The first men came rushing through the doors, continuing to run as they passed the two ballistae and the men standing beside them until they hit the far wall, cushioning the impact with their spread hands. More men came through, then more. Twenty, thirty, until the hall was crowded. Captain Machett detailed members of the Tower garrison to take them deeper inside the Tower, to where the rest of the refugees were waiting, but the soldiers hesitated, anxious to see if their fellows behind them made it.

     The last of the enlisted men had a limp, they saw. An injury gained in battle, they presumed. The officer took him by the arm and half carried him towards the Tower, still twenty yards away. Some members of the Tower garrison, looking splendid in their ceremonial uniforms, started forward to meet them half way and help them in, but Machett yelled at them to stay where they were. They stared at him in disbelief, but obeyed, watching as anxiously as the rest.

     “Your Majesty,” said Machett, “those doors are big and heavy, it takes time to move them. We should begin shutting them now.”

     “No! They're almost here!”

     “We can leave them open a crack. A big enough gap for them to squeeze through. If we don’t, we won't get them closed before the Radiants get here.”

    “Begging your pardon, Sire, but he’s right,” added a member of the Tower garrison. “Takes us a good long time to get ‘em closed usually. Takes four of us to do it too.”

     The King stared at him, then nodded reluctantly and four of the brightly uniformed men ran forward, two to each door. They heaved with their full strength to get the massive wooden doors moving and had to keep pushing as they turned with glacial slowness. More men ran forward to help them and, seeing it, Leothan feared he’d made a mistake leaving it for so long. Behind him, the ballistae crews loaded bolts into their weapons and stuffed the ‘eye of a needle’ hole with oil soaked rags. The crews then began winching the launching plate back, the mechanism clacking as the ratchet stop slipped from one tooth in the winching cog to the next. It took them nearly a full minute to complete the operation. Plenty of time, once the door had been breached, for a Radiant to push its way in and slaughter the crews before they could launch another bolt. They might kill one or two Radiants before being overrun, but that was the best they could hope for. A numbing sense of despair began to settle over the King.

     “Your Majesty,” said Darnell, “You must go deeper into the Tower. It's not safe here.”

     “Nowhere is safe, Phil, but if we're all going to die, I want to see a Radiant burn first.”

     “You have to survive as long as possible. The bulk of what’s left of the army is here, in the Tower. They'll sell their lives defending you...”

     “Is that what you want for me, Phil? To stand there and watch while hundreds of good men are butchered defending me? No. I'm staying here.” He drew his sword; a ceremonial weapon decorated with gold and precious stones. It had never been intended to actually be used in combat, but it had a core of steel and had a sharp edge. It would bite through Radiant flesh as well as any normal sword. “My wife and children are below?” he asked.

     “Yes, Sire, and no doubt wishing you were with them.”

     “They'll understand. My place is here, with my men...”

     A disturbance at the doors attracted his attention. The left hand door had been closed, the inch thick steel bolts being shot top and bottom, while the other was almost closed, with a gap of just eighteen inches or so left. Through that gap, Leothan saw the last two men struggling onward, the officer half carrying the injured man, but there was a Radiant right behind them, its piping rising to a higher tone as it prepared to cast a curse. “I have a shot!” cried the Sergeant in charge of one of the Ballista crews.

     “Take it!” shouted back Captain Machett.

     The Sergeant ordered one of his men to light the bolt with a smouldering taper. It burst into flames, the Sergeant pulled the trigger and the bolt flew, through the gap in the door, hitting the Radiant squarely in its buoyancy sacks. There was a gout of fire as the creature burst into flames and everyone in the hallway cheered with savage delight. A moment later the two men squeezed in through the gap between the doors and the Tower soldiers pushed it the rest of the way closed. Two men ran forward with a heavy wooden bar that they fitted into supports in the door while another man threw more bolts into the floor and ceiling. Almost immediately after, the doors began to thump as blows were rained upon it from outside, and Leothan knew that the same thing would be happening at the Tower's other entrances, especially the ones opening onto the roof that had never been designed to withstand an assault.

     “How long until they break through?” he asked the room at large.

     “Probably not long,” someone said, he didn't see who. “Doesn't matter really. We're not going anywhere.”

