed with the Gern
forces that he was killing more Gerns than Ragnarok men.

By then the fighting was so hand to hand that knives were better than
crossbows. The Gerns fell like harvested corn; too slow and awkward to
use their bayonets against the faster Ragnarok men and killing as many
of one another as men when they tried to use their blasters and flame
guns. From the rear there came the command of a Gern officer, shouted
high and thin above the sound of battle:

"Back to the ship--leave the natives for the ship's blasters to kill!"

The unicorns arrived then, to cut off their retreat.

They came twenty from the east and twenty from the west in a thunder of
hooves, squealing and screaming in their blood lust, with prowlers a
black wave going before them. They struck the Gerns; the prowlers
slashing lanes through them while the unicorns charged behind, trampling
them, ripping into them with their horns and smashing them down with
their hooves as they vented the pent up rage of their years of
confinement. On the back of each was a rider whose long spear flicked
and stabbed into the throats and bellies of Gerns.

The retreat was halted and transformed into milling confusion. He led
his own groups in the final charge, the prearranged wedge attack, and
they split the Gern force in two.

The ship was suddenly just beyond them.

He gave the last command to Lake and Craig: "_Now_--into the ship!"

He scooped up a blaster from beside a fallen Gern and ran toward it. A
Gern officer was already in the airlock, his face pale and strained as
he looked back and his hand on the closing switch. He shot him and ran
up the ramp as the officer's body rolled down it.

Unicorn hooves pounded behind him and twenty of them swept past, their
riders leaping from their backs to the ramp. Twenty men and fifteen
prowlers charged up the ramp as a warning siren shrieked somewhere
inside the ship. At the same time the airlocks, operated