“Father, Cassius needs you,” Thurston boomed from
ten meters away.
“What is it?”
Thurston shrugged. “Something’s shaping up.”
Evidently, he did not want to talk in front of civilians.
“Mr. Blake. Mrs. Blake. If you’ll excuse
me?”
“Of course,” Blake replied. “Wish I had an
excuse to slip out myself.”
“Creighton, Colonel Storm,” Grace said, her tiny
voice quavering, “could we go along?”
“Of course,” Storm replied. “Your husband is
the boss. I’d look silly keeping him away.”
“Albin, make my apologies,” Blake told Korando.
“Then join us in Colonel Storm’s war room.”
The war room was lively when they arrived. The Legion had added
a massive amount of specialized equipment to Blake Mining’s
Comm Center. The heartpiece was a gigantic display board on which
was imposed a computer-mastered chart of the Shadowline. The long,
dark river of the rift was alive with shoals of tiny moving lights.
Each represented a particular unit. A susurrus of soft
communications chatter filled the air as commtechs monitored
Shadowline radio traffic. The theme of the moment was confusion on
the firing line, questions racketing back and forth among
“Foxbat,”
“Mirage I,” and
“Damocles.” The chatter was clear, but couched in
jargon that Storm’s companions could not interpret.
Cassius’ was on visual, and clearly impatient.
“Command clear trunk, scrambled,” the technician told
Storm. Storm nodded.
“Gneaus,” Cassius said the instant Storm moved in
front of the pickup, “they’re starting something. We
don’t know what yet, but it looks big.”
“What have you got? I don’t see anything on the big
board.”
“They started probing with infantry and armor two hours
ago. Pushed our observers back. We’ve had to withdraw past
the limit of reliable sonic discrimination, so nothing’s
sure. The computer enhancements make it look like there’s a
lot of heavy stuff moving.”
Storm glanced at the pictures from the sky-eye orbitals. The
damned satellites were next to useless. The demon sun burned them
out in a few days’ time, and what pictures they did send down
were no good. Too much contrast between the sunlighted plains and
the darkness of the Shadowline. “You get anything from
Intelligence?”
“There hasn’t been a crackle from an open carrier
since this morning. Looks like they’ve shut down
communications completely. Yesterday we did get confirmation of
your notion that Richard went back to Twilight.”
“Who’d he leave in charge?”
“Doskal
Mennike. The younger.”
“Richard wouldn’t set up a
push and then leave.”
“That’s why I called.
He’s been gone awhile, near as we can tell. He wasn’t
here for their spoiling raids last week, either. Something strange
is happening.”
“Where are they up top?” Storm’s own forces
had begun moving to break the laager that morning, after the
engineers, a month behind schedule, had completed the incline to
the upward side of the Shadowline cliffs. Any attack by Hawksblood
would catch the Legion overextended.
“About ready. They were getting into position the last report I had.”
“You have comm with Wulf?”
“A bad link. The sun is distorting the relay
beam.”
“Patch me in on Tac Two.” While he waited, Storm
asked, “Mr. Blake, is there any way we can find out
what’s going on in Twilight?”
“I have a man there, but I can’t get in touch in a
hurry. We have to wait till he finds some way to smuggle his
microtapes out.”
“That’s no good. I need an idea of what’s
happening right now, today, not what was going on last
month.”
“Why?”
“I smell something rotten.”
“Patched, Gneaus,” Cassius said. “You
won’t get anything but snow on visual.”
“I’ll see if we can enhance. Switch it.” He
waited a few seconds. A 2 appeared momentarily. “Sky Writer,
Sky Writer, this is Andiron, over.” No response. “Sky
Writer, Sky Writer, this is Andiron, do you read me,
over.”
“Andiron, Andiron, this is Blackwood. Sky Writer has lost
lasecomm, over.” The response was barely audible.
Storm whispered to a tech, “Who’s
Blackwood?”
The technician checked his charts. “Bill Allen, sir. In
one of Colonel Darksword’s crawlers.”
“Blackwood, Blackwood, this is Andiron. Relay to Sky
Writer. Query your position. Query can you relay visual of laager,
over.”
“Andiron, Andiron, this is Blackwood, relaying to Sky
Writer. I read you loud. Am at point Romeo Tango X-Ray, engaged.
Visual follows, over.”
“Picture coming in,” Storm said. “Enhance
it.”
A deep darkness, waxing and waning behind static snow, appeared
before Storm. It wavered till the computer found how best to
enhance it.
The darkness was broken occasionally by the fire-lances of
lasecannon or the flash of explosives. The view was down from the
rim of the Shadowline. Richard’s laager was spread out like
toys on a sand table. Here and there, jerkily in the flashes,
movements suggested armor and mobile artillery scuttling for better
cover. The visible crawlers began to glow.
“Why are they lighting up?” Storm asked. From behind
him, Korando replied, “They’re putting up their solar
screens. That will stop the lighter lasecannon.”
Storm leaned closer. “Those rigs look smaller than their
military crawlers. Korando. What kind of units are they?”
