Lucifer's Hammer

by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle

  “We’re all dead on our feet,” Harvey told Steve Cox. “We won’t be much help.”

  Cox shrugged. “That’s all right. Get a good night’s sleep. We’ll hold them.”

  You’re a fool, Harvey wanted to say. There are a thousand of them and a hundred of you, and they come like death, like army ants, and nothing can stop them. “Have you brought…how is Forrester’s work? Have you got any of his superweapons?”

  “Thermite grenades.” Cox showed Harvey a box of what looked like lumps of baked clay with fuses stuck out of the top. Each was about six inches in diameter, and each had two feet of parachute cord attached to it. “You light the fuse and whirl it around,” Cox said. “Then throw it.”

  “Do they work?”

  “They sure do.” Cox was enthusiastic. “Some explode like bombs. Others just break open, but even then they throw fire ten or twelve feet. They’ll scare the hell out of those cannibal bastards.”

  “But what about the other weapons? Mustard gas?”

  Cox shrugged. “They’re working on it. Hardy says it will take time. That’s why we’re out here.”

  In the valley below, the lead elements of the New Brotherhood force had reached the ruined bridge. Deer Creek was high and swift, and the bridge was entirely gone; the few men who tried to wade it gave up quickly. The Brotherhood army stopped, then began to spread along the banks. Elements went upstream until they vanished. Others turned downstream toward the sea a few miles to the west.

  “They’ll get around us,” Harvey said nervously.

  “Nope.” Cox grinned. He pointed upstream, toward the towering Sierra. “We’ve got allies up there. About fifty Tule Indians, some of Christopher’s reinforcements. Tough bastards. Get some sleep, Randall. They won’t get through here, not tonight and not tomorrow. We’ve got a good position. We’ll hold them.”

  “I think Cox is crazy,” Harvey told Marie. “I’ve…we’ve seen the New Brotherhood fight. He hasn’t.”

  “They have our radio reports,” Marie said. She stretched in the back seat of the TravelAll. “Feels good to relax. I could sleep for a week.”

  “So could I,” Harvey said; but he didn’t. The TravelAll was parked on the far side of the ridge from Deer Creek. He had sent the others back further, to a farmhouse where they could get proper rest, and he knew he should join them, but he was worried. Harvey had learned to respect whoever was in charge of the New Brotherhood. The enemy general hadn’t wasted a man, had never exposed his people recklessly, yet he had swept through eighteen miles and more in less than a day.

  And he was using gasoline and ammunition recklessly. This was an all-out war; the New Brotherhood must have stripped their territory, must be gambling on taking the Stronghold for new supplies.

  Dusk brought a chill wind, but no more sleet. A few stars showed through the overcast, blinking points of light too far apart to recognize as constellations. Harvey remembered a hot sauna followed by a cold swimming pool in hot sunlight; he remembered driving the TravelAll south through the blazing desert beauty of Baja California, finally to swim in an ocean warm as a bathtub; bellysurfing the bigger, more exciting waves of Hermosa Beach, and spreading a towel over sand too hot to walk on.

  Down in the valley they could hear the sounds of Brotherhood trucks and men moving heavy objects. There was no way to know what the enemy was doing. Cox had patrols alert for infiltrators, but instead the enemy commander had his men fire weapons at irregular intervals, raise shouts, throw grenades and rocks across the creek; and often the ranchers responded, shooting wildly into the night, wasting ammunition, losing sleep.

  Harvey knew that was what the Brotherhood wanted, but the knowledge didn’t help. He slept fitfully, awakened too often. Marie stirred in the seat behind him. “You awake?” she whispered.

  “Yes.”

  “Who was it? In the truck, with the binoculars. Do you know?”

  “Probably the sergeant. Hooker. Why?”

  “Put a name on him and he’s less frightening. Do you think we can win? Is Hardy smart enough?”

  “Sure,” Harvey said.

  “They keep coming. Like a machine, a huge grinding machine.”

  Harvey sat up. Somewhere a grenade went off, and Cox shouted not to waste ammunition.

