At 0245, an attack developed on the northwestern corner of the
Reservation, in the direction of the explosives magazines. It turned
out to be relatively trivial. Remnants of the mob that had been broken
up by air attack on the road had gotten together and were making
rushes in small bands, keeping well spread out. Beating them off took
considerable ammunition, but it was accomplished with negligible
casualties to the defenders. They finally stopped coming around
daylight.
In the meantime, Themistocles M'zangwe called from Konkrook, appearing
in the screen with his left arm in a freshly white sling.
"What the hell have you been doing to yourself?" von Schlichten wanted
to know.
"Crossbow-bolt, about half an hour ago. A couple of inches lower and
acting Brigadier-General Colbert'd have been talking to you, now,
instead of me."
"Lucky it didn't have a nitro-capsule on the end. How are you making
out? Have Kankad's people started coming in, yet?"
"Oh, yes, about six hundred of them have gotten in already, in the
damnedest collection of vehicles you ever saw. Kankad must be using
every scrap of contragravity he has; it's a regular airborne
Dunkirk-in-reverse. Kankad sent word that he's coming here in person,
as soon as he has things organized at his place. And the geeks here
have scraped together an air-force of their own--farm-lorries,
aircars, that sort of thing--and they're using them to bomb us here
and at the mainland farm, mostly with nitroglycerine. We've shot down
about twenty of them, but they're still coming. They tried a
boat-attack across the Channel; that's how I got this. We've been
doing some bombing, ourselves; we made a down payment for Eric Blount
and Hendrik Lemoyne. Took a fifty-ton tank off a fuel-lorry, fitted it
with a detonator, filled it with thermoconcentrate, and ferried it
over on the _Elmoran_ and dumped it on the Keegarkan Embassy. It must
have landed in the middle of the central court; in about fifteen
seconds, flames were coming out every window in the place." His face
became less jovial. "We had something pretty bad happen here, too," he
said. "That Konkrook Fencibles rabble of Prince Jaizerd's mutinied,
along with the others; they got into the hospital and butchered
everybody in the place, patients and staff. The Kragans got there too
late to save anybody, but they wiped out the Fencibles. Jaizerd
himself was the only one they took alive, and he didn't stay that way
very long."
"How are you making out with your Civil Administration crowd?"
M'zangwe grimaced. "I haven't had to put any of them under actual
arrest, so far, but we've had to keep Buhrmann away from the
communications equipment by force. He wanted to call you up and chew
you out for not evacuating everybody in the north to Konkrook."
"Is he crazy?"
"No, just scared. He says you're going to get everybody on Uller
massacred by detail, when you could save Konkrook by bringing them
all here."
"You tell him I'm going to hold this planet, not just one city. Tell
him I have a sense of my duty to the Company and its stockholders, if
he hasn't; put it in those terms and he may understand you."
"Yes, I'll try that out on Meyerstein, too. He's in a hell of a state
about the losses the Banking Cartel are taking on this deal.... Well,
I'll call you when there's anything new."
By 0330, it was daylight; the attacks against the northwest corner of
the perimeter stopped entirely. Wallingsby had the three-hundred-odd
Skilkan laborers at work; he had gathered up all the tarpaulin he could
find, and had the two sewing-machines in the tentmaker's shop running on
sandbags. Jules Keaveney, to von Schlichten's agreeable surprise, had
taken hold of his ARP assignment, and was doing an efficient job in
organizing for fire-fighting, damage-control and first aid. Colonel
Jarman had his airjeeps and combat-cars working in ever-widening circles
over the countryside, shooting up everything in sight that even looked
like contragravity equipment. Some of these patrols had to be recalled,
around 1030, when sporadic nuisance-sniping began from the side of the
mountain to the west. And, along with everything else, Paula Quinton
managed, along with her other work, to get a complete digest prepared of
the situation elsewhere in the Terran-occupied parts of the planet.
The situation at Konkrook was brightening steadily. The second wave of
Kankad's improvised airlift, reenforced by contragravity from
Konkrook, had come in; there were now close to two thousand fresh
Kragans on Gongonk Island and the mainland farms, Kankad himself with
them. The _Aldebaran_ had reached Kankad's Town, and was loading
another thousand Kragans.... There was nothing more from Keegark. A
message from Colonel MacKinnon had come in at dawn, to the effect that
the geeks had penetrated his last defenses and that he was about to
blow up the Residency; thereafter Keegark went off the air.... By
0730, the _Northern Star_ had landed the regiment Murderers, armed
with first-quality Terran infantry-rifles and a few machine-guns and
bazookas, at the Palace at Krink, and by 0845 she had returned with
another regiment, the Jeel-Feeders. The three-lane street connecting
the Palace and the Residency had been widened to six, and then to
eight.... Guido Karamessinis, at Grank, was still at uneasy peace with
King Yoorkerk, who was still undecided whether the rebels or the
Company were going to be the eventual victors, and afraid to take any
irrevocable step in either direction.... Eight men and four women, the
survivors of a trading-station on the eastern shore of Takkad Sea,
reached Konkrook in a lorry; another trading station, on the south
shore, reported by telecast that the natives there had refused to rise
against them, and had crucified five of Rakkeed's disciples who had
come among them preaching _znidd suddabit_.
