Beowulf was bad.
Valkanhayn and Spasso had both been opposed to the raid. Nobody
raided Beowulf; Beowulf was too tough. Beowulf had nuclear energy
and nuclear weapons and contragravity and normal-space craft, they
even had colonies on a couple of other planets of their system. They
had everything but hyperdrive. Beowulf was a civilized planet, and
you didn't raid civilized planets, not and get away with it.
And beside, hadn't they gotten enough loot on Amaterasu?
"No, we did not," Trask told them. "If we're going to make anything
out of Tanith, we're going to need power, and I don't mean windmills
and waterwheels. As you've remarked, Beowulf has nuclear energy.
That's where we get our plutonium and our power units."
So they went to Beowulf. They came out of hyperspace eight light-hours
from the F-7 star of which Beowulf was the fourth planet, and twenty
light-minutes apart. Guatt Kirbey made a microjump that brought the
ships within practical communicating distance, and they began making
plans in an intership screen conference.
"There are, or were, three chief sources of fissionable ores,"
Harkaman said. "The last ship to raid here and get away was Stefan
Kintour's _Princess of Lyonesse_, sixty years ago. He hit one on the
Antarctic continent; according to his account, everything there was
fairly new. He didn't mess things up too badly, and it ought to be
still operating. We'll go in from the south pole, and we'll have to
go in fast."
They shifted personnel and equipment. They would go in bunched, the
pinnaces ahead; they and the _Space Scourge_ would go down to the
ground, while the better-armed _Nemesis_ would hover above to fight
off local contragravity, shoot down missiles, and generally provide
overhead cover. Trask transferred to the _Space Scourge_, taking
with him Morland and two hundred of the _Nemesis_ ground-fighters.
Most of the single-mounts, landing craft and manipulators and
heavy-duty lifters went with him, jamming the decks around the
vehicle ports of Valkanhayn's ship.
They jumped in to six light-minutes, and while Valkanhayn's
astrogator was still fiddling with his controls they began sensing
radar and microray detection. When they came out again, they were
two light-seconds off the south pole, and half a dozen ships were
either in orbit or coming up from the planet. All normal-space
craft, of course, but some were almost as big as the _Nemesis_.
From there on, it was a nightmare.
Ships pounded at them with guns, and they pounded back. Missiles
went out, and counter-missiles stopped them in rapidly expanding and
quickly vanishing globes of light. Red lights flashed on the damage
board, and sirens howled and klaxons squawked. In the outside-view
screens, they saw the _Nemesis_ vanish in a blaze of radiance, and
then, while their hearts were still in their throats, come out of it
again. Red lights went off on the board as damage-control crews and
their robots sealed the breaches in the hull and pumped air back
into evacuated areas, and then more red lights came on.
Occasionally, he would glance toward Boake Valkanhayn, who sat
motionless in his chair, chewing a cigar that had gone out long ago.
He wasn't enjoying it, but he wasn't showing fear. Once a Beowulfer
vanished in a supernova flash, and when the ball of incandescence
widened to nothing the ship was gone. All Valkanhayn said was: "Hope
one of our boys did that."
They fought their way in and down, toward the atmosphere. Another
Beowulf ship blew up, a craft about the size of Spasso's _Lamia_.
A moment later, another; Valkanhayn was pounding the desk in front
of him with his fist and yelling: "That was one of ours! Find out
who launched it; get his name!"
Missiles were coming up from the planet, now. Valkanhayn's detection
officer was trying to locate the source. While he was trying, a big
melon-shaped thing fell away from the _Nemesis_, and in the jiggling,
radiation-distorted intership screen Harkaman's image was laughing.
"Hellburner just went off; target about 50° south, 25° east of the
sunrise line. That's where those missiles are coming from."
Counter-missiles sped toward the big metal melon; defense missiles,
robot-launched, met them. The hellburner's track was marked first
by expanding red and orange globes in airless space and then by
fire-puffs after it entered atmosphere. It vanished into the darkness
beyond the sunset, and then made sunlight of its own. It _was_ sunlight;
a Bethe solar-phoenix reaction, and it would sustain itself for hours.
He hoped it hadn't landed within a thousand miles of their objective.
* * * * *
The ground operation was a nightmare of a different sort. He went down
in a command car, with Paytrik Morland and a couple of others. There
were missiles and gun batteries. There were darting patterns of flights
of combat vehicles, blazing gunfire, and single vehicles that shot past
or blew up in front of them. Robots on contragravity--military robots,
with missiles to launch, and working robots with only their own mass to
hurl, flung themselves mindlessly at them. Screens that went crazy from
radiation; speakers that jabbered contradictory orders. Finally, the
battle, which had raged in the air over two thousand square miles of
mines and refineries and reaction plants, became two distinct and
concentrated battles, one at the packing plant and storage vaults and
one at the power-unit cartridge factory.
Three pinnaces came down to form a triangle over each; the _Space
Scourge_ hung midway between, poured out a swarm of vehicles and big
claw-armed manipulators; armored lighters and landing craft shuttled
back and forth. The command car looped and dodged from one target to the
other; at one, keg-like canisters of plutonium, collapsium-plated and
weighing tons apiece, were coming out of the vaults, and at the other
lifters were bringing out loads of nuclear-electric power-unit
cartridges, some as big as a ten liter jar, to power a spaceship engine,
and some small as a round of pistol ammunition, for things like
flashlights.
Every hour or so, he looked at his watch, and it would be three or
four minutes later.
At last, when he was completely convinced that he had really been
killed, and was damned and would spend all eternity in this
fire-riven chaos, the _Nemesis_ began firing red flares and the
speakers in all the vehicles were signaling recall. He got aboard
the _Space Scourge_ somehow, after assuring himself that nobody who
was alive was left behind.
There were twenty-odd who weren't, and the sick bay was full of
wounded who had gone up with cargo, and more were being helped off
the vehicles as they were berthed. The car in which he had been
riding had been hit several times, and one of the gunners was
bleeding under his helmet and didn't seem aware of it. When he got
to the command room, he found Boake Valkanhayn, his face drawn and
weary, getting coffee from a robot and lacing it with brandy.
"That's it," he said, blowing on the steaming cup. It was the
battered silver one that had been in front of him when he had first
appeared in the _Nemesis'_ screen. He nodded toward the damage
screen; everything had been patched up, or the outer decks around
breached portions of the hull sealed. "Ship secure." He set down
the silver mug and lit a cigar. "To quote Garvan Spasso, 'Nobody
can call that chicken-stealing.'"
"No. Not even if you count Tizona giraffe-birds as chickens. That
Gram gum-pear brandy you're putting in that coffee? I'll have the
same. Just leave out the coffee."