Viscous Circle (16 page)

They made a slow loop, changing lines carefully, and the Kratch followed. They showed the other Bands how well this formation worked, and Rondl knew the encouragement was tremendous. It no longer mattered how many monsters there were; only one at a time could approach a tube. A dozen Bands could pass through a crowd of a thousand Kratches this way. Rondl had truly devised the perfect defense.

Then he remembered: he had forgotten the third Kratch, the one he himself had promised to handle. That one was chasing down a red Band, and getting close. The poor Band was on the verge of forced disbanding. Rondl had to help!

Keeping his tube intact, he shifted magnetic lines and cut across to parallel the red Band. Then he drew ahead. "Form a tube! Form a tube!" he flashed. He oriented toward other Bands and sent the same message.

They understood. A purple Band flew up and adhered to the red Band. Then a yellow one joined them. Soon there were too many for that Kratch to handle; they were safe.

Now Rondl took his own tube back toward Eclat. "Focus the beam on the Kratch," he directed. Their Kratch had followed obligingly during their maneuvers while communicating with the red Band; it was amazing what control was possible when proper advantage was taken of the monster's stupidity and determination. "Burn its nose. The monster may not be able to approach us at all!"

But it was hard to focus from this tight a formation; the Bands had no experience in it. Rondl was sure they could accomplish it with practice—but right now the beam was diffuse, generating only slight heat. The Kratch was nudging up close.

"We can't burn it this time," Rondl flashed regretfully. "That technique remains to be mastered. But we can still resist it. Cling tightly, now. Cirl—trust me. Though the monster comes near, you are secure—if you only hold firm."

The monster came near. Its spike shoved up into the tube. Rondl hoped Cirl's nerve would hold. To a Band, there was nothing more terrible than the approach of the Kratch's horn. It seemed the Kratch did not realize, even now, that it was dealing with an object impossible to consume. It thought it had a single Band.

As it would have, indeed, if Cirl lost nerve and detached. "You're doing well, Cirl!" he flashed. "Hold on, hold on!"

The dread spike came half the length of the tube. Rondl realized that the other Bands would be similarly appalled. "Stay tight, all of you!" Rondl flashed continuously. "Do not lose confidence. Hold the formation, and all is well! All is well!" If any of the Bands lost nerve and let go, the whole tube could break up, and Cirl was already on the horn of the monster. If any Band in the tube disbanded, the effect would be the same. "We are beating the Kratch. We are nullifying its power; no matter how close it nudges, it cannot prevail. Have faith, have courage. There is victory in unity. This is a significant occasion!" How he hoped it was! What would he do, if the formation broke, and Cirl lost her life—when she had trusted him?

The tube stayed tight. They all trusted him. The Kratch shoved in close, burying its spike the entire length, trying to take in the morsel—and could not.

Meanwhile, the Bands of the tube continued to work on the focus of the beam, making it finer and hotter. There was nothing like the stimulus of menace to make the effort stronger! Rondl slowed down the column—and the Kratch shoved forward harder, not comprehending.

"We can tire it rapidly!" Rondl flashed, uncertain how much of his message reached the Bands in the latter portion of the tube, since their lenses were pierced by the spike. They were probably blind for the moment, proceeding on trust alone. "We can make it carry us all!"

They slowed further, and the monster kept laboring to maintain velocity. But burdened with that intractable mass, it lost strength. Finally the Kratch fell away, exhausted, drifting, now too weak to maintain forward velocity.

"Now we can do with it as we wish," Rondl flashed. "We have conquered it. We have met it in battle and proven ourselves stronger." He was reinforcing the mood: he wanted all these Bands to depart with confidence that Bands could defeat the worst enemies, if they only maintained the correct formation and discipline. "Break formation; form a spread-out focusing tube."

They spread out, and re-formed into a more normal line. Now it was easy to focus the sun. In moments a fine beam touched the drifting body of the Kratch, burning into its side.