  “That’s a frightening image. Fortunately it’s not the right one,” Harvey said. “It’s not a meat grinder. It’s one of those kinetic structures where the artist invites a horde of newsmen to stand around and drink and watch while the machine tears itself to pieces.”

  Her laugh sounded forced. “Nice imagery, Harv.”

  “Hell, I made a living off imagery, before I took up breaking rocks. And ruining roads. I used to think of battles as a chess game, but they’re not. It’s like those sculptures. The commander puts together this huge sculpture, knowing that the pieces will grind each other up, and he doesn’t control them all. Half of them are controlled by an art critic who hates him. And each one tries to see that he has pieces left when it’s over, but there won’t be enough, so it has to be done over and over.”

  “And we’re some of the pieces,” Marie said. “I hope Hardy knows what he’s doing.”

  In the morning there was new excitement in the Stronghold camp. During the night Stephen Tallman, Vice President of the Tule Council, had come in to tell how his warriors were dug in to the east, and more were coming. The rumors grew. George Christopher was coming back, and he had a hundred, two hundred, a thousand armed ranchers he’d recruited from the hill country. Anyone who doubted it was shouted down.

  But certainly there were fifty Indians to the east, and all the ranchers talked about how tough the Indians were, and what great allies they’d be. There were other stories, of an attempt in the night by the New Brotherhood to force passage of Deer Creek five miles upstream, and how Tallman’s Indians had beaten them back and killed dozens; how the New Brotherhood had run away. When Harvey talked to the others, he could find nobody who had seen the battle. He found a few who claimed to have spoken to someone who was in it. Everyone had a friend who’d talked to Tallman himself, or to Stretch Tallifsen, who was with the ranch force sent upstream to hold the western end of the line.

  It was always like this. The new guys were demons incarnate; they would go through the enemy like so many mincing machines. The new guys always thought so too. But it could be true…sometimes it was true…maybe they would win this after all. The New Brotherhood could be stopped, and it wouldn’t even take the full strength of the Stronghold to do it.

  ■

  Clouds parted in the east; the sun shone shockingly bright. Full daylight, and still nothing happened. The ranchers and the forward skirmish line of the Brotherhood exchanged sniping shots, with little effect. Then—

  Over the opposite ridge tracks appeared. They didn’t look like trucks. They looked strange, for they had large wooden structures attached in front of them. They came down the hill, not too fast, because with all that weight in front they were hard to drive and unstable, but they came on toward the swollen creek.

  At the same time, hundreds of the enemy came out from behind rocks and folds of ground where they’d been hidden. They began firing at anything that moved. The trucks with their strange towers advanced to the stream edge, and some drove across meadows that should have been too swampy, except that during the night the Brotherhood had laid down tracks of fencing wire and planks to get them across the mud.

  They went to the stream edge and the towers fell, making bridges across the stream. Brotherhood troops rushed toward the bridges, began swarming across. Other Brotherhood units concentrated fire on any Stronghold defenders who dared show themselves. Harvey heard the sharp whump! which he recognized from Vietnam: mortars. The mortar bombs fell among the rocks where Cox’s ranchers hid, and each time they fell more accurately. Someone across the river was directing them, and he had good control: Wherever Cox’s men tried to oppose the crossing, the mortars soon found them.

  And more of the Brother
hood troops poured across the river. They fanned out and moved forward, along a line almost a mile wide, and Cox’s forward troops either fell back or were overrun. Suddenly—it had taken no more than half an hour—the river line was gone, and Cox held only the ridge; and even there the relentless mortars and machine guns, far out of range of effective rifle fire, sought them out, pinned them down, while more Brotherhood troops advanced up the hills, hiding behind boulders, dodging and leapfrogging and always moving on…

  “Ants!” Harvey screamed. “Army ants!” Now he knew. The cannibals couldn’t be stopped. They’d been fools to think they could do it. And at the rate they advanced, Cox would lose most of his force. Already groups of men had begun to break and run, some throwing down their weapons, others grimly hanging on to them and stopping to shoot back at the enemy. But there was no organization to the defense any longer, and more and more saw it and thought only of saving themselves. There was no place to make a stand: Every position was threatened by a breakthrough at some other point, and these men had not fought together, lived together; they didn’t have confidence that the man down the line wouldn’t run and leave an opening for the yelling cannibals to pour through and cut them off forever.

