Battlefield Earth Part 104

He was walking back to the entrance when he saw Glencannon come out. He was b.u.t.toning up a heavy flying suit. He didn't have a communicator or copilot with him. He was walking toward a plane that was surrounded by sandbags. Jonnie thought he must have special orders and did not stop him.

Glencannon got into the plane, a heavily armored Mark 32 that had been converted to high-alt.i.tude flying.

Just as Jonnie started down into the pa.s.sage, Stormalong came racing out of it.

"Glencannon!" shouted Stormalong. But the pilot had taken off.

Chapter 4.

For days Glencannon had brooded over this. His sleep was tortured with nightmares.

In his mind he could still hear the voice of his Swiss friend, "Go on! Go on! I will shoot them down! Keep going!" And then his scream when he was. .h.i.t just before he ejected. And back of Glencannon's eyes he could still see the viewscreen of his friend's body being shot to pieces in the air.

He had his own playbacks of the war vessel that had launched those planes. And he had the shots taken of this monster overhead.

It was the Terrify-cla.s.s battle-plane-launching capital ship Capture. There could be no doubt about it. That was the vessel that had butchered his friend.

He felt he should have gone back, regardless of any orders. The two of them could have finished the Tolnep attack plane, he was certain. But instead he had followed orders.

He had suppressed the urge to go up and destroy that ship, and he felt that if he did not go ahead and do it now his whole life would be a nightmare.

He heard Stormalong's voice in clear Psychlo on the local command channel: "Glencannon! You must come back! I order you to land!" Glencannon clicked the channel off.

This was Stormalong's own Mark 32 he was flying. It had been in "emergency reserve." It was rebuilt for high alt.i.tudes, the doors and ports sealed tight. It had huge firepower and even side bombs that could destroy half a city. It was armored to take a ferocious beating. And while its guns may or may not be able to penetrate the skin of a capital ship, there were other ways.

They could not follow him from the ground. All other Mark 32s were at Lake Victoria and here they were only using interceptors. No, they could not follow him. Not to the heights he was going.

He vaulted skyward higher and higher. He adjusted his air mask so it was snug: he was going to go out of the atmosphere.

The Capture was swinging in a slow and ponderous ellipse, three hundred fifty miles above Kariba. It was fifty miles above the termination of the Earth's atmosphere. It was operating on reaction engines and was no longer simply sailing in orbit.

Planes would leave it, streak downward to targets, and then return to be rearmed. One spotted him and dove. Almost with contempt, Glencannon centered him in his sights and pressed his fire b.u.t.ton. The Mark 32 bucked in recoil.

The Tolnep burst into fire and plummeted earthward like a comet.

It alerted the Capture to his presence, and as he neared it the gun ports winked and long laces of flame streaked the sky about him. One splashed on the side of the Mark 32. It made the flight deck hot.

Glencannon danced back out of range. He saw the steering ports of the ship jet fire and antic.i.p.ated its course.

Twenty-five miles in front of it he began to tap his console to hold his position. It was just out of the Tolnep's range.

He adjusted his viewscreens and began to watch.

The stars were glaring bright in the blackness above him but he had no eye for them. The Earth spread out its curves below him but he saw them not.

His whole, concentrated, obsessed attention was on the Capture, studying it.

The ship resumed operation after a bit, believing his mission must be surveillance, not attack. The arrogance of such a ship was plain. It did not believe it could be hurt. It was once more launching and taking aboard planes.

Glencannon saw that just before they opened the huge front ports of their hangar deck, a small exterior warning light winked, probably to warn approaching planes to stand clear and not get in front of the ship as it was about to open the door and launch.

Each time the door opened he studied the enlarged viewscreen of the interior. The entire hangar deck was cluttered with planes. Tolneps in pressure suits were racing about, fueling ships and loading bombs. They had gotten out much larger bombs now.

They were leaving the interior magazine open. Fuel cans, probably liquid gases, littered the hangar deck. The Tolneps were overconfident and sloppy. But what could one expect of a slaver?

Glencannon shifted his attention to the rearing diamond-shaped bridge. There were two figures there, moving back and forth. One was not in uniform. A civilian, probably. The one in the naval cap seemed to have attention only for the civilian. No, they were not being alert.

He turned his attention back to the outside light and the hangar door. He timed it. He calculated his own position.

In the back of his mind he could hear the voice of his friend from time to time: "Go on! Go on! I will shoot them down! Keep going!"

That was exactly what Glencannon was going to do: shoot them down!

For the first time in quite a while he felt calm, relaxed, confident. And totally determined. He was doing exactly what he had to do.

The next time...

The light went on!

His hands. .h.i.t the console.

The Mark 32 streaked ahead, almost smashed him through the back of the seat with acceleration.

Guns flamed in the Capture.

b.a.l.l.s of orange glare racketed against the Mark 32.

It sliced straight through the barrage.

Just as it entered the open hangar door Glencannon's hand hit all guns and bombs.

The explosion was a sun blowing apart!

Jonnie and Stormalong saw it as they stood outside the cone, back of a gun viewscreen. They saw the plane enter the hangar door with all guns blazing.

But it required no viewscreen to see the flash. The abrupt glare lit the fading daylight for fifty miles around. It was painful to the eyes.

It would be soundless in the void above the Earth. But it was not motionless.

The giant capital ship began to fall. A flaming arc began to draw its way down the sky, slowly, very slowly at first, but building up speed.

And then it hit the atmosphere and began to burn more brightly.

Down it came, further and further, lower and lower.