The Kratch jumped, struggling to avoid the heat. It was hurting now! The Band formation followed, refocusing the beam, catching the same place. Again the monster moved, but with less vigor; it really had little energy to spare.

A third time the hotspot formed, this time refined to especially narrow dimension, hotter than before. The Kratch wiggled, but could no longer escape. A hole began to form in its metal hide.

There was an explosion of vapors as the creature's armored flank was perforated. Its internal pressure had been released; it was mortally wounded.

And two Bands, appalled at what they had done, disbanded. They were so set against violence that even the destruction of a monster bent on killing them caused them to react with horror. But the rest had been sufficiently toughened; they survived. Which was, after all, the point of this exercise—to locate and prepare the survival types.

Even so, Rondl tried to ease the strain. "Perhaps they go to carry news to the Viscous Circle," he flashed—and then wondered whether he might be right. It was pretty good news, after all.

Now he checked on the other teams. The first had successfully trapped the first monster. Tembl and the brown Band had done their jobs. The Kratch had smashed into the double rock, and remained wedged there, dented. Unfortunately that meant this site could not be used again: another thing he had not anticipated.

The second team, or rather the third team, had profited from Rondl's advice; the tube was still leading its monster. Rondl now flashed to them how to dispatch it, and it did not take long to conclude that issue. This time only one Band disbanded.

They had met the enemy, Rondl thought again with relief, amazement, and joy, and conquered it. Only six Bands had disbanded—three from victory, three from the initial excitement at the notion of coping simultaneously with three Kratches. None from actual combat. Rondl now had his cadre of toughened troops.

And Cirl—she was safe. "I knew you would not let me disband," she flashed brightly. "You don't believe in life after disbanding, so you would not let me go." Rondl was weakly glad it had proved so.

 

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Meanwhile, the Solarian Monsters progressed on toward Planet Band. They took over the two outer moons and most of the larger moonlets, neglecting only the one that was the base for the Bellatrixians. It was evident that the Solarians did not want trouble with Sphere Bellatrix. The Monsters' advance eliminated virtually all Bands in the outer reaches. Now they were closing on the inner moons.

Little time remained. Rondl did not feel adequately prepared, but he knew he had to make his move now. His battle-seasoned troops had to be up to the job!

He set an ambush on the second moon, Glow. He knew from observation that the Monsters typically approached a planetary body cautiously, fired several explosive shots into it, then landed their vessels on the surface and disgorged assorted vehicles to traverse the terrain. It was this traversing that took time, because they covered every part of each planet or moon, crisscrossing and pausing at any unusual formations. Obviously they were searching for something—and that was the whole mystery of their presence. What could they want? There was nothing but rock and sand and gas on those moons.

At any rate, the Monsters had to be discouraged, because even if they never found the object of their search, they would destroy the Band society in the process of looking.

Destruction of the Solarians was not Rondl's strategy. Most Bands could never tolerate such an asocial concept, even to save their own society. So the objective was merely to thwart the Monster invasion, preferably without destruction of scenery or loss of life. At first this had seemed a hopeless task, but Rondl had consulted with his advisers and worked out a plan they thought might work.

More than a thousand Bands went to Moon Glow ahead of the Monsters. The great majority of these had not been seasoned by the campaign against the Kratch, but that campaign had had a salutary effect on Band morale, and many more volunteers had come. Since it was necessary to cover the entire surface, these inexperienced people had to be used. But Rondl took care to intersperse among them the seasoned ones, so that wherever the action occurred, there would be experienced people to handle it.

The Bands hid all around, in all manner of ways. Some buried themselves in sand, others in the scant snow and ice of the deep shadows, and others beneath rocks and boulders. They concealed themselves by coating their surfaces with clay or flakes of rock, so that they became filled disks or lumps, and lay scattered across the land all over the moon. Some hovered in the tenuous atmosphere, riding the twisted lines spawned by the odd magnetic patterns of this region. Others established physical orbits, becoming moonlets themselves, concealed among the chunks of rock already there. In short, Monsters were bound to encounter Bands, without knowing it.

