The dark cone bulked higher and higher in the screen. It must be seven miles around the crater, and a mile deep; when that thing blew out, ten or fifteen thousand years ago, it must have been something to see, preferably from a ship a thousand miles off-planet. It was so huge that it was hard to realize that the jumbled foothills around it were themselves respectably lofty mountains.
When they were within five miles of it, something twinkled slightly near the summit. An instant later, the missileman, in his turret overhead, shouted:
"Missile coming up; counter-missile off!"
"Grab onto something, everybody!" Karski yelled, bracing himself in his seat.
Conn, on his feet, flung his arms around an upright stanchion and hung on. Fred"s hand gave a twisting jerk on the steering handle; the _Goblin_ went corks.c.r.e.w.i.n.g upward. In the rearview screen, Conn saw a pink fireball blossom far below. The sound and the shock-wave never reached them; the _Goblin_ outran them. _Dragon_ and _Vampire_ were spiraling away in opposite directions. The radio was loud with voices, and a few of the words were almost printable. A gong began clanging from the command post on top of the mesa on the mainland.
"Be quiet, all of you!" Klem Zareff was bellowing. "And get back from there. Back three or four miles; close enough so they won"t dare use thermonuclears. Take cover behind one of those ridges, where they can"t detect you. Then we can start figuring what the Gehenna to do next."
That made sense. And get it settled who"s in command of this Donnybrook, while we"re at it, Conn thought. He looked into the rear and sideview screens, and taking cover immediately made even more sense. Two more fireb.a.l.l.s blossomed, one dangerously close to the _Dragon_. Guns were firing from the mountaintop, too, big ones, and sh.e.l.ls were bursting close to them. He saw a sh.e.l.l land on and another beside one of the enemy gun positions--115-mm"s from the _Lester Dawes_, he supposed. He continued to cling to the stanchion, and the _Goblin_ shot straight up, and he was expecting to see the sky blacken and the stars come out when the gunboat leveled and started circling down again. The mountainside, he saw, was sending up a lightning-crackling tower of smoke and dust that swelled into a mushroom top.
Klem Zareff, on the radio, was demanding to know who"d launched that.
"We did, sir; _Dragon_," Stefan Jorisson was replying. "We had to get rid of it. We took a hit. Gun turret"s smashed, Milt Hennant"s dead, and Abe Samuels probably will be before I"m done talking, and if we get this crate down in one piece, it"ll do for a miracle till a real one happens."
"Well, be careful how you shoot those things off," his father implored, from the _Lester Dawes_. "Get one inside the crater and we won"t have any s.p.a.ceport."
The _Lester Dawes_ vanished behind a mountain range a few miles from the volcano. The _Dragon_, still airborne but in obvious difficulties, was limping after her, and the _Vampire_ was covering the withdrawal, firing rapidly but with doubtful effect with her single 90-mm and tossing out counter-missiles. There was another fireball between her and the mountain. Then, when the _Dragon_ had followed the _Lester Dawes_ to safety, she turned tail and bolted, the _Goblin_ following.
As they approached the mountains, something the shape of a recon-car and about half the size pa.s.sed them going in the opposite direction.
As they dropped into the chasm on the other side, another nuclear went off at the volcano.
When Conn and Fred left the _Goblin_ and boarded the ship, they found Rodney Maxwell, Captain Poole, and a couple of others on the bridge.
Charley Gatworth, the skipper of the _Vampire_, Morgan Gatworth"s son, was with them, and, imaged in a screen, so was Klem Zareff. One of the other screens, from a pickup on the _Vampire_, showed the _Dragon_ lying on her side, her turret crushed and her gun, with the muzzle-brake gone, bent upward. A couple of lorries from the _Lester Dawes_ were alongside; as Conn watched, a blanket-wrapped body, and then another, were lowered from the disabled gunboat.
"Fred, how are you and Charley fixed for counter-missiles?" Zareff was asking. "Get loaded up with them off the ship, as many as you can carry. Charley, you go up on top of this ridge above, and take cover where you can watch the mountain. Transmit what you see back to the ship. Fred, you take a position about a quarter way around from where you are now. Don"t let them send anything over, but don"t start anything yourselves. I"m coming out with everything I can gather up here; I"ll be along myself in a couple of hours, and the rest will be stringing in after me. In the meantime, Rodney, you"re in command."
