by Colin Kapp
"Ho Stormdragon! It is I, Marke Sten."
Dam's finger relaxed on the trigger, but he kept the weapon raised as he carefully unlocked the door. Marke Sten was a senior water-guide and an old friend, but Dam had already learned the hard way that the old values could not be relied upon. In the near-darkness Marke acknowledged the presence of the weapon with open hands.
"Peace, Dam! I don't blame you being careful, but I'm unarmed. Search me if you like."
"How did you know I was back?"
Sten gestured. "Nobody uses the waterways without the watermen knowing. That's the message that brings me here. The Terrans have put a large price on your head, and there are a few who'll attempt to claim it. I warn you, Dam, this is no place for you to rest."
"Thanks for the warning, Marke. If you found me so quickly, then others won't be very far behind. What's the answer?"
"Come with me. I'll take you to a safer place." Dam's finger tightened imperceptibly on the trigger.
"Where to?"
"To friends. Long before the Terrans actually attacked, we were reading the signs. There's a resistance organization called Free Castalia. They'll have need of you."
"I need to contact Liam Liam or those who take his place."
"I know nothing of them, but if there is a way, our friends will probably be best placed to find it."
"That makes sense. But you'll excuse my wariness. Already I've been betrayed once in Darrieus. How can I be sure this isn't another trap?"
"You can't be sure, except that you know me of old. But you'd best not delay the decision. I can hear engines in the watercourse."
Listening carefully, Dam, too, could hear the muted drone far to his left, in the direction of the channels leading to the river. Their coming might have been a coincidence, but such a concentration of night craft was sufficiently unusual to cause him to make the connection which Sten had already made. With a sudden gesture he thrust the pistol back into his jacket and offered the waterman his hand.
"Let's get out of here! What time does the Water Forest rise?"
"It's already rising. By the time we reach the groves the trees will be nearly full. A thousand men could hide there and none of them be found until the waters subside."
Marke Sten started his turbines and held the craft against the post until Dam had leaped aboard, then he drove the sled at such a speed that only his masterful piloting prevented it from capsizing. Within minutes of this furious pace they were lost from sight amongst the boles of the liquid trees. Scarcely had they become thus obscured when Dam's house burst into a great gout of flame which lit the Water Forest with a fiery redness which the fountains had never before known.
Dam could have sworn that he himself knew every water passage and channel intimately, but as they cleared the far end of the forest he knew he was outclassed. With a precision which left no possible margin for error, Sten set the speeding sled straight at the rivulet-punctuated banks of the marshes beyond. Twisting and turning the craft as though it was a living thing, he struck sufficient water every time between the reeded banks, and thus progressed at a continuingly furious pace through a region of banks and broken water which most would have sworn unnavigable. Then they broke through to the dark waters of a canal beyond, and thence to a river, where heavy vessels of seagoing ilk rose starkly black amid a treacherous jungle of anchor chains and buoys .
Here, amid the tangle of piers and wharves, Sten turned the craft suddenly into a narrow, brick-lined channel which terminated soon at the foot of a flight of steps. He steadied the sled while Dam leaped out, then, in the growing colours of first-light, he gravely saluted his farewell.
"Here's as far as I go, Dam. Someone will meet you above. Take care of yourself, and may God give fortune to your hand in battle!"
The little sled spun within its own length in the water and was gone. Dam ensured the safety ring on his pistol was slipped, then carefully ascended the worn stone of the steps. A lone figure was waiting for him against the rail at the road's edge, and among the line of sleeping houses one solitary door was marked by an edge of light. Dam was motioned through and found himself in a room with the cosy, trim utility of a typical waterman's cottage. The three people in the room, two women and a man, were joined by the fellow who had met Dam in the street, and the drapes were again drawn against outside observation.
"Welcome you to Free Castalia, Dam Stormdragon! We know of you, but you don't know us. We're a cell of the Castalian Liberation Army; we extend to you an invitation to join our ranks."
Dam's eyes were summing the occupants of the room. All were gripped by the same drama of the occasion, yet none of them looked to have had actual fighting experience. His reluctant conclusion was that he had fallen into the hands of a group of well-intentioned amateurs .
"What do you know of me?" was his guarded question.
"You've a commission in the Space Army." One of the women, whose name had been given as Baba was ticking off items on her fingers. "You're trained in all branches of weaponry; you're a qualified aerospace pilot, you've seen tithe service with the Terran fleet; and you currently head the list of men most wanted by the Terran pigs. That makes you something of a celebrity."
"More to the point, it also makes me something of a liability. You'll have problems enough with anonymity on your side."
"Then you won't help us?" Jorg Turgen, the man who had met Dam in the street, eyed him anxiously.
"I would rather ask if you can help me. I've an urgent need to contact Liam Liam's organization. I've information they need to carry the war directly against the orbiting fleet€”or even back to Terra if the chance arises. I see this as being more to the point than trying to fight the battle on Castalia itself. Twist the Terrans tails too hard, and they'll sterilize the planet. Only in space can they actually be beaten."
"What sort of help would you need?" asked Baba.
