Chapter 10: The Geek Luftwaffe and the Kragan Airlift

At 0245, an attack developed on the northwestern corner of the Reservation, in the direction of the explosives magazines. It turned out to be relatively trivial. Remnants of the mob that had been broken up by air attack on the road had gotten together and were making rushes in small bands, keeping well spread out. Beating them off took considerable ammunition, but it was accomplished with negligible casualties to the defenders. They finally stopped coming around daylight.

In the meantime, Themistocles M’zangwe called from Konkrook, appearing in the screen with his left arm in a freshly white sling.

“What the hell have you been doing to yourself?” von Schlichten wanted to know.

“Crossbow-bolt, about half an hour ago. A couple of inches lower and acting Brigadier-General Colbert’d have been talking to you, now, instead of me.”

“Lucky it didn’t have a nitro-capsule on the end. How are you making out? Have Kankad’s people started coming in, yet?”

“Oh, yes, about six hundred of them have gotten in already, in the damnedest collection of vehicles you ever saw. Kankad must be using every scrap of contragravity he has; it’s a regular airborne Dunkirk-in-reverse. Kankad sent word that he’s coming here in person, as soon as he has things organized at his place. And the geeks here have scraped together an air-force of their own--farm-lorries, aircars, that sort of thing--and they’re using them to bomb us here and at the mainland farm, mostly with nitroglycerine. We’ve shot down about twenty of them, but they’re still coming. They tried a boat-attack across the Channel; that’s how I got this. We’ve been doing some bombing, ourselves; we made a down payment for Eric Blount and Hendrik Lemoyne. Took a fifty-ton tank off a fuel-lorry, fitted it with a detonator, filled it with thermoconcentrate, and ferried it over on the Elmoran and dumped it on the Keegarkan Embassy. It must have landed in the middle of the central court; in about fifteen seconds, flames were coming out every window in the place.” His face became less jovial. “We had something pretty bad happen here, too,” he said. “That Konkrook Fencibles rabble of Prince Jaizerd’s mutinied, along with the others; they got into the hospital and butchered everybody in the place, patients and staff. The Kragans got there too late to save anybody, but they wiped out the Fencibles. Jaizerd himself was the only one they took alive, and he didn’t stay that way very long.”

“How are you making out with your Civil Administration crowd?”

M’zangwe grimaced. “I haven’t had to put any of them under actual arrest, so far, but we’ve had to keep Buhrmann away from the communications equipment by force. He wanted to call you up and chew you out for not evacuating everybody in the north to Konkrook.”

“Is he crazy?”

“No, just scared. He says you’re going to get everybody on Uller massacred by detail, when you could save Konkrook by bringing them all here.”

“You tell him I’m going to hold this planet, not just one city. Tell him I have a sense of my duty to the Company and its stockholders, if he hasn’t; put it in those terms and he may understand you.”

“Yes, I’ll try that out on Meyerstein, too. He’s in a hell of a state about the losses the Banking Cartel are taking on this deal ... Well, I’ll call you when there’s anything new.”

By 0330, it was daylight; the attacks against the northwest corner of the perimeter stopped entirely. Wallingsby had the three-hundred-odd Skilkan laborers at work; he had gathered up all the tarpaulin he could find, and had the two sewing-machines in the tentmaker’s shop running on sandbags. Jules Keaveney, to von Schlichten’s agreeable surprise, had taken hold of his ARP assignment, and was doing an efficient job in organizing for fire-fighting, damage-control and first aid. Colonel Jarman had his airjeeps and combat-cars working in ever-widening circles over the countryside, shooting up everything in sight that even looked like contragravity equipment. Some of these patrols had to be recalled, around 1030, when sporadic nuisance-sniping began from the side of the mountain to the west. And, along with everything else, Paula Quinton managed, along with her other work, to get a complete digest prepared of the situation elsewhere in the Terran-occupied parts of the planet.

