Space 1999 - Earthfall

by E. C. Tubb

“Hold!”

  Only seconds had passed since the initial attack but already it seemed like minutes. The area around the decoys was thick with questing torpedoes intent on destroying the sources of electronic emission. Koenig shifted the controls of his Eagle, centred the mass on the cross-hairs of his sight-screen, tipped the primer of his missiles.

  “About to fire atomics,” he snapped. “All Eagles withdraw. Get up and away from operational site. Move, damn you! Get the hell out of here!”

  His gloved palm slammed against the releases.

  From the launching tubes of the Eagle spat slender, needle-like shapes, each driven by a thread of flame, each tipped with nuclear destruction. As they cleared Koenig rose up and away, following the others, keeping to the plan so painstakingly made during long hours in candle-lit darkness.

  To attack, to destroy, to divert. To distract and attack again, using all the power at their command, to crush the alien defences before they, themselves could be crushed. To gamble on the element of surprise. To win.

  From below blue-white flame erupted to spread in seductive blossoms of hellish destruction as the warheads loaded with plutonium released megatons of energy in a sudden, devastating blast. The rock and dust fused, turned into incandescent vapor which spread to engulf the glittering torpedoes, to hold them for a moment as if they were moths caught in a flame and then, abruptly, they had vanished, their own bulk going to join and increase the fountains of lambent brilliance which washed the area clean.

  “First phase completed,” snapped Koenig. “Begin second.”

  The five back-up Eagles had risen high, vanishing into space as they blended with the shimmer of the stars. Now they returned, falling to rise again, fresh decoys released from their cargo pods to hang, drifting, blasting the ether with radio transmissions; the alien pattern recorded by Sandra, amplified, distorted, broadcast on a dozen frequencies.

  Decoys fitted with remote-control detonation apparatus which would trigger the atomic bombs incorporated in the packages as the alien torpedoes gathered close.

  Four fire-balls which dimmed the stars with man-made hellfire.

  One package which failed to respond.

  Koenig thinned his lips and thrust again at the button. A relay had stuck, a wire broken, a unit, hastily constructed and improperly tested, had failed to function as it should. That or the aliens themselves had caused the jamming of the signal by intent or accident.

  The cause was unimportant—the package, followed by a cloud of aliens, was falling directly down towards the base.

  “Commander! If it hits and blows when it touches the base will be wiped out!” Carter had recognized the danger. “I’m going after it!”

  “Hold your position!” Koenig stared at the screens, noting the position of the Eagles, darting, fitful gleam of attacking torpedoes. The spindles seemed no less, despite the losses inflicted on their number. Only by constant evasive action and ceaseless laser-fire were the ships managing to survive. “I’ll handle it.”

  “How? If you fire at the package and miss you’ll destroy the base!”

  Koenig manoeuved his Eagle, not answering, firing as glittering shapes appeared on the sight-screen. His hands and eyes worked without conscious thought as his mind assessed time and distance, angles and approach and known radii of destruction, If the bomb hit and exploded the upper installation would be totally demolished. Below the sealed compartments would be cracked open, air lost, the rooms fused into unrecognizable slag. Towards the outer perimeter, there would be excessive irradiation and a loss of all environmental support systems.

  Those who died would be the lucky ones.

  The only chance was to throw the package far to one side, to lift it, even, and carry it far into space. A difficult manoeuvre at the best of times, one made almost impossible by the cloud of torpedoes and the fact that a touch could trigger the stuck detonators. A risk he had to take.

  One he was denied.

  Chadalah was hurt, blood oozing from his lips, his kidneys torn, his lungs lacerated, a thigh broken and one shoulder dislocated. His Eagle was in no better condition, the hull seared, and ripped, blue flame spouting from the region of his engine, one forward vision port shattered, his launchers dangling, a port torn and dangling from a hinge.

  Both ship and man dying and knowing it.

  Chadalah passed Koenig’s vessel so close the hulls almost touched then was diving down, towards the base and the drifting, falling package, using the mass of his Eagle as a hand to smash aside the cloud of torpedoes, ignoring the stings which created greater destruction, the shocks which tore at metal and flesh.

