Authors: Hubbard,L. Ron
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.
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 gun ports 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.
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 non-atmosphere major war vessels riding at three hundred fifty 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 hich 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 sentient. 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.
Lt startled him.
He was not sure how it could happen. A Terrify-classbattle-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.
- Part XXVI -