It’s funny how time passes when you’re under pressure. It felt like I had spent hours playing that game of firing and ducking, but my internal timer reported that we’d been exchanging fire for only three minutes, from the moment we burst into the docking module with guns blazing to the point when the villains were certain that they still had the upper hand and decided to force the situation.
My Colossaur was the first to make a run for it. With an impressive roar, he abandoned his fortress and headed straight at me in tremendous bounds. Imagine a two-ton rhinoceros leaping like a kangaroo. You’d never have expected such agility from his enormous bulk; he must have been buzzed on some exotic class of combat drug. Makrow was quite a fan of such concoctions.
I stole another glance at Vasily and Makrow. The Cetian lowlife must have made the same decision: he had also moved out into the open while firing his guns, which he kept pointed well away from Vasily. But unlike the Colossaur, he moved at his own majestic, leisurely pace, not troubling to run or jump. My friend El Afortunado was doing the same. They both ignored the continual rain of fire each hurled at the other. They looked like a pair of mythical warriors or antagonistic deities confronting one another in a ritual challenge. I saw that they were so focused on the duel, there was no reason for me to expect any danger to come from their direction—or any help, either.
So it was just me and Mama Reptile’s supersized son, all alone together.
While he was still bounding toward me, I tried to take advantage of my momentary cover to sharpen my aim. Now that my adversary was out in the open, I should (theoretically) have a better chance of hitting him and, if not knocking him down, at least slowing his charge.
But have you ever tried to hit an enraged rhinoceros that’s racing toward you? One that’s sentient, war-loving, drugged up the scaly wazoo, leaping like a kangaroo, and firing a portable cannon?
Anyway, I don’t think I did too bad. I got him once in a leg and once in a shoulder. But it was like trying to stop a charging tyrannosaurus with a .22.
I could’ve shot off one of his legs and he wouldn’t have noticed. Who knows what sort of drug cocktail Makrow had stuffed into him? As if that weren’t bad enough, Colossaur endocrine systems seem to be purposely designed to make them battle to the death. When they fight, their lymph becomes so saturated with endorphins that there have been cases where they have continued rushing forward with enough momentum to crush their enemy’s skull between their three-fingered hands even after their own heads have been shot clean off. This case was no exception. The scratches I put on him didn’t even throw him off his aim. Quite the contrary, in fact. Or maybe it was Makrow’s superior Gaussical powers finally spilling over, even as he concentrated on defeating Vasily.
The weirdest thing was that even while leaping, the elephantine reptiloid had such good aim that he hit me. With that minicannon of his, the logical result was that the blast tore off my entire right arm, almost from the shoulder. Normally this wouldn’t have been anything serious—we pozzies don’t feel anything you could properly call pain, and of course there was no risk of bleeding out—but wouldn’t you know it, that was the hand I had been using to hold my maser.
I watched my weapon sail through the air, still gripped tight by one of my favorite appendages, and found myself disarmed in every sense of the word while my express train of an enemy continued roaring and waving his armored arms and running me down, too close now to need to fire a second shot.
Gulp.
Blessed be the imperfect rationality with which the aliens endowed us. Knowing quite well by a simple comparison of our body masses that I’d already lost our one-on-one before it began, and even being well aware that I’d never be able to grab my maser with my left before being trampled like a daisy under a herd of mammoths, I still insisted on bending down to pick it up.
Had Vasily’s powers given me a nudge, or was it merely the absurdity of my action that saved me? The fact is, this time I was the one who caught him by surprise. My naïve mastodon apparently expected me to stand up to him.
One of my attacker’s immense lower extremities crashed into my torso, and it was like being swiped by the tail of a titanium dinosaur. I rolled several meters (farther and farther from my maser, by the way) until a wall was kind enough to stop my rolling cold.
It was a steel glass bulkhead. For an instant I saw nothing, then I saw everything black, then blue. Of course, that rainbow was much better that getting hit directly by one of his punches, which would have smashed me absolutely to pieces.
We both began to get back to our feet. I only got halfway up, then stubbornly dragged myself again toward my ripped-off right arm and my gun. What else could I do? He leaped straight back to his feet, getting all inexorable about it, more determined than ever to reduce me to plastimetal pozzie scraps. And as man is the only animal who trips twice over the same stone, he now moved deliberately enough to avoid the risk of slipping or anything so unpleasant as that.
I think I broke the galactic speed record for quadrupeds, but even so I never got within five feet of the trigger. A three-fingered hand the size of a baseball glove closed like a snare around my left ankle, and….
And then it let go. When I turned around, not understanding why he had freed me, I saw that the monster had much more urgent things for his right hand to do than tear me in half.
Such as, for example, helping his left hand keep his own two halves from splitting all along his giant body’s axis of symmetry. The reason? Nearly a foot of broad, razor-sharp steel jutting out of his stomach, like it was the most natural thing in the world, right around the spot where a mammal would keep its navel. And all along the straight path that the blade had taken through his tough flesh to reach that spot from the top of his massive skull, the monster was beginning to split into an enormous, fatal V, the edges of which were taking on an exotic turquoise hue.
I couldn’t help wondering what that blade was made of. Most likely it only looked like steel and was actually made from a power field or some sort of monomolecular invention. Few known alloys can cut through the osseo-scale armor of a Colossaur.
If I’ve ever been able to decipher the expression on a Colossaur’s reptilian face, it was that day. It was shocked but absolute concentration on the complicated attempt to keep the two cloven halves of his anatomy together—plus his rather fervent hope that if he could do so, the halves would stay together.
For an endless second I too waited anxiously to see what would happen to him—and even hoped in solidarity for him to succeed, when it seemed he might manage the trick. But an instant later, the sword (I had already figured out what kind of weapon it was and was wondering what sort of madman would attack a Colossaur with a simple steel blade—and win) withdrew from the tremendous slash, slipping out gracefully, almost tenderly. The eruption of bluish lymph that was unleashed then sent the titan tumbling.
No living creature, no matter how resilient, can do much after being almost surgically bisected through its brain and spinal cord.
When the giant body fell at length, I finally got a good look at the swordmaster responsible for his defeat—and I admit to feeling shocked. As if emerging from a nightmare about medieval Japan, a thirteen-foot-tall suit of samurai armor was meticulously wiping an interminable blade with a handkerchief, cleaning off its enemy’s blue lymph.