John Rackham (19 page)

"You
stupid oaf!
You've
learned!
How many engagements have you ever fought?
Now listen to me, and listen carefully; there's no time to repeat a lot of
elementary stuff. This is the
BIG
fleet,
remember? Those six ships are openers only. Markers. By the time they are
settling in for ground-fall there will be at least six more for each marker.
Thirty-six in all. They will come down in formation. They will hover above the
marker-ship, for reinforcement, surveillance, lookout. Right at this moment
they think you're all asleep, just waiting to be taken. You so much as hit one
of those markers and you'll blow the whole thing! Get me? The other ships will
go back up, fast. And stay there awhile until they've weighed up the picture
all over again."

"And then," Mordin snapped,
"they will come down, and we will bum them!"

"You're
still a fool. They won't come down, no more than a ten-mile ceiling. Can you
bum them at that range? Don't be stupid."

Mordin hesitated, looked to Karsh, who
shrugged. "I told you, didn't I? He knows his stuff. If they park at ten
miles and work us over from there we might as well give up!"

"Do
it!" Bragan ordered. "Tell your beamers to hold. Tell them!" As
Mordin hesitated still, there came a shout from the sky-watch group.

"More
objects are separating from the clouds, large numbers, too many to count us
yet."

"Now do you believe me? You so much as
lay a finger on one of those marker-ships and that swarm will lay off and pound
the
hell
out of you!"

Mordin
paled, reached for the microphone. "Attention all beamer-erews. Do not
fire on the first ships. Hold your fire until
I
order."

Bragan
settled back into his seat, getting the feel of the operation by degrees. This,
his natural talent, came to him as easily as breathing.

"Where's this picture
from?" he asked, and Karsh told him.

"This
camera is in the middle of Stopa, looking straight up. We've a ring of them all
around the perimeter."

"Any chance the enemy
might detect it?"

"Not
a hope. This is Scartanni stuff. Low-intensity T.V. Everything else is by wire.
I doubt if they know we have radio."

"Any chance of us
listening to theirs?"

"That's
a thought!" Karsh spun in his chair and began manipulating dials on a
nearby console. Bragan watched the big plot-screen intently. And there it was,
the first ship, destined for Stopa. The blurred dot slid in from the edge of
the picture and scurried past. Making the first gas-pass, he noted. Standard
Operating Procedure. Now the dot came back, larger, to make another pass and
swing into a slow curve and settle roughly in the center of the plate. Then,
abruptly, it grew larger, ballooning into hugeness. Mordin made a sign and the
picture jumped abruptly to another standpoint, from the top of some building on
the outskirts. Now they could see the Zorgan ship from the side, saw it
settling down. It was a great flattened oval of dead black, sitting on top of a
violet bed of ion-fire from the steering jets. The control-room was suddenly
very tense Mordin said it for all of them.

"That's a
big
ship!"

"No it isn't," Bragan corrected
grimly. "That is just a light-heavy. A vanguard. You wait until you see
the support-ships! Ours was tiny. That one will cany a thousand shock-troopers
ready to move out as soon as she's down on the ground."

"A
thousand?" Mordin roared, and Bragan gave him a chill stare.

"Remember what I told
you, now. Hit that ship and you might as well cut your throat. The
support-ships are ten times the size of that one, and loaded. Can we have a
reading on them, please?" He swiveled around to see the stiff-faced crew
hastily adjusting their instruments to get readings. And the picture was
grimer than he had painted it. The cloud of support-ships had subdivided neatly
into separate swarms, one cluster heading for Stopa. Forty-eight of them in
lattice-formation, a three-dimensional array with each ship one mile from any
other. The vanguard ship settled now, in exactly the same spot Bragan had
chosern. Mor-din's face showed that he itched to strike.

"A thousand armed troopers," he
growled, and Bragan spat at him.

"Helpless, once we cut their power
supply. Forget them. We have to get that upstairs force first." There came
an excited hail from away to their left. "Jalban has struck! Their ship
is destroyed!"

"Fools!" Bragan snarled, and heard
a sudden harsh-voiced clamor from Karsh's setup. Zorgan.

The commander out there in that ship was
ordering, "All troops ready to ground. Stand by for screens."

"Take
it!" Bragan ordered. "Beamers to fire, on the high force only! Get
those upstairs ships!"

He
had hardly spoken before the order was passed, and six of the dark discs in
that lattice exploded into white fire, blinding the screen for a moment. Then
four more, and the rest shifted rapidly, changed formation, grew huge as they
dived for the ground. Smart thinking, Bragan admitted, to drop down and
diminish the target area. The screen was full of dancing, darting, spinning
discs, the control-chamber thick with shouted orders and anxious reports.

Bragan
yelled to Mordin over the din, "Now you can take care of the
marker-ship!" and the old man made a wolfish grin as he nodded and moved
two switches, then thumbed a button. The whole chamber leaped and shuddered to
the shock of an immense explosion. The lights dimmed then flared again, and
Karsh grinned.

"How about that? Every square foot of
the city is mined!"

"Then where the hell
are we?"

"Just
outside. Same as every other city on the planet. All deserted and
booby-trapped. Mined. Smart, eh?"

