king buildings, there rose yet
again the soughing roar of jet engines gathering speed. Onto the runway
to the west--the only one which the workers had managed to clear before
their central control was knocked out--came waddling an enormous winged
thing.

Its multiple engines screamed up to a frenzied pitch, and it rolled out
along the strip at increasing velocity. Its huge wheels narrowly missed
a dead fighter slewed across the way. Its tail went up.

Naturally, the queen ships wouldn't be dependent on the nerve-center of
the hive that had spawned them; for each of them carried within itself
the full-grown robot brain, the nucleus of a new hive....

Shooting began again raggedly, the gunners caught unawares. Perhaps the
great machine was hit--but to stop it would take more than one or two
hits.

It reached and passed the end of the runway, its wheels barely clearing
the ground as the paved strip ended. Black smoke belched from its
engines as it spent fuel lavishly, fighting heavy-laden for altitude. It
rocked with the concussion of shells bursting all around it, and then it
was soaring out over the Barrier, dipping and rolling perilously in the
downdrafts beyond the cliffs. But it steadied and flew on, out of range
of the guns, rising and dwindling until it was a speck, a mote vanishing
into the western sky....

But no more queens escaped that day. The cannonade resumed with
redoubled fury, and the guns did not fall silent until nothing was left
to stir amid the gutted and blazing wreckage that had been the citadel
of the drones.

* * * * *

Morning wind blew over the plateau, clearing away the reek of battle,
bringing air that was cool and clear as it must have been in the
morning of the world.

In that breeze like the breath of a new creation, it somehow seemed not
at all strange to Dworn that he should be walking in the open under a
daylight sky, among a multitude of excited strangers, men and women of
all races, who mixed and exchanged greetings, laughed, shouted, slapped
one another on the back ... then, perhaps, drew away for a moment with
eyes of wonder at their own boldness....

Nor did it seem strange that Dworn strolled round the smoldering drone
fortress hand in hand with a girl of the spider (who was by that token
his hereditary foe,) and that he turned and kissed this enemy on the
mouth, and she returned the kiss.

They stood with arms around one another, on the e