“Pumpers and charters. Mostly old stuff. What I’d guess
they’d be using for hauling supplies.”
“Blackwood, Blackwood, this is Andiron. Query, Classes of
defensive fire received, over.”
“Andiron, Andiron, this is Blackwood. Receiving light
projectile fire. Have silenced one lasecannon. Over.”
“Wormdoom, Wormdoom, this is Andiron, do you read me?
Over.”
“Andiron, Andiron, this is Wormdoom,” Cassius
replied. “Switching to secure comm. Wormdoom out.”
Shifting to the scrambled trunk, Storm said, “Cassius,
they’ve replaced their heavy stuff with obsolete mining
equipment. Watch for something coming out of sunlight. You might
move up some artillery and armor. Go ahead with the blast.
It’s too late for Wulf to help you anyway. Try to get this
lot to surrender. If you don’t get hurt, and can push far
enough past them, a sunlight sweep wouldn’t be able to get
back to friendly territory.”
“I’m working along those lines already,”
Cassius replied. “Gneaus, if that’s it, it’s
likely to be bloody. What’s wrong over there? This
isn’t Richard’s style. There’s no need for an
attack. And Mennike isn’t any glory hound either.”
Remembering what it had been like out there, penned in a suit
most of the time and always surrounded by natural dangers as well
as enemies, Storm posited, “Maybe he went around the
bend.”
“Maybe. But I can think of a more probable cause.
There are enough Dees over there to wreck a galaxy. I’ve
got to get back and stay on top of this. Keep watching. I’ll
check in later.”
“Later.” Storm rose, surveyed the room. He moved a
chair to its center, seated himself. From there he could hear all
the monitors and see the big board. He completely forgot his
guests. Thurston received a curt nod when he brought a tankard of
coffee.
The razor’s edge of Now swept forward, turning future into
past. Hours groaned away, creaking on rusty hinges. Wulf took the
laager under heavy fire. One of his crawlers ran on out along the
cliff top, planted charges that would drop a rockfall behind
Hawksblood’s men. Wulf’s fire wrecked several Meacham
crawlers. The laager broke. The big units, manned by flighty
civilians, fled into sunlight, abandoning everyone not already
aboard. Cassius immediately applied pressure with his armor.
Hawksblood’s people withdrew till Wulf’s rockfall
barred farther retreat.
The Twilight fighting crawlers swept in from sunlight on a
well-organized front two hundred kilometers wide, far behind
Cassius.
“No doubt about it,” Storm muttered as he watched
the situation develop.
“Father?” Thurston asked.
“There’s a crazy man running things out
there.”
The thirty Meacham crawlers attacked everything man-made,
including hospitals, refuge stations, and recreation domes, all of
which had been clearly marked for what they were. The crawlers
maintained a grim comm silence throughout the action.
Albin Korando observed, “It looks like they don’t
want each other to know what they’re doing. It doesn’t
take any military genius to know that our comm nets would let us
watch every one of them.”
“Curious, isn’t it?” Storm said.
The Legion bent. Forewarned, it broke nowhere. The attack was
still on when Storm said, “We’ve got them.
They’re going to be sorry they tried this. This might mean
the whole war.”
Before long the others began to see what he meant. One by one,
Hawksblood’s military crawlers were being disabled or forced
back into sunlight. The specially designed military units were
Richard’s most potent tool. He was losing them fast, and
would lose more when the retreating units tried to get back into
the Shadowline.
A Lt. Col. Gunter Havik commanded the forces opposite Cassius.
He had been Walters’s student in Academy and had served with
Storm in Confederation’s Marines. He was the archetypal
mercenary officer. He surrendered the moment it became clear that
his position was untenable.
The modern freecorps would fight no heroic, doomed Stalingrads.
Not when there was no known tactical or strategic justification.
Glory was an epitaph for fools.
Cassius immediately started ferrying troops round the rockfall
and digging them in for the return of Hawksblood’s fighting
crawlers. He did not expect to have much difficulty forcing their
surrender. Most would be running near their limits of solar
endurance and would be short of munitions. They would be eager to
get into shade, and unable to shoot their way in.
Wulf’s force withdrew to the Shadowline to recuperate from
its extended exposure to the demon sun.
Storm glanced at a clock and realized that he had been in the
war room, awake and intensely attentive, for twenty-two hours. Even
iron man Thurston had taken a few hours to nap. Thurston started to
suggest that he do the same.
“I was just thinking that,” Storm told his son.
“I can’t do anything here anyway. It’s all on
Cassius right now. Get me up if it begins to go sour.”
In the Shadowline, of course, the only sleep for the men
involved was the big one. No one would rest till the issue was
decided.
Blake was on hand when Storm returned. He did not seem
pleased.
“What’s his problem?” Storm asked
Thurston.
“Casualty figures been coming in.”
“Bad?”
“Not good.”
Battle’s confusion had begun to resolve itself into a grim
statistical portrait, Storm saw when he checked the unit
reports.
The first big battle in the Shadowline, still under way, would
be a resounding victory for Edgeward. The laager had been broken.
