He and his copilot Dwight had drawn the long straw to the envy of their fellow pilots. They had drilled the navigation. No Scot had ever gotten within a hundred miles of this minesite in over a thousand years and little was actually known of it, but they had absorbed what there was.
They had lain all night, quite relaxed, warmly dressed for stratosphere flying. They had heard the warning horns go for the final firing of the semiannual. They had piled into their seats, hands waiting at the consoles.
Wide-eyed and thrilled, they had watched Jonnie’s incredible sprint. Something had gone wrong as he reached the cage, and that part wasn’t so good. No rescue. But Jonnie had piled down under the edge of the bluff, safe as a wee bairn in his truckle bed before the blast rifles went.
The recoil had been a bit disconcerting, for it had slewed the plane out of position with concussion. But all was well. They had vaulted their plane into the sky on schedule. They had seen the planetwide radio towers collapse in a tangle of cables behind them, hit by both the concussion of recoil and bazooka fire. A twelve-hour radio silence had begun successfully. Ample time for the farthest minesite to be reached without any warning.
At two thousand miles an hour, one hundred thousand feet up, they had shifted the clock and come down to normal Psychlo approach levels to a nighttime minesite. There it was!
Scanners and viewscreens alight, they found no sign of hostile action, no guard planes in the air.
Lighted steam was coming out of some shafts in the hills that must be five miles deep. Smelter chimneys belched curling, green smoke. Warehouses stood in bold outline. And there were the glowing domes of the compound! Target one.
But Dunneldeen, being Dunneldeen, was quick to take advantage of sudden opportunities, even when they were not quite specified in planning.
The silly apes down there lit up the whole landing area for him! It gleamed like a bloody stage. They thought he was simply some nonscheduled Psychlo flight. Bless radio silence.
And Dunneldeen saw something else. Strung on massive power poles, coming down from the north, was their power supply. And right there, in the full glare of the landing area, was the obvious master pole. The freaks cared nothing about an aerial navigation menace. It was the master pole. The lines from the north came down into it. The local light cables all routed out from it to the buildings and compound. There was a big open space for landing and takeoff in the middle of this spider’s web.
Right at the side of the landing stage was a huge wheel. Dunneldeen recognized it. The master wheel that, when spun, withdrew the master bus bar from the circuit.
By Dunneldeen’s opportunist mentality, it was simply too good to miss. Why let them have lots of light while they rushed about manning their defense weapons and trying to get out to their planes? Why not simply throw the whole thing into total chaos? And then go up and, with infrared screens, shoot the place to bits. Their own plane had a wave neutralizer, copied from one stolen from a ground car, and they could turn it on and those apes wouldn’t know what to shoot at. Further, if this battle plane took off it would seem like it was a defense plane.
Dunneldeen spoke rapidly to a startled but agreeable Dwight. Just as casually as though they were a visiting plane, they landed right beside the big wheel. Dunneldeen hitched the assault rifle strap over his shoulder, opened the door of the plane, stepped down, walked over to the bus bar wheel, and gave it its first spin.
It all went okay just up to that point. But now a Psychlo in a little guardhouse they had not spotted, only ten feet from that bus bar, stepped out and stared at Dunneldeen.
“The Tolneps!” screamed the guard.
Before Dunneldeen could get the assault rifle into position the guard had closed the door and hit a siren. A bullhorn opened up enough to blast one’s eardrums in. “Tolnep attack! All posts! Tolneps! Gun positions!”
Regardless of what Tolneps might be, Dunneldeen spun the bus bar wheel so fast it screamed. He realized then why it was so close to the landing stage. They darkened the place for attack precautions. And had a guardhouse right handy to do it.
Dunneldeen raced back to the plane. He dove in. Dwight’s assault rifle opened up as guards boiled out of a stairwell. They dissolved into luminous green flashes.
The battle plane soared. Dunneldeen threw on the wave neutralizer and infrared screens.
They reverted to plan.
With guns set to “No Flame, Maximum Concussion,” they roared across the compound.
