Part 25
1
For the first time in what had been a dreary, wearisome year, the small gray man was intense and interested. Hope, to which he had become a stranger, struggled to rise in his breast. Faint still, but it was there.
He had no real interest in the overpowering flash they had seen and almost did not bother to watch the roiling, filthy mass of violent cloud which rose above the earth.
It was that momentary trace on his screen. A teleportation firing! A trace he had never hoped to see again.
His immediate reaction was to see whether any of these military minds in the ships around had seen the flickering trace. He listened anxiously to their chatter.
“It was obviously a nuclear explosion,” said the Bolbod. That settled it for him. He thrust his pugnacious face forward from his collar until it was almost visible as though daring somebody to dispute him.
The Tolnep half-captain made an immediate proposal to go down there and “really wipe the place out!”
The Hawvin speculated that the situation might be political and sought to pull the small gray man into it. But the small gray man was noncommittal: he was waiting to see what the others knew.
It was the Hockner super-lieutenant who summed it up. He put his monocle to his eye and sniffed at them. “You fellows are missing the point, rather!” he said. “Earlier intelligence told of a night-raiding party vanishing in the area. Quite obviously, what we have just seen is the culmination of a political surface war. And I rather say that the government has now changed hands. As we know, the political scene was unstable: a priesthood earlier took over the planet, those yellow fellows in the robes. But they lost out, perhaps, and were driven back to that temple in their Southern Hemisphere.
“Some military group,” he continued, “has now obliterated the former capital of the planet with nuclear weapons. With two separate revolts in just the last few months, the political climate is highly unstable and the time is ripe for a concerted attack by us.”
“Yes!” rumbled the Bolbod. “We should go right down and smear them!”
The Jambitchow commander laughed lightly. “I am afraid you will have to count me out, gentle sirs. For the moment at least. Have you looked over there at that shoulder on the mountain peak—the one just to the west of the capital?”
There was silence and then some startled gasps.
Fifteen assorted battle planes and marine-attack carriers were just now rising into view.
“It was an ambush!” said the half-captain.
“Bah,” said the Bolbod. “Their firepower does not compare to even one of our major vessels!”
“They could be quite nasty,” said the Jambitchow in his lilting voice.
There was a lull. Abruptly a face filled the viewer of the small gray man. It was Roof Arsebogger of the Midnight Fang calling from the Tolnep Terrify-class, battle-plane-launching capital ship Capture.
“Your Excellency,” drooled the reporter, “could we take advantage of this lull to get your personal reactions to this general situation?”
The small gray man was always calm, never emotional. All he said, and in a quiet voice, was, “Get out of my viewscreen.”
“Oh, yes sir, Your Excellency. Indeed, sir, Your Excellency. At once, sir!” The diseased face vanished.
The small gray man made a grimace of distaste and then went back to considering the rest of them. Sooner or later they would come to some conclusion and take some concerted action. So far none had mentioned the teleportation trace. None of them was coming to any logical conclusion. Was each one privately hungering for prize money and keeping the rest in the dark? He would listen. It was always safe to listen.
The combined force had come alive and was changing position in orbit so as to maintain its location above this area. Flashes of engine exhausts were apparent in the sky around and a mutter of internal ship commands trickled through the channels. They were readying themselves.
It was the Hawvin who finally expressed something that must have been on all their minds—the rewards. “I have just worked out that they might be the one and don’t know! There is a report here of a big Psychlo walking around a firing platform down there earlier this day.”
“Well, if it was a Psychlo, don’t you think he would have known?” said the Jambitchow commander.
This brought the Hockner super-lieutenant into it. “If the silly fool didn’t know, he still might have been the one.”
“But if he had been the one,” said the Hawvin, “he would know. And he didn’t know, so this isn’t the one.”
The quarter-admiral chipped in, tapping a tooth thoughtfully. “As the possibility now exists that they are the one”—other faces looked at him on their viewscreens, unable to figure out how he had gotten to this conclusion—“why then I see no reason to hold off further from simply raiding the place and gutting it and then clearing out.
“But on the other hand,” continued the quarter-admiral in a brilliant spurt of logic, “if they are the one, then they constitute an extreme danger to us and should be raided. Either way, we simply raid it, divide up the loot, and clear out.”
“And the reward money?” said the Jambitchow.
“Why,” said the quarter-admiral, “we can best find out about that with an extensive interrogation of the resulting prisoners. As commander in chief of this combined force—”
There were instant protests. They agreed that in any event they should attack, gut the place, and clear out. But they didn’t agree that the quarter-admiral was their commander in chief!
This produced a very sour effect on Quarter-Admiral Snowleter. Roof Arsebogger being aboard, he wanted to get the best possible image. This disagreement didn’t fit with it and it made him quite cross.
The ensuing wrangling took considerable time and the small gray man returned to studying the scene below.
He had spotted a small convoy racing south. It was in two sections. The first, smaller section was streaking down what must have been an ancient highway. The second was larger and driving nearly as fast. At first it might appear that the second was chasing the first. But now they had come together without a fight on the banks of a river. They must all be the same group.
The stream was in spring flood, and shortly after the arrival of the first section, water pumps were placed and huge sprays of water were visible. They were spraying down their vehicles and themselves.
The action was not known to the small gray man so he consulted some reference books. Radiation! The way to get rid of contamination was copious use of water. The particles could be washed down and away due to their weight. Then that had been a nuclear blast. The Psychlos down through the ages had remorselessly suppressed anyone seeking to use such weapons. It was a nearly forgotten chapter of ancient warfare.
The small gray man had his communication officer tune in his viewscreens better. There was haze and overcast down there, a little difficult to see through. The city to the north had begun to burn quite fiercely, a glow under the clouds of spiring smoke. The wind was from the south and even though this left the river area where the trucks had arrived clearer, there was a lot of interference. Ah, it was that shorting power line to the old minesite. It made the viewscreen jump and distort.
It took some time for the group at the river to sort itself out. What were they? Refugees? The remains of an attack force?
