The power ships of the two forces faced one another across ten miles
of plain. Above the heads of each roved the tiny fighters, and above
this cover, reaching up far into the realm of space, were rising the
battlecraft.
Planet forces began to move against one another, right through the
unseen death that roved from the MacMillans on the tractors and
the moving pillboxes. Space above the battleground filled with a
continuously exploding roar, and sheets of released energy flares at
the meeting points of crossed MacMillans.
The constellation ships fenced momentarily, and then roared forward
into full battle. The sluggers stood back and threw the might of their
energy from long range. Tiny fighters raced forward, depending upon
speed, mobility, and minuteness to escape the wary detector-coupled
AutoMacs.
Sight became impossible. The flaring of explosive and raw energy
seared the eye that dared to look, and when the flaring light stopped
by chance, the rising wreaths of smoke, steam, and incandescent vapor
obscured the vision. Lightnings flashed in and through this cloud, and
the instruments became wabbly.
Fire ceased briefly, and both sides waited for the veil to clear.
Technicians put the cancel plugs on ruined targets to clear them from
further destruction, and turretmen served the heating projectors.
A wave of sub-ships zoomed in and spread flaming death among the Terran
forces, and the energy bombs poured up, and among the barrier-protected
ships. A group of Martians holding disperser screens zoomed over,
spreading energy in wide-aperture releases from their turrets. Bombs
and torpedoes raced in through the disperser screens, and the blind
crews died without knowing whether they had hit anything. Terran
sub-ships crossed beneath the first wave of Martians, and hit the
enemy. A veritable fence of exploding ships barred the view as
sub-ships collided. Their indetectability was mutual, too.
Like twin tornadoes, the ships of both worlds spun upwards in a vast,
whirling spiral. Bits of dust, smoke, and vapor intermingled with the
ships, giving them a definitely tornadolike appearance as they swept
the surface of Mephisto towards each other.
The volume between the twin vortices was torn and blasted. Slowly and
ponderously they moved together, and as they intermingled in a whirling
eddy of battle, the ground of Mephisto was scoured clean of life.
The weight of Terra's forces carried the most momentum, and the spout
moved across the territory formerly held by Mars.
Reinforcements swooped in from space, and the whirling mass expanded.
And with gathering speed, the vortex moved in an irregular path across
Mephisto, sterilizing the planet as it went. Mephistans went before the
tornado of huge battlecraft as straws go before a hurricane.
The path of the storm was strewn with smoking, ruined ships. The
luckless were forced inside of the whirling cylinder and gunned there.
They fell down that chimney of death to the ground that awaited them
at the bottom, or crashed against uprising sub-ships that swooped
upward through the vortex and fired on all sides, relying on the
identifier-couplers that stopped their aim against their fellows.
The vortex broke, and the Terran ships opened from circle to crescent
to straight line to closing crescent and strove to encircle the
Martians. Outnumbered now, the latter fled slowly and kept up a killing
fire of retreat.
Across the face of Mephisto arrowed the embattled fleets. A wall ten
miles high and fifty miles long and thirty miles from front to back
accelerated and swept everything before it. Between the two walls of
fighting ships was a constant flare of death. Cities caught in the
conflagration died; their buildings seared, blasted, and broken.
In full rout, the Martian forces raced to converge upon a large city.
In a tight circle, the Martians braced themselves. Power beams came
from the city to feed them, and as Terra came before them they lashed
out with the power of planet-supported fire. Terra englobed the city,
but it was a questionable success.
* * * * *
From horizon to zenith, the Terrans poured their power into the Martian
hemisphere. The ground about the city ran hot, and the grounded ring
tilted and mired down, but they continued to fire back. Stalemate set
in; Terra could not breach that close-knit hemisphere and Mars could
not fight off the pressing Terrans. Destroyed torpedoes filled the
annular gap with explosions, and crossed MacMillans flared to sear the
eye.
Then a mile inside of the Martian ring, the ground heaved upward, and
the ugly snouts of underground raiders appeared. Their protected
turrets lifted out of the blisters and began to pour energy into the
Martians from behind. The Martians swept downward from their hemisphere
and fought back against the pincer-movement. The topmost Terrans
pressed downward as a second ring of underground raiders appeared to
bolster the first wave.
The city erupted in tiny areas as Terran undergrounds broke the
surface, blasted the interfering building away with torpedoes, and
lifted to add to the ever-increasing energy of the battle.
The Martians hopped backwards over the ring of undergrounds and set up
an inner line. At point-blank range, and almost plate to plate, the
Terrans massed their energy in a flaming wall of destruction, fighting
the Martians back, foot by foot.
The circle tightened upon a tiny, central park. Spacesuited figures
worked furiously under a disperser screen; they were putting the
last touches upon an alien projector. No light came to them from
without, but they could be seen by the light of their own working
floods. Outside of the projector and the disperser, a ring of large
detector-coupled MacMillans were dancing from point to point and
dropping Terran ships with each point.
"Ben!" snapped Maynard. "We'd best get that thing before they finish!"
