The inner door of the soundproofed telecast-room burst open, three men hurried inside, and it slammed shut behind them. In the brief interval, there had been firing audible from outside. One of the men had a pistol in his right hand, and with his left arm he supported a companion, whose shoulder was mangled and dripped blood. The third man had a burp-gun in his hands. All were in civilian dress-shorts and light jackets. The man with the pistol holstered it and helped his injured companion into a chair. The burp-gunner advanced into the room, looked around, saw von Schlichten, and addressed him.
"General! The geeks turned on us!" he cried. "The Tenth North Uller"s mutinied; they"re running wild all over the place. They"ve taken their barracks and supply-buildings, and the lorry-hangars and the maintenance-yard; they"re headed this way in a mob. Some of the Zirk Cavalry"s joined them."
"How about the Kragans?"
"The Eighteenth Rifles? They"re with us. I saw a party of them firing into the mob; I saw some of the Tenth N.U.N.I. tossing a dead Kragan on their bayonets...."
"Have any ammo left for that burp-gun? Come on, then; let"s see what it"s like at Company House," von Schlichten said. "Captain Malavez, you know what to do about defending this station. Get busy doing it.
And have that girl in booth three tell Konkrook what"s happened here, and say that I won"t be coming down, as planned, just yet."
He opened the door, and the rattle of shots outside became audible again. The civilian with the burp-gun knew better than to let a general go out first; elbowing von Schlichten out of the way, he crouched over his weapon and dashed outside. Drawing his pistol, von Schlichten followed, pulling the door shut after him.
Darkness had fallen, while he had been inside; now the whole Company Reservation was ablaze with electric lights. Somebody at the power-plant--either the regular staff, if they were still holding, or the mutineers, if they had taken it--had thrown on the emergency lights. There was a confused ma.s.s of gray-skinned figures in front of Company House, reflected light twinkling on steel over them; from the direction of the native-troops barracks more natives were coming on the run. On the roof of a building across the street, two machine-guns were already firing into the mob. A group of Terrans came running out of a roadway between two buildings, from the direction of the repair-shops; several of them paused to fire behind them with pistols.
They started toward Company House, saw what was going on there, and veered, darting into the door of the building from which the auto-weapons were firing. From up the street, a hundred-odd saurian-faced native soldiers were coming at the double, bayonets fixed and rifles at high port; with them ran several Terrans.
Motioning his companion to follow, von Schlichten ran to meet them, falling in beside a Terran captain who ran in front.
"What"s the score, captain?" he asked.
"Tenth North Uller and the Fifth Cavalry have mutinied; so have these rag-tag Auxiliaries. That mob down there"s part of them." He was puffing under the double effort of running and talking. "Whole thing blew up in seconds; no chance to communicate with anybody...."
A Terran woman, in black slacks and an orange sweater, ran across the street in front of them, pursued by a group of enlisted "men" of the Tenth North Uller Native Infantry, all shrieking "_Znidd suddabit!_"
The fugitive ran into a doorway across the street; before her pursuers were aware of their danger, the Kragans had swept over them. There was no shooting; the slim, cruel-bladed bayonets did the work. From behind him, as he ran, von Schlichten could hear Kragan voices in a new cry: "_Znidd geek! Znidd geek!_"
The mob were swarming up onto the steps and into the semi-rotunda of the storm-porch. There was shooting, which told him that some of the humans who had been at the banquet were still alive. He wondered, half-sick, how many, and whether they could hold out till he could clear the doorway, and, most of all, he found himself thinking of Paula Quinton. Skidding to a stop within fifty yards of the mob, he flung out his arms crucifix-wise to halt the Kragans. Behind, he could hear the Terrans and native-officers shouting commands to form front.
"Give them one clip, reload, and then give them the bayonet!" he ordered. "Shove them off the steps and then clear the porch!"
"One clip, fire, and reload, at will!" somebody pa.s.sed it on in Kragan.
The hundred rifles let go all at once, and for five seconds they poured a deafening two thousand rounds into the mutineers. There was some fire in reply; a Zirk corporal narrowly missed him with a pistol, he saw the captain"s head fly apart when an explosive rifle-bullet hit him, and half a dozen Kragans went down.
"Reload! Set your safeties!" von Schlichten bellowed. "Charge!"
Under human officers, the North Uller Native Infantry would have stood firm. Even under their native-officers and sergeants, they should not have broken as they did, but the best of these had paid for their loyalty to the Company with their lives, and the rest had destroyed their authority by revolting against the source from which it was derived. At that, the Skilkan peasantry who made up the Tenth Infantry and the Zirk cavalrymen tried briefly to fight as individuals, shrieking "_Znidd suddabit!_" until the Kragans were upon them, stabbing and shooting. They drove the rioters from the steps or killed them there, they wiped out those who had gotten into the semicircle of the storm-porch. The inside doors, von Schlichten saw, were open, but beyond them were Terrans and a dozen or so Kragans. Hideyoshi O"Leary and Barney Mordkovitz seemed to be in command of these.
"We had about thirty seconds" warning," Mordkovitz reported, "and the Kragans in the hall bought us another sixty seconds. Of course, we all had our pistols...."
"Hey! These storm-doors are wedged!" somebody discovered. "Those G.o.ddam geek servants ...!"
"Yeah, kill any of them you catch," somebody else advised. "If we could have gotten these doors closed...."
The mob, driven from the steps, was trying to reform and renew the attack. From up the street, the machine-guns, silent during the bayonet-fight, began hammering again. The mob surged forward to get out of their fire, and were met by a rifle-blast and a hedge of bayonets at the steps; they surged back, and the machine-guns flailed them again. They started to rush the building from whence the automatic-fire came, and there was a fusillade and a shriek of "_Znidd geek!_" from up the street. They turned and fled in the direction from whence they had come, bullets scourging them from three directions at once.
