Now the terrible cylinder of fire, thousands of miles long, advanced past the orbit of Pluto. It began to gutter and die at the end nearest the Duglaari Fleet. It shortened, like an immense flame extinguishing itself, and in a few minutes the last missile had exploded and the lance of thermonuclear destruction was gone.
And the great Duglaari Fleet had a perfectly clear, arrow-straight path through the minefield, and into the Sol system.
The Doog Fleet began to accelerate Solward through its invisible lane of safety. It reached the orbit of Pluto and suddenly changed course ninety degrees.
“What are they doing?”
“They’re headed for Pluto,” Ortega said. “The Doogs are thorough. I think they plan to sterilize every habitable body in the system!”
The base of the Duglaari formation was obscured by flashes of rocket exhaust once more. A great barrage of missiles sped along in Pluto’s orbit straight for Sol’s outermost planet. Even as thermonuclear destruction hurtled towards Pluto, the Duglaari Fleet changed course again, and resumed its Solward journey.
“But Pluto’s a dead world….” Palmer muttered. “Why…?”
“Thoroughness,” said Ortega. “That Fleet has enough firepower to blast everything in the system to a cinder, and they fully intend to do just that. After all, there might be a few dozen humans on Pluto, and their goal is total extermination. And the Doogs always mean everything they say quite literally.”
Suddenly Pluto erupted in a sheet of fire. The planet almost seemed to quiver in its orbit, as thousands of huge fusion warheads blasted its surface simultaneously. Its long-dead surface flowed in rivers of molten rock; miles-deep layers of frozen gases were vaporized, and in its death-throes, Pluto was shrouded by what it had never had before—an atmosphere.
Even as Pluto’s now-molten surface was enveloped in clouds of volatilized ice, the great Duglaari Fleet zigged and zagged, launching missile barrages at the moons of Neptune and Uranus.
Then the Doogs changed course again and headed for Saturn.
“Every habitable moon!” Lingo said. “They’re going to blast every habitable moon!” He nodded to Ortega, who threw another switch on the console, changing cameras again. This tell-tale must’ve been located near the Rings of Saturn, for Titan, the system’s largest satellite dominated the view as the Doogs approached it.
Instead of a missile barrage, the Duglaari went into a low orbit around Titan. Sporadically but methodically, great beams of coherent light, the searing power of thousands of lasecannon, raked the surface of Titan.
“What are they doing?” Palmer muttered. “Why aren’t they using missiles?”
“Another Doog virtue,” said Ortega, “economy. Titan’s few cities are all domed and very conspicious. So they’re just cracking the domes open with lasecannon, like so many walnuts. They don’t need missiles. Titan’s poisonous atmosphere will do the job for them, once the domes are holed.”
Now the Duglaari Fleet broke orbit and changed course, headed straight across the lane of the ecliptic towards Jupiter.
“Where in hell are your ships?” demanded Palmer. “Why don’t they counterattack? Why doesn’t Sol do something?”
But th Solarians ignored him, their full attention riveted on the Duglaari Fleet as it split into several smaller-but-still-immense sections and attacked the habitable moons of Jupiter. This time the Duglaari followed up their lasecannon attacks with “dirty” thermonuclear missiles, since all the moons of Jupiter were airless.
As the Duglaari Fleet completed its deadly work and began to reform itself into one huge cone formation, Palmer kept shouting over and over again: “Where are your ships? Why don’t they attack?”
Lingo turned from the terrible spectacle for a moment. “Please, Jay,” he said, “stop shouting. How can you expect anyone to defend the Outer Satellites against that?“
“But those are millons of people dying, Lingo! How can you just let them die without at least trying to….?”
“The Outer Satellites have been evacuated,” Lingo said coldly. He turned back to the viewscreen, Ortega threw a switch, and the scene changed again. This time the tell-tale was located above the plane of the ecliptic, looking down on the heart of the Asteroid Belt.
“The Belt should be next…” Ortega muttered. “Ceres…Vesta…Pallas….”
But the Duglaari Fleet did not appear in the viewscreen.
“What’s happening?” exclaimed Lingo. “Where in space are they?”
