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Defenders that were sufficiently well armed were putting up stiff resistance with rocket launchers, grenade throwers, heavy weapons, and crew-served guns. Living beings and war machines were reeling back and forth in a storm of energy discharges, bullets, shells, and fire. Four robots lifted the reinforced roof off a boxlike hut as the men defending it fired frantically. Using a chattering quad-gun, the men’s shots kicked up enormous clots of ground and blew away segments of the machines even as they attacked. More robots approached to join in; the crew, with barrels depressed, traversed their gun back and forth in a frenzy, taking a terrible toll. But even though several crew members used side arms in a desperate attempt to keep from being overrun, the roofless hut was gradually outflanked and disappeared behind a wall of gleaming enemies.

Not far away, a dozen of J’uoch’s employees had formed a firing line in three ranks, concentrating on any robot that came near, and were thus far succeeding in preserving their lives. Elsewhere, isolated miners worked their way among the high rocks to exchange earnest fire with the machines, which couldn’t negotiate the incline.

But many of the camp personnel were caught alone or unarmed, or were surrounded. The fighting was heaviest and fiercest there, the robots’ implacability matched against the furious determination of the living beings. Humans, humanoids, and nonhumanoids dodged, evaded, ran, or fought as well as they could. War-robots simply advanced, overcoming obstacles or being destroyed, without any sense of self-preservation whatsoever.

Han saw a stocky Maltorran run up behind a robot with a heavy beamdrill cradled in its brachia and press it flush against the machine’s back. The robot exploded, and the drill, exploding from the backwash, killed the Maltorran. Two mining techs, a pair of human females, had gotten to a landgouger and were making a resolute effort to break through the automaton lines, crushing many of them under the gouger’s tremendous treads, maneuvering to avoid their weapons’ aim. But soon the fire of many robots converged on them, finding the landgouger’s engine. The gouger was blown apart with an ear-splitting explosion. Elsewhere, Han saw a robot grappling with three W’iiri who had swarmed onto it, tearing at it with their pincers. The machine plucked them off one by one, smashing them and tossing them aside, broken and dying; but in the next moment, the robot itself toppled over, disabled by the damage they had done it.

“We’ll never get through to the Falcon!” Badure yelled at Han. “Let’s get out of here!” More robots were approaching, and to attempt a return up the steep ridge under fire would be out of the question. The old man proposed, “We can withdraw across the bridge and take shelter in the barracks area!”

Han glanced across the crevasse. “It’s a dead end; there’s no other way off that plateau.” He considered blowing the bridge behind them, but that would take the Millennium Falcon’s guns, or those of the lighter.

The latter ship was herself under attack. A ring of dozens of war-robots had formed around her, furiously firing while the huge cargo ship’s engines strained to lift her off, her main batteries answering the robots’ fire. Many of the robots’ weapons were silent, their power exhausted, but more of the machines were gathering around the lighter every moment. Though the vessel’s salvos wiped out five and ten robots at a time, sending them flying in heaps of tangled, liquefied wreckage, Xim’s machines kept clustering to her, weapons-hands blazing, standing their ground. Soon hundreds were massed there.

Others turned their attention to Gallandro’s scoutship, cutting swaths in her hull. The lighter rose unsteadily, her shields glowing from the concentrated fire, her heavy guns raking back and forth. Just at the moment it seemed she would reach safety, one of her aged defensive shields failed; after all, the lighter was an old industrial craft, not a combat vessel. The ship became a brilliant ball of