by John F. Carr
Althene gave her agreement. “Signal’s very erratic. I’m initiating full and final braking fire, then.”
As the atmosphere of Haven began to surround the shuttle, the world outside the ports was lightening. Away and below them, the Fomoria was fast disappearing in a colossal cone of orange-white flame, super-heated gases produced by the ship’s sublimating metal skin being consumed in her entry into the atmosphere.
Althene pressed a switch, and the cone erupted downwards as the last of the Fomoria’s fuel went, along with much of her maneuver engines. For a moment, the great hulk became visible amid the flames as its descent slowed almost to a stop. Then it began to fall again into its own mass of smoke and debris. Seconds later, it left the cloud and began falling Haven-ward once more.
There was enough atmosphere around the shuttle now that they could hear the roar and feel the shock waves of the Fomoria’s drop. Fighter Rank Stahler pulled away slightly, expertly compensating for the buffeting.
For a moment, Diettinger wanted to ask if the Fomoria might hit the Citadel itself, but there was really no point in worrying about that. If it happened, they might just as well spiral the shuttle into the ground after it. And, if that happened, it truly would be the end of the Sauron Race. Diettinger turned back to the port, but the Fomoria was fading from view in the high cloud cover over Haven’s Shangri-La Valley. Stahler was diving the shuttle to catch up with it.
Soon, now, Diettinger thought.
II
Lieutenant Vohlt jerked awake at the touch on his shoulder. Only his training had kept him from crying out in his sleep. Dear God, what a dream!, he thought.
Behind him, Pederson hobbled over from the small stove. His toes had gone black with frostbite in the last two days of waiting, and all their food was gone. If the Saurons didn’t make their move soon, Vohlt and his men would die in vain. They were too exhausted, too low on supplies, to make the journey back down the mountain.
Bleary-eyed, he looked up at the man who had awakened him, Turlock, older than Vohlt by a season, younger by two wars.
“There’s something coming in, sir. I think the pirates are making their drop.”
“They’re not pirates,” Vohlt grumbled, as he rose up on ominously numb feet. “They’re Saur—”
The sight in the sky over the northern Valley shocked him into silence. The high clouds were roiling back in the turbulence of the fireball dropping through them. It seemed to be directly overhead and primal instinct churned Vohlt’s insides as he watched what was beginning to look like a burning city falling directly onto him.
Vohlt needed something to do, he realized, before he panicked. He knew, logically, that the ship was not targeted to hit anywhere near him.
He also knew, logically, that there had been no reason for the Saurons to come to Haven in the first place.
“Is the launcher ready?” he asked, forcing his gaze downward and reaching for the image intensifier gear.
“Yes, sir. Powering up now. Be ready in another few seconds; didn’t want to chance the Saurons detecting emissions from the generator.”
Vohlt switched the power back onto his field glasses and looked back up at the descending starship. He would never see its like again. The dateline at the base of the viewfield faded in and out as he put the added strain on its charge of a time-to-impact equation. Three minutes, sixteen seconds flashed along the dataline, then the entire image went blank.
“Well, that’s it for these,” Vohlt said in resignation, handing the glasses over to Turlock, who put them to his eyes in a perfunctory gesture, scanning the Valley floor from his standing view.
Vohlt walked stiffly to the launcher crew, glad that the weapon they were giving their lives to use was not prone to human weakness.
“What was that?” Deathmaster Quilland had been looking off to the sides of the Valley at the steep foothills surrounding the Citadel, when something glimmered in the morning sun. Just a brief flash, indistinguishable to lesser than Sauron vision.
“I didn’t see it, sir,” his aide replied.
“Looked like a reflection; metal, or perhaps optics. Scan that zone”—he indicated the relative position on the map before him—“for any emissions; electrical, nuclear, infrared.” Something is very wrong, Quilland felt. “Hurry!”
Pederson’s feet were beyond hope, but his hands and brain worked well enough. He adjusted the targeting equipment and nodded to Vohlt.
“Acquisition?” Vohlt asked, tension winning over fatigue in his tone. Pederson nodded.