“I don’t know,” said Ortega. “They should’ve reached the Belt by now. Let’s try a long view.”
He switched over to the ship’s own cameras. The Duglaari Fleet appeared as a comet in minature once more. But it was not headed for the inhabited asteroids of the Belt; it had zigged again and was bypassing the Asteroids.
It was heading straight for Mars, Sol’s second most populous planet, Man’s second oldest domain. Surely, thought Palmer, Sol will at last counterattack to defend Mars!
“What in blazes are they doing?” muttered Ortega. “Why should they bypass the Belt?”
He switched over to a tell-tale just beyond the orbit of Mars. The red planet loomed in the viewscreen twice the size of the Moon as seen from Earth. The image was large enough to show the miles-wide strips of native vegetation growing along the ancient canals and the cultivated and regular fields of mutated terrestrial plants as well. Unlike the Outer Satellites, Mars, even from this distance, looked unmistakably inhabited, domesticated. Palmer even thought he could see a glint from one of the great Martian domes, covering cities bigger than many on Earth itself.
Which made the sight of the monstrous Duglaari Fleet bearing down on the planet infinitely more horrible.
Still uncontested, the Duglaari made orbit around Mars. The Doogs broke formation and spread out, girdling the Martian surface like a great globular net of metal.
And still there was not the slightest sign of resistance from the forces of Sol. Not so much as a single Solarian ship had yet appeared, and the Duglaari warships were unopposed, even by ground fire.
The Duglaari attack began.
Lances of lasecannon fire from four thousand warships raked the Martian surface, holing every dome, scorching the cultivated fields and the native vegtation alike.
Missiles struck the Martian surface, but they did not explode. Apparently, their warheads contained not fusion bombs but deadly gases and perhaps plague bacteria adapted to the Martian air.
Then the nuclear bombardment began. Both polar ice caps were volatized in minutes and the dry atmosphere at least temporarily contained significant amounts of water vapor, for the first time in billions of years. But this was not a rain of life, but of death, for the vaporized ice was contaminated with millions of tons of lethal radioactive fallout. Ominous mists began to enfold the planet spreading towards the equator from both poles.
Still the missiles fell, now exploding in the iron oxide deserts, dotting them with lakes of molten steel, over which hovered clouds of radioactive dust, and, ironically, large quantities of liberated oxygen.
In a matter of half an hour, Mars was transformed into a nightmare of radioactive clouds, lakes of molten steel and deadly rain, where nothing organic could survive.
In a matter of half an hour, a whole planet died.
And still the forces of Sol had not appeared.
The Duglaari ships surveyed their monstrous handiwork and then broke orbit, reforming their massive cone formation. The next stop would be Earth itself!
But….
“Look!” cried Palmer, waving his arms wildly. “Look! Look! Look! They’re turning back! They’re retreating!”
Amazingly, inexplicably, the Duglaari Fleet was not continuing sunwards toward Earth. Back outward they went instead, away from Earth, away from the corpse of Mars.
“Lingo, I take back everything I ever thought or said!” Palmer exclaimed. “I don’t know how you did it, but man, you did it! They’re retreating! Without a shot being fired at them
, they’re turning back!”
But the Solarians were not shouting. Their faces were perplexed, confused, frightened.
“That makes two of us, Jay,” Lingo said softly. “I don’t know why they’re retreating either. We haven’t done anything to stop them.”
The Duglaari Fleet arced obliquely back, across the ecliptic towards the heart of the Asteroid Belt. Small squadrons detached themselves from the main Fleet and began bombarding the few settled asteroids.
Meanwhile, the main Fleet continued out to the outer fringes of the Belt and then stopped dead in space.
“What are they doing?” asked Palmer.
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said Ortega. “It doesn’t make sense. Why didn’t they attack the Belt before? Why Mars first?”
Now the destruction of the habitable asteroids was completed. The detached squadrons rejoined the main formation.
And the fleet began to move again.
Slowly it began to move, base forward as always, parallel to the edge of the Belt. It continued on that course for a while, then stopped and reversed direction a hundred and eighty degrees. Again it grazed along the margin of the Belt, and again it reversed itself, cutting slightly deeper into the Belt with each reversal.