The situation at Konkrook was brightening steadily. The second wave of Kankad’s improvised airlift, reenforced by contragravity from Konkrook, had come in; there were now close to two thousand fresh Kragans on Gongonk Island and the mainland farms, Kankad himself with them. The Aldebaran had reached Kankad’s Town, and was loading another thousand Kragans ... There was nothing more from Keegark. A message from Colonel MacKinnon had come in at dawn, to the effect that the geeks had penetrated his last defenses and that he was about to blow up the Residency; thereafter Keegark went off the air ... By 0730, the Northern Star had landed the regiment Murderers, armed with first-quality Terran infantry-rifles and a few machine-guns and bazookas, at the Palace at Krink, and by 0845 she had returned with another regiment, the Jeel-Feeders. The three-lane street connecting the Palace and the Residency had been widened to six, and then to eight ... Guido Karamessinis, at Grank, was still at uneasy peace with King Yoorkerk, who was still undecided whether the rebels or the Company were going to be the eventual victors, and afraid to take any irrevocable step in either direction ... Eight men and four women, the survivors of a trading-station on the eastern shore of Takkad Sea, reached Konkrook in a lorry; another trading station, on the south shore, reported by telecast that the natives there had refused to rise against them, and had crucified five of Rakkeed’s disciples who had come among them preaching znidd suddabit.

At 1100, Paula Quinton and Barney Mordkovitz virtually ordered him to get some sleep. He went to his quarters at Company House, downed a spaceship-captain’s-size drink of honey-rum, and slept until 1600. As he dressed and shaved, he could hear, through the open window, the slow sputter of small-arms’ fire, punctuated by the occasional whump-whump-whump of 40-mm auto-cannon or the hammering of a machine-gun.

Returning to his command-post at the telecast station, the terrain-board showed that the perimeter of defense had been pushed out in a bulge at the northwest corner; the TV-screen pictured a crude breast-work of petrified tree-trunks, sandbags, mining machinery, packing-cases and odds-and-ends, upon which Wallingsby’s native laborers were working under guard while a skirmish-line of Kragans had been thrown out another four or five hundred yards and were exchanging pot-shots with Skilkans on the gullied hillside.

“Where’s Colonel Quinton?” he asked. “She ought to be taking a turn in the sack, now.”

“She’s taking one,” Major Falkenberg, who had commanded the action at the native-troops barracks and the labor-camp, the night before, told him. “General Mordkovitz chased her off to bed a couple of hours ago, called me in to take her place, and then went out to replace me. Colonel Guilliford’s in the hospital; got hit about thirteen hundred. They’re afraid he’s going to lose a leg.”

“That’s a bloody shame!” He pointed to the northwest corner of the perimeter on the screen. “Whose idea was that?” he asked. “It’s a good one; I ought to have thought of it, myself.”

“Your new adjutant,” Falkenberg grinned. “She asked somebody what those big domes, up there, were. When they told her there were ten thousand tons of thermoconcentrate, five thousand tons of blasting-explosives, and five tons of plutonium, under them, she damned near fainted, and then she ordered that, right away.”

More reports came in. The entire garrison of the small Residency at Kwurk, the most northern of the eastern shore Free Cities, had arrived at Kankad’s Town in two hundred-foot contragravity scows and five aircars. Two of the aircars arrived half an hour behind the rest of the refugee flotilla, having turned off at Keegark to pay their respects to King Orgzild. They reported the Keegark Residency in ruins, its central buildings vanished in a huge crater; the Jan Smuts and the Christiaan De Wett were still in the Company docks, both apparently damaged by the blast which had destroyed the Residency. One of the aircars had rocketed and machine-gunned some Keegarkans who appeared to be trying to repair them; the other blew up King Orgzild’s nitroglycerine plant. Von Schlichten called Konkrook and ordered a bombing-mission against Keegark organized, to make sure the two ships stayed out of service.