Barathrum was a grim land, naked black and gray. Spines and crags of
bare rock jutted up, lava-flows like black glaciers twisting among
them. It was split by faults and fissures, pimpled with ash-cones.
Except for the seabirds that nested among the cliffs and the few thin
patches of green where seeds windblown from the mainland had taken
root, it was as lifeless as when some ancient convulsion had thrust it
up from the sea, Barathrum was a dead Inferno, untenanted even by the
damned; by comparison, the Badlands seemed lushly fertile.
The four craft crossed above the line of white breakers that marked
the division of sea and land; the gunboat Goblin in the lead, her
sisters, Vampire and Dragon to right and left and a little behind,
and the Lester Dawes a few miles in the rear. Fred Karski was at the
Goblin's controls; Conn, beside him, was peering ahead into the
teleview screen and shifting his eyes from it to the map and back
again.
Somebody behind him was saying that it would be a nice place to be
air-wrecked. Somebody else was telling him not to joke about it. From
the radio, his father was asking: "Can you see it, yet?"
"Not yet. We're on the right map-and-compass direction; we should
before long."
"We're picking up radiation," Fred Karski said. "Way above normal
count. I hope the place isn't hot."
"We're getting that, too," Rodney Maxwell said. "Looks like power
radiation; something must be on there."
After forty years, that didn't seem likely. He leaned over to look at
the omnigeiger, then whistled. If that was normal leakage from
inactive power units, there must be enough of them to power ten towns
the size of Litchfield.
"Something's operating there," he said, and then realized what that
meant. Somebody had beaten them to the spaceport. That would be one of
the new companies formed after the opening of Force Command. He was
wishing, now, that he hadn't let himself be talked out of coming here
first. Older and wiser heads indeed!
Fred Karski whistled shrilly into his radio phone. "Attention
everybody! General alert. Prepare for combat; prepare to take
immediate evasive action. We must assume that the spaceport is
occupied, and that the occupants are hostile. Captain Poole, will you
please make ready aboard your ship? Reduce both speed and altitude,
and ready your guns and missiles at once."
"Well, now, wait a minute, young fellow," Poole began to argue. "You
don't know—"
"No. I don't. And I want all of us alive after we find out, too,"
Karski replied.
Rodney Maxwell's voice, in the background, said something
indistinguishable. Poole said ungraciously, "Well, all right, if you
think so...."
The Lester Dawes began dropping to the rear and going down toward
the ground. Conn returned to the teleview screen in time to see the
truncated cone of the extinct volcano rise on the horizon, dwarfing
everything around it. Fred Karski was talking to Colonel Zareff, back
at Force Command, giving him the radiation count.
"That's occupied," the old soldier replied. "Mass-energy converter
going. Now, Fred, don't start any shooting unless you have to, but
don't get yourself blown to MC waiting on them to fire the first
shot."
The dark cone bulked higher and higher in the screen. It must be seven
miles around the crater, and a mile deep; when that thing blew out,
ten or fifteen thousand years ago, it must have been something to see,
preferably from a ship a thousand miles off-planet. It was so huge
that it was hard to realize that the jumbled foothills around it were
themselves respectably lofty mountains.
When they were within five miles of it, something twinkled slightly
near the summit. An instant later, the missileman, in his turret
overhead, shouted:
"Missile coming up; counter-missile off!"
"Grab onto something, everybody!" Karski yelled, bracing himself in
his seat.
Conn, on his feet, flung his arms around an upright stanchion and hung
on. Fred's hand gave a twisting jerk on the steering handle; the
Goblin went corkscrewing upward. In the rearview screen, Conn saw a
pink fireball blossom far below. The sound and the shock-wave never
reached them; the Goblin outran them. Dragon and Vampire were
spiraling away in opposite directions. The radio was loud with voices,
and a few of the words were almost printable. A gong began clanging
from the command post on top of the mesa on the mainland.
"Be quiet, all of you!" Klem Zareff was bellowing. "And get back from
there. Back three or four miles; close enough so they won't dare use
thermonuclears. Take cover behind one of those ridges, where they
can't detect you. Then we can start figuring what the Gehenna to do
next."
That made sense. And get it settled who's in command of this
Donnybrook, while we're at it, Conn thought. He looked into the rear
and sideview screens, and taking cover immediately made even more
sense. Two more fireballs blossomed, one dangerously close to the
Dragon. Guns were firing from the mountaintop, too, big ones,
and shells were bursting close to them. He saw a shell land on and
another beside one of the enemy gun positions—115-mm's from the
Lester Dawes, he supposed. He continued to cling to the
stanchion, and the Goblin shot straight up, and he was expecting
to see the sky blacken and the stars come out when the gunboat leveled
and started circling down again. The mountainside, he saw, was sending
up a lightning-crackling tower of smoke and dust that swelled into a
mushroom top.
Klem Zareff, on the radio, was demanding to know who'd launched that.