And then he saw it: under that dome they had raised with a crane, a teleportation console.
He began to piece this situation together. He did not know why or how, but that fight and explosion had to do with teleportation.
One or another of these commanders in the ships about him would invite his advice. He would answer noncommittally. For once he would not be helpful at all. He hoped and prayed that they would not see that console down there.
The group apparently had some wounded and were caring for them and their attention for quite a span was not on security. The console was sitting there, plain as day.
Finally six marine-attack battle planes flew in and landed. There was heavy air cover over this group, quite in addition to the landed planes.
The small gray man kept his eye on that console. They finally shrouded it and moved it into one of the marine-attack planes.
The Hockner super-lieutenant suddenly said, “Wasn’t that a transshipment console they transferred from truck to plane? I’m playing back my screens.”
The small gray man sagged. He had not wanted them to see that. He had hoped they wouldn’t recognize one if they did see it.
Vain hope. “It is!” said the Hockner.
It took them quite a while to load down there. Some of the marine-attack planes were quite empty; two were very fully loaded. The small gray man looked up capacities. Yes, two marine-attack planes could handle that entire party.
The commanders were now chattering at a great rate. Some had seen pictures of such consoles. There was a rising tide of excitement, a rising vision of sharing in two hundred million credits of reward money.
Then the group down there abandoned the flatbeds and pumps and a crane and what might be a couple of coffins. Six marine-attack planes took off.
And then they did a very puzzling and confusing thing. Instead of assuming an orderly formation, they began to crisscross each other’s bows and circle and dart. It was quite impossible even on a screen playback to tell which marine-attack carrier was which!
Four of them landed again. Which four? Which were the loaded ones?
The commanders really chattered over this. They were playing back screens, looking for identifying marks. Not possible in this static.
Abruptly the Hockner solved it. Two of the planes, with only a small part of the additional air cover, took off at a leisurely pace—only a thousand miles an hour—on a northeasterly course. The other four and the remaining but majority air cover planes stayed at the river.
“It’s a lure!” cried the super-lieutenant. “They want us to follow that northeast group!”
They watched, plotting the course of the northeast group. It would pass over this side of the pole and, unless it stopped before that, would wind up at that pagoda place in the Southern Hemisphere, and at that speed, would get there in about nine hours.
As if to confirm the Hockner’s suspicions, the remaining four marine-attack planes and the rest of the air cover suddenly streaked away on a course slightly to the west of north. They were traveling at two thousand miles an hour.
A hasty extrapolation of their course gave their only possible destination as an ancient minesite near a place which had been called “Singapore.”
“That does it, old fellow,” said the Hockner. “There is a report here that there has been heavy activity in that area and some sort of platform being laid out. They’re taking that console to ‘Singapore’!”
The quarter-admiral tried to disagree. As the senior officer he had a right to be obeyed. He explained that it must be the pagoda. The reason was that he hated all religions. Religious people were zealots and upset governments and always had to be crushed. This obviously was a religious revolt and they even had evidence of it. A religious order had upset the government of the planet and had now stolen a console. This planet was the one and he ordered them all to head for the pagoda objective.
His order did it. The combined force streaked into controlled motion, in full cry after the Singapore-bound group.
But the mighty Terrify-class, battle-plane-launching capital ship Capture did not follow them.
Egged on by Roof Arsebogger into independent action that would make better copy and by a scathing hatred of all religions, Quarter-Admiral Snowleter turned his ponderous and overwhelming ship, with its belly full of battle planes, toward Kariba.
2
Jonnie awoke with a start of alarm. The ground had shaken! A woman nurse who must have been at his bedside left the room.
He stared around him, for a moment unable to place the unfamiliar surroundings. Then he recognized them. It was the bunker room at Kariba that the Chinese had fixed up especially for him at the inner edge of the hollow of the firing platform. They had ringed the inside hill with deep bunkers and even tiled some of them. They were lit with mine lights.
This one was tiled in yellow. It was furnished with a bed, chairs and a wardrobe. They had even done a portrait of Chrissie in the tiles, taking it from a picto-recorder shot—it looked quite like her except that they had slightly slanted her eyes.
The ground jolted again. Bombs?
He was just about to swing out of bed when Dr. Allen came in and soothingly pushed him back. “It’s all right,” said Dr. Allen. “They have things under control out there.” He was taking Jonnie’s pulse.
Sir Robert showed up in the doorway. He had a bandage across his nose which Dr. Allen had set. He was obviously waiting for Dr. Allen to finish.
“You had a nasty one,” said Dr. Allen. “But your pulse is normal now. That prevention shot of serum you had handled some of the venom reaction. But you really owe it all to Sir Robert: he got the poison out and even gave you a few drops of serum.”
Jonnie’s huge Psychlo wristwatch was lying on the sidetable. He stared at it. He had been asleep for eighteen hours! Lord knows what had happened in that time.
Dr. Allen anticipated him. “I know, I know. But it was necessary to put you on an opiate to slow your heart down.” He had a stethoscope on Jonnie’s chest. He listened. Then he folded it up. “I can’t detect any heart damage. Hold out your hand.”
Jonnie did.
“Ah, no tremble,” said Dr. Allen. “I think you’re fine. A few days in bed—”
At that moment the ground jolted again. Jonnie tried to get up and Dr. Allen pushed him back again.
“Sir Robert!” called Jonnie. “What’s happening?”
Dr. Allen nodded to Sir Robert that it was all right and then left. Sir Robert came over to stand beside the bed. He was not answering Jonnie’s question. He just stood there beaming down at Jonnie, glad to see him alive. The lad even had color in his cheeks.
“What is happening?” said Jonnie, spacing each word.
“Oh,” said Sir Robert. “That’s a Tolnep ship up there. It’s at about two hundred miles but it keeps sending down planes to bomb this place. We have air cover. Stormalong is here and directing air defenses. So far the enemy is giving Singapore its main attention.”
Angus was at the door. Jonnie called to him, “Have you set up the console?”