“Heat signature alone from that sum’bitch is enough to go by. Trying to keep our energy signature low, but I’ve got it just about locked.”
Vohlt checked his watch. He could hear the distant roar of the falling Sauron spacecraft in the not-distant-enough distance. One minutes, twenty-three seconds to go.
“Get your final lock-on. Use as much juice as you need to paint it with everything you’ve got.”
“I have an odd reading, Engineering,” Althene spoke aloud. Fighter Rank Stahler was working to keep control of the shuttle against the air turbulence caused by the Fomoria; Diettinger’s eyes were locked on the great craft herself. Engineering leaned over to check Althene’s terminal.
“Looks like a radar emission. Too regular to be entry phenomena, too weak to be anything but a reflection.”
Engineering looked up; Diettinger had turned at the word “radar,” and their eyes met.
“The cattle must be targeting the Fomoria with something,” Engineering said. Althene’s head went up in shock, but the look on Diettinger’s face was unfathomable. The First Rank nodded and turned back to the window.
“Enemy targeting sensors, Deathmaster, emissions at level nine and locking on target.” The astonishment was impossible for the Communications ranker to keep from his voice. Quilland’s jaws clamped as he grabbed the microphone.
“Suppressive fire, immediate, these coordinates,” Quilland spoke rapidly in the monosyllabic Battle Tongue of the Saurons; simultaneously, he pressed the switch that fed the coordinates of the emissions trace to the launcher crews waiting along the rim of the Valley wall.
In seconds, targeting lasers converged on the small space in the rocks Quilland had spotted only by blind luck earlier.
Vohlt saw the small pinpoints of reflected green light on the stones around him and instantly recognized them for what they were.
“Got it, Pederson?”
Pederson nodded. Vohlt looked over the rim of their rock shield and saw tiny white puffs of smoke all along the Valley walls. The Saurons were launching their suppressive strikes on his position. He and his men had only seconds to live.
“Okay, men, this is it. Drop the other shoe, Pederson.”
Captain Vohlt took the small canteen with the last of Colonel Harrigan’s rum from its resting place on the rocks and drank it down.
“Wrong guess, you bastards,” he said quietly, as the roar of the missile engine behind him drowned out the high-pitched whine of the approaching Sauron tacticals.
The air superheated with the passage of the missile they had so laboriously dragged up into position, and, for a moment, Vohlt and his crew were warm again, one last time. Seconds later, the Sauron artillery rounds detonated on target.
“Direct hit, Deathmaster.” The ranker’s voice was quiet, still tense; a great cloud of dust hung over the position the cattle had launched from. A moment later the Engineering Ranker added, “Sir, too late. Sensors show the enemy missile still active.”
But Quilland did not need sensors to see the bright needle of light exiting the cloud just made by his suppressive strikes; a silvery arc rising smoothly upwards toward the Fomoria and the shuttle, rushing to meet them.
His gaze shot to the readout. Saurons depended little on computers for rapid calculations, and his own mind extrapolated the data it presented. He swore aloud.
The Sauron Race, he feared, was doomed.
“The cattle have charged us, First Rank,” Stahler
spoke over the cabin intercom to Diettinger in the control compartment.
“Interdict their missile.” The wealth of raw materials in the hulk of the Fomoria is indispensable, Diettinger reasoned. We are not.
The shuttle gave a sickening lurch as Stahler maneuvered to interpose it between the hulk of the Fomoria and the approaching missile. Engineering’s lap terminal and various other items flew against the wall as the small craft fought the G-forces of the violent maneuver. Diettinger looked away from the view of Haven and at Althene.
“I anticipated this, I’m afraid,” he shouted to her over the roar of the shuttle’s passage. “We cannot allow the cattle to destroy the Fomoria,” he told her. “Nor to irradiate it with a high-yield weapon, preventing our people’s use of it.” He looked at Althene tenderly, his mate. All too briefly that, he thought.
Second Rank was doing something else with her terminal; the image of the Fomoria control station on its screen was replaced by one unfamiliar to Diettinger, then she turned it away from his view. He smiled at her sadly.
