Loach pulled himself up out of the elevator shaft to join Emily who was staring after Randall as he and Dolly raced out of the camp on horseback. "Where's he off to?" she asked while, behind them, Jane struggled to pull herself out of the gaping hole in the ground.

     "He's got a soft spot for some kid back in the city," Loach replied. "We need to go after him in case he does something stupid, like surrender to the machines to save her."

     "Would he do that?" asked the eco-terrorist.

     "Once I would have said no," replied the mob boss, "but this place has done something to him. Made him go soft." He strode across to where the horses were tethered. One of the Barons was hastily strapping a saddle to the back of the best one. Loach grabbed him by the shoulder to spin him around to face him, then stunned him with a punch to the jaw. Then he jumped up onto the saddle.

     "What about us?" demanded Jane, running after him, but Loach was already kicking the horse into a gallop. He disappeared into the night without looking back.

     "Looks like we're on our own..." began Jane, but Emily was already chasing after another horse being ridden by one of the workmen. She stabbed him in the kidney with a thin bladed knife, dodged to the side as he fell out of the saddle, then jumped up to replace him. Jane stared in wide eyed astonishment as she followed Loach into the darkness. "I can't ride!" she called after her in shocked betrayal.

     She looked around in fear and confusion. Everyone else seemed to be fleeing the camp, either grabbing a horse or just running into the night. She glanced back at the transmitter and her heart leapt in terror as she remembered the destruction falling towards it from space. How much longer did they have? She began running, desperate to get away from it before it exploded into a fireball.

☆☆☆

     The soldiers who were supposed to be on the perimeter had all fled, Loach saw as his horse tore past where they had been. He didn't care. He barely noticed until he saw a corpse lying face down in the grass, barely visible by the light of the moon. Suddenly alert, Loach stared around, searching for what might have killed him, but he only had time for the barest glimpse of the dark form that suddenly rose up ahead of him. Then his horse was stumbling and falling, pitching Loach out of the saddle to land hard on the grass.

     His combat app activated automatically, making his hand reach for one of the knives on his belt and throw it, all without the control of his conscious mind. By the time he managed to recover the orc was drowning in its own blood, clawing at its throat as it sank to its knees. Loach looked back at his horse and saw that it had been skewered by the orc's halberd. He pulled it free, just in time as another orc came bounding over to attack him.

     The halberd was heavy. It had been designed for a creature larger and stronger than a human, but the combat app overrode the inhibitions that normally prevented people from overexerting themselves. It was a condition known as hysterical strength that occasionally arose naturally during times of extreme stress. Parents finding themselves able to lift a car to save a trapped child. Small women somehow managing to fight off attackers twice their size. Later, when (or if) he had time to recover, his whole body would ache from the effort, but for now the weapon felt light in his hands and he was able to swing it easily, bringing it to bear on the second orc.

     The orc thought it was attacking a normal human, and when it saw the orc sized halberd his opponent was carrying it assumed that he would be unable to use it properly. It rushed in heedless, therefore, intending to bat the weapon aside and then thrust with its own, but it was Loach who batted aside the orc's halberd and thrust his own weapon through the creature's throat.

     The sounds of slaughter were coming from all around now. Humans screaming, orcs howling, the clash of steel against steel. Loach wanted no part of it. Still holding the halberd, therefore, he ran in the direction he thought was away from the transmitter, out into the night.

     He ran until a large shape loomed out of the darkness ahead of him. A tent. He dodged around it, then froze when he saw glowing lights ahead of him. The oil lamps that had been placed around the elevator shaft. He must have gotten turned around while fighting the orcs and he'd been running in the wrong direction. He began to turn around, but then stopped when he saw a group of people gathered nearby. About twenty soldiers, half a dozen of the workmen and the five heavies he'd brought from the Halls of Valhalla. Trying to form a defensive position ready for when the orcs, who were closing in from every direction, threw themselves at them.

     Loach hesitated. That cluster of humans would attract the attention of the orcs. It was possible that one man alone, hiding in the long grass, might be able to escape notice and slip away when the battle got properly started. On the other hand, the orcs were still scattered and if he ran he was likely to run into some of them and have to fight them alone. Even with his combat app, he didn't fancy the odds of coming out alive. Being part of a larger group gave him a chance. There were only around twenty orcs, he remembered, and some of them had to be already dead, including the two he'd killed himself. The humans might well win that battle. That decided him, and he ran to join the soldiers gathered by the light of the oil lamps.

     "There he is!" said one of Loach's heavies as he approached. "Told you he wouldn't run out on us!"

     "Now we've got a chance," another added. "Have you seen him fight? He's like a demon from the time of the Old Ones!"

     That was more true than the man realised, Loach reflected as the soldiers moved aside to make room for him. Several eyes widened as they noted the orc halberd he was carrying. There was only one way he could have come by it. "Killed an orc!" he heard a man whispering in awed tones. "Single handed!" Loach smiled. Let Randall try to lord it over him with his combat record now!

