Chapter 12: The Shadow of Niflheim

The sun slid lower and lower toward the horizon behind them as the aircar bulleted south along the broad valley and dry bed of the Hoork River, nearing the zone of equal day and night. Hassan Bogdanoff drove while Harry Quong finished his lunch, then changed places to begin his own. Von Schlichten got two bottles of beer from the refrigerated section of the lunch-hamper and opened one for Paula Quinton and one for himself.

“What are we going to do with these geeks,”--she was using the nasty and derogatory word unconsciously and by custom, now--”after this is all over? We can’t just tell them, ‘Jolly well played, nice game, wasn’t it?’ and go back to where we were Wednesday evening.”

“No, we can’t. There’s going to have to be a Terran seizure of political power in every part of this planet that we occupy, and as soon as we’re consolidated around and north of Takkad Sea, we’re going to have to move in elsewhere,” he replied. “Keegark, Konkrook, and the Free Cities, of course, will be relatively easy. They’re in arms against us now, and we can take them over by force. We had to make that deal with Jonkvank, or, rather, I did, so that will be a slower process, but we’ll get it done in time. If I know that pair as well as I think I do, Jonkvank and Yoorkerk will give us plenty of pretexts, before long. Then, we can start giving them government by law instead of by royal decree, and real courts of justice; put an end to the head-payment system, and to these arbitrary mass arrests and tax-delinquency imprisonments that are nothing but slave-raids by the geek princes on their own people. And, gradually, abolish serfdom. In a couple of centuries, this planet will be fit to admit to the Federation, like Odin and Freya.”

“Well, won’t that depend a lot on whom the Company sends here to take Harrington’s place?”

“Unless I’m much mistaken, the Company will confirm me,” he replied. “Administration on Uller is going to be a military matter for a long time to come, and even the Banking Cartel and the mercantile interests in the Company are going to realize that, and see the necessity for taking political control. The Federation Government owns a bigger interest in the Company than the public realizes, too; they’ve always favored it. And just to make sure, I’m sending Hid O’Leary to Terra on the next ship, to make a full report on the situation.”

“You think it’ll be cleared up by then? The City of Montevideo is due in from Niflheim in a little under three months.”

“It’ll have to be cleared up by then. We can’t keep this war going more than a month, at the present rate. Police-action, and mopping-up, yes, full-scale war, no.”

“Ammunition?” she asked.

He looked at her in pleased surprise. “Your education has been progressing, at that,” he said. “You know, a lot of professional officers, even up to field rank in the combat branches, seem to think that ammo comes down miraculously from Heaven, in contragravity lorries, every time they pray into a radio for it. It doesn’t; it has to be produced as fast as it’s expended, and we haven’t been doing that. So we’ll have to lick these geeks before it runs out, because we can’t lick them with gunbutts and bayonets.”

“Well, how about nuclear weapons?” Paula asked. “I hate to suggest it--I know what they did on Mimir, and Fenris, and Midgard, and what they did on Terra, during the First Century. But it may be our only chance.”

He finished his beer and shoved the bottle into the waste-receiver, then got out his cigarettes.

“I’d hate to have to make a decision like that, Paula,” he told her. “The military use of nuclear energy is the last--well, the next-to-last--thing I’d want to see on Uller. Fortunately, or unfortunately, it’s a decision I won’t have to make. There isn’t a single nuclear bomb on the planet. The Company’s always refused to allow them to be manufactured or stockpiled here.”

“I don’t think there’d be any criticism of your making them, now, general. And there’s certainly plenty of plutonium. You could make A-bombs, at least.”

“There isn’t anybody here who even knows how to make one. Most of our nuclear engineers could work one up, in about three months, when we’d either not need one or not be alive.”

“Dr. Gomes, who came in on the Pretoria, two weeks ago, can make them,” she contradicted. “He built at least a dozen of them on Niflheim, to use in activating volcanoes and bringing ore-bearing lava to the surface.”

Von Schlichten’s hand, bringing his lighter to the tip of his cigarette, paused for a second. Then he completed the operation, snapped it shut, and put it away.

“When did all this happen?”

She took time out for mental arithmetic; even a spaceship officer had to do that, when a question of interstellar time-relations arose.

“About three-fifty days ago, Galactic Standard. They’d put off the first shot, six bombs, before I got in from Terra. I saw the second shot a day or so before I left Niflheim on the Canberra. Dr. Gomes had to stay over till the Pretoria to put off the third shot. Why?”

