Chapter 15: A Place in my Heart for Hildegarde

The company fleet hung off Keegark, at fifteen thousand feet, in a belt of calm air just below the seesawing currents from the warming Antarctic and the cooling deserts of the Arctic. There was the Procyon, from the bridge of which von Schlichten watched the movements of the other ships and airboats and the distant horizon. The Aldebaran was ten miles off, to the west, her metal sheathing glinting in the red light of the evening sun. There was the Northern Star, down from Skilk, a smaller and more distant twinkle of reflected light to the north of Aldebaran. The Northern Lights was off to the east, and between her and Procyon was a fifth ship; turning the arm-mounted binoculars around, he could just make out, on her bow, the figurehead bust of a man in an ancient tophat and a fringe of chin-beard. She was the Oom Paul Kruger, captured by the Procyon after a chase across the mountains northeast of Keegark the day before. And, remote from the other ships, to the south, a tiny speck of blue-gray, almost invisible against the sky, and a smaller twinkle of reflected sunlight--a garbage-scow, unflatteringly but somewhat aptly rechristened Hildegarde Hernandez, which had been altered as a bomb-carrier, and the gun-cutter Elmoran. With the glasses, he could see a bulky cylinder being handled off the scow and loaded onto the improvised bomb-catapult on the Elmoran‘s stern. Shortly thereafter, the gun-cutter broke loose from the tender and began to approach the fleet.

“General, I must protest against your doing this,” Air-Commodore Hargreaves said. “There’s simply no sense in it. That bomb can be dropped without your personal supervision aboard, sir, and you’re endangering yourself unnecessarily. That infernal machine hasn’t been tested or anything; it might even let go on the catapult when you try to drop it. And we simply can’t afford to lose you, now.”

“No, what would become of us, if you go out there and blow yourself up with that contraption?” Buhrmann supported him. “My God, I thought Don Quixote was a Spaniard, instead of a German!”

“Argentino,” von Schlichten corrected. “And don’t try to sell me that Irreplaceable Man line, either. Them M’zangwe can replace me, Hid O’Leary can replace him, Barney Mordkovitz can replace him, and so on down to where you make a second lieutenant out of some sergeant. We’ve been all over this last evening. Admitted we can’t take time for a long string of test-shots, and admitted we have to use an untested weapon; I’m not sending men out under those circumstances and staying here on this ship and watch them blow themselves up. If that bomb’s our only hope, it’s got to be dropped right, and I’m not going to take a chance on having it dropped by a crew who think they’ve been sent out on a suicide mission. What happened to the Gaucho when she blew the Smuts up is too fresh in everybody’s mind. But if I, who ordered the mission, accompany it, they’ll know I have some confidence that they’ll come back alive.”

“Well I’m coming along, too, general,” Kent Pickering spoke up. “I made the damned thing, and I ought to be along when it’s dropped, on the principle that a restaurant-proprietor ought to be seen eating his own food once in a while.”

“I still don’t see why we couldn’t have made at least one test shot, first,” Hans Meyerstein, the Banking Cartel man, objected.

“Well, I’ll tell you why,” Paula Quinton spoke up. “There’s a good chance that the geeks don’t know we have a bomb of our own. They may believe that it was something invented on Niflheim for mining purposes, and that we haven’t realized its military application. There’s more than a good chance that the loss of the Jan Smuts has temporarily demoralized them. Personally, I believe that both King Orgzild and Prince Gorkrink were aboard her when she blew up. That’s something we’ll never know, positively, of course. That ship and everything and everybody in her were simply vaporized, and the particles are registering on our geigers now. But I’m as sure as I am of anything about these geeks that one or both of them accompanied her.”

“Paula knows what she’s talking about,” King Kankad jabbered in the Takkad Sea language which they all understood. “Just like Von saying that he has to go on our cutter, to encourage the crew. They always insist that their kings and generals go into battle, particularly if something important is to be done. They think the gods get angry if they don’t.”

“And we have to hit them now,” von Schlichten said. “They still have a couple of bombs left. We haven’t been able to locate them with detectors, but those geeks Kankad’s men caught on that commando-raid, last night, say that there were at least three of them made. We can’t take a chance that some fanatic may load one into an aircar and make a kamikaze-raid on Gongonk Island.”

The Elmoran ran alongside, with her Masai-warrior figurehead and the black cylinder on her catapult aft. Somebody had painted, on the bomb: DIRE DAWN by Hildegarde Hernandez. Compliments of the author to H.M. King Orgzild of Keegark. A canvas-entubed gangway was run out to connect the ship with the cutter. Von Schlichten and Kent Pickering went down the ladder from the bridge, the others accompanying them. As he stepped into the gangway, Paula Quinton fell in behind him.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he demanded.

“Along with you,” she replied. “I’m your adjutant, I believe.”

“You definitely are not going along. Personally, I don’t believe there’s any danger, but I’m not having you run any unnecessary risks...”

“Von, I don’t know much about the way Terrans think, except about fighting and about making things,” Kankad told him. “And I don’t know anything at all about the kind of Terrans who have young. But I believe this is something important to Paula. Let her go with you, because if you go alone and don’t come back, I don’t think she will ever be happy again.”

He looked at Kankad curiously, wondering, as he had so often before, just what went on inside that lizard-skull. Then he looked at Paula, and, after a moment, he nodded.

“All right, colonel, objection withdrawn,” he said.

Aboard the Elmoran, they gave the bomb a last-minute inspection and checked the catapult and the bomb-sight, and then went up on the bridge.

“Ready for the bombing mission, sir?” the skipper, a Lieutenant (j.g.) Morrison, asked.

“Ready if you are, lieutenant. Carry on; we’re just passengers.”

“Thank you, sir. We’d thought of going in over the city at about five thousand for a target-check, turning when we’re half-way back to the mountains, and coming back for our bombing-run at fifteen thousand. Is that all right, sir?”

Von Schlichten nodded. “You’re the skipper, lieutenant. You’d better make sure, though, that as soon as the bomb-off signal is flashed, your engineer hits his auxiliary rocket-propulsion button. We want to be about fifteen miles from where that thing goes off.”

The lieutenant (j.g.) muttered something that sounded unmilitarily like, “You ain’t foolin’, brother!”

“No, I’m not,” von Schlichten agreed. “I saw the Jan Smuts on the TV-screen.”

The Elmoran pointed her bow, and the long blade of the figurehead warrior’s spear, toward Keegark. The city grew out of the ground-mist, a particolored blur at the delta of the dry Hoork River, and then a color-splashed triangle between the river and the bay and the hills on the landward side, and then it took shape, cross-ruled with streets and granulated with buildings. As they came in, von Schlichten, who had approached it from the air many times before, could distinguish the landmarks--the site of King Orgzild’s nitroglycerin plant, now a crater surrounded by a quarter-mile radius of ruins; the Residency, another crater since Rodolfo MacKinnon had blown it up under him; the smashed Christiaan De Wett at the Company docks; King Orgzild’s Palace, fire-stained and with a hole blown in one corner by the Aldebaran‘s bombs ... Then they were past the city and over open country.

“I wish we had some idea where the rest of those bombs are stored, sir,” Lieutenant Morrison said. “We don’t seem to have gotten anything significant when we flew reconnaissance with the radiation detectors.”

“No, about all that was picked up was the main power-plant, and the radiation-escape from there was normal,” Pickering agreed. “The bombs themselves wouldn’t be detectable, except to the extent that, say, a nuclear-conversion engine for an airboat would be. They probably have them underground, somewhere, well shielded.”