word that is written in the pay book and in the entry you've just
read. Implication: X is a Lunarian name for Earth's Moon."
Hunt thought hard for a while.
"He arrived at Seltar, too, didn't he?" he said at last. "So if he
knew where he was being sent as early as that, and you're certain
he was being sent to the Moon, and he got where he was supposed to
go. . . that rules out the other possibifity that occurred to me.
There's no way he could have been scheduled for Luna but rerouted
somewhere else at the last minute without the entry in the pay book
being changed, is there?"
Maddson shook his head. "No way. Why'd you want to make up things
like that anyhow?"
"Because I'm looking for ways to get around what comes later. It
gets crazy."
Maddson looked at Hunt curiously but suppressed his question. Hunt
looked down at the papers again.
"Days Three and Four describe news reports of the fighting on
Minerva. Obviously a large-scale conflict had already broken out
there. It looks as if nuclear weapons were being used by then-that
bit near the end of Day Four, for instance: It looks like the
Lambians have succeeded in confusing the (sky nets?) over Paverol-
That's a Cerian town, isn't it? Over half the city vaporized
instantly. That doesn't sound like a limited skirmish. What's a sky
net-some kind of electronic defense screen?"
"Probably," Maddson agreed.
"Day Five he spent helping to load the ships. From the descriptions
of the vehicles and equipment, it sounds as if they were embarking
a large military force of some kind." Hunt scanned rapidly down the
next sheet. "Ah, yes-this is where he mentions Seltar. We're going
with the Fourteenth Brigade to join the Annihilator emplacement at
Seltar. There's something crazy about this Annihilator. But we'll
come back to that in a minute.
"Day Seven. Embarked four hours ago as scheduled. Still sitting
here. Takeoff delayed, since whole area under heavy missile attack.
Hills inland all on fire. Launching pits intact but situation
overhead confused. Unneutralized Lambian satellites still covering
our flight path.
"Later. Received clearance for takeoff suddenly, and the whole
flight was away in minutes. Didn't delay in planetary orbit at all-
still not very healthy-so set course at once. Two ships reported
lost on the way up. Koriel is taking bets on how many ships from
our flight touch down on Luna. We're flying inside a tight defense
screen but must stand out clearly on Lambian search radars. There's
a bit about Koriel ifirting with one of the girls from a signals
unit-quite a character, this Koriel, wasn't he . . . ? More
war news received en route. . . Now-this is the part I meant." Hunt
found the entry with his finger.
"Day Eight. In Lunar orbit at last!" He laid the sheet down on the
table and looked from one linguist to the other. "In Lunar orbit at
last.' Now, you tell me: Exactly how did that ship travel from
Minerva to our Moon in under two of our days? Either there is some
form of propulsion that UNSA ought to be finding out about, or
we've been very wrong about Lunarian technology all along. But it
doesn't fit. If they could do that, they didn't have any problem
about developing space flight; they were way ahead of us. But I
don't believe it-everything says they had a problem."
Maddson made a show of helplessness. He knew it was crazy. Hunt
looked inquiringly at Maddson's assistant, who merely shrugged and
pulled a face.
"You're sure he means Lunar orbit-our Moon?"
"We're sure." Maddson was sure.
"And there's no doubt about the date he shipped out?" Hunt
persisted.
"The embarkation date is stamped in the pay book, and it checks
with the date of the entry that says he shipped out. And don't
forget the wording on Day-where was it?-here, Day Seven. 'Embarked
four hours ago as scheduled'- See, 'as scheduled.' No suggestion of
a change in timetable."
"And how certain is the date he reached Luna?" asked Hunt.
"Well that's a little more difficult. Just going by the dates of
the notes, they're one Lunarian day apart, all right. Now, it's
possible that he used a Minervan time scale on Minerva, but
switched to some local system when he got to Luna. If so, it's a
big coincidence that they tally like they do, but"-he
shrugged-"it's possible. The thing that bothers me about that idea,
though, is the absence of any entries between the ship-out date and
the arrival-at-Luna date. Charlie seems to have written his diary
regularly. If the voyage took months, like you're saying it should
have, it looks funny to me that there's nothing at all between
those dates. It's not as if he'd have been short of free time."
Hunt reflected for a few moments on these possibilities. Then he
said, "There's worse to come. Let's press on for now." He picked up
the notes and resumed:
"Landed at last, five hours ago. (Expletive) what a mess! The
landscape below as we came in on the (approach run?) was glow-
ing red in places all around Seltar for miles. There were lakes of
molten rock, bright orange, some with walls of rocks plunging
straight into them where whole mountains ha1'e been blown away. The
base is covered deep in dust, and some of the surface installations
have been crushed by flying debris. The defenses are holding out,
but the outer perimeter is (torn to shreds?). Most
important-~unreadable] diameter dish of the Annihilator is intact
and it is operational. The last group of ships in our flight was
wiped out by an enemy strike coming in from deep space. Koriel has
been collecting on all sides."