The domes squashed like punctured balloons.
They raced across the lines of warehouses and knocked their roofs flat.
For good measure they made another pass, this time dropping non-radiation, antipersonnel bombs.
One gun opened up at them and the plane took a jolt. They flashed down and squashed the gun with a single blast.
And that was the end of the base. The Psychlo Intergalactic Mining Company did not believe in lavishing money on safety equipment in any department, apparently. And hadn’t Jonnie said something about Terl calling in all the armaments from these bases?
From what they could gather, standing by way up in the air, the creatures in the compound had been unable to get the masks on before the domes were smashed, for there certainly wasn’t any mob coming out.
They hung around for a while, occasionally knocking out an isolated vehicle and a stray guard.
It really was quiet down there after that.
Then they saw something on their radar screen. It was an incoming transport. Abruptly they recalled transport plane engines leaving after the incoming firing. This thing had been slowpoking its way home and they had passed it. Good!
Dunneldeen, much to Dwight’s dismay, landed beside the bus bar and turned it on.
They just sat there. The landing lights were now on. Any Psychlo employee left alive was not concentrating on coming out.
The transport plane landed. The Psychlos got out, fooled around with baggage. Then the pilot got out. The Psychlos walked in a mob toward the compound. Then they began to feel something was wrong and stopped. The Psychlo pilot reached for his belt gun.
Dunneldeen and Dwight cut them down with assault rifles.
Dunneldeen flew Dwight over to the fuel dump. They knew what fuel cartridge the transport took, for it was a duplicate of the plane that had brought Jonnie to Scotland. Dwight got the fuel cartridges. Dunneldeen brought him back to the transport plane. Dwight took the old cartridges out and put new ones in. Dunneldeen shot a guard car that had survived and came racing toward them. It blew up.
Dunneldeen got into the air. Dwight flew the transport up. Dunneldeen shot the master power pole to bits in a fanfare of sparks and flashes.
Seeing that Dwight was well clear, Dunneldeen flew to a point about ten feet above the breathe-gas dump. He dropped a low-yield, lead-shielded, time-fused radioactive mine on it. He soared up and the dump roared in a lovely green blue flash.
He again checked to see where Dwight had gotten to, saw he was safe. Dunneldeen soared to ten thousand feet, nosed the plane over, sighted, and fired at the explosives dump. It went up like a miniature volcano. Absolutely beautiful.
He dropped back and verified that the compound had not exploded. This was part of their orders. The machinery and stored planes were apparently intact.
With no atmosphere to breathe and no fuel to fly, with ninety percent of its personnel probably dead, the minesite in Cornwall was a write-off. That paid for a lot of crimes.
Dunneldeen fell in beside the transport. “What’s a Tolnep?” asked Dunneldeen. Dwight didn’t know either, but Dunneldeen supposed he did look strange in a Chinko air mask and U.S. Air Force stratosphere flying gear.
They had already agreed on a new and wonderful plan Dunneldeen had thought up. They had almost six hours of radio silence left. Orders complete and time on their hands.
Dunneldeen was related to the chief of Clanfearghus, and besides, there was a lass he had not seen for nearly a year.
They hop
ed the other fourteen minesite attack planes had done as well. Of course, perhaps not with the same style.
They headed for Scotland.
4
Zzt had sunk into deep apathy.
The gas drone roared on, deafening, cold and dark.
That silly dimwit Nup!
Zzt had thought at first that the engine sounds he heard were just some rattles in this old relic, but after a while his trained ear could pick the sound out separately from the din in here. He listened in different parts of the cheerless drone and then at the flapping door. It was the Mark 32! The Mark 32, “Hit ’Em Low, Kill ’Em,” heavy armored ground strafer.
Nup was flying escort to the drone?
Zzt had puzzled and puzzled on it and in fact had done little else. At first Zzt was all hope. He thought Nup had followed him out of the hangar intending to lower a ladder to the open door and snatch him out of here. But Nup seemed to be utterly unaware of the fact that there was an open door and was flying on the opposite side of the drone from it.