At 1100, Paula Quinton and Barney Mordkovitz virtually ordered him to
get some sleep. He went to his quarters at Company House, downed a
spaceship-captain's-size drink of honey-rum, and slept until 1600. As
he dressed and shaved, he could hear, through the open window, the
slow sputter of small-arms' fire, punctuated by the occasional
_whump-whump-whump_ of 40-mm auto-cannon or the hammering of a
machine-gun.
Returning to his command-post at the telecast station, the
terrain-board showed that the perimeter of defense had been pushed out
in a bulge at the northwest corner; the TV-screen pictured a crude
breast-work of petrified tree-trunks, sandbags, mining machinery,
packing-cases and odds-and-ends, upon which Wallingsby's native
laborers were working under guard while a skirmish-line of Kragans had
been thrown out another four or five hundred yards and were exchanging
pot-shots with Skilkans on the gullied hillside.
"Where's Colonel Quinton?" he asked. "She ought to be taking a turn in
the sack, now."
"She's taking one," Major Falkenberg, who had commanded the action at
the native-troops barracks and the labor-camp, the night before, told
him. "General Mordkovitz chased her off to bed a couple of hours ago,
called me in to take her place, and then went out to replace me.
Colonel Guilliford's in the hospital; got hit about thirteen hundred.
They're afraid he's going to lose a leg."
"That's a bloody shame!" He pointed to the northwest corner of the
perimeter on the screen. "Whose idea was that?" he asked. "It's a good
one; I ought to have thought of it, myself."
"Your new adjutant," Falkenberg grinned. "She asked somebody what
those big domes, up there, were. When they told her there were ten
thousand tons of thermoconcentrate, five thousand tons of
blasting-explosives, and five tons of plutonium, under them, she
damned near fainted, and then she ordered that, right away."
More reports came in. The entire garrison of the small Residency at
Kwurk, the most northern of the eastern shore Free Cities, had arrived
at Kankad's Town in two hundred-foot contragravity scows and five
aircars. Two of the aircars arrived half an hour behind the rest of
the refugee flotilla, having turned off at Keegark to pay their
respects to King Orgzild. They reported the Keegark Residency in
ruins, its central buildings vanished in a huge crater; the _Jan
Smuts_ and the _Christiaan De Wett_ were still in the Company docks,
both apparently damaged by the blast which had destroyed the
Residency. One of the aircars had rocketed and machine-gunned some
Keegarkans who appeared to be trying to repair them; the other blew up
King Orgzild's nitroglycerine plant. Von Schlichten called Konkrook
and ordered a bombing-mission against Keegark organized, to make sure
the two ships stayed out of service.
The _Northern Star_ was still bringing loyal troops into Krink. King
Jonkvank, whom von Schlichten called, was highly elated.
"We are killing traitors wherever we find them!" he exulted. "The city
is yellow with their blood; their heads are piled everywhere! How is
it with you at Skilk?"
"We have killed many, also," von Schlichten boasted. "And tonight, we
will kill more; we are preparing bombs of great destruction, which we
will rain down upon Skilk until there is not one stone left upon
another, or one infant of a day's age left alive!"
Jonkvank reacted as he was intended to. "Oh, no, general, don't do all
that!" he exclaimed. "You promised me that I should have Skilk, on the
word of a Terran. Are you going to give me a city of ruins and
corpses? Ruins are no good to anybody, and I am not a Jeel, to eat
corpses."
Von Schlichten shrugged. "When you are strong, you can flog your
enemies with a whip; when you are weak, all you can do is kill them.
If I had five thousand more troops, here...."
"Oh, I will send troops, as soon as I can," Jonkvank hastened to
promise. "All my best regiments: the Murderers, the Jeel-Feeders, the
Corpse-Reapers, the Devastators, the Fear-Makers. But, now that we
have stopped this sinful rebellion, here, I can't take chances that it
will break out again as soon as I strip the city of troops."
Von Schlichten nodded. Jonkvank's argument made sense; he would have
taken a similar position, himself.