     The words hung in the air like the stench of a rotting corpse, and nobody had an answer for them as the hammering on the doors continued.

☆☆☆

     “Have you finished yet?” asked Andrea McCrea without taking her eyes from the pump that would drive the alternator's water cooling system. A bullet had hit the live steam inlet and the whole component had had to be replaced. She tightened the locking bolt with a spanner, grunting as she put all her strength into it. A leak of live steam would be bad for anyone who happened to be standing nearby.

     “Just about,” replied Shanks, winding the last few turns of rubber-insulated copper wire onto the ceramic spool. His hands stung with a dozen tiny cuts and abrasions where the wire had cut into his skin, and the knife wound throbbed with every tiny movement, but he persevered nonetheless, keeping the wire tight as he completed the last few turns. He applied small blobs of glue to keep the ends in place, applying wooden clamps to hold them still while they dried. They would be using the coil while the glue was still wet, though, so he took great care while attaching it to the great apparatus that occupied most of the work bench. One contact came loose while he was doing so and he pushed it back into place against the soggy patch of wet glue, adjusting the position of the clamp to hold it. “That's it, I think. What next?”

     “Reconnect the secondary coils, then get the battery ready,” said Andrea as she applied a smouldering taper to the waxy fuel of the steam pump. A flame leapt up from the fuel pellet and began warming the water in the tank that sat above it. “I'll get this thing going, then adjust the spark gap.”

     Shanks nodded and began searching out the loose lengths of wire that connected the various parts of the apparatus. “You know, I get the feeling that this thing is way more complicated than it needs to be. Once we figure out how it does what we hope it'll do, I think we’ll be able to make a much smaller, more compact design.”

     “Let’s just get it working first,” replied Andrea. “It doesn’t matter how ugly it is. We can pretty it up later.”

     Shanks nodded and concentrated on his work, tightening the screws that held each wire in place. Then his attention was diverted by a glow that shone down from one of the small windows high up near the ceiling. He looked up and saw the dangling tentacles of a Radiant just on the other side of the glass. “We've got company,” he said.

     Andrea looked up, and made a visible effort to remain calm. “It’s okay,” she said. “There's no way it can know we're in here.”

     “The lights are on,” hissed Shanks, trying to keep his voice low in case it could hear him. “It can see the light shining out through the window.”

     “Everyone ran for the Tower in a hurry,” replied Andrea, also speaking in a low voice. There had been an edge of panic in his voice that worried her and she tried to sound reassuring. “It'll just think someone left the lights on before leaving.”

     “What if it decides to investigate? Just to make sure?”

     “Just keep working.”

     “Can it curse you from that distance?”

     Andrea glanced up. The window was very high, but their work bench was standing against the wall and there was nothing on the other side but a wide city street. Would a brick wall block the power of the curse? Even if it did, how much of a barrier would a simple brick wall be against the brute, physical strength of a Radant? “No,” she said, as if the very word might have the power to protect them. “We're perfectly safe in here. Keep working.”

     Shanks glanced up at her. Her hair was a tangled mess where she'd pushed it up out of her eyes and tied it up with a length of hairy string. Her face was streaked with grease and soot and her lab coat was torn where she'd caught it on a nail someone had hammered into the bench for some reason. Her breath was coming in sharp little gasps as she fought against the fear that threatened to overwhelm her, but her eyes were bright and her face was flushed with determination. Shanks had been on the brink of running, driven by fear to find some small, dark hole to hide in until the danger had passed, but now he felt his heart glowing with admiration for the woman. Gradually the panic subsided and he forced his breathing to slow to a steady rhythm. “Right,” he said. “Perfectly safe...”

     There came the sound of breaking glass and the tinkling as the remains of the window fell to the floor in a silver shower. Shanks bowed his head and hunched his shoulders instinctively, even though their work table was several yards to one side. Then he looked up and saw tentacles reaching in through the hole where the window had been. He cried out in terror, frozen to the spot, but they couldn’t reach him. The window was too high, and too small for the creature to fit its body through. The creature soon realised this, though, and began tearing at the edges of the hole. Tearing bricks out and dropping them to the ground, a dozen yards away from where they were standing.