  He reached the decoy and swung beneath it, lifting with a delicately timed movement, accelerating as it came to rest, magnetic grapnels fast on the hull. Power thrust at the damaged Eagle, sending it up and away, a stanchion breaking; Chadalah ignoring the blood which gushed from torn lungs straining under savage high-G, the sickening agony of his bursting kidneys.

  Rising up and up until, abruptly, ship and man dissolved against the stars in a spread cloud of incandescent glory.

  As it faded Carter yelled, “The crater! Look at the crater!”

  C H A P T E R

  Eighteen

  It was filled with a lambent glow of shimmering brilliance, the cloud of darting torpedoes around it like gnats wheeling over a pond. The swollen bulk of the Queen had moved, rising to hang suspended, the rounded surface winking with scintillations of red and blue, yellow, cerise and emerald, violet, orange and purple—shades and hues covering the spectrum mingled with colors impossible to define.

  And from it, beneath it, rose a swarm of unfamiliar shapes.

  Things which expanded to form the skeletons of tremendous umbrellas, the ribs flexible, tentacular, winking with destructive ruby light. Bodies which were noduled with sacs burning in nacreous luminescence. Filaments which spread to form gossamer wings studded with a rainbow of jewels.

  Watching them Koenig guessed what they must be; specialized types bred in the cells dug from the Lunar rock and now sent to destroy the threat against the Queen. Against them stood only the Eagles—but Chadalah was dead and Patel was a mass of drifting fragments and Corcyra had crashed with his Eagle to dissolve in lambent flame.

  Three gone and only five left and of those five none had escaped damage of some kind. And still slender torpedoes darted and glowed and now had come the new menace.

  “Attack!” Carter’s voice was hard, firm with determination. “Hit them before they hit us! Commander?”

  “Maintain dispersal,” said Koenig. “Continue evasive action. Fire in numerical order.”

  Riding in Eagle One he took the lead. The torpedoes, he noted, remained concentrated about the Queen, leaving the new arrivals a clear field. One of them darted before him, paused, darted again as the laser fired. The beam missed then ruby light winked and Koenig felt the shuddering impact of blows against the hull, read the tell-tales blazing on the panel, saw the red flare of danger on every dial.

  “Commander?” Carter was the next to fire. “How badly are you hit?”

  “Too bad for comfort. Try multiple firing with wide-beam dispersion.”

  Advice which Carter took, his fire catching two of the tentacles and one of the sacs, searing the thin appendages and filling space with a sudden gust of burning rain which gilded his hull with eroding fire.

  “Abandon!” yelled Koenig. “Alan, get out of that Eagle, Fast!”

  “I can handle it.”

  “Handle what? The hull is burning. Leave it too late and you’ll burn with it. Get up and away. The rest of you give covering fire. Move!”

  As they darted in, fixing, weaving, firing again but avoiding getting too close, Koenig followed the burning Eagle. The hull was dissolving as he watched, tough alloy melting as if it had been wax in a flame, inner structures standing clear before they too succumbed. Against the glitter of the stars Carter’s suited figure was a small, barely seen patch of moving color.

  “I�
��ve spotted you, Alan,” said Koenig. “Just drift until I pick you up.”

  With the suit-jets he could alter course but to do so would complicate the rescue. Koenig swung close, praying the ship-computer hadn’t been impared during the battle, that the guidance systems would hold, that all the things which could go wrong in the damaged Eagle would wait until later.

  Only when Carter sank into the co-pilot’s chair did he relax.

  “Hurt?”

  “No.” Carter echoed his disgust. “I had the damned thing! I saw the laser hit—then all hell broke loose on the board. What happened?”

  “You hit a sac. It burst and sprayed you with some kind of acid.” Koenig stared at the screen where the Eagle drifted, a fading pyre. “A neat kind of defence.”

  “We can beat it,” said Carter. “Stand back and use the nukes.”