True, Zzt had not briefed him at all. The busted lamp bulb had mostly been talking about Bolbods and rumors in Psychlo that they were the next target. What nonsense! Zzt went over it carefully. No, in the rush of trying to get out and at those attacking Tolneps with a ground strafer, he had simply raced around asking whether anyone had been checked out on a Mark 32 and had slammed Nup into the copilot seat and then had had to go attend to that drone.
He dimly remembered his last words to Nup. They were “Come on!” And he had been surprised when Nup hadn’t run after him to the drone.
Instead of mopping up the Tolneps, Nup was out there flying escort in a ground strafer. He might have been checked out, but he certainly didn’t know what it was for. Why, with that Mark 32 he could batter down a whole city! And nothing could penetrate its hide. It was a support plane, a support plane for ground troops. No ground fire could touch it. No interceptor ships could even scratch its hide. And what was Nup doing with it? Riding escort to a drone that needed none. Zzt got bitter. Damn Terl and damn Nup!
Then as the huge drone with its deafening engines rolled along to the devils-knew-what destination, Zzt began to realize that Nup didn’t know he was aboard!
A bit later, when he looked at his watch, Zzt realized that that Mark 32 was going to run out of fuel. Wherever they were in this dark night, that Mark 32 was a write-off. He hadn’t put fuel in it for such a trip because he didn’t have cartridges, and a Mark 32 had no great range anyway, being intended for local use.
Well, Zzt had plenty of breathe-gas. He had a gun, he had a wrench.
For a while he monkeyed around with the preset box armor, thinking he might be able to open it and change it. But without keys or the means to make them, not even a piece of blast artillery could open it. When they said “armored” they sure meant these damned old gas drones.
So he had finally slumped down on the cold plates in the forward end of the ship and in apathy decided to last it out. In a day or two or three this thing would land. There was nothing in it to cushion anyone from the rough landings these made, but Zzt imagined he would survive it.
Just sit and wait. That was all he could do.
Damn Terl! Damn Nup! Damn the company!
And all on half-pay and no bonuses.
5
Jonnie was searching for the drone.
Every viewscreen was flashing.
Down below the cold Arctic spread out, visible in the screens, invisible to direct sight. He remembered it from his last trip across it. A forbidding array. Once down in it you were dead, if not from direct cold on an ice floe, then from immersion in those waters.
As nearly as he could judge, the gas drone was somewhere ahead only a few minutes now. Shortly he should have it on his screen.
He was a little bit disturbed about the girls and Thor. He had not seen them on his screens as he went by. Of course he was by then very high. The spot of light he saw might be their fire, but it also might be the planes still burning. He had wasted too much time already and help was on the way to them. He remembered their numb faces when they realized he was leaving them there. But they must be all right. Probably they were at the Academy or the compound by now. Maybe the parson had been driving very fast. A mine ground car could do over sixty on rough terrain.
He hoped the other planes had reached the minesites and done their jobs. There was still five hours of radio silence yet to go. He wished he could open up on this radio and yell to them, “Hey, anybody that’s done in his minesite, get up here to such and such coordinates and help blast this confounded drone.” But he didn’t dare. It might cost some of them their lives by alerting their targets. They all had extra fuel and then some. They all had spare ammunition. But if any had had to delay or were waiting for an optimal moment to pounce on a minesite and he opened up, it could throw their lives away. He wasn’t about to kill any Scots to save his own hide. When radio silence opened and Robert didn’t hear from him, Robert would converge them to handle the drone. Late, maybe, but a second chance. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that, for their friends in Scotland would be endangered.
Maybe he was searching for something that was wave cancelled. That escort ship was his hope. Maybe it had peeled off or gone somewhere else. Its blip should be visible!
Ah, now. What was that tiny spark of green on the viewscreen? Another iceberg? No, the height telltale read 4,223 feet. Speed? Speed?
Three hundred two miles per hour!
He had the escort on the screen.