“Oh, aye,” said Angus. He came in. “That’s why they didn’t disturb you.” He pointed a finger up. “With all that firing, our antiaircraft outside the screen, and the motors of our own planes, we wouldn’t dare use the firing rig. It’s all connected. The Chinese set that place up very nice.”
“The next firing position of the switch is down,” said Jonnie.
“Yes, Sir Robert told us that. It’s all ready to go if this firing ever stops! Get a rest.” Angus left and passed Thor.
Thor said, “How do you feel?”
Jonnie waved his hand negatively. “Unimportant. The last I remember was being in the dome. You better bring me up to date.”
They told him what had happened and what they had done.
“A recoil that bad!” said Jonnie.
“Worse,” said Thor.
“How many men did we lose?” said Jonnie.
“Andrew and MacDougal,” said Thor. “But we have fifteen of them here in this little hospital they have. Couple of concussions, broken arms or legs. Mostly bruised, very badly bruised. The lead of the coffins protected them. No radiation burns. Andrew was badly bayoneted by the Brigantes and couldn’t fasten his coffin lid from inside, and it blew open.”
“And MacDougal?” said Jonnie.
“Well, that one is sort of bad. He had the station over by the old cage and the coffin was jolted out of the ground. We couldn’t find his body for a while and that’s what got us looking.” Jonnie noticed Thor was holding a heavy package: he had steadied it against the table. “We had to start looking for corpses. They had been blown all around, most of the flesh burned off. We followed the blast line, thinking his body had been blown directly away from the platform, and we got into what was left of Terl’s office—the whole top of it had been blown off. Four or five bodies from the platform edge had been blown into that area. We didn’t want to leave anyone listed simply as missing, so we were trying to identify bodies. We found MacDougal’s body.
“And we found this.” He was unwrapping the heavy package. “I know you will be relieved to have it. One of the corpses had all the flesh burned off and the vertebrae were exposed and this was sticking in them.”
It was the pea-sized pellet of the unknown core material of the bomb.
“Brown Limper,” said Jonnie. “Terl threw it at him. Like a bullet. Yes, I am very, very glad you found it!”
“We got the other package Terl handed to him,” said Thor. “We gave it to Angus and he disarmed it. What does it do?”
“We don’t really know,” said Jonnie. “But knowing Terl—”
“We got his whole recycling basket,” said Thor. “We figured he’d try to use it and we cut the power off. It’s really full! It’s out here on a dolly if you want it. We had it in a radiation-proof mine sack, fortunately.” He beckoned toward the door. “We grabbed it right after he left his office.”
A gillie wheeled the dolly in. They had stacked the material neatly on it.
“Don’t try to fire those assassin pistols,” said Thor. “Ker put a plug in them so they’d shoot out of the back at the user. Ker said to tell you and that he’d fix them back.”
They handed Jonnie some of the booklets and papers that had been in the false backs and bottoms of the cabinets. Jonnie had a lot of it already. His eye was caught by a pamphlet: “Known Defenses of Hostile Races and Surveys of Their Homelands.” He thumbed through it. Lot of planets here. He looked under Tolnep:
Jonnie looked at the Psychlo date. It was only a couple of years old. The catalogue went on. Jonnie laid it down.
Another thud and ground shake.
Suddenly, Jonnie was aware of the underlying tension in all those who had come in. They were just trying to make him feel easy! Thor had received an urgent summons while he had been reading. And now a communicator rushed in with a sheaf of dispatches for Sir Robert and rushed out. Jonnie saw the frown flicker across Sir Robert’s face as he read them.
“The situation is worse than you’re letting on, isn’t it?” said Jonnie.
“Naw, naw,” said Sir Robert. “Dinna fret yersel’, laddie.”
“What is the situation?” demanded Jonnie. Sir Robert never dropped into dialect unless agitated.
The grizzled old Scot sighed and recovered his university accent. “Well, if you must have it, we have lost the initiative. For whatever reason, the enemy has decided to attack in force.” He tapped the reports. “Singapore is holding so far and right now has tied down about three-quarters of their forces. But they won’t be tied down there forever. The Russian base is getting the attention of planes from a large war vessel. Edinburgh is getting hit. Neither of the last two places have any armor-cable coverage. And up there,” he pointed, “is a huge monster of a battleship that has been sending planes and bombs down for several hours. It could also launch up to a thousand Tolnep marines and we aren’t that well equipped to handle an assault force by land. So there you have it. It can only get worse, not better.”
“Call Dr. Allen,” said Jonnie. “I’m getting up!”
Sir Robert tried to protest, but he finally called the doctor in.
Dr. Allen did not like it. “You’re full of a drug we found called ‘sulfa’ that will prevent infection and blood poisoning. You’ll feel dizzy if you get up suddenly. I don’t advise it.”
Nevertheless, Jonnie insisted. He knew they were doing all they could. But he wanted to look over the situation. He just couldn’t sit still and be pounded to bits.
Jonnie couldn’t see any clothes. A coordinator showed up with an elderly, gray-headed Chinese man. “This is Mr. Tsung,” said the coordinator. “He has been in charge of fixing up your room. He has been learning a little English so he can help you.”
Mr. Tsung bowed. He was obviously pleased to see Jonnie but the thudding bombs also held some of his attention. He had a bowl of soup for Jonnie to drink and his hands shook a bit as he held it out. Jonnie would have laid it down, but Mr. Tsung shook his head. “Drink! Drink!” said Mr. Tsung. “Mebbe so no chance eat later.”
Another communicator beckoned to Sir Robert from the door and the old Scot rushed out.
Mr. Tsung was getting his nervousness under control. The novelty of meeting Jonnie was wearing off, and now that he was doing something, the sporadic thuds of bombs seemed less. And then a conviction came to him that if anybody could do anything about this it would be Lord Jonnie. As he laid out weapons he began to smile with more confidence.
It was true what Dr. Allen said about being dizzy if he moved too suddenly, Jonnie discovered as he dressed. His arm was very sore and stiff. It was a bit hard to dress.
