Colonel Shanga's command post had survived the storm with only minimal damage, and the surviving journalists tended to congregate there—probably because the bar had not yet reopened.
Reports of damage and casualties, claims of enemies destroyed, were coming in from every quarter of the miniature world. Human casualties in fact were light, thanks to an early warning and heavy preparation. Early analysis of combat recordings confirmed the number of attacking berserkers at well over a hundred; it would take a while to make sure how many had been shot down.
The garrison commander, coming on line to make a general announcement, was grimly satisfied—for the moment— with the way the people of the garrison had performed. Neither he nor anyone under his command doubted that the enemy would be back, probably soon, and in even greater force. Emergency repairs were started, reserve resources redeployed upon the surface. Thanks to the early warning, casualties had been light.
Once more able to move freely around the surface of the atoll, Jory soon found herself exchanging smiles with Jay Nash, who was in fine spirits, proudly brandishing his bandaged arm.
A couple of little robots bearing the company logo, ignoring the devastation all around, were busy maintaining the equipment Nash had been using personally.
"Any enemy landers reported?" Jory asked him.
"Not yet. But they'll be back. That little skirmish was just to soften us up." He beamed at her happily.
Damage had been inflicted, but there appeared to have been no softening at all. People and machines, thousands of armored figures, the great majority intact, had come pouring out of shelters. All the digging in had really paid off. A stern voice in Jory's helmet reminded everybody to keep their armor on; the oxygen had been drained from the atmosphere, and the enemy had dumped in poisons, or deadly microorganisms. Somewhere, distantly, some kind of an alarm was ringing. Closer at hand, some wounded human's cries for help drifted through the attenuated air.
A quick look at the recordings showed that Jay Nash and his crew had been hard at work. Every member of his crew, including his newest employee, had performed creditably. The capture of live combat scenes had been amply successful. They had focused their equipment on the right places. But under the circumstances no one but themselves was paying much attention to the people from the entertainment world or to their results.
The wounded, several dozen of them in scattered locations around the atoll, were cared for quickly. The handful of dead were respectfully given temporary burial. Defenses were patched up, machines reloaded and rearmed.
No one on the ground doubted that the berserkers would be back, and most expected the second wave of the assault soon.
A new rumor was now rapidly spreading among the defenders, to the effect that a Solarian carrier force was somewhere in the area. Not everyone believed it, but morale went up a notch.
A small handbook appeared, What To Do If Captured, but many people swore they were not going to be captured.
Half an hour after the cease-fire, orders came to stand down from full alert.
Nash's yacht, the Araner, carrying most of his people and equipment, along with the more seriously wounded, was preparing to make a dash for Port Diamond while the going was good.
The early-warning system reported nothing incoming, at the moment.
Jory observed, with a lightening of her spirits, that the building housing the bar had not been totally destroyed in the berserker raid, though it suffered some picturesque damage.
Large holes in the walls and roof, but fortunately it wasn't going to rain. And now she noticed taut bubbles of plastic, sealing all the holes. Visiting such an establishment would seem rather pointless if one couldn't take one's helmet off when one got there. Fortunately, the interior could still be pressurized.
Jory heard one of the bartenders say, while waiting for the next (never doubting there would be more) berserker onslaught: "It has been said from old times that a battle is a succession of mistakes and that the party that blunders less emerges victorious."
Jory wondered, as she had on her previous visit to the nameless bar, why the place was open. But, feeling ready for a drink herself, she wasn't going to protest the fact.
The place seemed empty, or it would, Jory thought, when Jay Nash and his wild stories were gone, along with his selfconsciously macho crew of hard drinkers and swearers. Most, but not all, of that bunch were men.
Now the roaring music changed, suggesting the presence of a striptease dancer. Only in a holostage recording/doing a strip of some entertainer's idea of space armor, piece by piece, with nothing underneath? That reminded Jory, with a faint shock, of her own actual situation. Well, she'd get back to her quarters, and some privacy, in a few minutes.
As usual, the performance alternated hardbodied young men and women, or at least their computer-generated images, in that role. Some kind of entertainment. Different varieties, at the push of a button. There hadn't been any live musicians on Fifty Fifty for a long, long time.
Jory thought of demanding a male dancer next, but she was too tired. To hell with it.
People were arguing, a couple of tables away. Someone had a theory that no one had ever got around to telling the robot manager of the bar that it had to be shut down. No, the door had really been locked, half an hour ago. Well then, someone had slyly deprogrammed the robot to forget any closure command within an hour after it was issued.
If a high state of alert still obtained, then the bar should have been officially closed. Now that Jory noticed it, a great many of the customers seemed to have been wounded. People were drinking, chewing, and inhaling various substances, some in exotic combinations.
The newest fad, popular among the celebrities of Port Diamond and Earth, and taken up eagerly by their followers, was the subtle effect attained by simply sipping ordinary wine.
"This is what wine was originally like."
The taster frowned judiciously. "Fermented grape juice? Nothing at all added?"
"Nothing."