  A dozen men clung to the TravelAll, piled into it, hung on top or lay on fenders as Harvey drove away. Deer Creek, which Cox had expected to hold all day, perhaps even to break the Brotherhood and stop them permanently, had fallen in less than an hour and a half.

  The rest of the morning was nightmare. Harvey could not find his truck; the only equipment he had left was in the TravelAll, and only a few of Cox’s ranchers were willing to help. Reinforcements from the Stronghold came finally, twenty men and women with more dynamite and gasoline and the chain saws from the truck, but they could never get far enough away from the advancing Brotherhood forces to do any useful work.

  The Brotherhood tactics had changed: Now instead of fanning out and outflanking the defenses, they flooded forward trying to close; they wanted to keep the Stronghold force running, and now their general was willing to spend men to do it.

  If Marie had not been with him, Harvey would have run with the rest; but she wouldn’t let him. She insisted they keep on with their mission, at least that they stop and light the fuses of the charges they’d set two nights before when they went forward. Once they delayed too long, and there was a crash; shattered glass from the rear window sprayed over them, and the front windshield was smashed out as well. A .50 slug had passed all the way through the TravelAll, passed between them, missing them by inches. The next time they stopped, the ranchers who’d stayed with them abandoned the car.

  Harvey yelled to Marie, “Why the hell are you so—” He didn’t finish the sentence. He’d wanted to say “brave,” but if he did, it meant he wasn’t, that he was a coward, “—determined?” he finally said.

  She looked up from where she was digging. They had one last stick of dynamite, and she wanted to plant it. She pointed up toward the Sierra. “My boy is up there,” she said. “If we don’t stop them, who will? This is good enough. Give me the dynamite.”

  Harvey had already crimped fuse onto the cap. He handed her the stick and she thrust it into the hole, then shoveled dirt and rock onto it.

  “That’s enough!” Harvey screamed. “Let’s get out of here!” They were on the far side of a low hill and couldn’t see the advancing enemy, but Harvey didn’t think they would be far behind.

  “Not yet,” Marie said. “Something I have to do first.” She walked toward the hilltop.

  “Come back here! I swear, I’ll leave you! Hey!”

  She didn’t look back. After a moment he cursed, then followed her uphill. She was adjusting her rifle, setting the strap on her left arm. She braced herself against a rock. “Down there is where you put the oil. And the mines,” she said. “We drove right past it.”

  “We had to! They were right behind us!” And it’s all so damned futile anyway. Motorcycles were coming up the road. They’d reach the ridge in a minute or two.

  Marie took careful aim. Fired. “Good,” she muttered to herself. She fired again. “I’d be done quicker if you’d do some shooting too,” she said.

  Harvey knew he wasn’t about to hit the oil drum set three hundred yards away. He braced his rifle on a rock and aimed at the first of the oncoming motorcycles. He fired again and again, and missed each time. But the cyclists slowed, then stopped and took cover in the ditch to wait for the infantry. Marie continued to fire, slowly, carefully. Finally she said, “That ought to do it. Let’s go. Actually, what’s the hurry? They’re stopped.” She took up her position again and waited.

  Harvey clenched his fists and took a deep breath. She was right. There was no immediate danger. The oil was spilling across the road now, and the two motorcycles were going nowhere.

  Another motorcycle reached the oil slick. It skidded into the ditch and the biker screamed. Marie smiled faintly. “Good idea, those pungie sticks of yours.”

  Harvey looked at her in horror. Marie Vance: on the board of governors of half a dozen charities; banker’s wife, socialite, country club member; and she was grinning at the thought of a man impaled on a stick smeared with human shit to make the wounds fester…

  A truck came to the oil slick and stopped; then it started forward, slowly. Marie put a bullet through its windshield. It slid forward and skidded, turning slightly sideways. The motor gunned and the wheels spun, but it did not move.