His gloved hands danced on the console. He braked down from hypersonic, dropping abruptly to five thousand feet in a descent as fast as a firing rocket. He cushioned at the bottom, feeling a trifle squashed for a moment. Easy, take it easy. Size up this escort.
He got it bright and clear in infrared. There was the drone beside it. One thing at a time. This escort was first target.
What was that plane? He had never seen anything like it before. Lowslung, flat, minimum skids . . . it looked like it was mainly armor!
Suddenly he realized that his guns might not even dent it. He had seen a tank bazooka flash against its side without affecting it in the least. He had a sinking feeling. Not only was the drone renowned as impregnable, but here was an escort ship that—
His mind raced with possibilities. Robert the Fox sometimes said, “When you only have two inches of claymore, use ten feet of guile.” What did that escort know about him?
He reached for the local command radio switch. The range was only about twenty miles.
A torrent of angry Psychlo words hit him: “It’s about time somebody showed up! I should have been relieved of this job hours ago! What kept you?” Angry. Very angry!
Jonnie opened his transmit switch. He lowered the pitch of his voice as much as possible. “How are things?”
“The drone’s all right and why shouldn’t it be? I’ve been escorting it, haven’t I? You certainly run a messed-up planet here! It’s not like this on Psychlo! I should hope not! You’re late! What’s your name?”
Jonnie hastily dredged up a name that was common to twenty percent of the Psychlos. “Snit. Could I ask who I’m talking to?”
“Nup, Executive Administrator Nup! Use ‘Your Executiveship’ when you address me! Crap planet.”
“Did you arrive recently, Your Executiveship?” asked Jonnie.
“Just today, Snit. And how am I greeted? With a crummy Bolbod attack anyone could handle! Wait,” suspiciously, “you have a very strange accent. Like . . . like . . . yes, like a Chinko instruction disk! That’s what it is. You’re not a Bolbod, are you?” The click of firing buttons pulled off safety to standby.
“I was born here,” said Jonnie truthfully.
A sharp nasty laugh. “Oh, a colonial!” Silence for a moment. “Were you briefed on this mission?”
“A little bit, Your Executiveship. But orders have been changed. That’s what I was sent to tell you.”
“You’re not relieving me??
?? Very hostile.
“The destination has been changed!” said Jonnie. “There’s radio silence. They had to send me with the word.”
“Radio silence?”
“Planetary wide, Your Executiveship.”
“Ah, then it is a Bolbod attack! They operate everything on radio! I knew it.”
“I’m afraid so, Your Executiveship.”
“Well, if you’re not going to relieve me, what am I expected to do? I am almost out of fuel! Where’s the nearest minesite?”
Jonnie thought very fast.
“Your Executiveship, the orders were that if you were almost out of fuel”— Good Lord, where could he send him? That Mark 32 was the only thing that one could home in on in a search!—“I was to tell you to land with magnetic grapnels on top of the drone . . . right at the front end.”
“What?” Incredulous.
“Then drop off when we come close to the next minesite. You’ve got a map there?”
“No. I haven’t got a map. You run things very badly on this planet. Not like Psychlo. It should be reported.”
“There’s an attack on.”
“Nothing can dent this plane. It’s a ground strafer. I don’t know why it’s being sent on escort.”
“How much fuel do you have, Your Executiveship?”
A pause. Then, “Crap! It’s only ten minutes’ worth! You almost killed me with your lateness.”
“Well, just land on the extreme front end of the drone—”
“Why the front end? I should land in the middle. If I land on the front end it will unbalance the weight distribution of the drone.”
“It’s the way it’s loaded this trip. They omitted part of the load in the front. They said specifically the front end.”
“This is a pretty heavy plane!”
“Not for the drone. You better get moving, Your Executiveship. That water is cold down there. Ice, too! And you’ll need fuel to offload. It’s only a few hours to the next minesite.”
Jonnie watched his screens. He couldn’t see the plane in direct sight. With a bit of anxiety, he opened up the view to include the monstrous drone.