Whoooop went the music. Craaash! God, you would think these people had had more than enough of noise during the last few hours—but evidently not.
People gasped, taking in fumes, and chewed and drank. In dark booths a few couples were rubbing each other's bodies with perfumed ointments, while the bulk of the customers ignored them. Discreet placards on the walls proclaimed the availability of antidote substances that promised to restore the Solarian brain from various kinds of intoxication to full alertness and coordination in a matter of seconds, if some call to duty did not allow one to enjoy the prolonged high otherwise attainable from the various psychoactive party materials.
Here and there, in corners of the large room, serious matters were under discussion: "Or put it this way… 'He who makes the next-to-the-last blunder wins.'"
The nearest bartender responded, off-the-wall.
Someone else commented, "A truly Zen reply."
Hours were yet to pass before some military police officer eventually realized that the manager robot had had its senses scrambled; it had started giving irrelevant answers to questions, and sometimes answering queries that had not been asked at all.
A few years ago there had been an adjoining small tourist hotel, but that building had been converted, months ago, to other uses. Putting up some temporary buildings was no problem, nor was anything strong or elaborate needed, in the absence of rain and snow and wind; probably the atolls experienced almost nothing like weather in the usual planetary sense.
The male dancer was long gone. And now again the device switched, in response to a request. Now it was putting up an enhancement of some twentieth-century 2-D movie.
The berserker raid, as Jory realized, listening to the talk around her, teeth-rattling and mind-numbing as it was, had been really of no more than moderate intensity. Obviously it was intended as a mere preliminary to an intended landing and occupation—the berserker plan called for cleansing the atoll of all life without shattering it into bits. In
the face of determined Solarian resistance, even that modest objective proved impossible to attain. The land-based defenses, forewarned and forearmed, were still strong when it was over.
Nash, after agonizing briefly over the question, reluctantly confirmed for Jory his decision to get himself, his crew, and his documentary out. He had accomplished what he'd come for. Now the job called for getting the material he'd gathered into shape. Staying here would only endanger what they had so far achieved.
The commander of the garrison was ready to see him go. The colonel had a million other things to tend to that were more important than recordings or public relations.
Nash, prominently displaying his bandaged arm while he sipped a beer, told Jory he had been about to send for her.
"Here I am."
"Okay, girl, I want you to pack up and get ready to move out."
Jory bristled. "What? Who? Just me?"
He grinned evilly, and seemed unconscious of the fact that his opposite hand came over to stroke his bandage. At least today he was keeping his artificial eye in his head where it belonged. "No. Fact is, I'm leaving too, pulling out the whole crew. Got what we came for."
"I'd like to stay."
"No, ma'am. We've got what we came for, enough to make the documentary."
It was a good point. "All right. When?"
Nash looked at his old-fashioned wristwatch. "We're lifting off in about two hours."
"You're the boss."
"Damn right. Don't forget it." Nash grunted some additional comment to the effect that no woman was going to take that kind of risk while he moved on to safety; no, sir, not if he could help it.
Jory sighed. It was as if the hundreds of women who were here in the military, among the volunteer defenders, had escaped his notice entirely. Well, it was a job.
When she left the tavern it was with mixed feelings, including a twinge of disappointment. Now she could wish that she'd made some fuss earlier about her own trivial combat wound; if she'd ever been given a medal to wear, she'd certainly be wearing it now, just to irritate the boss.
TWENTY-THREE
Grimly Admiral Naguance considered the first reports of Solarian casualties. A majority of the fighters and bombers sent out in the first waves against the enemy carriers had not returned. Underslugger Eight, from Stinger, comprising fifteen hardlaunchers and thirty people, seemed to have been totally wiped out without scoring even a single hit on a berserker. Certainly not one ship of that squadron had made it back to Stinger. Hope that some of the missing crews might still be recovered was fading fast.
The losses among Naguance's small ships, including both those who had managed to find the enemy and those who had not, looked so high that he refused to think about them, though part of his mind was keeping an automatic inventory of the people and machines he still had left with which to fight. Pilots from Fighter Six, who had failed to find the enemy in their first attempt, had landed and repowered their ships, and stood by to liftoff from Venture again. But overall, the totals were dishearteningly low. Still, despite the horrifying losses, the admiral had no regrets about his chosen plan of attack. Going all out to destroy the enemy carriers was the only way this battle could possibly be won.
There were still two squadrons of hardlaunchers to be heard from.
As minutes dragged on into hours, Naguance's carrier captains, his surviving flight officers and enlisted crew members, as well as the humans assigned to maintenance and support jobs, tried to work as tirelessly as their machines.
Meanwhile, Admiral Bowman and the entire crew of his flagship had been fighting with all their strength and skill to keep the heavily damaged Lankvil from blowing up. For a time it seemed that the damage-control people, working heroically beside their faithful machines, might turn the trick.
Every few minutes Bowman took time-out, mentally, to congratulate himself for having turned Naguance loose; there would be one less thing for the commander of Task Force Sixteen to worry about.