Hunt laid the paper down and looked at Maddson. "Don," he said,
"how much have you been able to piece together about this
Annihilator thing?"
"It was a kind of superweapon. There was more information in some
of the other texts. Both sides had them, sited on Minerva itself
and, from what you're reading right now, on Luna too." He added as
an afterthought, "Maybe on other places as well."
"Why on Luna? Any ideas?"
"Our guess is that the Cerians and the Lambians must have dcveloped
space-ifight technology further than we thought," Maddson said.
"Perhaps both sides had selected Earth as their target destination
for the big move, and they both sent advance parties to Luna to set
up a bridgehead and. . . protect the investment."
"Why not on Earth itself, then?"
"I dunno."
"Let's stick with it for now, anyway," Hunt said. "How much do we
know about what these Annihilators were?"
"From the description dish, apparently it was some kind of
radiation projector. From other clues, they fired a high-energy
photon beam probably produced by intense matter-antimatter
reaction. If so, the term Annihilator is particularly apt; it
carries a double meaning."
"Okay." Hunt nodded. "That's what I thought. Now it goes silly." He
consulted his notes. "Day Nine they were getting organized and
repairing battle damage. What about Day Ten, then, eh?" He resumed
reading:
"Day Ten. Annihilator used for the first time today. Three
fifteen-minute blasts aimed at Calvares, Paneris, and Sellidorn.
Now, they're all Lambian cities, right?
"So they have this Annihilator emplacement, sitting on our Moon,
happily picking off cities on the surface of Minerva?"
"Looks like it," Maddson agreed. He didn't look very happy. "Well,
I don't believe it," Hunt declared firmly. "I don't believe they
had the ability to register a weapon that accurately over that
distance, and even if they could, I don't believe they could have
held the beam narrow enough not to have burned up the whole planet.
And I don't believe the power density at that range could have been
high enough to do any damage at all." He looked at Maddson
imploringly. "Christ, if they had technology like that, they
wouldn't have been trying to perfect interplanetary travel- they'd
have been all over the bloody Galaxy!"
Maddson gestured wide with his arms. "I just translate what the
words tell me. You figure it out."
"It goes completely daft in a minute," Hunt warned. "Where was I,
now. . . ?"
He continued to read aloud, describing the duel that developed
between the Cerian Annihilator at Seltar and the last surviving
Lambian emplacement on Minerva. With a weapon firing from far out
in space and commanding the whole Minervan surface, the Cerians
held the key that would decide the war. Destroying it was obviously
the first priority of the Lambian forces and the prime objective of
their own Annihilator on Minerva. The Annihilators required about
one hour to recharge between firings, and Charlie's notes conveyed
vividly the tension that built up in Seltar as they waited, knowing
that an incoming blast could arrive at any second. All around
Seltar the battle was building up to a frenzy as Lambian ground and
space-borne forces hurled everything into knocking out Seltar
before it could score on its distant target. The skill in operating
the weapon lay in computing and compensating for the distortions
induced in the aiming system by enemy electronic countermeasures.
In one passage, Charlie detailed the effects of a near miss from
Minerva that lasted for sixteen minutes, during which time it
melted a range of mountains about fifteen miles from Seltar,
including the Twenty-second and Nineteenth Armored Divisions and
the Forty-fifth Tactical Missile Squadron that had been positioned
there.
"This is it," Hunt said, waving one of the sheets in the air.
"Listen to this. We've got it! Four minutes ago we fired a
concentrated burst at maximum power. The announcement has just come
over the loudspeaker down here that it scored a direct hit.
Everyone is laughing and clapping each other on the back. Some of
the women are crying with relief. That," said Hunt, slapping the
papers down on the table and slumping back in his chair with
exasperation, "is bloody ridiculous! Within four minutes of firing
they had confirmation of a hit! How? How in God's name could they
have? We know that when Minerva and Earth were at their closest,
the distance between them would have been one hundred fifty to one
hundred sixty million miles. The radiation would have taken
something like thirteen minutes to cover that distance, and there
would have to be at least another thirteen minutes before anybody
on Luna could possibly know about where it struck. So, even with
the planets at their closest positions, they'd have needed at least
twenty-six minutes to get that report. Charlie says they got it in
under four! That is absolutely, one-hundred-percent impossible!
Don, how sure are you of those numbers?"