“Second Rank, you are relieved from duty.” She smiled back at him, shrugged; a gesture that understood all the things that now would never be. “I am sorry, Althene.”
Althene nodded. Engineering sat back. Too bad, he thought. The challenge of life on Haven would have been interesting. But duty to the Race came first.
Stahler fought the controls to move the shuttle as quickly as possible; the craft was ungainly now and badly out of position. Diettinger had guessed the Haveners might take such an action, but of course he could not know which direction they would launch from, and the shuttle was on the wrong side of the Fomoria’s hulk.
Fomoria had perhaps forty-five seconds left to impact; the missile would hit it in thirty. If it had any decent yield at all, the remains of the Sauron starship would be scattered over the entire Shangri-La Valley and, worse, likely irradiated. The northern Valley was so metal-poor that control of the wreckage of the Fomoria would make the Saurons absolute rulers of it, the rest of the Valley, and eventually the entire moon. Diettinger had no choice but to sacrifice their lives for it.
Fighter Rank Stahler’s concentration was locked on the view ahead of him; the approaching missile, the falling, precious Fomoria, his own craft’s relative position to both. He did not see the blinking red warning light on his control panel.
EVADE EVADE EVADE ENEMY LOCK-ON EVADE EVADE
The missile had closed to sufficiently short range that it no longer needed the camouflage of pretending to attack the Fomoria. Preprogrammed orders switched on in its brainchip as it activated its own targeting suite, locking onto the shuttle; the Fomoria was no longer its prey.
Diettinger reached out for Althene’s hand; she had retained her portable computer and picked it up to place it aside. She looked at him for a moment, then smiled.
“I’m sorry, too, Galen.” She threw a single switch on the terminal. The shuttle lurched yet again. The control array wrenched itself from Stahler’s hands and the small craft dropped into a vertical power dive. The Havener missile lost its target and activated its optional acquisition mechanism. Its true primary target gone, it switched back to the nearest heat source without a friendly transponder and flew on, detonating within the mass of the immolated Sauron starship Fomoria, thousands of feet above the Valley floor.
“What happened? What in hell happened?” Quilland lost all composure at the sight of the enemy missile on the screen; it was heading straight for the shuttle. The shuttle! Quilland thought in rage at these hideously crafty cattle. The next instant, the shuttle had vanished, while the missile continued on to detonate within the storm of flames surrounding the Fomoria.
The ranker shook his head in confusion. “Hopeless, sir. It looks like something happened aboard the shuttle; she dove off the sensor screens like a falcon. I had to replay the data to tell even that much; I see her on sensors, now, but how could her pilot pull out of a dive like that?”
Over the northernmost expanse of the Shangri-La, the trueday morning sun was dimmed by the huge pall of the Fomoria’s destruction. What meager segments of the ship remained intact fell in blazing fragments to the ground with thunderous impacts. Quilland could see the shock waves rippling out from the impact points, feel the vibrations through the granite beneath his boots.
He gave up trying to see where they all hit. It was hopeless. Nothing remained larger than a cargo container. Quilland sighed. Now his troops would be required to make recovery journey into the flatlands of the hostile Valley, exposed to the Haveners far more than he cared to think about. Dangerous, Quilland thought, but not impossible. He grunted. Be good for the Soldiers, no doubt, in the long run. Give them more chance to learn about these cattle than their previous pacification raids had allowed.
Deathmaster Quilland gave a short, grim laugh. “Pacification,” he said out loud. The Sensor Ranker beside him looked up curiously.
“We haven’t even come close to ‘pacifying’ these cattle,” the Deathmaster told the lower ranker. His short laugh of a moment before became an open smile. “I doubt that we ever will.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
I
Stahler, suddenly finding his controls responsive once more, recovered the shuttle with room to spare. The resulting sonic boom over the Citadel brought several messages of congratulations from the Soldiers stationed at the communications outpost there, once they were sure it was not an impact explosion.
Diettinger inspected Althene closely. She returned his stare. Engineering was repositioning himself in his acceleration couch after tending to the body of Communications. Unprepared, the young Sauron had snapped his neck during the violent maneuver, dying instantly.