"I know nothing of the whereabouts of Liam Liam, except that he has a base within the Hub. Do you have any communications channels which can reach other worlds?"
Turgen shrugged. "We've secret access to a commercial FTL link, but the Terrans are jamming the entire transmission spectrum."
"That we can break, by sending repetitive transmissions at fixed time intervals. The original signal can then be separated from the jamming noise by coincidence sensing. The problem is where to direct the beam. Have any of you a clue in which direction Liam's base might be located?"
Suddenly the man who had not yet spoken bound to his feet with a finger raised in urgent caution. He killed the lights in the room and moved to the window, peering carefully around the corners of the heavy drapes .
"I thought as much!" His face was white with anxiety. "Terran patrols at both ends of the street. They may be coming here."
"Quickly! Through the back way," said Turgen, indicating a small door to the rear. "There's an alley leading out to the river path."
There was a sudden flurry of near-panic as the conspirators made for the little door; but just before they reached it the door itself was smashed from its hinges by the force of a great blow struck from the outside, and the startled group were staring straight into the carbon-blackened coils of well-used Terran weapons and into the hard eyes of the uniformed men who held them.
"Anyone who moves is dead," a voice informed them. "Most especially lover-boy here, who would be doubly dead before he could reach halfway to his para-ion control. So nobody moves a single muscle until your weapons are removed and Stormdragon has been neutralized. I have little time for games, you understand?"
CHAPTER XXX
As the pinnace leaped from Castalia, the officer in charge searched Dam's unhappy face with a slightly sardonic smile on his lips.
"Welcome back, lover-boy! You didn't really think we'd let talents like yours escape us? You don't realize how valuable you are."
Dam spat expressively. "Not to you, I'm not. There's no way you can force me to fight on your behalf."
The officer shoo
k his head ruefully. "You're wrong there, my lecherous Hub friend. When I tell you fight, you will fight. I have methods of persuasion, you understand?"
"They won't help you. Let me get back into para-ion identity and I swear I'll turn your own weapons against you."
"We shall see!"
Having gained orbital height, the pinnace headed not for the flagship, as Dam had expected, but far out to where a craft he identified as a paraformer mother-ship was separately located. Dam was reasonably sure no such vessel had accompanied the fleet, and surmised it must have been a later addition. It was only when they had closed for docking that Dam realized it was the selfsame carrier from which he had escaped near Sol. The fact baffled him slightly, because he was sure insufficient time had elapsed for the carrier to have reached Terra, acquired a second paraforming ship, and then travelled to Castalia's orbit. He was even more surprised on boarding to find a second paraforming craft securely installed on the ramps.
Then he stopped, relief building in his face: and suddenly he was laughing as the true nature of the monstrous joke flooded his comprehension with a rare and uncontrollable joy. The mad-bright stare of the shipman who hurried to release his bonds could have belonged to none other than Fiendish; and the other members of the para-ion squad captured on Syman were there as well. Also there was a second para-ion squad, all new faces to Dam, but obviously men from the Hub and of the toughest fighting grade that he could imagine. Lastly, there was Absolute, triumphant fire in her eyes, and a look of confident determination which could have routed an army. Her delight at seeing him blazed like a beacon, and the warmth of their re-union evoked a great cheer of admiration from the assembled onlookers.
Shortly the man who had posed as a Terran officer tapped Dam on the shoulder.
"You are not to eat her, you understand? I hate to break up a dedicated clinch, but I've a war to run, and my Castalian sources suggested you were looking for me."
"You're Liam Liam? Yes, you have to be Liam! Nobody else would dare operate so closely within the Terran fleet."
"The weakness of bureaucracy is that it encourages abuse by those unscrupulous enough to play the system against itself. But the time for compliments must wait. Our battle tactics are laid, with Absolute and yourself as key components. Did I not say I had means of persuading you to fight?"
In far orbit the Terran hellship was observing the approaching pinnace with some interest: visitors to the ship were rare and always provided a measure of relief from the lonely monotony of manning the most feared and isolated ship in the whole fleet. Slumbering uneasily in the hellship's cooled and insulated bays were seven of the deadliest weapons ever devised, each with the inherent stability of a carboy of nitroglycerine on a hot tin roof. This fact was sufficient to ensure that visitors seldom came without an excellent reason.
The interest of the hellship's crew was heightened even more when the docked pinnace disembarked a female officer whose trim looks and magnetic personality negated the security counter-check requirements and led her straight to a comfortable chair in the captain's cabin. Five seconds after the cabin door had closed, however, the captain was dead, and the para-ion person who emerged was a female of a more literally fatal kind. Before the hellship's crew had come to fully appreciate her nature, their phantom visitor had destroyed both radio room and occupants with bursts of electron fire, and was busy attacking the environmental controls which helped keep the hellburners quiescent.