Bragan clung to his chair as the chamber
leaped again to another heavy shock. Again the lights flickered. Dust began to
haze the air. The screen-picture shifted to another camera and they saw the
angry red glare where the marker-ship had been. They saw angry black shapes
plunging and swooping, and spouting fiery-red heat-blasts to sear the city. One
blinked out and then flared into a blaze of white destruction. Another plunged
down as it died, and the chamber danced again with the impact.

Zorgan thinking,
Bragan mused, watching the carnage from the
furious heat-beams.
Hit
back ruthlessly.
But
they were hitting the wrong target, a deserted city. The beamers were all
outside in a circle, and they took their toll. Three more of the vengeful black
ships blew apart in coruscating flares of death before the message got through
and the remainder collected themselves into formation and fell away into the
chill gray dawn sky. Up and away they went, but not so fast that the eagle-eyed
beamers could track, and get, four more before they became dots in the blue.
Bragan counted the blips, squinting against the dust. One marker-ship and
forty-eight supports had come down. Only twenty went away.

If that was a fair measure of how the other
cities had fared then the Zorgan force had lost the first engagement. But not
the battle, not yet. The tension dwindled into aftermath as the reports began
to come in from the rest of Scarta. Jalban was worst hit, the entire city
reduced to a smoldering crater, more than half the beamer-posts blasted out of
the ground and only three ships taken in return. Other cities reported as good
as Stopa, some better. Geelzon had managed to wipe out all but three of her
attackers and was jubilant. Otham reported, angrily, no strikes at all. Their
ships had taken warning from the rest before even getting within range. Karsh
totaled up the score. Mordin had figures too, for check and comparison. Bragan
watched them.

"So much," he said, "for that.
You've mauled them, and they won't like it. Now they will really get
rough."

Mordin
growled, made a sign for a sky-watch check, and an anxious-faced girl told him,
"It is not possible to count how many, at this range. But very large
numbers are still there in the sky-lights."

"See?" Bragan rubbed it in.
"You haven't begun yet.

They
11
regroup, recast their strategy—" Mordin turned away from him to
Karsh.

"They have gone back to the god-clouds
to lick their wounds. Now is the time for the ultimate weapon you spoke
of."

Bragan hardly heard, because here came Ryth
through the dusty control room. Her face was white and set, streaked with dust
and full of despair. She went to her father.

"The city is destroyed," she
mumbled. "Everywhere is fire and wreckage and smoke. It's all gone!"

"Not all," he said. "We know
how bad it is. Jalban is even worse, and there is more to come." She
sighed and turned her stare on Bragan. He had expected anger, even hatred, but
she looked stunned and hurt.

"I
don't understand," she whispered, "how someone like you could do this
to us?"

"You can't say I didn't warn you. I told
you. I kept on telling you." He made his tone hard, avoiding her eyes. Mordin
growled in his throat.

"Enough of that. What
about the fire-weapon?"

"What about it?" Bragan added his
words and looked at the technologist anxiously. "You can trigger a
stellar, can't you?"

"Nothing
to it," Karsh said slowly. "It's all set up. But we have no way of
telling which way it will go, afterward. It's a nice balance. The whole system
is knife-edge unstable."

"You knew?" Bragan turned to feel
Ryth's clutch on his arm, and saw her blazing eyes.

"That you were set to spy on me? Yes, I
knew. You didn't do it very well. You're too honest to make a good spy."
He shifted his gaze quickly to Mordin. "Now you know," he said
gently, "what responsibility is like, and what it's for. You can say the
word—and destroy Zorgan. But you may be destroying your own planet at the same
time. You may be condemning every Scartanni man, woman and child to slow
death. And you haven't time to ask for their agreement, have you? How does it
feel, old man?"

Mordin's
craggy face went gray as death. The whole chamber seemed to hold its breath, so
that the hum and dick of instruments struck loudly. And there came a foreign
splutter and crackle, from the radio by Karsh's arm.

"Earth task-force Alpha to Operation
Antibody. Alpha
to
Antibody. Do you read? Does anybody
read?" The language was strange to the Scartanni but heartwarmingly
familiar to Bragan and Karsh.

"Gimme that thing!" Bragan snapped,
stretching his hand out for it and holding it to his face. "Antibody to
Alpha. We read. Mastermind here."

"Hello, Professor Bragan. Glad to know
you're still functioning."

"Glad
to hear from you. What kept you?"

"We have been in position some time. We
have observed the first-wave attack and resistance. Can we help?"

Bragan put the speaker against his chest and
stared
at
Mordin. "Make up your mind, old man.
What's it to be? Suicide—or surrender?"

"We use it. You would destroy us anyway.
You and your friends out there." Despair struck the old face. "I
think we are betrayed—"

Bragan hushed him with
a
gesture, brought the radio back to his mouth again. "Hello, Alpha.
We don't need you yet. Lay well off and stand by. We are arranging a spectacular.
You can be ready to pick up the pieces. Out!" He nodded to Karsh. "Go
ahead and blow it!"

Karsh began to pull and push switches on
another console. Bragan grinned up at Ryth. "Remember what I told you,
once? That you needed a friendly planet nearby, to clobber your enemy from the
rear while they were busy? You just heard them. That was not Zorgan."

"That's it!" Karsh closed a switch,
pushed
a
plunger full home and got up from his chair.
"It will take maybe three minutes to build up, and I'd like to see it with
my own eyes. It might be the last 111 ever see."

"Why not?" Bragan
agreed soberly. "Which way is
out,
here?"