A large anthology of sci.., p.609
A Large Anthology of Science Fiction, page 609
“Deneb wasn’t bad—they found two good worlds there—but they’re still a long way from home. It’ll be several generations before they can begin to tame their worlds to the point where minimum technology begins. But they do have one thing. They have us. Within a few weeks they have their Starpath receiving station open. We get the signal and drop in to say hello. One more link in the chain is complete.
“Naturally, these people are pretty happy to see us at first. We just left home, seconds ago. We have all the latest news for the past 20 years. So we say hello. Then. . . .”
“Then,” DeLuso finished for me, “we seal up the works and say good-by. Yes sir. I get the idea.” _ “So do they, very quickly. The thrill of pioneering wears off as soon as the supplies run out. Soon they need things. Maybe they need things badly, like Gellhell. We do what we can, but we can’t do everything. Most of the time we stand behind our force field and give friendly advice. But we don’t take passengers, and we don’t bring in supplies. We don’t, because it’s economically impossible. It costs a small fortune to break up the mass of two men and assemble them at the other end of Starpath. The load of necessities for just one world would bankrupt the whole spiral arm!
“The colonists know this,” I said, “but it isn’t much comfort when you need help in the worst way. We have the stuff—but we can’t give it to them. And it looks as if we’re still a long way from pushing heavy cargo through Starpath. That leaves us in kind of a touchy position. Until a world has time to develop its own power—like Primera—we can’t even set up a Starpath transmitting station. We just run through on the circuit and drop off 10 or 15 pounds of whatever will do the most good at the time.”
“Sir,” asked DeLuso, “did you ever read about the early 19th- and 20th-century railroads on Barth? They laid track across the country, but they couldn’t afford to stop at every station along the line. Only the economically important areas had anything like real two-way travel. Starpath is about in the same position now.”
I shook my head. “Worse, Cadet. Remember, those trains could stop and let off cargo and people, or take something out. We can’t. Even the richest worlds still have to send anything out the hard way—through every long mile of space. Starpath is a link between the worlds. A valuable link, certainly. But for now that’s all it is. We’ve been in space a little over 300 years, but we haven’t always bad the advantage of even 20 times light speed. Space travel has been a slow, hard pull. And Starpath’s even younger—less than a hundred years. We’re just getting our feet wet, Cadet! We have a long way to go.”
IV
There were two more days. Matt DeLuso spent them with the girl he had met on our big night out. I spent mine alone, and didn’t regret it at all. They were quiet, good days, with the balmy sun of Primera following me over bright beaches and through shaded parks.
For the first time since I can remember, I managed to put Starpath in a small compartment somewhere and let the old nerves unwind. It was still there, of course. It never goes away. But there was something else there, too. It was almost as if some part of me had an idea it might be a good thing to store up visions of green grass and wet mornings and red sunsets over gray mountains. I remember every minute of those 48 hours, and I hang onto them. They say it takes a good three to five years to grow a new pair of eyes, even if the first ones work out. So I need pictures of those two good days I was half awake on pink sand when the shadow of the Starpath floater dropped over me and shut out the sun. A port opened before the gear touched sand, and I took one quick look at the young pilot’s face. Just one. Then I grabbed my gear and sprinted the few yards to the ship and pulled myself in. The boy wouldn’t look at me; his face was a sick ash-gray, and his eyes were somewhere else. I laid a hand on his shoulder and turned him around.
“Okay, son, take it easy. Now. Is this what I think it is?”
He nodded dumbly, trying hard to work his mouth over the words. “Sir . . . it’s Priority Red.”
I didn’t say anything. Like the boy, I knew there was nothing to say. I didn’t believe it any more than he did. You just don’t believe there’ll ever be a Priority Red. . . .
The ship screamed down and jerked against the roof of Starpath Control. It only took me half a minute to reach the staging room, but I knew it was true long before then. I could feel it—the unbelievable surge of power pouring into Control from all over the planet. There’d be no private or industrial power left on Primera now. It was all channeling into this one building, down into the giant generators beneath Control and out to some flyspeck world that had bought itself the big package of trouble.