  One of the others had the same idea. As Koenig swung towards the crater he saw an Eagle swing down, level, fire spurt from its launching tubes. A thread of flame which reached towards one of the enigmatic defenders, to touch it, to pass it, to explode far beyond in a ball of blue-white fury.

  “The fool!” Snapped Carter, “He missed!”

  “No,” said Koenig. “It wasn’t that. Watch!”

  The Eagle fired again at shorter range and again the missile reached towards the tentacular shape touched it, passed it, wasted its destructive energies far beyond. As it exploded the gossamer-like wings glowed with shimmering rainbows.

  “An energy trap,” whispered Carter. “The damned thing must be feeding on radiation collected by those wings. And that missile didn’t miss—it passed right through. But why didn’t it explode?”

  A badly set fuse, a misjudgement in distance, an optical illusion which had made the missile appear to hit while, in reality, it had missed. Facile explanations but Koenig knew there could be others; an attribute of the creature itself which could have “frozen” the firing mechanism, a defence which could, by slowing time, have altered the settings, even, perhaps, a means of by-passing the missile past its target via another dimension.

  A mystery which needed time to solve and now they had no time. The vast bulk of the Queen was no longer rising but, from the region beneath it, streamed more of the tentacular shapes. The torpedoes, darting like minnows, clustered around the bulk, riding high, forming an inner defence. But now, where once they had emulated the density of hail in a storm, they were like the residual leaves of autumn.

  “We were winning,” said Carter. “Given time we’d have got them all. Now—?”

  He broke off, brooding, but there was no need for him to finish. Human courage, alone, was not enough. Too many Eagles had been lost, too many of the new and frightening creatures had entered the battle. The missiles were limited and the bulk of the Queen was screened by the living defences.

  Even so Koenig tried.

  “Commander to all Eagles. Withdraw and hold your fire, Alan, take over the armament.”

  “Nukes?”

  “Half of all we’ve got. Set fuses for impact, proximity and range. Distance . . .” He checked the panel and gave the figure. “I’ll head directly towards the crater. Fire at signal. Go!”

  Acceleration slammed them back into the chairs as Koenig fed power to the jets. He fought the blackness edging his vision as he watched the panel, the screen. The crater seemed to be moving towards him with mounting speed, the bulk of the Queen now blazing with shimmering colors, the tentacular defenders darting, halting, seeming to vanish and to appear in a new position. One facing the Eagle, placing layers of alien tissue between it and its target.

  “Commander?”

  “On three . . . two . . . one . . . now!”

  Koenig swung up the Eagle a second after Carter had pressed the releases. He caught a glimpse of the missiles as they flashed from their launching tubes, a dozen messengers of annihilation, then was fighting to maintain control of the crippled vessel. Metal creaked, plates tore and stanchions yielded beneath the strain. As the crushing pressure of high-G thrust at heart and lungs and bodily fluids he saw nothing but blackness shot with streaks and smears of color, heard nothing but the scream of tortured metal, tasted nothing but the warm saltiness of his own blood.

  An eternity compressed into seconds. As he eased the vicious, upward sweep of the Eagle he saw the missiles still lancing on their path, saw them hit the defenders, to explode and sear the Lunar plain with man-made sun-glare.

  Five tentacular shapes added their flame to the atomic holocaust.

  “We got ’em!” Carter was yelling. “Commander we got some of the swine!”

  A dozen missiles for five, expendable defenders, but the bulk of the Queen was untouched. How many missiles would it take to smash a path to that shimmering bulk?

  An academic question—they couldn’t make more than they had and they didn’t have enough.

  “Commander!” Carter lifted a hand, pointing. “The torpedoes! They’re moving!”

  Darting away from the bulk of the Queen now safely surrounded by the tentacular shapes. Moving like questing sharks towards the base.

  Simon Lansing watched them come and felt a coldness grip his stomach. When the chips were down no man could avoid knowing fear, the anticipation of injury or death, the total . . . erasure of what he was and had ever hoped to be. Then came the anger, the anodyne to the emotional pain, the rush of adrenaline which prepared him for action as it had readied his forebears in the past. And, with it, came relief that the waiting was over at last.

