The H. Beam Piper Megapack

by H. Beam Piper

  “How about the Kragans?”

  “The Eighteenth Rifles? They’re with us. I saw a party of them firing into the mob; I saw some of the Tenth N.U.N.I. tossing a dead Kragan on their bayonets.…”

  “Have any ammo left for that burp-gun? Come on, then; let’s see what it’s like at Company House,” von Schlichten said. “Captain Malavez, you know what to do about defending this station. Get busy doing it. And have that girl in booth three tell Konkrook what’s happened here, and say that I won’t be coming down, as planned, just yet.”

  He opened the door, and the rattle of shots outside became audible again. The civilian with the burp-gun knew better than to let a general go out first; elbowing von Schlichten out of the way, he crouched over his weapon and dashed outside. Drawing his pistol, von Schlichten followed, pulling the door shut after him.

  Darkness had fallen, while he had been inside; now the whole Company Reservation was ablaze with electric lights. Somebody at the power-plant—either the regular staff, if they were still holding, or the mutineers, if they had taken it—had thrown on the emergency lights. There was a confused mass of gray-skinned figures in front of Company House, reflected light twinkling on steel over them; from the direction of the native-troops barracks more natives were coming on the run. On the roof of a building across the street, two machine-guns were already firing into the mob. A group of Terrans came running out of a roadway between two buildings, from the direction of the repair-shops; several of them paused to fire behind them with pistols. They started toward Company House, saw what was going on there, and veered, darting into the door of the building from which the auto-weapons were firing. From up the street, a hundred-odd saurian-faced native soldiers were coming at the double, bayonets fixed and rifles at high port; with them ran several Terrans. Motioning his companion to follow, von Schlichten ran to meet them, falling in beside a Terran captain who ran in front.

  “What’s the score, captain?” he asked.

  “Tenth North Uller and the Fifth Cavalry have mutinied; so have these rag-tag Auxiliaries. That mob down there’s part of them.” He was puffing under the double effort of running and talking. “Whole thing blew up in seconds; no chance to communicate with anybody.…”

  A Terran woman, in black slacks and an orange sweater, ran across the street in front of them, pursued by a group of enlisted “men” of the Tenth North Uller Native Infantry, all shrieking “Znidd suddabit!” The fugitive ran into a doorway across the street; before her pursuers were aware of their danger, the Kragans had swept over them. There was no shooting; the slim, cruel-bladed bayonets did the work. From behind him, as he ran, von Schlichten could hear Kragan voices in a new cry: “Znidd geek! Znidd geek!”

  The mob were swarming up onto the steps and into the semi-rotunda of the storm-porch. There was shooting, which told him that some of the humans who had been at the banquet were still alive. He wondered, half-sick, how many, and whether they could hold out till he could clear the doorway, and, most of all, he found himself thinking of Paula Quinton. Skidding to a stop within fifty yards of the mob, he flung out his arms crucifix-wise to halt the Kragans. Behind, he could hear the Terrans and native-officers shouting commands to form front.

  “Give them one clip, reload, and then give them the bayonet!” he ordered. “Shove them off the steps and then clear the porch!”

  “One clip, fire, and reload, at will!” somebody passed it on in Kragan.

  The hundred rifles let go all at once, and for five seconds they poured a deafening two thousand rounds into the mutineers. There was some fire in reply; a Zirk corporal narrowly missed him with a pistol, he saw the captain’s head fly apart when an explosive rifle-bullet hit him, and half a dozen Kragans went down.

  “Reload! Set your safeties!” von Schlichten bellowed. “Charge!”

  Under human officers, the North Uller Native Infantry would have stood firm. Even under their native-officers and sergeants, they should not have broken as they did, but the best of these had paid for their loyalty to the Company with their lives, and the rest had destroyed their authority by revolting against the source from which it was derived. At that, the Skilkan peasantry who made up the Tenth Infantry and the Zirk cavalrymen tried briefly to fight as individuals, shrieking “Znidd suddabit!” until the Kragans were upon them, stabbing and shooting. They drove the rioters from the steps or killed them there, they wiped out those who had gotten into the semicircle of the storm-porch. The inside doors, von Schlichten saw, were open, but beyond them were Terrans and a dozen or so Kragans. Hideyoshi O’Leary and Barney Mordkovitz seemed to be in command of these.