  Another truck came up behind it and started around; one of the dynamite mines went off, loudly, and the truck went up in flames. Harvey felt it now: the urgent impulse to shout in triumph. Something had worked. Those weren’t people down there, scrambling to get away from the burning truck, some themselves burning; they were army ants, and the trick had worked—

  They heard the plop! from in front of them, then a faint whistle. Something exploded twenty yards to their left. Another plop!

  “The car! Now, dammit!” Harvey shouted.

  “Yes, I think it’s time.” Marie followed. The second mortar round went off somewhere behind them. They leaped into the TravelAll and drove off laughing and shouting like children.

  “Son of a bitch, it worked!” Harvey shouted. He looked over at Marie, and her eyes shone with triumph to match his own. We make a great team, he thought.

  “‘Run away!’” cried Harvey.

  Marie looked at him strangely.

  “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” Harvey said. “Didn’t you see it?”

  “No.”

  They drove on, still laughing with excitement. Inside, Harvey knew it wasn’t really much of a victory, but it was better than the rest of the day. There was no question of stopping now, not until they reached the next large barrier, which was a fork of the Tule River. That would be a formidable barrier once its bridge was blown; surely it would stop the New Brotherhood. It had to; beyond was the ridgeline that marked the entrance to the Stronghold itself. The Tule was their most important defense line.

  They came around a curve and started down into the Tule Valley—and there was no bridge. It had already been blown.

  Harvey drove up to the wrecked bridge and stared at the swollen river. A hundred feet wide, and deep, and swiftly flowing. “Hey!” he shouted.

  Across the river, one of Hartman’s constables rose from hiding behind a log bunker. “They said you’d had it,” he called.

  “What do I do now?” Harvey shouted.

  “Whatever it is, do it quick,” Marie said. “They won’t be far behind us—”

  “Go upstream,” the constable yelled. “We’ve got troops up there. Make sure you radio ahead that you’re coming.”

  “All right.” Harvey turned the TravelAll and started up the county road toward the Tule Indian Reservation. “Get on that CB,” he told Marie. “Tell ’em the reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated.”

  A mile and a half upstream the road crossed the Tule. A dozen men were working with shovels at the bridge foundations
. Harvey drove up warily, but they waved him on. He drove across and stopped.

  They looked like ranchers, but they were darker and did not show the effects of months without sunlight. Harvey wondered if lack of vitamin D would affect them; pale faces were evolved for life in a cold, cloudy environment.

  One of the work crew left off digging and came over to the TravelAll. “Randall?”

  “Yes. Look, the New Brotherhood must be right behind us—”

  “We know where they are,” the man said. “Alice can see them, and we’ve got a radio. You’re supposed to go on up there onto Turtle Mountain and help her observe. Find a place where you can see the valley and still get her on the CB.”

  “All right. Thanks. And we’re glad to have you on our side.”

  The Indian grinned. “I see it that you’re on our side. Good luck.”

  Their earlier mood of elation had vanished now. They drove on along an increasingly difficult road: mud, fallen rocks, deep ruts. Harvey put the TravelAll into four-wheel drive. As they climbed higher the entire valley came into view. To the southwest was the south fork of the Tule, and the road junction and bridge they’d just left. The fork ran northwest to the remains of Lake Success, where it joined the Tule itself.

  A ridge separated the forks of the Tule, the ridge that guarded the Stronghold. From their vantage point Harvey and Marie could see the defense line of Police Chief Hartman’s troops—trenches and foxholes and log bunkers. There were less elaborate defenses thrown forward into the south fork valley; they didn’t look adequate to hold. Only the high ridgelines seemed well defended. A classic crust defense, Harvey thought; the enemy need only punch through, and there was nothing to stop them from over-running the entire Stronghold.

  At dusk it was clear what the enemy’s plan was. He brought up his trucks, dug in his troops and lit large campfires in plain sight of the Stronghold. They looked relaxed, confident, and Harvey knew they’d be working on bridges during the night. Finally dark came, and the hills were silent.