Mr. Tsung got him into the plain green uniform they all wore. He buckled the Smith and Wesson with the left-hand holster and a blast pistol with a right-hand holster around Jonnie’s waist. He rigged a black silk sling for his arm and then adjusted it so that Jonnie could get the arm out of it fast and draw the Smith and Wesson if he had to. He made Jonnie check it to make sure he could do that. Then he gave Jonnie the plain green helmet.
“Now you shoot them,” said Mr. Tsung. He made his hand into a pistol and fired it twice. “Bang! Bang!” He was very confident now, smiling. He tucked his hands in his sleeves and bowed.
If it were only that simple, Jonnie thought. But he bowed and thanked the little man. Good Lord, he was dizzy. Made the room spin to lower his head.
An unusually large explosion shook the ground.
They were catching it.
3
As Jonnie left his room, he saw that the underground passage also led past the hospital. Although his intention had been to go out to the cone where the platform was, concern about the wounded of the raiding party halted him by that door.
A clatter was coming from the place. The click of bolts being cocked and the slap of slings? Arms? He stepped inside the door. There were about thirty beds and over half of them were occupied. But two Chinese, whose armbands showed they were from the armory, had a dolly with assorted weaponry, and they were passing out blast rifles, AK 47s with thermit ammunition, and handguns to the wounded Scots.
A gray-haired Scot nurse came up to Jonnie. She obviously did not approve of this commotion in her ward. Then she recognized Jonnie and choked back whatever she was about to say, probably to tell him to get out.
Jonnie had been counting. “There’s thirteen in here from the raiding party and two gunners. Are there any more?”
“The two lads with concussions are in surgery,” said the nurse. “Dr. MacKendrick says their operations went well and they’ll be fine. Are you supposed to be up, MacTyler?”
By now one of the injured Scots had seen Jonnie at the door and barked his name. Jonnie had been about to go from bed to bed with apologies. It appeared there were seventeen casualties out of the raiding party of thirty-one. No, eighteen including himself. Heavy! These men were badly bruised; black eyes predominated. Several broken limbs. He felt that better planning could have averted this.
But the other Scots had seen him and they began to put up a yell. Sounded like “Scotland wei heigh!” They were sitting up and yelling. Nothing wrong with their morale!
Suddenly Jonnie realized that these lads had slaughtered the Brigantes and settled the blood feud of Scotland. They were victors. Their injuries were badges of honor. They would be heroes to the whole Scottish nation.
No apologies needed here. He tried to shout into the din and then simply saluted them and, with a smile and wave, withdrew.
He could hear loudspeakers outside playing solemn religious music to prevent infrabeam surveillance.
He came out of the passage from the bunkers and gazed into the bowl. The daylight was made murky from drifting smoke. The slight odor of the atmosphere armor at Stage Three mixed with charcoal’s tang. The bowl seemed unusually crowded.
It was a thousand feet in diameter at the level of its floor. Before, he had thought that was a lot of space, about three-quarters of a million square feet he had guessed. But it did seem crowded now.
The pagoda structure in the center extended well beyond the platform on all sides. All around the bowl, with the pagoda at its center, was a sort of wide paved road.
When he had seen it before, it had almost been deserted. Over there to the right were two Italian-Swiss electricians rigging more wires into some bunkers. A German and a Swiss pilot were sorting out a dolly load of air masks. Near to hand a Scot officer was giving some instructions to a Russian soldier. Way over to the left a group of Swedish soldiers were sorting out ammunition on a dolly. There, just coming out of a passage which must lead outside, were two Sherpa hunters pushing a dolly load of African buffalo meat toward what must be a kitchen. Here and there a Buddhist communicator was moving with a floating walk from one bunker to another. And scattered all about, along the inner bank, were Chinese families and their children and belongings. On one of the big posts which held up the pagoda roof, the Chinese had hung tribal shields representing the remaining tribes of Earth.
A truly international scene—the peoples of Earth.
Jonnie was about to move on when a voice speaking Psychlo sounded behind him and to his right.
“I am so sorry.” It was Chief Chong-won, head of the Chinese tribe and principal architect of this place. “We had to bring in all the people from the village by the lake. The lake is so broad, the cable protection is thin in the center, and some bombs have come through above the dam. Waves from the explosion have made the village unsafe. And the smoke from cooking fires does not escape through the screen.”
He was bowing. Jonnie nodded. “But see,” continued Chong-won, “my engineers are digging air ducts through the hill under the cable.”
Piles of dirt and rock on either side of the bowl showed where the Chinese were using spade drills to cut a channel to the outside air.
“They will use intake fans in one and exhaust fans in the other. They will be curved so no bomb blasts come through. I am so sorry for the oversight.”
“I think you have done splendidly,” said Jonnie. “You say bombs fall in the lake above the dam. Is there any dam injury?”
Chief Chong-won beckoned a Chinese engineer and they chattered for a moment in Mandarin. Then Chong-won said to Jonnie, “Not so far. But some have sent water over the top of the dam and they have put in the flashboards to reduce the spillway. If the lake were to drop in volume, we would have no electricity.”
The whole lowest floor of the “pagoda” was wide open on all four sides. The pagoda was really just a fancy roof. The metal transshipment platform was in plain view. The Chinese had polished it until it shone even in the subdued light.
Jonnie walked under the high roof to get a better look at where they had put the all-important console. Then he smiled. Over on the other side of the platform they had built a stand with sides in the shape of a huge, savage-looking, winged beast!
Angus was there at the console and he waved. “It’s something, isn’t it?” said Angus.
Yes, it really was. A huge head, two wings, a curling tail. Armored metal. Painted gold and red.
“A dragon,” said Chong-won. “Once it was the emblem of imperial China. See, it is laminated molecular armor.”
Not only that, but it had a top! The console was set into the dragon’s back and a cover was made of dragon scales so the operator could work the console without anyone’s observing what he was really doing. There were two stools on the raised console platform and a side shelf for papers and a computer. And all armored. Nothing was going to hurt that console. Or see what was being done with it either.
