Chapter 9

Barathrum was a grim land, naked black and gray. Spines and crags of bare rock jutted up, lava-flows like black glaciers twisting among them. It was split by faults and fissures, pimpled with ash-cones. Except for the seabirds that nested among the cliffs and the few thin patches of green where seeds windblown from the mainland had taken root, it was as lifeless as when some ancient convulsion had thrust it up from the sea, Barathrum was a dead Inferno, untenanted even by the damned; by comparison, the Badlands seemed lushly fertile.

The four craft crossed above the line of white breakers that marked the division of sea and land; the gunboat Goblin in the lead, her sisters, Vampire and Dragon to right and left and a little behind, and the Lester Dawes a few miles in the rear. Fred Karski was at the Goblin’s controls; Conn, beside him, was peering ahead into the teleview screen and shifting his eyes from it to the map and back again.

Somebody behind him was saying that it would be a nice place to be air-wrecked. Somebody else was telling him not to joke about it. From the radio, his father was asking: “Can you see it, yet?”

“Not yet. We’re on the right map-and-compass direction; we should before long.”

“We’re picking up radiation,” Fred Karski said. “Way above normal count. I hope the place isn’t hot.”

“We’re getting that, too,” Rodney Maxwell said. “Looks like power radiation; something must be on there.”

After forty years, that didn’t seem likely. He leaned over to look at the omnigeiger, then whistled. If that was normal leakage from inactive power units, there must be enough of them to power ten towns the size of Litchfield.

“Something’s operating there,” he said, and then realized what that meant. Somebody had beaten them to the spaceport. That would be one of the new companies formed after the opening of Force Command. He was wishing, now, that he hadn’t let himself be talked out of coming here first. Older and wiser heads indeed!

Fred Karski whistled shrilly into his radio phone. “Attention everybody! General alert. Prepare for combat; prepare to take immediate evasive action. We must assume that the spaceport is occupied, and that the occupants are hostile. Captain Poole, will you please make ready aboard your ship? Reduce both speed and altitude, and ready your guns and missiles at once.”

“Well, now, wait a minute, young fellow,” Poole began to argue. “You don’t know--”

“No. I don’t. And I want all of us alive after we find out, too,” Karski replied.

Rodney Maxwell’s voice, in the background, said something indistinguishable. Poole said ungraciously, “Well, all right, if you think so...”

The Lester Dawes began dropping to the rear and going down toward the ground. Conn returned to the teleview screen in time to see the truncated cone of the extinct volcano rise on the horizon, dwarfing everything around it. Fred Karski was talking to Colonel Zareff, back at Force Command, giving him the radiation count.

“That’s occupied,” the old soldier replied. “Mass-energy converter going. Now, Fred, don’t start any shooting unless you have to, but don’t get yourself blown to MC waiting on them to fire the first shot.”

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 corkscrewing 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 fireballs blossomed, one dangerously close to the Dragon. Guns were firing from the mountaintop, too, big ones, and shells were bursting close to them. He saw a shell 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 spaceport.”

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 passed 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 assume that this spaceport 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 assume wrong. This gang’s been at the spaceport 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 assume 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 spaceport is doing most of it.”