"As sure as we are of any other Lunarian time units. If they're
wrong, you might as well tear up that calendar you started out with
and go all the way back to square one."
Hunt stared at the page for a long time, as if by sheer power of
concentration he could change the message contained in the neatly
formatted sheets of typescript. There was only one thing that these
figures could mean, and it put them right back to the beginning. At
length he carried on:
"The next bit tells how the whole Seltar area came under sustained
bombardment. A detachment including Charlie and Koriel was sent out
overland to man an emergency command post about eleven miles from
Seltar Base. . . I'll skip the details of that .
Yes, here's the next bit that worries me. Under Day Twelve: Set off
on time in a small convoy of two scout cars and three tracked
trucks. The journey was weird-miles of scorched rocks and glowing
pits. We could feel the heat inside the truck. Hope the shielding
was good. Our new home is a dome, and underneath it are levels
going down about fifty feet. Army units dug in the hills all
around. We have landline contact with Seltar, but they seem to have
lost touch with Main HQ at Gorda. Probably means all longdistance
landlines are out and our comsats are destroyed. Again no
broadcasts from Minerva. Lots of garbled military traffic. They
must have assumed (frequency priority?). Today was the first time
above surface for many days. The face of Minerva looks
dirty and blotchy. There," Hunt said. "When I first read that, I
thought he was referring to a video transmission. But thinking
about it, why would he say it that way in that context? Why right
after 'the first time above surface for many days'? But he couldn't
have seen any detail of Minerva from where he was, could he?"
"Could have used a pretty ordinary telescope," Maddson's assistant
suggested.
"Could have, I suppose," Hunt reflected. "But you'd think there'd
be more important things to worry about than star gazing in the
middle of all that. Anyhow, he goes on: About two-thirds is blotted
out by huge clouds of brown and gray, and coastal outlines are
visible only in places. There is a strange red spot glowing
through, somewhere just north of the equator, with black spreading
out from it hour by hour. Koriel reckons it's a city on fire, but
it must be a tremendous blaze to be visible through all that. We've
been watching it move across all day as Minerva rotates. Huge
explosions over the ridge where Seltar Base is."
The narrative continued and confirmed that Seltar was totally
destroyed as the fighting reached its climax. For two days the
whole area was systematically pounded, but miraculously the
underground parts of the dome remained intact, although the upper
levels were blown away. Afterward the scattered survivors from the
military units occupying the surrounding hills began straggling
back, some in vehicles and many on foot, to the dome, which by this
time was the only inhabitable place left for miles.
The expected waves of victorious Lambian troopships and armored
columns failed to materialize. From the regular pattern of
incoming
salvos, the Cerian officers slowly realized that there was nothing
left of the enemy army that had moved forward into the mountains
around Seltar. In the fighting with the Cerian defenses, the
Lambians had suffered immense losses and their survivors had pulled
out, leaving missile batteries programmed to fire robot mode to
cover their withdrawal.
On Day Fifteen, Charlie wrote: Two more red spots on Minerva, one
northeast of the first and the other well south. The first has
elongated from northwest to southeast. The whole surface is now
just a snags of dirty brown with huge areas of black mixing in with
it. Nothing at all on radio or video from Minerva; everything
blotted out by atmospherics.
There was nothing further to be done at Seltar. The inhabitable
parts of what had been the dome were packed with survivors and
wounded; already many were having to live in the assortment of
vehicles huddled around outside it. Supplies df food and oxygen,
never intended for more than a small company, would give only a
temporary respite. The only hope, slender as it was, lay in
reaching HO Base at Gorda overland-a journey estimated to require
twenty days.
On Day Eighteen, the departure from the dome was recorded as
follows: Formed up in two columns of vehicles. Ours moved out half
an hour ahead of the second as a small advanced scouting group. We
reached a ridge about three miles from the dome and could see the
main column finish loading and begin lining up. That was when the
missiles hit. The first salvo caught them all out in the open. They
didn't have a chance. We trained our receivers on the area for a
while, but there was nothing. The only way we'll ever get off this
death furnace is if there are ships left at Gorda. As far as I
know, there are 340 of us, including over a hundred girls. The
column comprises five scout cars, eight tracked trucks, and ten
heavy tanks. It will be a grim journey. Even Koriel isn't taking
bets on how many get there.
Minerva is just a black, smoky ball, difficult to pick out against
the sky. Two of the red spots have joined up to form a line
stretching at an angle across the equator. Must be hundreds of
miles long. Another red line is growing to the north. Every now and
then, parts of them glow orange through the smoke clouds for a few
hours and then die down again. Must be a mess there.
Giant Series 01 - Inherit the Stars Page 17