"We did, sir; Dragon," Stefan Jorisson was replying. "We had to get
rid of it. We took a hit. Gun turret's smashed, Milt Hennant's dead,
and Abe Samuels probably will be before I'm done talking, and if we
get this crate down in one piece, it'll do for a miracle till a real
one happens."
"Well, be careful how you shoot those things off," his father
implored, from the Lester Dawes. "Get one inside the crater and we
won't have any spaceport."
The Lester Dawes vanished behind a mountain range a few miles from
the volcano. The Dragon, still airborne but in obvious difficulties,
was limping after her, and the Vampire was covering the withdrawal,
firing rapidly but with doubtful effect with her single 90-mm and
tossing out counter-missiles. There was another fireball between her
and the mountain. Then, when the Dragon had followed the Lester
Dawes to safety, she turned tail and bolted, the Goblin following.
As they approached the mountains, something the shape of a recon-car
and about half the size passed them going in the opposite direction.
As they dropped into the chasm on the other side, another nuclear went
off at the volcano.
When Conn and Fred left the Goblin and boarded the ship, they found
Rodney Maxwell, Captain Poole, and a couple of others on the bridge.
Charley Gatworth, the skipper of the Vampire, Morgan Gatworth's son,
was with them, and, imaged in a screen, so was Klem Zareff. One of the
other screens, from a pickup on the Vampire, showed the Dragon
lying on her side, her turret crushed and her gun, with the
muzzle-brake gone, bent upward. A couple of lorries from the Lester
Dawes were alongside; as Conn watched, a blanket-wrapped body, and
then another, were lowered from the disabled gunboat.
"Fred, how are you and Charley fixed for counter-missiles?" Zareff was
asking. "Get loaded up with them off the ship, as many as you can
carry. Charley, you go up on top of this ridge above, and take cover
where you can watch the mountain. Transmit what you see back to the
ship. Fred, you take a position about a quarter way around from where
you are now. Don't let them send anything over, but don't start
anything yourselves. I'm coming out with everything I can gather up
here; I'll be along myself in a couple of hours, and the rest will be
stringing in after me. In the meantime, Rodney, you're in command."
Well, that settled that. There was one other point, though.
"Colonel," Conn said, "I assume that this spaceport is occupied by one
of these new prospecting companies. We have no right to take it away
from them, have we?"
"They fired on us without warning," Karski said. "They killed Milt,
and it's ten to one Abe won't live either. We owe them something for
that."
"We do, and we'll pay off. Conn, you assume wrong. This gang's been at
the spaceport long enough to get the detection system working and put
the defense batteries on ready. They didn't do that since this
morning, and up to last evening they neglected to file claim. I'll
assume they're on the wrong side of the law. They're outlaws, Conn.
All the raids along the east coast; everybody's blamed them on the
Badlands gangs. I'll admit they're responsible for some of it, but
I'll bet this gang at the spaceport is doing most of it."
That was reasonable. Barathrum was closer to the scene of the worst
outlaw depredations than the Badlands, not more than an hour at Mach
Two. And nobody ever thought of Barathrum as an outlaw hangout. People
rarely thought of Barathrum at all. He liked the idea. The only thing
against it was that he wanted so badly to believe it.
They brought the body of Milt Hennant aboard, and Abe Samuels, swathed
in bandages and immobilized by narcotic injections. A few more of the
Dragon's six-man crew had been injured. Jorrisson, the skipper, had
one trouser leg slit to the belt and his right thigh splinted and
bandaged; he took over the Lester Dawes' missile controls, which he
could manage sitting in one place. Fred Karski and Charley Gatworth
went aboard their craft and lifted out.
For a long time, nothing happened. Conn got out the plans of the
volcano spaceport and the photomaps of the surrounding area. The
principal entrance, the front door of the spaceport, was the crater of
the extinct volcano itself. It was ringed, outside, with
launching-sites and gun positions, and according to the data he had,
some of the guns were as big as 250-mm. How many outlaws there were to
man them was a question a lot of people could get killed trying to
answer. The ship docks and shops were down on the level of the crater
floor, in caverns, both natural and excavated, that extended far back
into the mountain. There were two galleries, one above the other,
extending entirely around the inside of the crater near the top;
passages from them gave access to the outside gun and missile
positions.
With a dozen ships the size of the Lester Dawes, about five thousand
men, and a CO who wasn't concerned with trivialities like casualties,
they could have taken the place in half an hour. With what they had,
trying to fight their way in at the top was out of the question.
There was another way in. He had known about it from the beginning,
and he was trying desperately to think of a way not to utilize it. It
was a tunnel two miles long, running into some of the bottom workshops
and storerooms back of the ship berths from a big blowhole or small
crater at the foot of the mountain. According to the fifty-year-old
plans, it was big enough to take a gunboat in, and on paper it looked
like a royal highway straight to the heart of the enemy's stronghold.
To Conn, it looked like a wonderful place to commit suicide. He'd only
had a short introductory course, in one semester, in military and
protective robotics, just enough to give him a foundation if he wanted
to go into that branch of the subject later. It was also enough to
give him an idea of the sort of booby-traps that tunnel could be
filled with. He knew what he'd have put into it if he'd been defending
that place.