Meanwhile, the disaster might not be as complete as he had originally feared. Lankvil, all her hydrogen power lamps once more fired up, and other essential emergency repairs completed, at first succeeded in throwing the newest wave of attackers off by taking sharp evasive action, turns and acceleration that strained the artificial gravity.
Eighty thousand metric tons of steel and composites, peppered with vital specks of other materials, including fragile human flesh, all locked in a domain of gentle subjective acceleration, by one of the finest fields of artificial gravity ever generated.
"We've taken three direct hits, sir, and there's four nuclear reactions burning." Self-propelled atomic piles held an honored place in the berserker arsenal of weapons. Other, more sophisticated boarding machines had to be feared also, but so far today those murderous gadgets had not been used.
"Keep at it." Robots and armored humans were struggling in hellish conditions to restore the flight deck to some kind of functional condition, and laboring just as intently belowdecks, beset by fire and radiation, in getting the wounded to sick bay, getting the ship's essential systems all working again, and re-moving the dead.
"Here the sons of bitches come again!"
Only minutes ago, the crew of Lankvil had succeeded in clearing the last wreckage from the essential portions of the flight deck. Only seconds ago the operations officer had proclaimed the ship ready to begin launching the ten fighters that had repowered and were standing by.
Bowman issued orders, keeping his voice calm. The launching proceeded, in the teeth of the renewed berserker attack. Eight fighters made liftoff. The last one to get spaceborne was piloted by Ensign Mike Horn, a stranger to combat who only six days ago had come aboard a carrier for the first time.
Propelled into space, almost fired at the enemy like a missile, Horn wrenched his fighter into a tight left turn, and immediately cut loose with all his weaponry at a berserker hardlauncher that appeared seemingly from nowhere directly in his path. He just had time to see the bandit disintegrate into radii of fragments before he was hit himself by a bone-wrenching jolt. Horn had only a moment in which to suspect the truth—his fighter had been struck by antispacecraft fire from his own carrier—before he had to abandon ship. The pilot drifted briefly in space, surrounded by the flares of battle, before being hauled to relative safety by a Solarian ship of the destroyer class. Less than a quarter of a standard hour had passed since he was cleared for liftoff.
But effort could not beat the berserkers back this time.
This time Bowman happened to be caught momentarily out of his combat couch. Superb gravity or not, he had to pick his armored body up off the deck.
The jolt when the first berserker missile struck was terrifying, to veteran and raw newcomer alike. Bowman himself had a vision of his flagship as a small animal in a predator's jaws. The screens of his combat displays cracked with the vibration, and someone on intercom began muttering a prayer. Regular electrical power had gone out, and vital systems were operating on backup.
The deck had now canted steeply beneath the admiral's feet. Lankvil's artificial gravity developed a list, and gradually over the next few minutes it let go altogether, first in pockets of failure, then throughout the ship.
The second missile strike, only seconds after the first, killed everybody who had been trying to get regular power restored. Now communications, and even emergency lighting, were almost gone. Maneuvering the ship had now become practically impossible.
It was just too much. Too damned much. Bowman was forced, reluctantly, to give the order to abandon ship. He was now down to his suit radio as his only means of communication. But it was vital that he remain in close touch with other ships of both task forces. He was still the admiral, still officially in command of all the Solarian forces now engaged in space. With that in mind, his next duty was clearly to switch his flag to the cruiser-class vessel Jonjay, which, as he learned with some difficulty, was standing by.
"I don't see any sense in frying two thou
sand people just to stick with the ship."
From everywhere below decks a horde of men and women in armor drifted and groped through midnight passageways toward the surface of the ship.
The latest wave of attackers had withdrawn, and at least the ruin they had inflicted would not have to be dealt with while still under fire. Lankvil's fighting small ships now in space were, when possible, signaled to try to reach Stinger or Venture for recovery.
Getting the admiral and his aides off the doomed ship and aboard a smaller one, while everyone else aboard was also trying to abandon ship, was a tricky business, particularly as no one knew at what moment the berserkers might strike again. Just evacuating people from the jerking, vibrating Lankvil was a difficult task. Fighters, hardlaunchers, and undersluggers had zero capacity to carry anyone save their own crews. The few other small craft available were promptly overloaded, and space in the vicinity of the carrier's dying bulk was sprinkled with hundreds of inhabited suits of space armor.
At last the transfer was accomplished safely. But the accompanying difficulty in communication had kept Admiral Bowman out of touch with most of his fleet for eleven long suspenseful minutes.
Meanwhile, Task Force Sixteen, comprising Stinger and Venture, with their two dozen or so supporting and escort craft, had first launched attack ships at 0838, on the standard day on which the fighting began. Stinger had begun at 0700, and Venture at 0706.
Halfway to their objective, the flight of six undersluggers passed, at great velocity, a single Void headed directly for Fifty Fifty, evidently trying to catch up with the other machines that had gone raiding there. The humans had another enemy in mind, and it seemed that the berserker did too, for neither party changed course.
Soon afterward, the Solarian squadron came in sight of the berserker fleet, and Tadao could identify two carriers.
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