For a moment, von Schlichten and the three Terrans and eighty-odd Kragans who had survived the fight stood on the steps, weapons poised, seeking more enemies. The machine-guns up the street stuttered a few short bursts and were silent. From behind, the beleaguered Terrans and their Kragan guards were emerging. He saw Jules Keaveney and his wife, Commander Prinsloo of the _Aldebaran_, Harry Quong and Bogdanoff. Ah, there she was! He heaved a breath of relief and waved to her.
The Kragans were already setting about their after-battle ch.o.r.es.
About twenty of them spread out on guard; the others, by fours, went into the street, one covering with his rifle while the other three checked on their own casualties, used the short, leaf-shaped swords they carried to slash off the heads of enemy wounded, and collected weapons and ammunition. A couple of hundred more Kragans, led by Native-Major Kormork, the co-parent of young with King Kankad, came up at the double and stopped in front of Company House.
"We were in quarters, aboard the _Aldebaran_ and in the guesthouse at the airport," Kormork reported. "We were attacked, fifteen minutes ago, by a mob. We took ten minutes beating them off, and five more getting here. I sent Native-Captain Zeerjeek and the rest of the force to retake the supply-depot and the shops and lorry hangars, which had been taken, and relieve the military airport, which is under attack."
There was still firing from the commercial airport and the smaller military airfield. Once there was a string of heavy explosions that sounded like 80-mm rockets.
"Good enough. I hope you didn"t spread yourself out too thin. What"s the situation at the commercial airport?"
"The two ships, the _Aldebaran_ and the freighter _Northern Star_, are both safe," Kormork replied. "I saw them go on contragravity and rise to about a hundred feet."
"Whose crowd is that you have?" he asked the Terran lieutenant who had taken over command of the first force of Kragans.
"Company 6, Eighteenth Rifles, sir. We were on duty at the guardhouse; fighting broke out in the direction of the native barracks. A couple of runners from Captain Retief of Company 4 came in with word that he was being attacked by mutineers from the Tenth N.U.N.I. but that he was holding them back. So Captain Charbonneau, who was killed a few minutes ago, left a Terran lieutenant and a Kragan native-lieutenant and a couple of native-sergeants and thirty Kragans to hold the guardhouse, and brought the rest of us here."
Von Schlichten nodded. "You"d pa.s.s the military airport and the power-plant, wouldn"t you?" he asked.
"Yes, sir. The military airport"s holding out, and I saw the red-and-yellow danger-lights on the fence around the power-plant."
That meant the power-plant was, for the time, safe; somebody"d turned twenty thousand volts into the fence.
"All right. I"m setting up my command post at the telecast station, where the communication equipment is." He turned to the crowd that had come out onto the porch from inside. "Where"s Colonel Cheng-Li?"
"Here, general." The Intelligence and Constabulary officer pushed through the crowd. "I was on the phone, talking to the military airport, the commercial airport, ordnance depot, s.p.a.ceport, ship-docks and power-plant. All answer. I"m afraid Pop Goode, at the city power-plant, is done for; n.o.body answers there, but the TV-pickup is still on in the load-dispatcher"s room, and the place is full of geeks. Colonel Jarman"s coming here with a lorry to get combat-car crews; he"s short-handed. Port-Captain Leavitt has all the native labor at the airport and s.p.a.ceport herded into a repair dock; he"s keeping them covered with the forward 90-mm gun of the _Northern Star_. Lorry-hangars, repair-shops and maintenance-yards don"t answer."
"That"s what I was going to ask you. Good enough. Harry Quong, Ha.s.san Bogdanoff!"
His command-car crew front-and-centered.
"I want you to take Colonel O"Leary up, as soon as my car"s brought here.... Hid, you go up and see what"s going on. Drop flares where there isn"t any light. And take a look at the native-labor camp and the equipment-park, south of the reservation.... Kormork, you take all your gang, and half these soldiers from the Eighteenth, here, and help clear the native-troops barracks. And don"t bother taking any prisoners; we can"t spare personnel to guard them."
Kormork grinned. The taking of prisoners had always been one of those irrational Terran customs which no Ulleran regarded with favor, or even comprehension.
VIII.
Authority of Governor-General von Schlichten
There was fresh intelligence from Konkrook, by the time he returned to the telecast station. Mutiny had broken out there among the laborers and native troops, who outnumbered the Terrans and their Kragan mercenaries on Gongonk Island by five thousand to five hundred and fifteen hundred respectively. The attempt to relieve Jaikark"s palace had been called off before the relief-force could be sent; there was heavy and confused fighting all over the island, and most of the combat contragravity and about half the Kragan Rifles had had to be committed to defend the Company farms across the Channel, on the mainland, south of the city. There had also been an urgent call for help from Colonel Rodolfo MacKinnon, in command of Company troops at the Keegark Residency, and another from the Residency at Kwurk, one of the Free Cities on the eastern sh.o.r.e of Takkad Sea.
He called Keegark; a girl, apparently one of the civilian telecast technicians, answered.
"We must have help, General von Schlichten," she told him. "The native troops, all but two hundred Kragans, have mutinied. They have everything here except Company House--docks, airport, everything.
We"re trying to hold out, but there are thousands of them. Our Takkad Native Infantry, soldiers of King Orgzild"s army, and townspeople.
They all seem to have firearms...."
"What happened to Eric Blount and your Resident-Agent, Mr. Lemoyne?"
"We don"t know. They were at the Palace, talking to King Orgzild.
We"ve tried to call the Palace, but we can"t get through, general, we must have help...."