  “We had about thirty seconds’ warning,” Mordkovitz reported, “and the Kragans in the hall bought us another sixty seconds. Of course, we all had our pistols.…”

  “Hey! These storm-doors are wedged!” somebody discovered. “Those goddam geek servants…!”

  “Yeah, kill any of them you catch,” somebody else advised. “If we could have gotten these doors closed.…”

  The mob, driven from the steps, was trying to reform and renew the attack. From up the street, the machine-guns, silent during the bayonet-fight, began hammering again. The mob surged forward to get out of their fire, and were met by a rifle-blast and a hedge of bayonets at the steps; they surged back, and the machine-guns flailed them again. They started to rush the building from whence the automatic-fire came, and there was a fusillade and a shriek of “Znidd geek!” from up the street. They turned and fled in the direction from whence they had come, bullets scourging them from three directions at once.

  For a moment, von Schlichten and the three Terrans and eighty-odd Kragans who had survived the fight stood on the steps, weapons poised, seeking more enemies. The machine-guns up the street stuttered a few short bursts and were silent. From behind, the beleaguered Terrans and their Kragan guards were emerging. He saw Jules Keaveney and his wife, Commander Prinsloo of the Aldebaran, Harry Quong and Bogdanoff. Ah, there she was! He heaved a breath of relief and waved to her.

  The Kragans were already setting about their after-battle chores. About twenty of them spread out on guard; the others, by fours, went into the street, one covering with his rifle while the other three checked on their own casualties, used the short, leaf-shaped swords they carried to slash off the heads of enemy wounded, and collected weapons and ammunition. A couple of hundred more Kragans, led by Native-Major Kormork, the co-parent of young with King Kankad, came up at the double and stopped in front of Company House.

  “We were in quarters, aboard the Aldebaran and in the guesthouse at the airport,” Kormork reported. “We were attacked, fifteen minutes ago, by a mob. We took ten minutes beating them off, and five more getting here. I sent Native-Captain Zeerjeek and the rest of the force to retake the supply-depot and the shops and lorry hangars, which had been taken, and relieve the military airport, which is under attack.”

  There was still firing from the commercial airport and the smaller military airfield. Once there was a string of heavy explosions that sounded like 80-mm rockets.

  “Good enough. I hope you didn’t spread yourself out too thin. What’s the situation at the commercial airport?”

  “The two ships, the Aldebaran and the freighter Northern Star, are both safe,” Kormork replied. “I saw them go on contragravity and rise to about a hundred feet.”

  “Whose crowd is that you have?” he asked the Terran lieutenant who had taken over command of the first force of Kragans.

  “Company 6, Eighteenth Rifles, sir. We were on duty at the guardhouse; fighting broke out in the direction of the native barracks. A couple of runners from Captain Retief of Company 4 came in with word that he was being attacked by mutineers from the Tenth N.U.N.I. but that he was holding them back. So Captain Charbonneau, who was killed a few minutes ago, left a Terran lieutenant and a Kragan native-lieutenant and a couple of native-sergeants and thirty Kragans to hold the guardhouse, and brought the rest of us here.”

  Von Schlichten nod
ded. “You’d pass the military airport and the power-plant, wouldn’t you?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir. The military airport’s holding out, and I saw the red-and-yellow danger-lights on the fence around the power-plant.”

  That meant the power-plant was, for the time, safe; somebody’d turned twenty thousand volts into the fence.

  “All right. I’m setting up my command post at the telecast station, where the communication equipment is.” He turned to the crowd that had come out onto the porch from inside. “Where’s Colonel Cheng-Li?”

  “Here, general.” The Intelligence and Constabulary officer pushed through the crowd. “I was on the phone, talking to the military airport, the commercial airport, ordnance depot, spaceport, ship-docks and power-plant. All answer. I’m afraid Pop Goode, at the city power-plant, is done for; nobody answers there, but the TV-pickup is still on in the load-dispatcher’s room, and the place is full of geeks. Colonel Jarman’s coming here with a lorry to get combat-car crews; he’s short-handed. Port-Captain Leavitt has all the native labor at the airport and spaceport herded into a repair dock; he’s keeping them covered with the forward 90-mm gun of the Northern Star. Lorry-hangars, repair-shops and maintenance-yards don’t answer.”