“Oh my God!” cried Ortega as the Duglaari Fleet made yet another reversal. “Of course! That’s four thousand ships there, four thousand ships in one Fleet Resolution Field. The biggest Resolution Field that ever existed. It’s powerful enough to move small planetoids! Look…just ahead of the Doog Fleet!”
Now the reason for the Doogs’ strange maneuvers became apparent. Just ahead of the fleet, well within the huge Resolution Field, a mass of rocks and small planetoids was accreting, with every pass that the Fleet made into the Belt. The Doogs were collecting a huge screen of rocks, a gigantic and deadly artificial meteor swarm.
Back and forth like a pendulum the Duglaari Fleet swung, each swing adding still more rocks to the ever-growing shield of meteors.
Finally, slowed considerably by the additional mass it was propelling, the Duglaari Fleet rose high above the ecliptic, and changed course again, crossing above the Asteroid Belt, and resuming its sunward course.
The Duglaari Fleet pushed before it the largest swarm of meteors the Sol system had ever seen; the Doogs were going to use a chunk of the Asteroid Belt itself to hurl at the Earth!
Earthward, behind its huge screen of rock, the Duglaari Fleet sped, back across the orbit of Mars, further and further sunward….
“Damn clever!” muttered Ortega, in grudging admiration. “Look how they keep the asteroids between them and Earth. The perfect shield—it’ll detonate any missiles that try to go through it, and even lasecannon fire would simply be deflected. They’re practically invulnerable now.”
Lingo shook his fist at the image of the Doog Fleet in the viewscreen. “A lot of good it’ll do you, damn you!” he swore.
Now the Duglaari Fleet was approaching Luna, the first extraterrestrial body that men had ever stood on. Surely Earth’s moon would be armed to the teeth, thought Palmer. At last, the counter-attack would begin.
The Duglaari Fleet made orbit around Luna, and they threw the great meteor swarm into orbit with them but slightly below them, so that they were completely screened from surface fire.
In fat, lazy arcs, they launched nuclear missiles into polar orbits, at right angles to the orbit of the fleet, over and around the orbiting shield of rocks.
Unerringly, the missiles began to drop, one by one, onto the domed cities of the Moon.
“Thermal differential fuses,” said Ortega. “On the dark side, Luna is so cold that our cities stick out like sore thumbs, and on the other side of the terminator, they can home in on the comparative lack of heat.”
Nuclear explosions tatooed the surface of the Moon with pinpoint accuracy.
“Like shooting fish in a barrel!” cried Palmer. “Where in blazes are your fleets? Why don’t they do something?”
“Luna has been evacuted,” Lingo said coldly. “We’re not going to waste the effort to try to defend it.”
“But Earth is next!” Palmer said. “Less than a quarter of a million miles away.”
“I know my astrogation as well as you do, Jay,” Lingo said, quietly and somehow finally. He nodded to Ortega, who switched the viewscreen over to a tell-tale about fifty thousand miles from Earth itself.
Earth hung huge, green and brown and blue and peaceful in the viewscreen. And now, like a swarm of ugly black flies spying a particularly lush and ripe piece of fruit, the Duglaari Fleet streamed towards Earth.
Cautiously, the Doogs advanced on Earth, keeping the screen of artificial meteors between them and Man’s home planet. They eased into a polar orbit, with the meteor screen directly below them, so that they would eventually pass over every point on the planet.
Twice they orbited, under full power and at a speed far greater than orbital velocity, apparently trying to draw out Earth’s defenses.
But nothing happened. Not a single ship rose to do battle, not lasecannon beam tried to penetrate the meteor screen.
The Duglaari Fleet seemed to hesitate, as if uncertain and puzzled, as well they might be.
Then they stopped dead in space for a moment, while their meteor screen passed beneath them. They rose to uge, gghtly higher orbit, accelerated at full power; caught up to the meteor screen, reversed direction and dropped down in front of it for a brief moment, facing the meteors head-on. Then they rose above the meteors again, and returned to their original polar orbit.
“What’s going on?” said Lingo. “What are they doing?”