Well, that settled that. There was one other point, though.
"Colonel," Conn said, "I a.s.sume that this s.p.a.ceport is occupied by one of these new prospecting companies. We have no right to take it away from them, have we?"
"They fired on us without warning," Karski said. "They killed Milt, and it"s ten to one Abe won"t live either. We owe them something for that."
"We do, and we"ll pay off. Conn, you a.s.sume wrong. This gang"s been at the s.p.a.ceport long enough to get the detection system working and put the defense batteries on ready. They didn"t do that since this morning, and up to last evening they neglected to file claim. I"ll a.s.sume they"re on the wrong side of the law. They"re outlaws, Conn.
All the raids along the east coast; everybody"s blamed them on the Badlands gangs. I"ll admit they"re responsible for some of it, but I"ll bet this gang at the s.p.a.ceport is doing most of it."
That was reasonable. Barathrum was closer to the scene of the worst outlaw depredations than the Badlands, not more than an hour at Mach Two. And n.o.body ever thought of Barathrum as an outlaw hangout. People rarely thought of Barathrum at all. He liked the idea. The only thing against it was that he wanted so badly to believe it.
They brought the body of Milt Hennant aboard, and Abe Samuels, swathed in bandages and immobilized by narcotic injections. A few more of the _Dragon_"s six-man crew had been injured. Jorrisson, the skipper, had one trouser leg slit to the belt and his right thigh splinted and bandaged; he took over the _Lester Dawes_" missile controls, which he could manage sitting in one place. Fred Karski and Charley Gatworth went aboard their craft and lifted out.
For a long time, nothing happened. Conn got out the plans of the volcano s.p.a.ceport and the photomaps of the surrounding area. The princ.i.p.al entrance, the front door of the s.p.a.ceport, was the crater of the extinct volcano itself. It was ringed, outside, with launching-sites and gun positions, and according to the data he had, some of the guns were as big as 250-mm. How many outlaws there were to man them was a question a lot of people could get killed trying to answer. The ship docks and shops were down on the level of the crater floor, in caverns, both natural and excavated, that extended far back into the mountain. There were two galleries, one above the other, extending entirely around the inside of the crater near the top; pa.s.sages from them gave access to the outside gun and missile positions.
With a dozen ships the size of the _Lester Dawes_, about five thousand men, and a CO who wasn"t concerned with trivialities like casualties, they could have taken the place in half an hour. With what they had, trying to fight their way in at the top was out of the question.
There was another way in. He had known about it from the beginning, and he was trying desperately to think of a way not to utilize it. It was a tunnel two miles long, running into some of the bottom workshops and storerooms back of the ship berths from a big blowhole or small crater at the foot of the mountain. According to the fifty-year-old plans, it was big enough to take a gunboat in, and on paper it looked like a royal highway straight to the heart of the enemy"s stronghold.
To Conn, it looked like a wonderful place to commit suicide. He"d only had a short introductory course, in one semester, in military and protective robotics, just enough to give him a foundation if he wanted to go into that branch of the subject later. It was also enough to give him an idea of the sort of b.o.o.by-traps that tunnel could be filled with. He knew what he"d have put into it if he"d been defending that place.
Colonel Zareff had sent one last message from Force Command when he lifted off with a flight of recon-cars. After that, he maintained a communication blackout. It was an hour and a half before he got close enough to be detected from the outlaw stronghold. Immediately, the volcano began spewing out missiles. Poole hastily took the _Lester Dawes_ ten miles down the rift-valley in sixty seconds, while Stefan Jorisson put out a nuclear-warhead missile and left it circling about where the ship had been. From their respective positions, Fred Karski and Charley Gatworth filled the airs.p.a.ce midway to the volcano with counter-missiles, each loaded with four rockets. There were explosions, fireb.a.l.l.s in the air and rising c.u.mulus clouds of varicolored smoke and dust. Only about half the enemy missiles reached the _Lester Dawes"_ former position.