  “That’s what I was going to ask you. Good enough. Harry Quong, Hassan Bogdanoff!”

  His command-car crew front-and-centered.

  “I want you to take Colonel O’Leary up, as soon as my car’s brought here.… Hid, you go up and see what’s going on. Drop flares where there isn’t any light. And take a look at the native-labor camp and the equipment-park, south of the reservation.… Kormork, you take all your gang, and half these soldiers from the Eighteenth, here, and help clear the native-troops barracks. And don’t bother taking any prisoners; we can’t spare personnel to guard them.”

  Kormork grinned. The taking of prisoners had always been one of those irrational Terran customs which no Ulleran regarded with favor, or even comprehension.

  VIII.

  Authority of Governor-General von Schlichten

  There was fresh intelligence from Konkrook, by the time he returned to the telecast station. Mutiny had broken out there among the laborers and native troops, who outnumbered the Terrans and their Kragan mercenaries on Gongonk Island by five thousand to five hundred and fifteen hundred respectively. The attempt to relieve Jaikark’s palace had been called off before the relief-force could be sent; there was heavy and confused fighting all over the island, and most of the combat contragravity and about half the Kragan Rifles had had to be committed to defend the Company farms across the Channel, on the mainland, south of the city. There had also been an urgent call for help from Colonel Rodolfo MacKinnon, in command of Company troops at the Keegark Residency, and another from the Residency at Kwurk, one of the Free Cities on the eastern shore of Takkad Sea.

  He called Keegark; a girl, apparently one of the civilian telecast technicians, answered.

  “We must have help, General von Schlichten,” she told him. “The native troops, all but two hundred Kragans, have mutinied. They have everything here except Company House—docks, airport, everything. We’re trying to hold out, but there are thousands of them. Our Takkad Native Infantry, soldiers of King Orgzild’s army, and townspeople. They all seem to have firearms.…”

  “What happened to Eric Blount and your Resident-Agent, Mr. Lemoyne?”

  “We don’t know. They were at the Palace, talking to King Orgzild. We’ve tried to call the Palace, but we can’t get through, general, we must have help.…”

  A call came in, a few minutes later, from Krink, five hundred miles to the northeast across the mountains; the Resident-Agent there, one Francis Xavier Shapiro, reported rioting in the city and an attempted palace-revolution against King Jonkvank, and that the Residency was under attack. By way of variety, it was the army of King Jonkvank that had mutinied; the Sixth North Uller Native Infantry and the two companies of Zirk cavalry at Krink were still loyal, along with the Kragans.

  There was a pattern to all this. Von Schlichten stood staring at the big map, on the wall, showing the Takkad Sea area at the Equatorial Zone, and the country north of it to the pole, the area of Uller occupied by the Company. He was almost beginning to discern the underlying logic of the past half-hour’s events when Keaveney, the Skilk Resident, blundered into him in a half-daze.

  “Sorry, general, didn’t see you.” His face was ashen, and his jowls sagged. Von Schlichten wondered if there could be another spectacle so woe-begone as a back-slapping extrovert with the bottom knocked out of him. “My God, it’s happening all over Uller! Not just here at Skilk; everywhere where we have a residency or a trading-station. Why, it’s the end of all of us!”

  “It’s not quite that bad, Mr. Keaveney.” He looked at his watch. It was now nearly an hour since the native troops here at Skilk had mutinied. Insurrections like this usually succeeded or failed in the first hour. It was a little early to be certain, but he was beginning to suspect that this one hadn’t succeeded. “If we all do our part, we’ll come out of it all right,” he told Keaveney, more cheerfully than he felt, then turned to ask Brigadier-General Mordkovitz how the fighting was going at the native-troops barracks.

  “Not badly, general. Colonel Jarman’s got some contragravity up and working. They blew out all four of the Tenth N.U.N.I.’s barracks; the Tenth and the Zirks are trying to defend the cavalry barracks. Some of our Kragans managed to slip around behind the cavalry stables. They’re leading out hipposaurs, and sniping at the rear of the cavalry barracks.”

