Montrose opened his eyes, but he saw nothing but the dense fog pouring from the coffin lid, and every droplet of the fog was dazzling with sunlight. With regret, he realized that he should have mixed a nerve gas or at least a puking agent among the fumes. Well, he had been pressed for time. He brought his pistol down sharply on where he thought the back of the skull of the man falling on him would be, but Montrose must have miscalculated, because the skull was pointed toward him, not away, and his gun arm was seized in the man’s teeth.

They were too sharp and too many to be the teeth in a man’s mouth. This must be one of the guard dogs he heard barking. He heaved with his arm, thankful of the lingering numbness, and still struggling to keep his mouth shut and his breath held. He twisted his trapped hand, firing at another source of nearby noise (he saw a silhouette in the mist stumble and fall) and brought his free hand up to shoot through the skull of the dog trapping his arm and toward a second looming figure in the smoky brightness. The skull must have been both large and oddly shaped for a dog, because the skull fragments exploded in blast pattern other than what he calculated, and pain lodged in Montrose’s face. His flesh was torn, and his nose felt like it was broken.

The pistols in his hands whined suddenly. Montrose used a mental trick to speed up his nerve actions, so that the scene seemed to slow down. He went through a number of theories in his mind as to what could be causing that whining noise. It was an induction field, he decided. Some onlooker had deduced that his pistols used magnetic caterpillar fields for acceleration, and set up a counterfield to interfere. The metal dowels were being heated by the resulting conflict. The pistols were not designed for this: the metal was expanding and about to crack the barrels open.

He pondered. In combat, if the troops are not well trained, nine to fifteen seconds will pass before the troopers will react to incoming fire and return fire. Trained troops will drop or seek cover and return fire immediately, if and only if they are armed with automatic weapons. Automatic weapons allow the troops to spray toward unseen targets, hoping to hit, or at least to suppress the enemy. But troops armed with single-shot weapons were more hesitant, rarely willing to fire without a clear shot, lest the return fire kill them. So far, the combat had lasted perhaps five seconds, maybe half, maybe less, of normal human reaction time. From the position of the barks and howls, it seemed the guards near the coffin were reacting with normal human-reaction confusion. Which meant the field was being sent by someone occupying a higher intellectual topography than the guards.

There was no time for more than a guess. He looked toward where the crane that had picked up the coffin was supposed to be. Sure enough, looming up through the fog, he could dimly make out what looked like the exoskeleton of a ten-foot-high praying mantis made of steel. But why had there been no outcry from the operator when he’d shot there earlier? Either the machine was an automaton, or remotely controlled, or the operator had some means of deflecting the shot.

There was no time for more guesswork. Montrose returned to normal neural timeflow in order to operate his muscles without tearing or cramping them. He held down the thumb trigger so that both pistols ejected the entire mass of their ammo at once. Two dowels like little red-hot javelins flew into the fog toward the spider-legged machine.

Suddenly the operator was visible. He was no bigger than a child, was bald of head, and he wore a long coat studded with glittering gems. The gems lit up as if with fire, and rainbows and halos of energy surrounded the figure. In the confused light, Montrose could see the little bald man had skin as blue as a peacock’s neck.

The dowels never struck their target. Whether they were deflected magnetically, or disintegrated by some unimaginable energy, Montrose could not tell. But the dazzle shining from the many-colored coat of the strange little man was bright enough that the silhouettes of the guards stood out clearly.

Even through the fog, he now could see that they were not men, but Moreaus, modified dog things walking on hind legs, and with swords or firearms in their paws. The dog things were grouped in a semicircle and lunging toward him, ears perked up, noses high, and not confused by the blinding vapor cloud.

In that momentary, eerie flash of radiation from the gems on the coat of the little blue man, Montrose saw a rippling glitter to one side. Water! Perhaps he could reach it. The dog thing bodies were not designed for swimming, and if he somehow escaped them downstream, the water might kill his scent. If he were lucky, the river would be deep enough and the current strong enough to carry him out of range before anyone could react.

With a powerful leap he flung himself through the fog toward the gleam of water.

He was not so lucky as he might have hoped. The blind leap brought the edge of the dock sharply against his shins, so that he tumbled, both legs numb in a shock of pain.

That tumble saved him from landing headfirst, which might have killed him. As it was, the shallow, icy stream struck him in the belly, and so when he struck the streambed, no bones broke. So that was a modicum of luck.

But the current was not strong, and the water was not deep.

4. First Impressions

Striking the shallow bottom dazed him, and so the hyperoxygenated fluid gushed from the tube in his throat. His lungs then rebelled and tried to draw in the icy, freezing waters of the stream. He flung himself to his knees, puking pale hyperoxygenated fluid down across his naked, bruised, and torn chest and belly.

The bank of the stream was coated with snow. In the bewilderment, Montrose had not noticed how cold it was.

On the bank, the fog was still billowing and spreading from the open coffin. The coffin alarms were ringing—another fact his dazed mind had not been able to take in—and the disabled coffin guns were clicking pathetically.

The stream tumbled down a hillside covered with snow and (Montrose saw to his immense satisfaction) pine trees. The crest of the hill was bare of trees, but angular walking machines and scaffolding surrounded a deep cleft from which the thunder of gunfire and the snap of laser fire echoed. The Tombs were violated, ripped open.

He was in a yard enclosed by wire inside a camp enclosed by wire. The streambed neatly bisected the yard. There were seventy coffins in the yard in various states of damage and disrepair. Those with working alarms were ringing; those whose alarms were mute were raging weakly, flickering the stubs of their disconnected legs and or spinning the useless wheels of their missing treads, flicking their aiming lasers at potential targets, clicking to one another with sound-transmitted ranging information. All the coffins were trying to come to his aid. None could move or fire.

Montrose absorbed this in one split-second flicker of his eyes. Still puking up fluid from his lungs, he rose to his feet. The stream was not even knee deep. All he had done was to wet himself in the winter wind and bruise and cut himself badly enough on the streambed rocks that he could barely force his tortured body into motion.

A sudden gush of wind stirred and parted the fog like a curtain. There was the semicircle of sixty dog things. Most were unclothed, except for weapon belts, but some wore scarlet pantaloons or braided vests or half capes. They carried muskets, cutlasses, and long knives. Montrose was gratified to see that he had killed seven and wounded ten more, who were writhing on the ground yowling, as pairs of comrades, two to each wounded hound, pulled them back out of combat or applied pressure to wounds. Of these sixty, only twenty-three were standing with weapons at the shoulder. The muskets had been pointing at Montrose even before the wind parted the vapor, since the fog had not deceived their sense of smell.