We were draining a planet to feed raw power to a distant star. The same thing would be happening on a dozen other Starpath Control worlds. Electric transport would halt; atomic plants would scream as hot power was torn from their vitals. If you needed power to live—you’d die. Whatever problem you had, Priority Red was bigger.
“Keith! Over here!” I jerked around, vaulted a power truck hauling an ugly, snouted weapon and faced Walt Martin. He grasped my hand and signaled to a nearby captain. The captain nodded and sprinted away.
“I’m glad you’re here, Keith,” Walt said softly. “We’re going to need everyone who’s had over fifteen minutes of Starpath experience!”
“It’s true, then. It finally happened.”
Walt nodded grimly. “It’s true, and it’s bad.” He turned to the high-vaulted chamber of the staging room. It was chaos, unless you knew what was going on there. Every bank of Starpath conveyors was in use. As men stepped from their missions on a hundred worlds, they were handed a combat suit and shuffled into line. Weapons, trucks hummed back and forth like blind beetles through the auxiliary tunnels. And everything, men and equipment, tunneled eventually toward one particular Starpath portal.
“Where is it, Walt? Where did they hit?” The sector commander’s face was gray and drawn. He had aged ten years in half an hour.
“I said it was bad, Keith. It’s worse than that. It’s Corphyrion.”
I took a deep breath and held it. “Yeah. It would be. Damn, Walt! We’ll never hold it! It’s too far!”
“We’ll hold it,” said Walt. “We’ll hold it because we have to hold it.”
And he was right, of course. If we didn’t hold Corphyrion, we’d lose more than Starpath. Starpath first, but then the whole spiral arm.
The captain pulled up to us then and handed me a set of combats. Behind him sprinted Matt DeLuso, half in and half out of his fighting gear.
“Major!” he said and started a salute in my direction. Then he saw Walt beside me and turned the gesture to him. “Commander Martin! Sir, I—”
I said, “Okay, hold it, Cadet. This is a Priority Red, son. I don’t have time to tell you what that means. Neither does the Commander. Get yourself to supply and draw a weapon. Pull one for me while you’re at it. There won’t be a briefing on this one, Matt—just stick close and come out shooting.”
Matt stared. “Shooting? Sir, shooting at what?”
I looked at him, then at Walt. Walt smiled grimly. “Cadet, we haven’t the faintest idea. But I think we’ll know what to shoot at when we see it.”
I didn’t have the slightest doubt about that.
Walt and I transmitted together, on the second wave. DeLuso and Captain Hamiel, Commander Martin’s captain-aide, came right behind us.
It was a pure, textbook hell. There were about forty men already crowded outside the dome, behind the bubble of our force field. There was no room to do anything. Everyone was on top of someone else. Beside me, a heavy-weapons sergeant cursed under his breath as a combat foot came down on his gauntlet hand. He was trying to assemble a bulky disruptor that had of necessity been transmitted in four sections.
Raw, unimaginable power was surging in from Starpath worlds to supplement and reinforce the dome’s generators. The field’s protective bubble was expanding to make room for our forces—but not fast enough. The dome’s air conditioning wasn’t built to handle this kind of thing. On top of that, whatever was outside our field was letting us have it with some pretty awesome stuff. Energy washed over the field, turning it faintly red, and we were getting plenty of heat from that alone.
A hand tapped my shoulder, and I faced Commander Martin. He motioned me to the far side of the dome where a harried group of technicians were laboring over a small, glowing screen.
“Their weapons output makes it damn near impossible to pin down any positions,” he growled. “But we think we have something.” He pointed. “There. Those three blips keep turning up in spite of the static. We have three disruptors assembled. I can’t afford to wait for more. We can’t take much more of this pounding, Major—get this stuff in line and try to knock out those positions!”