“Thank you for relieving me of my command, First Rank,” Althene was saying. Diettinger turned to her. “On active duty I would have been guilty of disobedience in using my terminal to override Stahler’s controls.”
Diettinger stared. She had kept the lap terminal long after control of Fomoria had been lost; now Diettinger knew why. She had been infiltrating the control panel of the shuttle, anticipating Diettinger’s own plan to sacrifice the craft. The strange control panel he had seen on her terminal’s readout had been a duplicate of Stahler’s station forward.
“You knew,” he said.
Althene shrugged. “I guessed.” Their voices dropped as the speed of the shuttle decreased; Stahler was making his final approach for landing.
“Why the cattle chose our shuttle for a target over the Fomoria makes little sense to me,” Diettinger said, shaking his head. “The military value of the hulk is unmistakable.”
“They weren’t thinking in military terms, Galen.” Althene spoke quietly, firmly. “They were making a statement, one with little strategic value, but of high importance in terms of morale.”
“Clarify, O Muse,” Diettinger said, laughing in relief. Althene laughed back.
“They must have guessed our commander would be aboard. They can’t eavesdrop on tight beam communications, but they’d be aware of them.”
Diettinger laughed again. “You flatter me, Lady. I cannot believe the cattle would waste a nuclear weapon on me.”
Althene smiled sadly. “I am an historian, First Rank,” she said formally. “And history shows that humanity will not always make the best choice in a seemingly hopeless situation. As often as not, they will make the most satisfying one. This time, they were the same. The cattle wanted to hurt us, even if they couldn’t beat us. The elimination of our entire command structure would have little impact on us under battlefield conditions; underofficers would advance to fill the void.” She shook her head again.
“But this is not a ‘command structure.’” She took his hand. “It is a dynasty, now. And Haven cannot be a battlefield any longer. It must be our home.”
Diettinger nodded. “Our strength was always our discipline,” he said quietly. “But it made us predictable.” He rubbed his eye-patch as he spoke, suddenly weary. There was time, at la
st, to be tired. “No doubt it was why we lost the war.”
Althene lowered her head in silence. There was nothing to say.
“It may be the single distinction of our existence on this world,” Diettinger spoke again after a moment, “that we are never to really understand our enemies here; nor they us.” He turned back to the window.
II
John Hamilton awoke slowly to the soothing touch of a gentle hand on his forehead. He kept his eyes shut to prolong the pleasurable sensation, a subliminal remembrance of his long lost mother’s touch. He heard the whisper of cloth as the nurse sat down and his head followed the sound. He opened his eyes to see Ingrid Cummings’ blue eyes searching his face with concern.
His heart skipped a beat. It was too late to close his eyes and pretend she wasn’t there. He tried to smile, but it felt all wrong.
“Are you still in pain?” Ingrid asked.
Her words brought his attention back to a persistent throbbing at the right side of his head. He nodded, not trusting himself to speak; he was afraid he would say the wrong thing again, and that she would leave. Maybe forever this time.
“Doc Glazzer says that you took a large caliber bullet to the side of your head. It didn’t penetrate your helmet, but it bruised your skull and caused a concussion. That’s why you passed out.”
“How long have I been like this?”
“You’ve been unconscious for almost two days. We were all worried. Your Grandfather was here all day. I took night duty.”
“Thanks. It means a lot.”
Her face suddenly hardened, as though she suddenly remembered to whom she was talking. “But don’t get in your mind that this has changed anything. I’m not one of the servant girls.”
“Please! I know that. I’m sorry.”
She rose up and turned toward the door. “Then don’t forget it. And,” she turned back toward him.
The overhead lighting caught her profile in sudden relief as she turned, and he felt as if he were seeing Ingrid for the first time. She was beautiful: high forehead, golden-hued brown hair, with a slightly turned-up nose that he would have loved to kiss. His chest felt as if it had taken a bullet! Now, maybe too late, he knew what love was. He thought of the hidden delights that were secreted behind her no-nonsense skirt and blouse. His pulse began to race and he felt lightheaded.