The girl lay motionless.
Green-black nightmare crouched over her, that hideous beak yawning wide.
The serpentine tentacles were writhing about her throat.
The geopellor hurled Chan forward.
The blaster flashed in his extended right hand.
The first white bolt struck the dark-scaled body with a flare of green incandescence.
Without harm, it seemed.
And the green tentacles flung up a weapon.
Another service blaster of the newest Legion design, identical with his own!
The merest fraction of its energy would have meant slow death, from radiation sickness.
A little more would have killed him instantly, by ionizing his brain tissue.
But his second bolt into the monster’s central crimson eye, took instant effect.
The blaster fell.
Queerly stiffened, the creature toppled toward the girl.
Ignoring a voice of fearful protest in his heart, Chan sent himself forward.
The same arm that held the blaster slipped under the girl.
The geopellor lifted them both.
The monster came crashing down behind them.
The diaphanous green wings, when it struck, abruptly unrolled.
They remained rigidly extended, and the thing did not move again.
Chan dropped beside it, and set the girl upon her feet.
Her lithe body had moved again in his arms, and now she gasped for breath, smiling at him shakenly. Her synthetic loveliness made him glad, for a moment, that he had saved her life. “Thank you,” she whispered, “Chan!”
Her voice was velvet magic.
Her violet eyes slowly closed toward his. And then, with an unexpected pantherine quickness, she was gone from his arms.
A sudden, numbing blow from her elbow had struck some nerve center in his neck.
A clever, savage strength had wrested the blaster out of his hand. He swayed dazedly.
Here, far from the gravity plates in the “bottom” of the New Moon’s hull, their attraction was somewhat decreased, and it required a little time for muscles to adjust themselves to lessened strains.
When he recovered his balance, the girl was already backing alertly away from him, covering him with his own weapon.
“Well, Mr. Basilisk!” her soft voice mocked him.
“Let’s see you get away this tune!”
Chan caught his breath.
The blue darkness and the shadowy strands of steel spun about him.
He had foreseen this danger from the girl—and yet the very peril of her beauty made it all incredible.
His hand tightened on the spindle of the geopellor.
He had small chance of distancing the bolt of protons, but the power of the little unit could hurl his body against her—
“Still, Chan Derron!” her voice rang sharply.
“Open your hand.”
The blaster gestured alertly.
His fingers relaxed. He tried, hopelessly, to protest.
“Vanya, you can’t believe that I’m the Basilisk.
For, all the time, you were there at my side—”
“Silence!”
The bright weapon lifted, imperatively.
“I was there— close enough to feel the mechanism strapped to your body, Derron. And the wires in your sleeve.”
Narrowed, her violet eyes had a deadly glint.
“I had you then, Derron—until you sent your little pet to carry me away.
Now I’ve got you again—and this tune you won’t escape.”
He wondered again at the fingers of her left hand, lifted to that strange white jewel at her throat.
“But still I’m going to give you one more chance.”
He saw the tension in her hand, and the ruthless purpose behind the white perfect mask of her face.