     “Keep working!” shouted Andrea, grabbing a pair of graphite contacts from the box at her feet. She started connecting wires to them, working with desperate speed, then attached them to the scaffold poles which held the apparatus together. While she was doing that, another Radiant appeared at another window and began tearing its way through it.

     Shanks picked up a jar of acid and tried to pour it into the outer chamber of the battery, but his hands were shaking so much that most of it spilled onto the wooden bench and the tiled floor, where it smoked as it ate away at it. Some landed on his feet and he gave a yelp as he shook the potent yellow liquid off before it could burn its way through to his flesh. The glass was wet with acid now and he had to wrap a cloth around it before he could pick it up again. He felt it burning its way through the cloth as he poured the liquid, as slowly and carefully as he could while masonry fell around him and the air was filled with the sound of piping. He gave silent thanks that neither of the windows was above the apparatus, or it would have been wrecked by now.

     He threw the cloth aside the moment he was done with it, then wiped his hands on his lab coat. Some acid had gotten through to his skin and it burned a little, but not seriously. He picked up another bottle of chemical to fill the inner chamber of the battery, then inserted a new pair of electrodes. The battery was now ready to deliver current.

     “All ready!” he yelled.

   M Andrea nodded as she finished tightening screws, casting her eyes across the apparatus to make sure they hadn't made a mistake in their haste. The water in the steam pump was still heating up, but it would be a while before the apparatus would be hot enough to need cooling. “Turn it on!” she yelled.

     Shanks reached for the switch that would turn the machine on, knowing, even as he did so, that it wouldn't work. Why would it? None of the others had. He was kidding himself if he thought that adding a tuning circuit would make a difference. Do it anyway, he thought, though. Why not? If they were going to die anyway, why not give it one more shot, just in case? If there was just one chance in a million that it might actually work...

      He’d actually laid his hand on the switch and was about to throw it when there was a thunderous crash as part of the wall collapsed. He staggered back in terror as clouds of dust filled the room and suddenly there were fat, luminous tentacles reaching for him. The bulk of the creature’s body filled the hole in the wall. He saw eyes staring at him. Its piping rose in pitch as it prepared to cast a curse and Andrea turned to run, sobbing in terror. All her previous strength and courage vanishing...

    She tripped on a piece of masonry and fell, cutting her hands on broken glass. She scrambled to climb back to her feet, smearing blood on the tiles, but the Radiant was already casting its curse. Shanks could only stare in horror as her body writhed and contorted as if she were in agony, but the torment was all in her mind. The terrible knowledge of what was about to happen to her. She stared back at Shanks as if begging him to help her, but then she literally shrank inside her clothes. Her legs shortening, her hands pulling back into the sleeves of her jacket. Shanks had a last glimpse of her head narrowing and elongating, her braincase shrinking, before it was hidden by the folds of her lab coat. A moment later she vanished from view altogether, while the animal she'd been reduced to struggled to free itself from the pile of clothing it was tangled up in.

     Shanks stared in horror and disbelief as the small dog extricate itself and ran from the room, howling in terror even though it no longer had the intellectual capacity to know what it was afraid of. All it knew was that something terrible had been done to it. Something that it was no longer capable of understanding.

     Then, the sound of falling masonry jerked the scientist back to his own dire situation. The Radiant was struggling to fight its way into the room. The hole it had made was almost big enough, but it couldn’t quite fit its body through. It was staring at him with all the eyes on that side of its body, and the tone of its piping told him that it had just cast another curse, one that had had no more effect on him than the one before. He saw its eyes widening in surprise, then narrow in anger.

     “Yes!” he shouted. “You know what I am now, don't you? You destroyed our civilisation! Drove us to the brink of extinction, but we're not gone yet! One day, one of us will get you! All of you!” He looked back at the apparatus. Complete now, just waiting to be turned on. “Who knows! Maybe it’ll be me!”

     It was the only thing left for him to do. Turn it on and pray to Those Above that this time they'd gotten it right. Beside him, the Radiant made one final effort, and this time it burst through into the room with a shower of dust and masonry. It lashed out with its tentacles, and Shanks leapt forward for the switch...