There was a system of communication, with selected individuals positioned to receive and relay flashes from the surface. Rondl and Cirl waited well out from Glow with a reserve troop of Bands. This was the command post. Such a concept no longer seemed alien; it was practical. Large-scale missions had to be organized hierarchically, and once he had gotten this concept across to his troops, they had cooperated.

The fleet of Monster ships arrived as projected. They blasted away at the moon, as though seeking to make it twitch with discomfort. Rondl hoped no Bands were at the sites of the explosions. Yet this was a necessary risk; they had known some could be disbanded randomly. Those would be the first to convey the report of this engagement to the Viscous Circle. Rondl felt guilty using that concept to encourage the Bands, but at this point he had to facilitate things in any fashion that offered. If they did not halt the Monsters, the entire species of Band could make that trip to the Viscous Circle!

After the usual nonreaction by the moon—what had the Solarians expected?—the Monster ships settled down on the surface. Actually there were several types and sizes of them. The larger ships remained in orbit, as they were unable to withstand the effect of surface gravity. The medium-sized ones went on down, and the smallest shuttled between, conveying specimens to the large ones. Rondl realized that, coincidentally, this operation was organized very much like his own; the alien command post was also in space.

Wheeled vehicles emerged from the landed ships and commenced their canvassing. They moved rapidly, as each had extensive territory to cover. Perception devices extended from them, emitting radiation. Now at last the rationale began to manifest: the Band communications system relayed news that the Monsters reacted to anything metallic. Were they short of metals? Surely not; their ships were mostly metal, suggesting that they had substantial quantities of it in their home system. Therefore it was likely that the metal merely signaled the possible presence of something else the Monsters wanted. What could that be?

Rondl thought he should know. But when he concentrated on that thought, it vanished as though deliberately hiding from him. He let it go, being by now well used to this frustration.

The Band body was to a large extent metallic, though evidently not the kind of metal the Monsters wanted. That was just as well; it would have been terrible if the Solarians had charged in to Planet Band and begun capturing Bands for their metal content, in the manner of the Kratch. Now some Bands were located and ignored; others were taken aboard the land-traveling vehicles. There seemed to be a preference for those Bands who had coated themselves with metallic dust and fragments, holding them in place magnetically. It seemed that this additional concentration of metal made them of interest. But not compellingly so; the Bands were merely dumped in hoppers with other objects and ignored. That was exactly what Rondl wanted.

A new hint came. There was a concavity in the surface of one of the large lava-flow plains, and several vehicles converged on this. Rondl's planetary geologist specialists had already advised him that this concavity was natural, the result of the long-ago collapse of a volcanic bubble of gas. At times some water had condensed in it, leaving concentric marks; now it was dry. It really was of very little interest to anyone except a geologist—and it turned out to be of no further interest to the Monsters, once they too had ascertained its nature. The vehicles went on. But this diversion indicated that it was not merely metal, but special shapes that they were searching out. Perhaps they collected the small bits of metal in the hope that these were fragments of the main mass, so that an increasing density of them would chart its presence.

In due course the vehicles reached rendezvous points and delivered their samples to the shuttle ships. The shuttles blasted off with much flame and smoke and wastage of energy—and with a few concealed Bands within.

Now it should get interesting. Each Band had been drilled in the procedure, and knew what to do. Rondl was not in contact with these captives, but did not need to be. The effects of his strategy should become apparent soon.

The first shuttle homed in on its command ship. A docking-hatch opened in the larger vessel. The shuttle flew neatly in—and misjudged slightly, colliding with the rim of the aperture. It seemed to be an accident of chance, a minor malfunction causing a small but awkward deviation in course.

There was a pause. Then the dented shuttle backed off, reoriented, and moved forward again—and banged into the other side of the hatch, staving in its nose-point.

"It's working!" Cirl flashed with almost unsocial glee. She was becoming hardened to violence by her association with Rondl, especially during the dreams and the Kratch hunt. "Our plan is causing them trouble!"