Such a far cry from the materialistic Psychlo, who was without paintings or art. And what these Chinese could do!
“See?” said Chief Chong-won. “It is the same as those other dragons.” He pointed to a dragon that formed the roof point of the pagoda nearby. Each corner had one. And then the chief pointed to some unfinished work over by the bank. “Each bunker was supposed to have its dragon over the entrance. We have not had time to put them up.” They were much smaller dragons, made of baked clay and painted in gold and red.
The console looked fine under the protective cover. Angus had a copy of the coordinate book there and was drilling himself without punching anything. He was figuring how to convert the figures in the book to this moment of time and the console buttons. “I’ve got it pretty well,” said Angus. “It just takes quite a bit of time to do the calculations. There are eight separate movements listed for each planet and you have to pick where on the planet. But it is not too hard.”
Jonnie looked up. Another bomb had just hit somewhere. “If all that would stop, we’d be in business. I don’t have any idea when it will or exactly what we can do with this console yet.”
Chief Chong-won was pointing at the inside of one of the huge posts that held up the pagoda roof and protected the platform and console from rain. They had rigged mine spotlights on each post so that they spotlighted the platform center. “At night,” he said, “they won’t shine outside.”
Jonnie wanted to go over to the operations bunker, but the chief detoured him into a large underground room in the side wall of the bowl. It was nicely tiled and had a platform at the end for a speaker. It had chairs and would hold about fifty people. Very nice.
Then Chief Chong-won showed him a sample of thirty little apartments they had made for guests and visitors. They were in addition to pilot and personnel berthings. These Chinese engineers could certainly build in wood and tile and stone, particularly when assisted by Psychlo machinery.
Jonnie was interested in gun emplacements all around that could cover the platform and the bowl interior. Given troops, the place could really be defended. But they did not have all that many troops.
He finally got to the ops room. It was a busy place. It was a miniature of the one they had found in the American underground base. A huge map of the planet was in the center. As reports came in from the adjoining communications office, men with long poles were pushing about small lead models of planes and the war vessels in orbit. Enemy vessels were red with tags. Their own planes were green with tags.
Stormalong was there in his white scarf, leather coat and oversized goggles. He had two Buddhist communicators on either side of him and they were talking into close-to-the-mouth microphones that excluded any speech but theirs. Their shaved heads gleamed under the too-large headphones they wore.
Jonnie was told they were operating a planetary battle channel—used by Stormalong—and a planetary command channel used by Sir Robert. The Scot war chief had a thirteen-year-old Buddhist boy operating his channel.
Nobody had to brief Jonnie. It was all there on the big operations board. Singapore was really catching it. There was a lot of antiaircraft being used at the Russian base. Dunneldeen was flying air cover for Edinburgh. Thor was flying air cover for Kariba. Nothing was happening at the Lake Victoria minesite or any of the rest. But where it was hot, it was very hot.
Jonnie listened in to the babble on both battle and command channels. It was all in Pali which he didn’t speak.
There was a third station, manned by a Scot officer, that was monitoring enemy traffic.
Down at the end of the room where there were some spare desks, Glencannon was hunched over a pile of pictures. Jonnie glanced at them. They seemed to be viewscreen runoffs of an air battle. The one he had when the Swiss was killed? Glencannon had another stack, apparently just taken. They were of the huge monster overhead.
Glencannon seemed very agitated, his hands shaking. He had not really recovered from that courier run, seemingly, for Stormalong didn’t have him flying. He didn’t answer when Jonnie spoke to him.
The operations board was not good, but Jonnie did not have anything to contribute. It was simply a slugfest. He wondered how long places not protected with atmosphere-armor cable could hold out. Edinburgh was particularly vulnerable. A worry about Chrissie passed through his mind. He hoped she was safe in a bunker under Castle Rock. Sir Robert answered his question. Yes, they were all in bunkers up there. It was mainly antiaircraft that was protecting the place. Dunneldeen was taking care of strafing planes that tried to come in. The antiaircraft was taking care of bombs.
Jonnie thought he had better look at this antiaircraft they had here. He had never seen the Psychlo guns in action. Not up close.
He went out. Chief Chong-won had vanished, attending to other duties. Chinese families with their children and an occasional dog were sitting about, mostly in and near rifle pits. They looked a bit worn, a bit worried. Some of the children were crying. But the parents smiled broadly, and got up and bowed as Jonnie passed. It made him hope their confidence was not misplaced.
The exit from the bowl was a curving underground passage under the cable so it wouldn’t have to be turned off each time anyone went in or out. The curves were to prevent bomb flash and fragments from getting in.
He went to the first antiaircraft gun emplacement. The gun was shielded. The two gunners were in Russian bulletproof battle dress. A Scot officer saw him and got out of a pit.
“We don’t have enough of these,” said the Scot, pointing at the gun. “We can’t cover the lake. It’s all we can do to cover this bowl.”
Jonnie went over to the gun. It had computer sights that zeroed in on anything moving. What one had to do was hit a trigger and the gun calculated the speed and direction of a moving object, sent a blast concussion into its path, then found the next moving object and hit that.
He looked up. An enemy plane at about two hundred thousand feet was barely discernible. Jonnie knew the range of this gun was short of that by about fifty thousand feet. So did the enemy apparently.
That plane was dropping bombs.
The gun bucked five times rapidly. Five bombs exploded in midair, direct hits by the gun. The explosions up there came back down to them.
“The ones you feel land,” said the Scot officer, “go into the lake. They’re beyond our sector. And of course the ones that fall way out in the woods. We don’t bother with those.”
Jonnie looked toward the woods. Seven or eight miles away there was quite a fire going. No, three separate fires. Every animal within fifty miles must have left the country. The African buffalo the Sherpas had was probably killed by bombs earlier. Well, the woods wouldn’t burn very long. It was pretty wet just now.