     Emily and Jane were huddled together in the middle of the group, he saw, the younger woman staring daggers at the eco-terrorist as if angry at some attempted betrayal. For some reason their presence pleased Loach, although he couldn't think why it should. Emily in particular had earned a smiling throat for what she'd done back in Tettlehall, but for now they were all humans together facing an opponent that cared nothing for age or gender. Creatures that would skewer a young girl as readily and with as little remorse as a battle scarred soldier. Let them come! he thought savagely. There's something even badder and deadlier than an orc in this world, and I'm it!

     Then there was no more time for reflection as the orcs howled in the darkness surrounding them, a sound that could freeze the marrow of even the bravest man, and then they were coming, thundering across the grass towards them with the obvious intention of bowling them over with the momentum of the impact. Loach and the soldiers dodged to the side as the beasts arrived, stabbing at their backs and sides with their poleaxes. Several orcs fell, but the others swung savagely with their halberds, the sheer momentum of the massive weapons throwing soldiers aside even if they successfully blocked the attack with their own weapons. Men screamed, splatters of blood flew threw the air and corpses fell to the ground, nearly half the defenders killed in that one attack.

     Then Loach saw a larger figure looming in front of him, the Chieftain, and he felt a sudden surge of hope. "Chieftain!" he shouted. "Call off the attack! I am Dinsdale Loach, a member of category one. You have been told not to attack me!"

     The Chieftain heard him, but its only reply was to raise its halberd high.over its head and roar its fury into the sky. The sound chilled Loach to the bones, and then the Chieftain was running towards him, its bestial eyes fixed on his own. Every other human was forgotten. The Chieftain wanted Loach, and it would shoulder aside every other human, barely noticing their existence, in its single minded determination to kill the man that had dared presume to give it orders.

     "What's going on?" he heard Jane crying out. "Why didn't it obey you?"

     "Randall's betrayed us!" replied Loach. He heard Jane's shocked intake of breath, but then the Chieftain was upon him and it took every ounce of his augmented fighting skills just to stay alive.

     Everyone else, orc and human alike, drew back and gave them space as they traded blows. The halberd still felt light in Loach's hands, but he knew that his muscles and tendons were taking a terrible toll wielding the heavy weapon and that it was only his combat app that was keeping him from feeling the agony that would otherwise be crippling him. When this was over, assuming he survived, he would be confined to a bed for a week as his tortured body recovered, and even then he might never be the same again.

     Worse was the knowledge of what he was fighting. The orcs were just flesh and blood. They could be killed just like any other animal, but the Chieftain was a robot covered with flesh. A terminator. Even if he got past its defences and scored what would have been a killing blow against an ordinary orc, it would do nothing against the titanium armour that was hidden beneath the creature's hairy hide. He might make a good account of himself for a while, but ultimately the battle was hopeless. There was no way he could win.

     Unless... An idea came to him. A desperate idea, almost certainly doomed to failure, but it was all he had. Around him, the battle was breaking up into a few small skirmishes. Almost everyone was dead now, including most of the orcs. To his left, one of his heavies and two soldiers had an orc surrounded and were stabbing at it with their weapons. Elsewhere an orc with a poleaxe embedded in its belly was trying to summon the strength to attack the still barely alive works foreman. Loach and the Chieftain were the only ones still fighting with all their original fury. That meant that he had space to manoeuvre, and that gave him a chance.

     He began to stagger back as he and the Chieftain continued to trade blows, trying to make it look as if he was being driven back against his will. If the Chieftain figured out what he was doing, he was dead. When he saw the glow of the oil lamps growing bright behind him he turned slowly, one small step for every thrust of his weapon, another for every time he parried a thrust from his opponent. The pain of his tortured body was beginning to grow upon him now, not even the combat app being able to subdue it any more. He could actually feel muscle fibres tearing with every thrust and parry, could feel the tendons pulling loose from his bones. Soon now something would give, some part of his body would suffer a catastrophic failure, and he would be left unable to raise the halberd again, unable to defend himself as his opponent's weapon came powering forward towards his heart...

     Somehow, impossibly, his body held together. He and the Chieftain had turned completely about now, had traded places so that it was the Chieftain that had its back to the oil lamps. This was it. Now or never. Loach gathered what was left of his strength and drove himself forward towards the chieftain, striking it hard in the stomach. The Chieftain was driven back a couple of steps, through the rope barrier between the oil lamps...

     Over the edge of the gaping elevator shaft.