I pulled Captain Hamiel along with me and sent Cadet DeLuso back to key in the cables from radar to our bank of disruptors. Sweat burned into my eyes under the heavy combat armor. I glanced up once and saw a deep circle of cherxyred pouring across the side of our field.
Suddenly the sweat under my helmet turned to ice. We were dealing with some smart cookies. They hadn’t been able to penetrate out force field with their mass firepower—so they were turning everything they had on one spot. That spot was absorbing a hell of a lot of energy—and holding. For how long?
I didn’t want to think too much about that.
DeLuso sprinted up and signaled me the cables were keyed. I turned. Two Starpathers were gingerly lowering the deadly disruptor tubes and extracting the shiny safety keys.
“Ready, Major,” said Hamiel. “I’ve set it up for one blast over each of the three targets. I think, sir, if we hit them while they’re still concentrating fire on one area—”
I nodded quickly, cutting him off, and glanced once more at the deep, red scar spreading across our field.
I wondered what the enemy—whoever or whatever they were—would be thinking right now. The more I considered that concentrated firepower stunt, the less I liked it.
It was a good idea, certainly. Maybe I’d have done the same thing in their place. Still, maybe it was just too good an idea. . . .
I turned back to Hamiel. “Captain, change your settings. Concentrate two of your weapons on targets one and three. Lob the other one high and slow over target two. I want it to fire a good two seconds ahead of your other weapons.”
Hamid stared. I could see his eyes darting around to the side land behind me, probably hoping to find Walt looking over my shoulder.
“Major,” he said slowly, “we don’t know much about their weapons, but we do know they have the capacity to knock off a slow-firing battery.”
“That, Captain, is my thinking, too. It’s getting hotter than hell in here—please carry out the order, Hamiel! Now!” He turned red under his helmet, his mouth opening with the beginning of another protest. I moved him aside quickly.
“DeLuso!”
The cadet nodded, moved to the weapons and made rapid adjustments. He raised his hands from the board, and I pressed the button of the first disruptor, sending the silver bolt in a high, slow arc they couldn’t miss.
They didn’t. Before I’d counted off the two seconds, a white blast shook the dome, and I jammed home the other two buttons at once. Twin missiles thrummed through the field in a ground-hugging trajectory. A mile away, double cones of silent purple light winked and died. I ran around the dome and glanced at the small screen.
Two of the blips Were gone for good. A disruptor missile plays some pretty horrifying tricks on its target. Every atom in the area moves a meter to its right and changes place with its neighbor. Result: some pretty gory scenery.
“Major.” It was Hamiel. “Sir, I—”
“Forget it, Captain. We don’t have time for a bloody court martial—those characters aren’t licked yet!” In answer, a flood of red splashed over the dome. I grinned anyway—their concentration was a lot weaker than before.
We fed bolts into our three disruptors as fast as they could fire. Some of them got through—and a lot of them didn’t.
We weren’t fooled by the enemy’s strength any more, but they had learned a lot about us, too. They were answering us from three new positions now. But they had spread their power thin. I could feel their concentrations weakening, and I could read the story in the viewer. Walt looked over my shoulder. I looked back, and he smiled grimly.
“Okay,” he said, “let’s take ’em, Major.”
It always seems to end up that way, doesn’t it? You can soften up the enemy with the most awesome of weapons. Then you have to go in yourself and dig ’em out.
We went. And every Starpath soldier that leaped through that force field knew there was only one way back. He knew that field couldn’t be turned off to let him in unless every enemy position was destroyed first. I did what every other soldier did. I tried not to think about it.
There wasn’t time to worry about getting back. We found that out soon enough. I lost half a dozen troopers before we made the small gully about 100 yards from the dome.
I knew Walt’s group had fared a little better. But not much. We gave them everything we had—hand disruptor, V-grenades, small arms fire. We did a pretty fair job of it, too, because the second wave got through our covering fire with only half our casualties.
