Sighing, Pell aimed the blaster at the ceiling and depressed the stud. The innocuous-looking blue finger took huge bites from the heavily reinforced cement and it cascaded down to the floor of the corridor before him.

Ignoring its burning heat, Pell leaped for a drooping girder and hauled himself painfully through the ragged hole to the corridor above.

Frozen with surprise, several DIC mercenaries watched a haggard, blackened figure materialize suddenly from the midst of a gaping hole in the floor. One or two fired wildly at Pell, but the majority fled with terror up a low ramp nearby and through an exit at the top. Pell ran after them, noting with relief that the soldiers wore no gas masks.

The ramp continued its sharp upward rise on the other side of the exit. As he panted up its steep ascent, Pell felt the breath of cool air touch his face; with it the sound of firing increased. Evidently Dallard was attempting to storm the fortress. Breathlessly he hammered up the slope on the heels of the fleeing men and ducked instinctively as several shots were fired at him. He was out on open ground. Swiftly he ran for the cover of a dump of bushes and dived into their concealment.

Centaura's lone satellite shed a strong light over the surrounding ground and Pell was able to make out the dim figures of men around the blaster tower. To his right the tower itself rose sharply into the sky, the vicious helix of the blaster being etched by the moonlight into a clearly defined blackness in the midst of the lesser blackness of the star-studded sky.

To Pell's left the sound of firing was intense, the sharp, hacking bark of machine-guns dominating the chorus. But ragged firing seemed to be present everywhere, apparently indicating that Dallard's Insurgents had attacked the fortress from all sides. The mercenaries seemed to be firmly entrenched, but not so firmly that a little diversion from the rear could not root them out, Pell thought, smiling mirthlessly. Gripping the blaster tightly, Pell peered into the darkness to locate a juicy target.

Beyond the clump of trees in which he was concealed there was a rise in the rocky ground and silhouetted against the sky was a group of men crouching around a machine-gun and firing it down the path up which Heintz, Gret and himself had been brought. He had no doubts that discovery would be only a matter of moments—no doubt word was already being circulated about the madman with a blaster.

Grimly he 

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