Colonel Zareff had sent one last message from Force Command when he
lifted off with a flight of recon-cars. After that, he maintained a
communication blackout. It was an hour and a half before he got close
enough to be detected from the outlaw stronghold. Immediately, the
volcano began spewing out missiles. Poole hastily took the Lester
Dawes ten miles down the rift-valley in sixty seconds, while Stefan
Jorisson put out a nuclear-warhead missile and left it circling about
where the ship had been. From their respective positions, Fred Karski
and Charley Gatworth filled the airspace midway to the volcano with
counter-missiles, each loaded with four rockets. There were
explosions, fireballs in the air and rising cumulus clouds of
varicolored smoke and dust. Only about half the enemy missiles reached
the Lester Dawes' former position.
When their controllers, back at the volcano, couldn't see the ship in
their screens, the missiles bunched together. Immediately, Jorisson
sent his missile up to join them and detonated it. Including his own,
eight nuclear weapons went off together in a single blast that shook
the ground like an earthquake and churned the air like a hurricane.
Klem Zareff came on-screen at once.
"Now what did you do?" he demanded. "Blew the whole place up, didn't
you?"
Rodney Maxwell told him. Zareff laughed. "They might just think they
got the ship; all the pickups would be smashed before they could see
what really happened. You're about ten miles south of that? Be with
you in a few minutes."
They got a screen on for his rearview pickup. Zareff had with him a
dozen recon-cars, some of them under robo-control; six gunboats
followed, and behind them, to the horizon, other craft were strung
out—airboats, troop carriers, and freight-scows. They could see enemy
missiles approaching in Zareff's front screen; counter-missiles got
most of them, and a couple of pilotless recon-cars were sacrificed.
The Lester Dawes blasted more missiles as they crossed the top of
the mountain range. Then Zareff's car was circling in and entering at
one of the ship's open cargo-ports. Zareff and Anse Dawes got out.
"Gunboats are only half an hour behind," Zareff said. "Get some
screens on to them, Anse; you know the combinations. Now let's see
what kind of a mess we're in here."
It was almost a miracle, the way the tottering old man Conn had seen
on the dock at Litchfield when he had arrived from Terra had been
rejuvenated.
The rest of the reinforcements arrived slowly, sending missiles and
counter-missiles out ahead of them. Zareff began worrying about the
supply; the enemy didn't seem to be running short. By 1300—Conn noted
the time incredulously; the battle seemed to have been going on
forever, instead of just four hours—the Lester Dawes had moved
halfway around the volcano and was almost due west of it, and the
eight gunboats were spaced all around the perimeter. Then one stopped
transmitting; in the other screens, there was a rising fireball where
she had been. The radio was loud with verbal reports.
"Poltergeist," Zareff said, naming half a dozen names. One or two of
them had been schoolmates of Conn's at the Academy; he knew how he'd
feel about it later, but now it simply didn't register.
"They're launching missiles faster than we can shoot them down," he
said.
"That's usually the beginning of the end," Zareff said. "I saw it
happen too often during the War. We've got to get inside that place.
It's a lot of harmless fun to send contragravity robots out to smash
each other, but it doesn't win battles. Battles are won by men,
standing with their feet on the ground, using personal weapons."
"We'll have to win this one pretty soon," Rodney Maxwell said. "The
amount of nuclear energy we've been releasing will be detectable
anywhere on the planet by now. The Government has a ship like the
Lester Dawes in commission; if this keeps on, she'll be coming out
for a look."
"Then we'll have help," Captain Poole said.
"We need Government help like we need the polka-dot fever," Rodney
Maxwell said. "If they get in it, they'll claim the spaceport
themselves, and we'll have fought a battle for nothing."
Well, that was it, then. The spaceport was essential to the Maxwell
Plan. He'd gotten seven men killed—eight, if the recon-car that was
taking Abe Samuels to the hospital in Litchfield didn't make it in
time—and it was up to him to see that they hadn't died for nothing.
He spread the photo-map and the spaceport plans on the chart table.
"Look at this," he said.
Klem Zareff looked at it. He didn't like it any better than Conn had.
He studied the plan for a moment, chewing his cigar.
"You know, it's possible they don't know that thing exists," he said,
without too much conviction. "You'll be betting the lives of at least
twenty men; fewer than that couldn't accomplish anything."
"I'll be putting mine on the table along with them," Conn said. "I'll
lead them in."
He was wishing he hadn't had to say that. He did, though. It was the
only thing he could say.
"You better pick the men to go with me, Colonel," he continued. "You
know them better than I do. We'll need working equipment, too; I have
no idea what we may have to take out of the way, inside."
"I won't call for volunteers," Zareff said. "I'll pick Home Guards;
they did their volunteering when they joined."
"Let me pick one man, Colonel," Anse Dawes said. "I'll pick me."