He looked back at the gun. What havoc one of these things would have made with their attack on the minesites over a year ago if the attack had not been a total surprise. And if security chiefs like Terl had not let the company defenses go neglected.
Another bomb hit on a hill about ten miles away, and even from here one could see the geyser of smoke and trees. That battleship up there was dropping pretty heavy bombs. If one hit this cone, he didn’t know whether the atmosphere screen would repel it.
He was walking back to the entrance when he saw Glencannon come out. He was buttoning up a heavy flying suit. He didn’t have a communicator or copilot with him. He was walking toward a plane that was surrounded by sandbags. Jonnie thought he must have special orders and did not stop him.
Glencannon got into the plane, a heavily armored Mark 32 that had been converted to high-altitude flying.
Just as Jonnie started down into the passage, Stormalong came racing out of it.
“Glencannon!” shouted Stormalong.
But the pilot had taken off.
4
For days Glencannon had brooded over this. His sleep was tortured with nightmares.
In his mind he could still hear the voice of his Swiss friend, “Go on! Go on! I will shoot them down! Keep going!” And then his scream when he was hit just before he ejected. And back of Glencannon’s eyes he could still see the viewscreen of his friend’s body being shot to pieces in the air.
He had his own playbacks of the war vessel that had launched those planes. And he had the shots taken of this monster overhead.
It was the Terrify-class, battle-plane-launching capital ship Capture. There could be no doubt about it. That was the vessel that had butchered his friend.
He felt he should have gone back, regardless of any orders. The two of them could have finished the Tolnep attack plane, he was certain. But instead he had followed orders.
He had suppressed the urge to go up and destroy that ship, and he felt that if he did not go ahead and do it now his whole life would be a nightmare.
He heard Stormalong’s voice in clear Psychlo on the local command channel: “Glencannon! You must come back! I order you to land!” Glencannon clicked the channel off.
This was Stormalong’s own Mark 32 he was flying. It had been in “emergency reserve.” It was rebuilt for high altitudes, the doors and ports sealed tight. It had huge firepower and even side bombs that could destroy half a city. It was armored to take a ferocious beating. And while its guns may or may not be able to penetrate the skin of a capital ship, there were other ways.
They could not follow him from the ground. All other Mark 32s were at Lake Victoria and here they were only using interceptors. No, they could not follow him. Not to the heights he was going.
He vaulted skyward higher and higher. He adjusted his air mask so it was snug: he was going to go out of the atmosphere.
The Capture was swinging in a slow and ponderous ellipse, three hundred fifty miles above Kariba. It was fifty miles above the termination of the Earth’s atmosphere. It was operating on reaction engines and was no longer simply sailing in orbit.
Planes would leave it, streak downward to targets, and then return to be rearmed. One spotted him and dove. Almost with contempt, Glencannon centered him in his sights and pressed his fire button. The Mark 32 bucked in recoil.
The Tolnep burst into fire and plummeted earthward like a comet.
It alerted the Capture to his presence, and as he neared it the gunports winked and long laces of flame streaked the sky about him. One splashed on the side of the Mark 32. It made the flight deck hot.
Glencannon danced back out of range. He saw the steering ports of the ship jet fire and anticipated its course.
Twenty-five miles in front of it he began to tap his console to hold his position. It was just out of the Tolnep’s range.
He adjusted his viewscreens and began to watch.
The stars were glaring bright in the blackness above him but he had no eye for them. The Earth spread out its curves below him but he saw them not.
His whole, concentrated, obsessed attention was on the Capture, studying it.
The ship resumed operation after a bit, believing his mission must be surveillance, not attack. The arrogance of such a ship was plain. It did not believe it could be hurt. It was once more launching and taking aboard planes.
Glencannon saw that just before they opened the huge front ports of their hangar deck, a small exterior warning light winked, probably to warn approaching planes to stand clear and not get in front of the ship as it was about to open the door and launch.
Each time the door opened he studied the enlarged viewscreen of the interior. The entire hangar deck was cluttered with planes. Tolneps in pressure suits were racing about, fueling ships and loading bombs. They had gotten out much larger bombs now.
They were leaving the interior magazine open. Fuel cans, probably liquid gases, littered the hangar deck. The Tolneps were overconfident and sloppy. But what could one expect of a slaver?
Glencannon shifted his attention to the rearing diamond-shaped bridge. There were two figures there, moving back and forth. One was not in uniform. A civilian, probably. The one in the naval cap seemed to have attention only for the civilian. No, they were not being alert.
He turned his attention back to the outside light and the hangar door. He timed it. He calculated his own position.
In the back of his mind he could hear the voice of his friend from time to time: “Go on! Go on! I will shoot them down! Keep going!”
That was exactly what Glencannon was going to do: shoot them down!
For the first time in quite a while he felt calm, relaxed, confident. And totally determined. He was doing exactly what he had to do.
The next time . . .
The light went on!
His hands hit the console.
The Mark 32 streaked ahead, almost smashed him through the back of the seat with acceleration.
Guns flamed in the Capture.
Balls of orange glare racketed against the Mark 32.
It sliced straight through the barrage.
Just as it entered the open hangar door Glencannon’s hand hit all guns and bombs.
The explosion was a sun blowing apart!
Jonnie and Stormalong saw it as they stood outside the cone, back of a gun viewscreen. They saw the plane enter the hangar door with all guns blazing.
But it required no viewscreen to see the flash. The abrupt glare lit the fading daylight for fifty miles around. It was painful to the eyes.
It would be soundless in the void above the earth. But it was not motionless.
The giant capital ship began to fall. A flaming arc began to draw its way down the sky, slowly, very slowly at first, but building up speed.
And then it hit the atmosphere and began to burn more brightly.
Down it came, further and further, lower and lower.
“My God!” said Stormalong. “It’s going to hit the lake!”
Down it came, faster and faster, like some huge comet painting the sky.
It was dropping at an angle.
Stormalong’s muscles strained as though by will alone he could push it into the hills and away from the water above the dam.
