Von Schlichten shut his eyes, then opened them slowly. The driver,
upon releasing the flares, had nosed up, banked, turned, and was
coming in again, down the road toward the advancing column. Von
Schlichten peered into his all-armament sight, his foot on the
machine-gun pedal and his fingers on the rocket buttons. The highway
below was jammed with geeks, and they were all stopped dead and
staring upward, as though hypnotized by the lights. A second later,
they had recovered and were shooting--not at the airjeep, but at the
four globes of blazing magnesium. Then he had the close-packed mass of
non-humanity in his sights; he tramped the pedal and began punching
buttons. He still had four rockets left by the time the mob was behind
him.
"All right, let's take another pass at them. Same direction."
The driver put the airjeep into a quick loop and came out of it in
front of the mob, who now had their backs turned and were staring in
the direction in which they had last seen the vehicle. Again, von
Schlichten plowed them with rockets and harrowed them with his guns.
Some of the Skilkans were trying to get over the high fences on either
side of the road--really stockades of petrified tree-trunks. Others
were firing, and this time they were shooting at the airjeep. It took
one hit from a heavy shellosaur-rifle, and, immediately, the driver
banked and turned away from the road.
"Dammit, why did you do that?" von Schlichten demanded, lifting his
foot from the gun-pedal. "Are you afraid of the kind of popguns those
geeks are using?"
"I am not afraid to risk my vehicle, or myself, sir," the lieutenant
replied, with the extreme formality of a very junior officer chewing
out a very senior one. "I am, however, afraid to risk my passenger.
Generals are not expendable, sir; neither are they issued for use as
clay pigeons."
He was right, of course. Von Schlichten admitted it. "I'm too old to
play cowboy, like this," he said. "Back to the Reservation, telecast
station."
Looking back over his shoulder, he saw eight or ten more flares
alight, and the ground-flashes of exploding shells and rockets; the
air above the road was sparkling with gun-flames. Jarman must have had
some contragravity ready to be sent off on the instant.
While he had been out, somebody had gotten a TV-pickup mounted on a
contragravity-lifter and run up to two thousand feet, on the end of a
steel-tough tensilon mooring-line. The big circular screen was lit,
showing the whole Company Reservation, with the surrounding
countryside foreshortened by perspective to the distant lights of
Skilk. The map had been taken up from the floor, and a big
terrain-board had been brought in from the Chief Engineer's office and
set up in its place. In front of the screen, Paula Quinton, Barney
Mordkovitz, Colonel Cheng-Li, and, conspicuously silent, Jules
Keaveney sat drinking coffee and munching sandwiches. Half a dozen
Terrans, of both sexes, were working furiously to get the markers
which replaced the pink and white pills placed on the board, and one
of Captain Inez Malavez's non-coms, with a headset, was getting
combat reports directly from the switchboard. Everything was clicking
like well-oiled machinery.
On the TV-screen, the Residency area was ablaze with light, and so
were the ship-docks, the airport and spaceport, the shops, and the
maintenance-yard. On the terrain-board, the latter was now marked as
completely in Company hands. The ruins of the native-troops barracks
were still burning, and there was a twinkle of orange-red here and
there among the ruins of the labor-camp. Much of the equipment for the
polar mines had already been shifted into defensible ground. The rest
of the circle was dark, except for the distant lights of Skilk, where
the nuclear power plant was apparently still functioning in native
hands.
Then, without warning, a spot of white light blazed into being
southeast of the Company area and southwest of Skilk, followed by
another and another. Instantly, von Schlichten glanced up at the row
of smaller screens, and on one of them saw the view as picked up by a
patrolling airjeep.
The army of King Firkked of Skilk had finally put in its appearance,
coming in two columns, one southward from Skilk and the other
northward along the west bank of the dry river. The former had crossed
over and joined the latter, about three miles south of the
Reservation. The scene in the screen was similar to the one he had,
himself, witnessed through his armament-sight. The Skilkan regulars
had been marching in formation, some on the road and some along
parallel lanes and paths. They had the look of trained and disciplined
troops, but they had made the same mistake as the rabble that had been
shot up on the north side of the Reservation. Unused to attack from
the air, they had all halted in place and were gaping open-mouthed,
their opal teeth gleaming in the white flare-light. However, before
the aircar had passed over them, the lead company of one regiment,
armed with Terran rifles, had begun firing.