“Did you run into a geek named Gorkrink, while you were on Nif?” he asked her. “And what sort of work was he doing?”

“Gorkrink? I don’t seem to remember ... Oh, yes! He was helping Dr. Murillo, the seismologist. His year was up after the second shot; he came to Uller on the Canberra. Dr. Murillo was sorry to lose him. He understood Lingua Terra perfectly; Dr. Murillo could talk to him, the way you do with Kankad, without using a geek-speaker.”

“Well, but what sort of work... ?”

“Helping set and fire the A-bombs... Oh! Good Lord!“

“You can say that again, and deal in Allah, Shiva, and Kali,” von Schlichten told her. “Especially Kali ... Harry! See if you can get some more speed out of this can. I want to get to Konkrook while it’s still there!”

It was full dark when Konkrook came in view beyond the East Konk Mountains, a lurid smear on the underside of the clouds, and, at Gongonk Island and at the Company farms to the south, a couple of bunches of searchlights fingering about in the sky. When von Schlichten turned on the outside sound-pickup, he could hear the distant tom-tomming of heavy guns, and the crash of shells and bombs. Keeping the car high enough to be above the trajectories of incoming shells, Harry Quong circled over the city while Hassan Bogdanoff talked to Gongonk Island on the radio.

The city was in a bad way. There were seventy-five to a hundred big fires going, and a new one started in a rising ball of thermoconcentrate flame while they watched. The three gun-cutters, Elmoran, Gaucho, and Bushranger, and about fifty big freight lorries converted to bombers, were shuttling back and forth between the island and the city. The Royal Palace was on fire from end to end, and the entire waterfront and industrial district were in flames. Combat-cars and airjeeps were diving in to shell and rocket and machine-gun streets and buildings. He saw six big bomber-lorries move in dignified procession to unload, one after the other, on a row of buildings along what the Terrans called South Tenth Street, and on the roofs of buildings a block away, red and blue flares were burning, and he could see figures, both human and Ulleran, setting up mortars and machine-guns.

Landing on the top stage of Company House, on the island, they were met by a Terran whom von Schlichten had seen, a few days ago, bossing native-labor at the spaceport, but who was now wearing a major’s insignia. He greeted von Schlichten with a salute which he must have learned from some movie about the ancient French Foreign Legion. Von Schlichten seriously returned it in kind.

“Everybody’s down in the Governor-General’s office, sir,” he said. “Your office, that is. King Kankad’s here with us, too.”

He accompanied them to the elevator, then turned to a telephone; when von Schlichten and Paula reached the office, everybody was crowded at the door to greet them: Themistocles M’zangwe, his arm in a sling; Hans Meyerstein, the Johannesburg lawyer, who seemed to have even more Bantu blood than the brigadier-general; Morton Buhrmann, the Commercial Superintendent; Laviola, the Fiscal Secretary; a dozen or so other officers and civil administrators. There was a hubbub of greetings, and he was pleased to detect as much real warmth from the civil administration crowd as from the officers.

“Well, I’m glad to be back with you,” he replied, generally. “And let me present Colonel Paula Quinton, my new adjutant; Hid O’Leary’s on duty in the north ... Them, this was a perfectly splendid piece of work here; you can take this not only as a personal congratulation, but as a sort of unit citation for the whole crowd. You’ve all behaved simply above praise.” He turned to King Kankad, who was wearing a pair of automatics in shoulder-holsters for his upper hands and another pair in cross-body belt holsters for his lower. “And what I’ve said for anybody else goes double for you, Kankad,” he added, clapping the Kragan on the shoulder.

“All he did was save the lot of us!” M’zangwe said. “We were hanging on by our fingernails here till his people started coming in. And then, after you sent the Aldebaran...”

“Where is the Aldebaran, by the way? I didn’t see her when I came in.”

“Based on Kankad’s, flying bombardment against Keegark, and keeping an eye out for those ships. Prinsloo caught the De Wett in the docks there and smashed her, but the Jan Smuts got away, and we haven’t been able to locate the Oom Paul Kruger, either. They’re probably both on the Eastern Shore, gathering up reenforcements for Orgzild,” M’zangwe said.

“Our ability to move troops rapidly is what’s kept us on top this long, and Orgzild’s had plenty of time to realize it,” von Schlichten said. “When we get Procyon down here, I’m going to send her out, with a screen of light scout-vehicles, to find those ships and get rid of them ... How’s Hid been making out, at Grank, by the way? I didn’t have my car-radio on, coming down.”