"Right. We'll hit 'em with AutoMacs and keep 'em under constant fire."
"No good."
"We can't hit 'em through that disperser, but they can't see to hit us."
"I know. But there's one thing they don't need sight to hit."
"Huh?"
"Mephisto III, you idiot. Could you hit Luna from Terra without aim?"
"If I had an ephemeris."
"What do you suppose they call theirs?"
"I--"
"Break out a ground force," ordered Maynard. "We're going to take that
projector!"
* * * * *
The Terran fire tripled as the ground force moved ponderously across
the intervening yards. A salient point was made, and the sides began
to widen. Back and forth the individual sorties went, and as men and
machines went up in flaring puffs of fire, the salient moved forward
toward the projector.
Inside the disperser, the combined Martians and Mephistans worked
furiously, though they seemed oblivious to their danger. No signals
would enter this barrier, and no living thing could step outside and
hope to re-enter.
They stepped back from the thirty-foot parabola, and one of them thrust
down upon a plunger.
Above the parabolic reflector, a thick haze formed. A torpedo succeeded
in passing the coupled AutoMacs and raced inside of the disperser and
into the haze. It exploded, and its energy added to the forming vortex.
The haze thickened, became toroidal, and spread out. Up from a
dun color it went, into cherry-red incandescence. Up through the
red past yellow into blue and then into flaming white went the
color-temperature. Like a close-knit toroid of flaming, white-hot
metal, it poised above the projector, moved slightly, and then raced
upwards. It passed the disperser, and the screen went up in a flare of
white.
Into the sky above Mephisto went the toroid, and below it, Terrans
swarmed over the projector, fought off the remaining enemy, and held
the projector as their objective. The last floods of resistance died as
the toroid went into the far sky above.
"_Orionad!_" bellowed Maynard. His ship lifted, swooped over him, and
lifted him on a tractor. Upward they raced, catching the slow-moving
vortex.
Turret-mounted AutoMacs vomited energy into the vortex--and
back-thrusting power burned out the feedlines. Torpedoes entered
the flaming mass and just disappeared. Tractor beams slid from the
coruscating surface and pressor beams found nothing against which to
push. A sub-ship plunged against the vortex. It was stripped of its
barrier and it floated down, inert, and started the long fall to the
hard ground below.
Fighting against the vortex with weapons that did no good, and cursing
the foul thing all the way, Maynard and the _Orionad_ followed its
ponderous course out and out and out to Mephisto III.
It spread as it went, and by the time it wrapped its tenuousness about
the tiny moon, it was almost gone. But it contained strength enough to
blow out the barrier-generator that held Mephisto III invisible from
without.
The toroid disappeared, and Guy, with misgivings, made inward to land
at the base.
His fears grew as time went on, for he was not challenged. A swift
report gave him some hope, but it came from Mephisto itself, telling
him that resistance was at an end in the sector he had just left, and
that the fleet, victorious and supreme on Mephisto, was returning to
the outer moon.
Guy worried. Returning to what?
Inspection showed that nothing was harmed--save life. Dead men sat in
their places operating instruments, dead men patrolled unseen areas,
dead men manned the landing ports. It was a moon of the dead--with
every instrument operable.
Not a machine was damaged--but no living things remained on Mephisto
III.
* * * * *
Broken with grief, Guy Maynard looked down on the silent face of
Senior Aide Joan Forbes. He felt wooden, and it all seemed dreamlike
and unreal, but he knew that this was no dream, but cruel reality. Hat
in hand, he stood there as if frozen and searched the girl's face as
though expecting the closed lips to part in a smile, and the closed
eyelids to open before a pair of twinkling eyes. His men knew of the
affection there, and they pitied him silently.
In neat, geometrically precise rows; seven billion, four hundred
million miles from home; on a tiny, almost airless moonlet of an alien
planet the hundreds upon hundreds of physically perfect bodies were
buried. Not a scar or burn marred them, yet--
The chaplain said: "--from the earth thou camest, and to the earth thou
hast returned. And though this earth is far removed from the earth
which bore thee and thine, it is thy resting place and home, for in
the eyes of God Almighty all places and all planets are His Domain.
And though ye travel to the farthest star, yet you will find Him there
before thee, and this we know and believe for His Only Begotten Son
hath said: 'My Father hath other worlds beside thine.'
"And so we consign these erstwhile friends of ours to the depths of the
earth, knowing that time and space knows no deterrent to Our Father
Almighty; We shall all meet again some day--"
Guy Maynard plodded away from the scene. His eyes were dry, and in his
heart was nothing. Shock had taken control of Maynard. Through the rows
of mounds he walked, back to the _Orionad_, and his entry into the
super ship failed to give him that lift he always felt.
He sat in his scanning room and stared at the blank wall. Nothing
aroused him. Nothing caused him to think; his mind was almost a blank,
and it raced with futile rapidity from scene to scene with no plan, no
reason.
An hour he sat, and the shock began to wear off. It left him with
heartbreaking grief, and Maynard put his hands over his face and wept
bitter, honest tears.