"My G.o.d!" said Stormalong. "It's going to hit the lake!"

Down it came, faster and faster, like some huge comet painting the sky.

It was dropping at an angle.

Stormalong's muscles strained as though by will alone he could push it into the hills and away from the water above the dam.

Down it came, a blazing incandescent wreck, traveling at great speed.

Five miles uplake from the dam it struck.

The heat and speed of pa.s.sage thundered in the air. Then came the screeching crash of the strike.

Steam and water geysered a thousand feet in the air.

There was an underwater flash as some remaining part of its fuel exploded.

The shock concussion raced ahead of the wave as great as any tidal wave.

The deserted Chinese village was snuffed out as though it had never been.

The concussion wave hit the back of the dam.

The water wave inundated the structure, smashing flashboards, flying in a mighty cascade into the air at the dam front.

The ground underfoot shook.

Breathless, they steadied themselves and stared. Would the whole dam go?

Waves subsided. The dam was still there. But there was new sound in it.

The lights were still on. The generators were running.

Guards who had been in the powerhouse came staggering out.

Water was roaring down the river as the excess sped away, tearing down banks, ripping through islands.

Engineers came racing from the cone.

Most of the machinery which had been parked near the lake had been swept away. They were racing about trying to find a flying platform.

They found one imbedded in the bank, half-covered with mud. They freed it, swept the mud off it, and got it flying.

The engineers and a machine operator went flying along the top of the dam.

Jonnie and Stormalong stood by beside a plane, waiting to see whether the engineers needed help. Their voices, in Chinese, were coming over a mine radio.

The atmosphere armor over the cone was still sizzling in Stage Three. Guards got back into the powerhouse and turned off the dam protection cable and reduced the cone armor to Stage One.

Although this dam lake was one hundred twenty miles long, it seemed lower in level.

Jonnie and Stormalong were about to take off to see what the engineers had found when they came back. They landed and were reporting to Chong-won. There was a lot of excited and upset talk and Jonnie went over.

"They say the dam did not break," Chong-won told him. "Flashboards are broken all along the top and even some concrete along the walkway and the guard rails are gone. But that is nothing. They can see no cracks.

However, at the far end of the dam abutment, over there on the other side of the dam, it seems to have shaken loose from the bank and there is water escaping. They say water is erosive and it could get bigger. It could even greatly lower the level of the lake to a point where the water turbines will not run."

"How many hours?" said Jonnie. Chong-won asked them. They could only guess. Maybe four, maybe five hours. They would do all they could to stop the water and plug the leak. They did not have much grouting to seal it. The whole far end of the dam seemed to have torn out of the bank. They wanted to get back over and do what they could.

Angus came running out of the pa.s.sageway seeking Jonnie. "We can fire now! There is no shooting."

"Maybe you can fire the rig," said Stormalong, appalled at Glencannon's sacrifice. "But for how long?"

"At least he bought us that," said Jonnie, sadly.

Chapter 5.

The small gray man had followed the pack to the Singapore area. He had instructed his ship captain not to get in the way of military craft for they were inclined to be impetuous and p.r.o.ne to accidents, to say nothing of poorly aimed shots. Thus they were a little late on the scene and the battle had already begun.

The minesite was not at all hard to locate- it was a brilliant cone of defensive fire, its guns arcing up and converging upon target after target. It was quite a distance north of the ancient ruined city, and just north of the minesite was a hydroelectric dam. The gunfire was quite intense and disturbed his infrabeams, preventing for the moment a closer inspection of what they had down there.

The small gray man did not consider himself much of a military specialist, and things which a military man might know at once, he usually had to look up. He wanted the maximum-minimum height which would give him a safe alt.i.tude from which to observe and it was quite laborious to identify those guns. At last he had it: "Local defense perimeter, computerized antia.s.sault craft, and bomb predetonation atmosphere-nonatmosphere beam projection cannon; rate of fire 15,000 shots per minute, maximum 175,000 feet, minimum safe limit 2,000 feet; crew two; barrels and shields manufactured by Tambert Armaments, Predicham; computers by Intergalactic Arms, Psychlos; Cost C4,269 freight on platform Predicham." My, my, what cheap guns. But that was Intergalactic Mining: "Profit- first, last, and always, profit." No wonder they had trouble! One would have thought they would have orbit cannon.

So it was safe to remain two hundred miles up so long as they did not get in the road of launched craft from the non-atmosphere major war vessels riding at three hundred fifty miles high. He told his captain and then asked his communicator to focus beams very sharply on what appeared to be a firing platform under the shield cable below.

He spotted it almost at once and had a surge of hope. It was a console! A transshipment console right there near the platform! There were even some men about it as though working it.

Intently, he watched his viewscreens for a teleportation trace. He watched for quite a while. There was none. He wondered that the military men in the war vessels had not noticed this lack. Maybe they did not know the telltale trace existed. Maybe they had a different make of viewscreen. But the probability was that they had never seen one because they were always shooting and you couldn't shoot- The small gray man sighed. He was no detective, and the evidence so plain before him had gone unnoticed. Those men down there could not be using a transshipment rig. They even had their own planes in the air. And either one, planes or shots, would prevent any use of teleportation. The rig itself would blow to bits with distortions.

The military had begun to give attention to the power dam lake now and were trying to drop bombs into it to cut off the minesite power supply. This gave a respite to the minesite itself and the small gray man had been put onto that console.

He looked up the mineral traces which resulted.

Carbon!

That settled it. That thing down there was a burned-out console.