  “You see them?” Luke Kenter, caution forgotten in the need to talk, to communicate with another of his kind. “Simon? Dell?”

  “Pipe down!” Latour was curt. “You wanna bring them down on us?”

  “They’re coming anyways. And what difference does it make now? Those Eagles are filling space with radiated energy.” Luke sucked in his breath with a harsh rasping. “You think we can handle it?”

  “We can try.” A different voice from another of the volunteers. “And maybe they won’t attack. They could be making a reconnaissance for some reason. If we lay low and hold our fire they could miss us.”

  Maybe, but Simon wasn’t so sure. The things seemed to move with purpose and the idiots weren’t helping with their yak. Slowly he picked up the launcher and for the thousandth time checked the loading. It was primed, a missile in the tube, three others in the magazine, everything ready to go when he touched the release. Which one should he aim for? That one in the front, the one to the left, the right, the one further to the rear?

  Into the radio he snapped, “Quit gassing. We need to make a plan and spot our targets. No point in more than one aiming at the same torpedo. Suggestions?”

  “We’re in a ring,” said Dell Latour immediately. “You’re at twelve o’clock, Simon, I’m at six. I’ll take the leader and you take the one behind.”

  “And the rest of us?”

  “They’re coming in a bunch. Stare straight ahead and those facing you are yours. Take front and back and wait until they get close. Don’t fire for the sake of it. If you can’t be sure of making a score then hold your fire.” He added, with annoyance, “We should have fixed up a buddy-system so one could cover the other. Put in some training too, but we didn’t have the time. Well, we’ll have to make the best of it.”

  A good, man, thought Simon, and remembered that Dell had done a hitch in the army. Maybe they should make him their captain. At least he could spell off the shots and direct each man’s fire—but, no, that wouldn’t work. The torpedoes looked all alike and it would be impossible to identify individual targets.

  “Now,” said Latour, tensely. “If they fire let them have it!”

  The aliens were close, drifting, darting, coming lower, glowing like the ornaments he remembered hanging on the Christmas Tree when young. Fragile things of glass touched with magical colors, catching and reflecting light and images, his own face distorted into a grotesque mask. Fragile . . .

  The torpedoes opened fire.
r />   Dust plumed as ruby light winked and rock lifted in showers of shattered debris to rim the edge of new-made craters. Lansing heard the yell in his helmet, but ignored it, rising, the launcher lifted, aimed, finger clamping on the release.

  “No!” yelled the voice again. “Hold your fire! Hold—”

  The missile struck home, penetrating the glowing surface, sending the torpedo to twist and spin and dive to land and roll in a gush of flame.

  “You crazy bastard!” The voice was harsh with anger. “They were nowhere near the base. You—hell, what does it matter now?”

  Nothing as space yielded to the dominion of death. Dust and broken stone rose as threads of flame darted upwards. Mutual destruction dealt with a lavish hand. Torpedoes, caught by the missiles, dropped as men, yelling with battle-excitement, rose and fired and fired, reloading when their launchers were empty.

  Dropping as they reloaded. Dying as they fell. Blood and bone and suits shredded and scattered as ruby light winked from the few remaining torpedoes.

  Lansing swore as he fumbled for fresh missiles, his hand touching only dust and stone. There had to be more. He couldn’t have used them all. There were still some of the enemy left and he needed a missile, more . . . where the hell were they?

  The detonation was like a blow as if someone had kicked him in the leg with a soft slipper or used a pillow to knock him down. There was no pain but when he tried to rise he fell again and turning saw that both legs were missing below the knee.

  A freak, he thought. The legs have been blown to hell and the tissue mixed with the suit fabric has made a seal. That’s why I can still breath. That’s why I’m not dead.

  Not dead—not yet.

  And not maybe at all if he could tie the suit tight to the thighs and maybe use some of the blood to complete the seal.

  Then the pain hit him and with it came a thought. What the hell would Monica want with a cripple?

  Then the pain again and the sudden gush of escaping air and, after that, nothing.

  Koenig said, savagely, “Paul, what the hell’s going on?”