  “That’ll give us some cavalry of our own; a lot of these Kragans are good riders.… How about the repair-shops and maintenance-yard and lorry-hangars? I don’t want these geeks getting hold of that equipment and using it against us.”

  “Kormork’s outfit are trying to take back the lorry-hangars. Jarman’s got a couple of airjeeps and a combat-car helping them.”

  “…won’t be one of us left by this time tomorrow,” Keaveney was wailing, to Paula Quinton and another woman. “And the Company is finished!”

  “We’d better get him a drink, or a cup of coffee, general,” Mordkovitz suggested. “With a knockout-drop in it.”

  Colonel Cheng-Li, the Intelligence officer, seemed to have somewhat the same idea. He approached Keaveney and tried to quiet him. At the same time, a woman in black slacks and an orange sweater—the one whose pursuers had been overrun by the Kragans at the beginning of the fighting—approached von Schlichten.

  “General, King Kankad’s calling,” she said. “He’s on the screen in booth four.”

  “Right.” To avoid any possibility of misunderstanding, he slipped his geek-speaker into his mouth before entering the booth. Kankad’s face was looking out of the screen at him, with Phil Yamazaki, the telecast operator at Kankad’s Town, standing behind him.

  “Von!” The Kragan spoke almost as though in physical pain. “What can I do to help? I have twenty thousand of my people here who are capable of bearing arms, all with firearms, but I have transport for only five hundred. Where shall I send them?”

  Von Schlichten thought quickly. Keegark was finished; the Residency stood in the middle of the city, surrounded by two hundred thousand of King Orgzild’s troops and subjects. Since Ullerans were bisexual, the total population, less the senile, crippled, and very young, was the military potential. Sending Kankad’s five hundred warriors and his meager contragravity there would be the same as shoveling them into a furnace. The people at Keegark would have to be written off, like the twenty Kragans at Jaikark’s palace.

  “Send them to Konkrook,” he decided. “Them M’zangwe’s in command, there; he’ll need help to hold the Company farms. Maybe he can find additional transport for you. I’ll call him.”

  “I’ll send off what force I can, at once,” Kankad promised. “How does it go with you at Skilk?”

  “We’re holding, so far,” he replied. “Paula is with me, here; she sends her friendship.”

  Captain
Inez Malavez, the woman officer in charge of the station, put her head into the booth.

  “General! Immediate-urgency message from Colonel O’Leary,” she said. “Native laborers from the mine-labor camp are pouring into the mine-equipment park. Colonel O’Leary’s used all his rockets and MG-ammunition trying to stop them.”

  “Call you back, later,” von Schlichten told Kankad. “I’ll see what Them M’zangwe can do about transport; get what force you can started for Konkrook at once.”

  He left the booth, removing his geek-speaker. “Barney!” he called. “General Mordkovitz! Who’s the ranking officer in direct contact with the Eighteenth Rifles? Major Falkenberg?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, tell him to get as many of his Kragans as he can spare down to the equipment-park.” He turned to Inez Malavez. “You call Jarman; tell him what O’Leary reported, and tell him to get cracking on it. Tell him not to let those geeks get any of that equipment onto contragravity; knock it down as fast as they try to lift out with it. And tell him to see what he can do in the way of troop-carriers or lorries, to get Falkenberg’s Rifles to the equipment-park.… How’s business at the lorry-hangars and maintenance-yard?”

  “Kormork’s still working on that,” the girl captain told him. “Nothing definite, yet.”

  In one corner of the big room, somebody had thumbtacked a ten-foot-square map of the Company area to the floor. Paula Quinton and Mrs. Jules Keaveney were on their knees beside it, pushing out handfuls of little pink and white pills that somebody had brought in two bottles from the dispensary across the road, each using a billiard-bridge. The girl in the orange sweater had a handful of scribbled notes, and was telling them where to push the pills. There were other objects on the map, too—pistol-cartridges, and cigarettes, and foil-wrapped food-concentrate wafers. Paula, seeing him, straightened.