I moved out of our gully down a small ridge and got my first sight of the enemy. A dark beak opened under black pinpoint eyes, and a stubby weapon came up fast in long arms. I kicked in the green-tinted faceplate and kept going. A trooper in front of me turned with half a face and dropped under my feet. We stormed the first position and fried a good fifty of them. They died silently, great horny beaks straining for whatever poison they breathed back home.
I turned, then, to take a quick count of my men. My stomach sank, and a bad taste welled up in my throat. There were three of them left: Matt DeLuso and two veteran Starpath troopers.
I looked at Matt. He managed a tight-grin. He didn’t look much like a raw cadet now. You couldn’t come through that last hundred yards without earning Starpath wings.
Martin stepped into our post and held out a weary hand. “Well, Keith, we got ’em. It was a high price for Round One. But we did it.”
I looked at him. “Sir?” Then I got it. A cold hand reached up and touched the hairs on the back of my neck.
Of course—the ship! Somewhere, there was a ship that had brought the aliens to Corphyrion.
Walt nodded grimly. “I’ve ordered a couple of small flyers, but it’ll take half a damn hour to get them through piece by piece and reassembled. Hell, Keith, this is no way to fight a war—sneaking back and forth across the galaxy through a mousehole!” He cursed under his breath and ran a glove over his mud-streaked faceplate. “Come on, let’s get these troopers back to the dome area—fast!”
We almost made it . . .
Suddenly a soldier in the rear looked up and yelled loud enough to bum out every receiver in the area. And there it was—a black, egg-shaped ship rising out of the hills not two miles away.
We turned and sprinted for the dome area, but it was already too late. Red lights winked from the black ship, and troopers began to die. The disruptors behind our field opened up to cover us, but there was Little they could do. It was too late now to even think about lifting the field to let us in. No matter what happened on Corphyrion, we couldn’t risk losing the dome.
So that was that. If our disruptors couldn’t stop that looming black egg, the enemy could scoot for home and come back with a thousand, a million more—before we could get enough power on Corphrion to put down a small-sized riot.
There were five of us—Walt, DeLuso, myself and two troopers. We all hit the dirt at once and hung on. We had a pitiful amount of cover—a small, dried up creek bed and a couple of leafless shrubs. All we could do was wait. Acid I didn’t figure we had too much longer for that.
The alien ship dropped lower, then settled atop a small hill overlooking the dome. I cursed aloud, and DeLuso turned with a questioning look.
“They’re landing, Matt,” I said dryly, “because they’re a particularly nasty bunch of characters. They’re in no hurry to finish us off!”
“They don’t have to be,” grunted Walt. “That ship is just big enough to neutralize our disruptors, long enough to ram a beam through that field. Look!”
I glanced across the gully and squinted at the dome. A bright red spot was growing on one perimeter.
It couldn’t have been more than a foot wide, but it was a concentrated circle of awful power. Theoretically the dome’s field would hold. But it had never been meant to stand that kind of attack.
“Major!”
I jerked up, following DeLuso’s arm. I frowned, seeing nothing.
Then figures moved in the churned up debris before the dome, and three troopers suddenly plunged into the open, running for a grove of trees to our left. They made 15 or 20 yards, before the ship spotted them. I clutched Walt’s shoulder as red lances leaped out and cut the legs from under the last trooper. As he dropped, he tossed a long sliver of silver to the man beside him. He and his companion made it to the trees as angry beams of light cut through every leaf and branch above them.
Walt and I exchanged quick looks, then belly-crawled our way back along the ditch. DeLuso and the troopers followed.
We met them halfway—Captain Hamiel and a young Starpath technician. Hamiel grinned, snapped a quick salute at Martin.
“I thought you might find some use for a couple of these, sir. We also borrowed a carton of fuses.”
I looked at Hamiel’s feet, and I suddenly knew what the dying trooper had tossed to his buddy. There were three bound cannisters of disruptor missiles. Enough to send every alien on Corphyrion to his own particular heaven—the hard way.