Down it came, a blazing incandescent wreck, traveling at great speed.
Five miles uplake from the dam it struck.
The heat and speed of passage thundered in the air. Then came the screeching crash of the strike.
Steam and water geysered a thousand feet in the air.
There was an underwater flash as some remaining part of its fuel exploded.
The shock concussion raced ahead of the wave as great as any tidal wave.
The deserted Chinese village was snuffed out as though it had never been.
The concussion wave hit the back of the dam.
The water wave inundated the structure, smashing flashboards, flying in a mighty cascade into the air at the dam front.
The ground underfoot shook.
Breathless, they steadied themselves and stared. Would the whole dam go?
Waves subsided. The dam was still there. But there was new sound in it.
The lights were still on. The generators were running.
Guards who had been in the powerhouse came staggering out.
Water was roaring down the river as the excess sped away, tearing down banks, ripping through islands.
Engineers came racing from the cone.
Most of the machinery which had been parked near the lake had been swept away. They were racing about trying to find a flying platform.
They found one imbedded in the bank, half-covered with mud. They freed it, swept the mud off it, and got it flying.
The engineers and a machine operator went flying along the top of the dam.
Jonnie and Stormalong stood by beside a plane, waiting to see whether the engineers needed help. Their voices, in Chinese, were coming over a mine radio.
The atmosphere armor over the cone was still sizzling in Stage Three. Guards got back into the powerhouse and turned off the dam protection cable and reduced the cone armor to Stage One.
Although this dam lake was one hundred twenty miles long, it seemed lower in level.
Jonnie and Stormalong were about to take off to see what the engineers had found when they came back. They landed and were reporting to Chong-won. There was a lot of excited and upset talk and Jonnie went over.
“They say the dam did not break,” Chong-won told him. “Flashboards are broken all along the top and even some concrete along the walkway and the guard rails are gone. But that is nothing. They can see no cracks. However, at the far end of the dam abutment, over there on the other side of the dam, it seems to have shaken loose from the bank and there is water escaping. They say water is erosive and it could get bigger. It could even greatly lower the level of the lake to a point where the water turbines will not run.”
“How many hours?” said Jonnie.
Chong-won asked them. They could only guess. Maybe four, maybe five hours. They would do all they could to stop the water and plug the leak. They did not have much grouting to seal it. The whole far end of the dam seemed to have torn out of the bank. They wanted to get back over and do what they could.
Angus came running out of the passageway seeking Jonnie. “We can fire now! There is no shooting.”
“Maybe you can fire the rig,” said Stormalong, appalled at Glencannon’s sacrifice. “But for how long?”
“At least he bought us that,” said Jonnie, sadly.
5
The small gray man had followed the pack to the Singapore area. He had instructed his ship captain not to get in the way of military craft for they were inclined to be impetuous and prone to accidents, to say nothing of poorly aimed shots. Thus they were a little late on the scene and the battle had already begun.
The minesite was not at all hard to locate—it was a brilliant cone of defensive fire, its guns arcing up and converging upon target after target. It was quite a distance north of the ancient ruined city, and just north of the minesite was a hydroelectric dam. The gunfire was quite intense and disturbed his infrabeams, preventing for the moment a closer inspection of what they had down there.
The small gray man did not consider himself much of a military specialist, and things which a military man might know at once, he usually had to look up. He wanted the maximum/minimum height which would give him a safe altitude from which to observe, and it was quite laborious to identify those guns. At last he had it: “Local defense perimeter, computerized antiassault craft, and bomb predetonation atmosphere/nonatmosphere beam projection cannon; rate of fire 15,000 shots per minute, maximum 175,000 feet, minimum safe limit 2,000 feet; crew two; barrels and shields manufactured by Tambert Armaments, Predicham; computers by Intergalactic Arms, Psychlos; Cost C4,269 freight on platform Predicham.” My, my, what cheap guns. But that was Intergalactic Mining: “Profit—first, last, and always, profit.” No wonder they had trouble! One would have thought they would have orbit cannon.
So it was safe to remain two hundred miles up so long as they did not get in the road of launched craft from the nonatmosphere major war vessels riding at 350 miles high. He told his captain and then asked his communicator to focus beams very sharply on what appeared to be a firing platform under the shield cable below.
He spotted it almost at once and had a surge of hope. It was a console! A transshipment console right there near the platform! There were even some men about it as though working it.
Intently, he watched his viewscreens for a teleportation trace. He watched for quite a while. There was none. He wondered that the military men in the war vessels had not noticed this lack. Maybe they did not know the telltale trace existed. Maybe they had a different make of viewscreen. But the probability was that they had never seen one because they were always shooting and you couldn’t shoot—
The small gray man sighed. He was no detective, and the evidence so plain before him had gone unnoticed. Those men down there could not be using a transshipment rig. They even had their own planes in the air. And either one, planes or shots, would prevent any use of teleportation. The rig itself would blow to bits with distortions.
The military had begun to give attention to the power dam lake now and were trying to drop bombs into it to cut off the minesite power supply. This gave a respite to the minesite itself and the small gray man had been put onto that console.
He looked up the mineral traces which resulted.
Carbon!
That settled it. That thing down there was a burned-out console.
It was so disappointing!
He drew off and watched for a while. Combined force planes were not having much luck with the dam lake due to atmosphere-armor cable around it and they were now giving their attention to the air cover planes from below. There was a boiling fight and he saw two Jambitchow combat battle planes blown to bits.
He had his ship moved up higher. Down to the south the combined force bombers had begun to drop bombs into the deserted ancient ruins of Singapore. A fire blossomed up. Then another. He wondered at the military mind that would bomb an undefended city with no military value but which might contain some loot that they so valued. But they always did it.
His indigestion was bothering him again. These were such awful times. There seemed to be no hope at all.
He knew there was a base in the northern continent man had once called “Russia” and he had his ship captain move up there.