Some of the crewmen tried to cut her down with hand weapons, but their fire was completely ineffective. Others, in an agony of panic, took to the life-craft, only to be neatly taken out of space by marksmen in the pinnace, which had backed-off and was obviously waiting for them. Then at a signal the pinnace returned to the hellship, picked up its ghostly saboteur, and began a hasty return to the lower orbits where the main fleet remained unaware of what had taken place. The pinnace had just managed to regain the carrier when the hellship exploded, and this was a fortunate circumstance for the crew because all seven hellburners triggered simultaneously to create a burst of deadly heat and radiation which began to tax the best shields in the fleet.
The explosion of the hellship caused a wave of dismay to run through the fleet. In one hectic fraction of a second there had been stripped from them the ultimate threat which they had contrived to hang over Castalia. Their concern was not made less by the failure of the sector commander to reply to the urgent requests for instructions which flooded his communications terminal. His failure to respond would have been better understood had it been known that Sector Commander Canwolf was already dead from a burst of electron fire. His body lay alongside that of Sub-Sector Neilson who had been similarly treated by the weapons of an officer, who, having been admitted to the flagship on forged credentials, had inexplicably converted to the para-ion condition.
Having robbed the fleet of their commander, the ghost warrior's next move had been to destroy the communications room in older to prevent broadcast alarms being sent to the rest of the fleet. So swiftly did he accomplish this task that the communications men were actually unaware of a crisis on board their vessel until both they and their equipment were shattered and burned. Then the deadly phantom, cutting down anyone who dared stand in his path, leaped down several companion-ways to the engineering section to gain control of the motor boards and to so expertly disable the flight controls that the flagship entered an unalterable descent spiral towards the planet which would bring it certain incineration as it entered the atmosphere at terminal velocity.
Except for this last action, the attack on the flagship had been accomplished in such a way that observers in the other ships would have had no visual indication that anything was wrong. Dam's return to the pinnace, however, was the signal for a new phase of the operation to begin. With the flagship nosing ever more heavily towards drastic burn-up, groups of Liam's para-ion men, using both paraformer ships and a couple of pinnaces, managed to gain access to four of the fleet corvettes. Having disposed of the crews, they swiftly took over the automatic gunnery systems and emptied the ships' entire armouries of target-seeking missiles into the orbital paths of the warfleet. They followed this action by liberating over two thousand space mines into the nearer approaches before setting the corvettes' powerplants to run critical and escaping back into space in their small ships.
Liam's plan had been the deliberate creation of chaos. Having had the fleet's commander struck down, and broken the communications chain at several points, he now focused on intensifying the growing panic in the fleet. The Starbucket, out in deep-space, began to mimic the Terran Command FTL transmission, broadcasting a warning to the Castalian orbital fleet of an armed mutiny within their own ranks. With the space-approaches bright with the flare of target-seeking missiles and treacherous with mines all released from Terran ships, many captains needed no further evidence to convince them of the truth of the report, and proceeded to fire on any vessel close enough to pose an active threat. Thus Terran guns came increasingly to bear on Terran ships, and even some of those too well shielded to succumb to weapon-fire or projectiles still fell to the magnetic attentions of the space-mines.
Their panic and confusion was tuned to new heights when a great number of unidentified spacecraft spread out of tachyon space on the fringes of the conflict, wrought great havoc among the mazed fleetships, then leaped back into tachyon space almost before the automatic weapon systems of the fleet had been able to plot their brief trajectories. The punch of the weapons delivered by these infuriatingly vanishing craft ripped great holes in the fabric of the fleet and shattered the morale of the men still further as it became apparent that the Terran force was due for a crushing defeat. Rallying now against a common and obvious enemy, the Terran ships attempted to re-group. However, this proved to be a great mistake as concealed missile silos on Castalia itself began to open-up with massive shipbreakers which even the best protected of ships could not withstand.
Finally, in space-approaches thickly seeded
with mines and treacherous with debris, most of the remainder of the Terran fleet responded to Liam's demand for unconditional surrender. Those units which attempted to escape into deep-space encountered a new sort of ship-chain composed of the unmarked ships of Liam's war, heavily reinforced by vengeful volunteer ships which, breaking tithe-loan conditions, had streaked back towards Castalia anxious to assist in the ending of Terra's colonial rule.
Back on the Starbucket, Liam Liam was nodding sagely as the reports of the collapse of the Terran fleet piled high on his desk. Then he turned to Dam and Absolute, who had been asked to join him.
"This doesn't mean we've won, you understand? None of us, least of all the worlds of the Hub, can afford an all-out interstellar war. Therefore we've a need to be more subtle and make full use of our advantages."
"How do you mean?" asked Dam.
"We plan to carry the fight back to Sol and Terra, with para-ion attacks on strategic solar installations and on the surface of Terra itself. Once the destruction comes closer home, our sick mother-planet will be forced to have new thoughts about the megalomaniacs who drive her. Thus we reach towards the cause of the malady rather than battling with the symptoms. But the main burden of this will fall on just the two of you, you understand?"
"Why us in particular?" Dam asked.
Liam glanced at Absolute. "You tell him," he said, with a wry grimace.
"Because, Lover, they've chickened out," said Absolute witheringly. "Despite what we've demonstrated about the advantages of the in-built para-ion technique, something called ethics forbids them doing to others that which has been done to us.