"Well, get as many as you can over here, as soon as possible," he
said. "We'll try to do as little damage to Skilk as we can, but ..."
At 1830, Paula joined him for her breakfast, while he sat in front of
the big screen, eating his dinner. There had been light ground-action
along the southern end of the perimeter--King Firkked's regulars,
reenforced by Zirk tribesmen and levies of townspeople, all of whom
seemed to have firearms, were filtering in through the ruins of the
labor-camp and the wreckage of the equipment-park--and there was
renewed sniping from the mountainside. The long afternoon of the
northern autumn dragged on; finally, at 2200, the sun set, and it was
not fully dark for another hour. For some time, there was an ominous
quiet, and then, at 0030, the enemy began attacking in force, driving
herds of livestock--lumbering six-legged brutes bred by the North
Ullerans for food--to test the defenses for electrified wire and
land-mines. Most of these were shot down or blown up, but a few got as
far as the wire, which, by now, had been strung and electrified
completely around the perimeter.
Behind them came parties of Skilkan regulars with long-handled
insulated cutters; a couple of cuts were made in the wire, and a
section of it went dead. The line, at this point, had been rather
thinly held; the defenders immediately called for air-support, and
Jarman ordered fifteen of his remaining twenty airjeeps and five
combat-cars into the fight. No sooner were they committed than the
radar on the commercial airport control-tower picked up air vehicles
approaching from the north, and the air-raid sirens began howling and
the searchlights went on.
As a protection from the sudden fury of the summer and winter gales,
the buildings were all low, thick-walled, and provided with steel
doors and window-shutters which were electrically operated and
centrally controlled. These slammed shut in every occupied building.
The contragravity which had been sent to support the ground-defense at
the south side of the Reservation turned to meet this new threat, and
everything else available, including the four heavy airtanks, lifted
up. Meanwhile, guns began firing from the ground and from rooftops.
There had been four aircars, ordinary passenger vehicles equipped with
machine-guns on improvised mounts, and ten big lorries converted into
bombers, in the attack. All the lorries, and all but one of the
makeshift fighter-escort, were shot down, but not before explosive and
thermoconcentrate bombs were dumped all over the place. One lorry
emptied its load of thermoconcentrate-bombs on the control-building at
the airport, starting a raging fire and putting the radar out of
commission. A repair-shop at the ordnance-depot was set on fire, and a
quantity of small-arms and machine-gun ammunition piled outside for
transportation to the outer defenses blew up. An explosive bomb landed
on the roof of the building between Company House and the telecast
station, blowing a hole in the roof and demolishing the upper floor.
And another load of thermoconcentrate, missing the power-plant, set
fire to the dry grass between it and the ruins of the native-troops
barracks.
Before the air-attack had been broken up, the soldiers of King Firkked
and their irregular supporters were swarming through the dead section
of wire. They had four or five big farm-tractors, nuclear-powered but
unequipped with contragravity-generators, which they were using like
ground-tanks of the First Century. This attack penetrated to the
middle of the Reservation before it was stopped and the attackers
either killed or driven out; for the first time since daybreak, the
red-and-yellow lights came on around the power-plant.
As soon as the combined air and ground attack was beaten off, von
Schlichten ordered all his available contragravity up, flying patrols
around the Reservation and retaliatory bombing missions against Skilk,
and began bombarding the city with his 90-mm guns. A number of fires
broke out, and at about 0200 a huge expanding globe of orange-red
flame soared up from the city.
"There goes Firkked's thermoconcentrate stock," he said to Paula, who
was standing beside him in front of the screen.
Half an hour later, he discovered that he had been overly optimistic.
Much of the enemy's supply of Terran thermoconcentrate had been
destroyed, but enough remained to pelt the Reservation and the Company
buildings with incendiaries, when a second and more severe air-attack
developed, consisting of forty or fifty makeshift lorry-bombers and
fifteen aircars. The previous attack von Schlichten had viewed in the
screen at the telecast station; it was his questionable good fortune
to observe the second one directly, having been out inspecting the
defenses around the ordnance-depot at the time.
Like the first, the second air-attack was beaten off, or, more
exactly, down. Most of the enemy contragravity was destroyed; at least
two dozen vehicles crashed inside the Reservation. As in the first
instance, there was a simultaneous ground attack from the southern
side, with a demonstration-attack at the north end. For a while, von
Schlichten found himself fighting hand-to-hand, first with his pistol
and then, when his ammunition was gone, with a picked-up rifle and
bayonet. It was full daylight before the last of the attackers was
either killed or driven out.
Five minutes later, while he was reloading his pistol-clips with
salvaged cartridges, the _Northern Star_ came bulking over the
mountains from the west.