In the big screen, it could be seen that Colonel Jarman had thrown
most of his available contragravity at them, including the
combat-cars, that had already started to form the second wave of the
attack on the mob to the north. Other flares bloomed in the darkness,
and the fiery trails of rockets curved downward to end in yellow
flashes on the ground.
The airjeep with the pickup circled back; the troops on the road and
in the adjoining fields had broken. The former were caught between the
fences which made Ulleran roads such death-traps when under
air-attack. The latter had dispersed, and were running away,
individually and by squads; at first, it looked like a panic, but he
could see officers signaling to the larger groups of fugitives to open
out, apparently directing the flight. By this time, there were ten or
twelve combat-cars and about twenty airjeeps at work. In the moving
view from the pickup-jeep, he saw what looked like a 90-mm rocket land
in the middle of a company that was still trying to defend itself with
small-arms fire on the road, wiping out about half of them.
"Make the most of it, boys," Barney Mordkovitz, his mouth full of
sandwich, was saying. "Heave it to them; you won't get another chance
like that at those buggers."
"Why not?" Colonel Paula Quinton wanted to know. Her military
education was progressing, but it still had a few gaps to fill in.
"The next time they're air-struck, they won't stay bunched,"
Mordkovitz replied. "A lot of them didn't stay bunched this time, if
you noticed. And they'll keep out from between the fences."
In the large screen, a quick succession of gun-flashes leaped up from
the direction of the Hoork River and shells began bursting over the scene
of the attack. The screen tuned to the pickup on the airjeep went
dead; in the big screen, there was a twinkling of falling fire. Almost
at once, thirty or forty rocket-trails converged on the gun-position,
and, for a moment, explosions burned like a bonfire.
"They had a 75-mm at the rear of the column," somebody called from the
big switchboard. "Lieutenant Kalanang's jeep was hit; Lieutenant
Vermaas is cutting in his pickup on the same wavelength."
The small screen lighted again. In the big screen, a cluster of
magnesium-lights appeared above where the Skilkan gun had been; in the
small screen, there was a stubbled grain-field, pocked with craters,
and the bodies of fifteen or twenty natives, all rather badly mangled.
An overturned and apparently destroyed 75-mm gun lay on its side.
Five or six fairly large fires had broken out, by this time, around
the point of attack. Von Schlichten nodded approvingly.
"I was wondering how long it'd take somebody to think of that," he
said. "Granaries and forage-stacks on some of these farms. They'll
burn for half an hour, at least." He looked at his watch. "And by that
time, it'll be daylight."
"As far as we know, that was the only 75-mm gun Firkked had," Colonel
Cheng-Li said. "He has at least six, possibly ten, 40-mm's. It's a
wonder we haven't seen anything of them."
"Well, there's no way of being sure," Jules Keaveney said, "but I
have an idea they're all at or around the Palace. Firkked knows about
how much contragravity we have. He's probably wondering why we aren't
bombing him, now."
"He doesn't know we've sold the Palace to King Jonkvank for an army,"
von Schlichten said. "And that reminds me--how much contragravity
could Firkked scrape together, for an attack on us? I've been
expecting a geek _Luftwaffe_ over here, at any moment."
Colonel Cheng-Li studied the smoking tip of his cigarette for a
moment. "Well, Firkked owns, personally, three ten-passenger aircars,
a thing like a troop-carrier that he transports some of his courtiers
around in, four airjeeps armed with a pair of 15-mm machine-guns
apiece, and two big lorries. There are possibly two hundred vehicles
of all types in Skilk and the country around, but some of them are in
the hands of natives friendly to us and or hostile to Firkked. I can
get the exact figures from the Constabulary office at Company House."
"That's close enough," von Schlichten told him. "And there'll be
oodles of thermoconcentrate-fuel, and blasting explosives. Colonel
Quinton, suppose you call Ed Wallingsby, the Chief Engineer, right
away; have him commissioned colonel. Tell him to get to work making
this place secure against air attack; tell him to consult with Colonel
Jarman. Tell him to get those geeks Leavitt has penned in the
repair-dock at the airport and use them to dig slit-trenches and fill
sandbags and so on. He can use Kragan limited-duty wounded to guard
them.... Mr. Keaveney, you'll begin setting up something in the way of
an ARP-organization. You'll have to get along on what nobody else
wants. You will also consult with Colonel Jarman, and with Colonel
Wallingsby. Better get started on it now. Just think of everything
around here that could go wrong in case of an air attack, and try to
do something about it in advance."