     The Chieftain's reflexes were terrifyingly fast. It reached out a taloned hand to grasp the edge of the shaft and hung there while it stared up at Loach with an expression that seemed to suggest admiration and respect. Then, with a shrug of its shoulders, it began to pull itself back up. In a moment it would have been safely up on solid ground again and Loach's last chance to defeat it would have been lost, but the combat app reacted instantly, before Loach was even aware of the danger. The app made him raise the halberd and bring it down on the orc's talons with every ounce of his remaining strength. The talons, being thin and made of ordinary steel, were sheared through with a shower of sparks and the orc fell, disappearing silently into the darkness. Thirty metres down, Loach thought with relief. The Chieftain itself had said that a fall that far onto a hard surface would cause crippling damage. Unless God really had it in for him, the thing should no longer be a danger.

     The combat app shut itself down and Loach staggered back as pain and fatigue came crashing down upon him. His body was on fire! Every joint, every muscle, screamed its agony at him. Loach could do nothing but collapse to the ground and lie there, shivering as wave after wave of pain swept over him. Then there were people gathering around him, though. The handful of remaining humans, most of them pressing bandages to injuries while staring at him in pure awe.

     "I don't believe it!" someone whispered, more to himself than to anyone else. The single remaining soldier, Loach saw. "He killed a Chieftain!"

     "That's our boss!" said someone else. One of the heavies he'd brought from the Halls of Valhalla, his voice breathless with utmost respect. The others called him Brick. Loach was a little ashamed to realise that he didn't know what his real name was. "Took down Machine and two of his best men without even trying! He's the new Machine, and three times deadlier than the last one."

     Loach felt that she shouldn't be just lying there while such praise was being heaped upon him and he rolled over onto his side so he could try to climb back to his feet. His body cried out in protest and he almost fell back, but then there were hands taking him gently by the arms and helping him to stand. He accepted their help, then looked around to see who was left. One soldier, two of his heavies, a workman and, to his surprise, Jane and Emily, staring at him with wide eyed wonder from the back of the small crowd. Emily was holding a knife stained with blood and seemed unsure what she was supposed to do with it now that the battle was over.

     "Where's Randall?" asked Jane.

     "He betrayed us," said Loach, his eyes glowing with anger. "Left us here to die. He told me the Chieftain wouldn't attack us. He lied."

     "Who's Randall?" asked Sandbag, the second heavy.

     "Watt Fletcher," said Emily. "His real name's Randall and he's a lying piece of filth."

     "Watt Fletcher? But he's the hero of Duffield! He's the champion of the people..."

     Something was bothering Loach. The feeling that they'd forgotten something important, and suddenly it came to him. The space weapons! "We have to get out of here!" he said, glancing up into the sky as if he'd be able to see the bolt coming. "Quick!"

     He tried to run, staggered and almost fell, and Brick put an arm around his waist to help him. "Why?" The heavy asked. "They're all dead. We won."

     Loach didn't have the breath to reply. He just tried to run faster, a new desperation visible in his features as he wondered how many seconds they had left. The others found themselves infected by his sense of urgency and the soldier supported the mob boss from the other side to help him along. The others trotted alongside, looking as though they would have liked to run ahead but somehow unwilling to leave this man behind. Partly from a new found sense of camaraderie but perhaps also from fear of what this awesome fighting man would do to someone he thought was running out on him. Only Jane and Emily, who alone had some idea of what was coming, really picked up their legs and ran as if all the demons of Hell were after them.

     They'd covered nearly fifty metres when the weapon hit. There was no warning. One moment the night was quiet, the silence broken only by the laboured breathing of seven running humans. The next the ground suddenly jumped under their feet like a bounding dog, throwing them up into the air, followed almost immediately after a blast wave that hit them from behind and sent them flying forwards. They landed hard on the damp grass, rolling and sprawling, and then rubble was raining down upon them. Clods of earth, shards of steel and lumps of plasteel shattered and broken like glass; sharp edged and deadly.

     They covered their heads with their arms, deafened by the thunderous detonation that threatened to burst their ears, and waited for the deadly rain of debris to end. Brick and Sandbag were already climbing back to their feet, though, staring at the smoking, ten metre wide crater where the Gorsty Common transmitter had been. "The wrath of VIX," said Brick with satisfaction. "This sinful place has been purged."

     "You knew," said the soldier, staring at Loach in amazement. "You knew it was coming! How?"

     "VIX is with him," said Brick, his eyes shining with religious fervour. "He has been chosen by VIX."

     "But he's a criminal!" protested Sandbag. "Meaning no disrespect, Sir," he hurriedly added, "but you are. We all are! How can a criminal be chosen by VIX?"

     "Do not presume to know the mind of VIX," warned the other heavy, though. "His ways are beyond the understanding of mortal man."

     "Oh yeah? Since when were you so religious?"

     "Silence, both of you," warned Loach, struggling back to his feet. The two heavies ran forward to help him. "We have to get back to Elmton, find Randall. If the wrath of VIX impressed you, wait until you see the wrath of Loach."