One of the attacking-force war vessels was launching planes over that base. They were personnel carriers. The small gray man observed a force of about five hundred Hawvin marines deploying on the plain before the base. Behind fire shields they began to move forward. It almost seemed that the base was not defended. No answering fire came back to the advancing force. It got closer and closer to the base. Several fires erupted. Then the force began to move up a mountain slope toward what must be an underground defense point. The force was within a hundred yards of it now, pouring a hail of fire into it.
Abruptly the ground under the attacking force erupted.
Mines! The whole terrain was flaming.
Flashes of weapon fire blasted down the hill from the base. The attacking force withdrew in haste beyond the village. Officers were shouting and regrouping their marines. But they had left over a hundred dead or wounded on the ground before the base.
The attacking force formed up again and advanced on the base.
Planes streaked out of base hangar doors and ground-strafed the assault force.
The small gray man had seen no traces on his viewscreens. He had not really hoped to see any, not in all that firing.
Since it was not far out of the orbit course he now had, he told his ship captain to pass over the American minesite at a height of four hundred miles.
It took a while and the small gray man napped a little. A buzzer told him they were over it and he turned to his screens.
Way down below, the ruin of the minesite was utterly dead. The abandoned trucks and pumps still lay beside the river. What a desolate, lifeless scene! The dome which had covered a console was still lying there, still attached to a crane hook but tipped over.
The city to the north was still burning.
His mineral tracer showed the whole area hot with radiation.
He directed his ship captain to change orbit to pass over Scotland. It was in his mind to stop and see whether the old woman might have come back, but then down on the horizon beyond, the sensors picked up heat and then a clear view of a Drawkin war vessel. He looked at his maps. They were not very good maps, for they were just pages of schoolbooks, but he easily identified the city. It was Edinburgh. And it was burning.
His radio was crackling and the communicator tuned it in more finely. What a rushing barrage of sound! Some of it was Drawkin and the small gray man could not understand that tongue even though they controlled twenty planets. It was a sort of hysterical-sounding language. He could take a vocoder to it, for he had the vocabulary circuits somewhere, but they would just be commands to pilots down below. The other language he had heard an awful lot of lately. It was a sort of smooth, meditative tongue. He had even dawdled over a frequency decoding table to try to get a grasp of it, but it seemed to defy that.
But he didn’t need to understand the language. The physical facts were plain enough. There was a heavy air battle in progress.
He looked down through the port. A big promontory stood above the city. Antiaircraft fire was coning up from it. The rock stood in a sea of fire as the city burned.
A Drawkin bomber exploded in midair and fell to add its bursting gouts of green flame to the orange of the burning city.
No teleportation traces possible there. That was for certain.
He felt very depressed, even sad. He wondered at himself. Was the strain of this past year making him emotional? Surely not! Yet the old woman in the north of Scotland, and particularly his finding her gone, had stirred sentiment. And here he was feeling a bit of anxiety lest she be down there in all that flame.
All this was quite unlike him. Quite unprofessional.
He thought he had better have a little nap so he could awake thinking more clearly, less clouded and blurred. What an absolutely terrible year it had been.
He went to his cabin and lay down. And it seemed only moments later that he woke with the whole thing bright and plain before him.
That criss-cross dance those terrestrial marine-attack planes had done. How dull of him! Of course he was no military tactician, but he should have realized it long before now. That high-speeding group that flashed off to Singapore was the lure. The burned-out console was just bait.
He went to his small gray office and did a very efficient playback of that “dance of planes” and then plotted the course of the real group quite accurately. Yes, on that course they would arrive at that pagoda in the Southern Hemisphere of the planet.
He gave his orders to his ship captain and away they sped, right up to 2X light.
He was just in time to see the death of the Capture.
It startled him.
He was not sure how it could happen. A Terrify-class, battle-plane-launching capital ship? Exploded in orbit?
With a cautionary word to the bridge to draw off, the small gray man watched the huge vessel disintegrate down through the atmosphere and strike the lake of the dam. For a bit he watched to see whether the dam would give. It might be damaged, he decided, but it appeared to be holding for the moment. A huge amount of water was rushing down the river channel in an overpowering flood. But there was nothing down there.
He telephotoed his viewscreens on the dam itself. Yes, it had been damaged. Quite a bit of water was escaping on the lower left-hand side, much of it under the dam there. A big hole from the looks of it.
There had been quite a fight here. The woods were burning. Yes, and there went a squadron of the Capture’s planes, streaking off over the horizon in the hopes of being taken aboard some Tolnep ship in the Singapore area. They must have been outside when the Capture exploded. Well, they probably wouldn’t make it. They didn’t have the range. They’d wind up in the sea.
But he better watch this pagoda. There were no planes around it now. His infrabeams couldn’t pick up anything but religious music. It drowned out any voices.
From a respectful distance he watched his screens intently. He did not have too long to wait.
A teleportation trace!
Yes, yes, yes! He played it back.
Hope surged.
Then he felt this was too good to be true. Consoles when captured had been known to fire once and then that was it. They never fired again.
It seemed absolutely ages that he waited.
There it was again.
It had fired twice. It had fired twice!
Joy surged up in him. Then he found an instant to wonder at himself. Sentiment? Anxiety? And now joy? How very unprofessional! Get to the urgent business at hand.
How could he communicate with them?
The radio channel was full of the calm, religious-sounding speech. What would they speak down there?
He grabbed a vocoder. He threw on his transmit and put the vocoder in front of a microphone. But what language? He had several in the vocoder bank. One called “French”—no, that was utterly dead. One called “German?” No, he had never heard that in their channels. “English.” He would start off with English.
He muttered into the vocoder and it said, “I am requesting safe conduct through your lines. My vessel is not armed. You may train your guns on it or on me. I have no hostile intentions. It might be mutually beneficial were you to grant me an interview. I am requesting safe conduct through your lines. My vessel is not armed. You may train your guns on it or on me. I have no hostile intentions. It might be mutually beneficial were you to grant me an interview.”
The small gray man waited. He hardly dared breathe. An awful lot of things depended upon the reply.