“I think I can tell you that,” Palmer said grimly. “They’ve slowed down the orbits of the meteors so that they’re now travelling at less orbital velocity. They’ve put them into decaying orbits…. Look. Look!”
By the thousands, by the tens of thousands, the asteroids were falling to the surface of the Earth, their deadly paths ignited into fiery tracers by the heat of their passage.
Randomly, the Earth revolved under their decaying orbits. Thousands of the meteors burned up the atmosphere, but thousands more fell over the entire surface of the Earth, millions of tons of red-hot rock falling on cities, countryside, deserts, seas. The oceans hissed steam and swallowed their share of the meteors, but the land blossomed in craters, pockmarked and tortured now like the Moon—in the desert, on the land, and smoldering holes where cities had been, all with dreadful impartiality.
What had taken ages on the Moon was accomplished in minutes on the Earth—the face of the Earth was transformed into a skin pitted with huge smoldering pock-marks, like a human face ravaged by an impossibly rapid and virulent case of small pox.
And still the Duglaari Fleet orbited, unopposed.
Palmer was too numbed with horror to speak. Where were the forces of Sol? Why weren’t they fighting to save Man’s home planet? What could they be waiting for?
Now the Duglaari Fleet let loose a tremendous barrage of thousands of thermonuclear missiles. Palmer’s heart sank…and then rose, as he saw how badly the Doogs had aimed.
For the great fusillade had missed the continents entirely! Unexploded, harmlessly, they were falling into the depths of the Pacific Ocean, off the western coast of the Americas, around the great eastern crescent of Asia. The Pacific swallowed them all with barely a ripple.
Had the Solarians some fantastic defensive weapon that had caused it? Did they have some unimaginable way of protecting the continents from bombardments?
Suddenly, the Pacific Ocean, in a great semi-circle arcing up the Asiatic coast, across the Bearing Straight and down the western coast of the Americas, seemed to rise in a titanic ridge. Monstrous clouds of radioactive steam shot forth as if every volcano in Earth’s great Pacific ring had erupted at once, as if the molten bowels of the Earth were pouring forth, deep below the ocean, in the great fault that rimmed the Pacific, as if….
“Lord!” whispered Ortega. “The Pacific fault! They’re
bombing the Pacific fault underwater!”
<
As the clouds of steam mounted like a forest of malignant toadstools into the stratosphere, the entire Pacific coast of the Americas seemed to shudder, to shiver like a great beast awakening after an aeons-long sleep. The entire Pacific fault was shifting!
With calm and horrid majesty, the Pacific coasts, to the very slopes of the Rockies and the Andes, began to slide down under the steaming waters of the Pacific.
And across the vast mother of oceans, the islands of Japan began to break up and subside into the deeps. Indonesia, the Philippines, the Malay Peninsula, slid downward into the Pacific. Every volcanic island in the vast Pacific erupted rivers of lava, boiling the already-tortured Pacific into new clouds of steam.
The entire Pacific basin was a hell of subsiding land, flowing lava and quaking chaos, veiled in all-encompassing clouds of billowing steam.
The Duglaari Fleet fired two more barrages, in opposite directions at the poles. The polar icecaps vaporized into great radioactive mists as thousands of thousand-megaton thermonuclear explosions rocked them in minutes.
Four times the Duglaari Fleet orbited the steaming, erupting, quaking that was Earth, surveying their dreadful handiwork.
Then they began to fire missiles again, thousands upon tens of thousands, wave after wave.
These missiles never reached the tortured surface of the Earth. Instead, they exploded at all levels throughout the atmosphere, releasing tens of thousands of huge clouds of deadly radioactive elements: sodium, cobalt, carbon 14. Radioactive elements with half-lives of decades, centuries, millenia, spreading throughout the Earth’s atmosphere, mixing with the all-encompassing clouds of super-heated steam.
Perhaps it was possible that there were living creatures down there which had unhappily survived the holocaust. Unhappily, because their deaths would be the worst of all.
Both of Earth’s icecaps had been vaporized. Cubic miles of the Pacific had been steamed into the atmosphere. As the heat of the explosions dissipated and Earth began to regain its temperature equilibrium, all that vapor would condense and fall back to Earth as rain.
The Solarians Page 19