When their controllers, back at the volcano, couldn"t see the ship in their screens, the missiles bunched together. Immediately, Jorisson sent his missile up to join them and detonated it. Including his own, eight nuclear weapons went off together in a single blast that shook the ground like an earthquake and churned the air like a hurricane.
Klem Zareff came on-screen at once.
"Now what did you do?" he demanded. "Blew the whole place up, didn"t you?"
Rodney Maxwell told him. Zareff laughed. "They might just think they got the ship; all the pickups would be smashed before they could see what really happened. You"re about ten miles south of that? Be with you in a few minutes."
They got a screen on for his rearview pickup. Zareff had with him a dozen recon-cars, some of them under robo-control; six gunboats followed, and behind them, to the horizon, other craft were strung out--airboats, troop carriers, and freight-scows. They could see enemy missiles approaching in Zareff"s front screen; counter-missiles got most of them, and a couple of pilotless recon-cars were sacrificed.
The _Lester Dawes_ blasted more missiles as they crossed the top of the mountain range. Then Zareff"s car was circling in and entering at one of the ship"s open cargo-ports. Zareff and Anse Dawes got out.
"Gunboats are only half an hour behind," Zareff said. "Get some screens on to them, Anse; you know the combinations. Now let"s see what kind of a mess we"re in here."
It was almost a miracle, the way the tottering old man Conn had seen on the dock at Litchfield when he had arrived from Terra had been rejuvenated.
The rest of the reinforcements arrived slowly, sending missiles and counter-missiles out ahead of them. Zareff began worrying about the supply; the enemy didn"t seem to be running short. By 1300--Conn noted the time incredulously; the battle seemed to have been going on forever, instead of just four hours--the _Lester Dawes_ had moved halfway around the volcano and was almost due west of it, and the eight gunboats were s.p.a.ced all around the perimeter. Then one stopped transmitting; in the other screens, there was a rising fireball where she had been. The radio was loud with verbal reports.
"_Poltergeist_," Zareff said, naming half a dozen names. One or two of them had been schoolmates of Conn"s at the Academy; he knew how he"d feel about it later, but now it simply didn"t register.
"They"re launching missiles faster than we can shoot them down," he said.
"That"s usually the beginning of the end," Zareff said. "I saw it happen too often during the War. We"ve got to get inside that place.
It"s a lot of harmless fun to send contragravity robots out to smash each other, but it doesn"t win battles. Battles are won by men, standing with their feet on the ground, using personal weapons."
"We"ll have to win this one pretty soon," Rodney Maxwell said. "The amount of nuclear energy we"ve been releasing will be detectable anywhere on the planet by now. The Government has a ship like the _Lester Dawes_ in commission; if this keeps on, she"ll be coming out for a look."
"Then we"ll have help," Captain Poole said.
"We need Government help like we need the polka-dot fever," Rodney Maxwell said. "If they get in it, they"ll claim the s.p.a.ceport themselves, and we"ll have fought a battle for nothing."
Well, that was it, then. The s.p.a.ceport was essential to the Maxwell Plan. He"d gotten seven men killed--eight, if the recon-car that was taking Abe Samuels to the hospital in Litchfield didn"t make it in time--and it was up to him to see that they hadn"t died for nothing.
He spread the photo-map and the s.p.a.ceport plans on the chart table.
"Look at this," he said.
Klem Zareff looked at it. He didn"t like it any better than Conn had.
He studied the plan for a moment, chewing his cigar.
"You know, it"s possible they don"t know that thing exists," he said, without too much conviction. "You"ll be betting the lives of at least twenty men; fewer than that couldn"t accomplish anything."
"I"ll be putting mine on the table along with them," Conn said. "I"ll lead them in."
He was wishing he hadn"t had to say that. He did, though. It was the only thing he could say.
"You better pick the men to go with me, Colonel," he continued. "You know them better than I do. We"ll need working equipment, too; I have no idea what we may have to take out of the way, inside."
"I won"t call for volunteers," Zareff said. "I"ll pick Home Guards; they did their volunteering when they joined."