Zwei cut himself off, his eyes narrowing.

‘Wait. I know you. You’re Knight. Aloysius Knight, the bounty hunter. You’re also the fucking bastard who helped West attack our base at Ischia Island. I think Jaeger Eins would love to see you, too. Get a little payback, if you know what I mean.’

And with those words, Aloysius and the unconscious Alby were yanked off the ground and taken to a nearby truck, loaded onto it, and whisked away.

Hiding behind a boulder on his ledge forty metres up the hill, Rufus watched it all happen in helpless dismay.

He saw Jaeger Zwei’s truck speed away, heading westward across the smoking, dust-hazed battlefield, winding its way past all the wrecked and ruined vehicles lying on the plain until it came to a C-5 Super Galaxy parked in the distance.

‘Damn,’ he breathed.

They had Aloysius and Alby.

That Rufus would go after Aloysius was a given. They were buddies for life.

But Rufus also really liked Alby: he was a nice kid, sweet and smart, and they’d bonded during their shared mission to that abandoned Russian spaceport in Libya.

He’d damn well rescue him, too.

But he couldn’t do anything yet.

For on the desert plain in front of the gates to the Labyrinth, the battle was still actually raging, or at least coming to a conclusion.

Sphinx’s superior force of bronzemen and humans now ruled the battlefield and the only threat remaining was Rastor’s huge four-rotored V-88 Condor.

The massive V-88 was hovering above the right-most gate to the maze, having briefly landed to drop off Rastor and then successfully provide cover for him to enter the Labyrinth.

But now the flying fortress became the sole target of all of Sphinx’s remaining forces.

Three terrific explosions rang out as the V-88 was hit by a trio of ground-to-air missiles fired from Jaeger Eins’s anti-aircraft jeeps.

And that was it for the V-88.

Trailing a plume of black smoke, it wheeled in the air, mortally wounded, and amid the whine of its dying engines, it plunged into the side of the low mountain and exploded in a towering fireball.

Once the Condor was gone, Sphinx’s forces quickly reformed and regathered.

The massive army of bronzemen marched in orderly ranks away from the Labyrinth’s gates, returning to two more C-5 Super Galaxies out on the plain.

Rufus watched as some Knights of the Golden Eight managed the evacuation. He fiddled with his digital radio scanner and found their frequency.

The intercepted voice of Jaeger Eins came over his earpiece: ‘Pack it up, people. There’s nothing more we can do here. We need to move to the surface point of the Labyrinth to support Sphinx if he needs us. Mendoza said it’s somewhere underneath the Red Horizon Star-4.’