194
You shelter under the broken machinery of the worker droid. Pieces clang as they are cut from it to fall to the steel floor by the pulse lasers of the interceptors. They loop the loop and fire again on the return run, before arcing away, their drive reactors emitting a harsh whine. You continue towards the hangar-like entrance of the fluorescent building. The rim of the hangar boasts twenty great space-artillery pieces like outward pointing teeth in the cavernous maw of a prehistoric monster. As you approach it, skirting a huge iron cooling tower, an incredible sight meets your gaze. A spaceship almost as large as one of the generation starships of the 24th Century is being dismantled on a huge brass landing field. As you fly over it you see a contraption which can only be an enlarged Variac Drive being hoisted out of its front end. It takes a few seconds for you to realise what has been happening. The factory droids must have manufactured this colossal Time Machine in hours! Hundreds of them hover about it. They must have planned to invade the EigerVault with this machine on Earth, 3033 AD. Now that you have destroyed the Polybdenum and the Timehole on Thrix has closed, Yelov must have altered his plans. As you streak onwards, a daunting vista opens up beneath you. It is Mechanon's space launch field, and it is packed with an interstellar warfleet the size of which defies belief. Row upon row of Interceptors, Ion-drive Battle Cruisers and Atmospheric fighter-carrying Mother-ships glow a burnished bronze beneath the dull red sky. At the hangar mouth, worker droids are cutting part of the Time Machine apart in a blaze of heat and light. Will you:
Walk in past these? | Turn to 245 |
Skirt them, entering the hangar in shadow? | Turn to 218 |