All but a handful of the attacking battle crawlers had been taken
out. Cassius, with every available man and machine, facing light
resistance, was racing toward the point where Twilight’s
supply line intercepted the Shadowline. He would reach it in four
days if Hawksblood could not stop him. The war could be over before
the end of the week.
And a thousand Legionnaires had died the
death-without-resurrection. More were missing. The survivors were
sifting the rubble. There were as many more injured and
resurrectable dead.
Storm was appalled. He was dazed. He could not accept the
figures. He had not encountered this much killing since the
Ulantonid War. “Richard didn’t do this,” he
murmured several times. “This’s the work of a
madman.” Michael’s face seemed to laugh silently from
nowhere and everywhere.
Only a Dee stratagem could have spilled so much blood.
He circulated around the war room, trying to find some positive
spark amid all the negatives. He found no promise anywhere but in
Cassius’s headlong sprint.
Suddenly, he caught one strained thread from amid the constant
babble being monitored. “ . . . you read,
Iron Legion? I’ve hit heat erosion fourteen kilometers off
Point Nine Hundred. Main track in. Can’t drop my slaves. I
have thirty-two men aboard. Can you help? Mayday, Mayday, This is
Twenty-ninth Brightside Main Battle Tractor, can you read, Iron
Legion? I’ve hit heat
erosion . . . ”
“How’s he sending?” Storm asked.
“Pulse-beam laser, sir. He’s bouncing it off the cliff
face.”
Storm turned to the big display board. It portrayed
incredible confusion. He wondered if even the computers were
keeping track.
Point Nine Hundred would be nine hundred kilometers out the
Shadowline, only about fifty kilometers east of the incline Wulf
had used to scale the cliffs. “How long have we been getting
this?”
The monitor checked the log for the previous watch.
“Nearly four hours, Colonel. Colonel Darksword began rescue
operations as soon as the message came in.”
Storm turned to Blake. “What’re the chances of
bailing them out?”
Blake shook his head. “About zit. We haven’t had a
successful daylight rescue since Moira Jackson brought her father
in. That was right after the Ulantonid War. And we get several
chances a year. Finding them is the hard part. Point Nine Hundred
and fourteen out don’t mean that much. It’s a
dead-reckoning guess. DR gets pretty loose after a few hours in
sunlight. If we ever develop the technology, we’ll put out
navigation beacons . . . Anyway, you have to be
right on top of another crawler to spot it. The charters have the
best instruments, and even they can’t see far. But we always
try, if only because we hope we’ll learn
something.”
The drama unfolded with painful slowness. Wulf had committed all
his units to a computer-mapped search spiral around the trapped
crawler’s estimated position.
The tractor’s commander grew more and more desperate as
his screens drew nearer overload.
Suddenly, “Hey! Got him! Hey, over here!”
Storm chuckled nervously.
Soberly, the same voice said, “Intrepid, Intrepid, this is
White Wing One. We have a contact bearing three four seven at six
one zero meters. Over.”
“White Wing One, White Wing One, this is Intrepid. Hold
your position, over.” Intrepid was Wulf on his own tactical
net. “Storm King, Storm King, this is Intrepid. Assemble on
White Wing One, immediate execute, over.” Wulf shifted to
command net. “Wormdoom, Wormdoom, this is Sky Writer. We have
a positive contact. Request instructions, over.”
There was no response from Cassius. Walters had outrun his
communications engineers.
Storm bent to a pickup. “Sky Writer, Sky Writer, this is
Andiron. Proceed with caution. Let one of the miners direct the
rescue. Andiron out.”
Storm stared at the big board again. He had a sudden bad feeling
about this. Something told him he should let it go. Yet he could
not overcome his feeling of moral obligation to a brother soldier.
He could not make himself call Wulf off.
“Andiron, Andiron, this is Sky Writer. Acknowledge proceed
with discretion under native direction. Sky Writer out.”
Storm told the tech, “Keep a close monitor. Let me know if
you smell anything funny.”
The communications technician frowned questioningly. Storm did
not expand.
The rescue attempt followed procedures which were little more
than paper theory. It went smoothly, according to Korando and
Blake, one or the other of whom was always present.
Charters moved into position sunward of the stricken crawler.
They set up portable shadow generators which were themselves
protected by a series of disposable molybdenum-ceramic ablation
sails. Pumpers, the leviathan crawlers which took liquid metals
aboard and hauled them in for processing, ran their pump trunks to
emergency locks designed to receive them. The inner diameter of the
trunks was large enough to permit passage of a small man.
“Makes a hog more comfortable, knowing he has a
theoretical chance,” Korando observed. “Even if
it’s so slim it only pays off once a century. Knowing
somebody will try means a lot when you’re crawling
Brightside.”
“Andiron, Andiron, this is Sky Writer. We’re getting
no response from the crawler. We’re sending a man from Main
Battle One. Over.”
Storm turned to Blake, frowning a question. “The battle
crawlers are modified pumpers,” Blake told him. “The
first few have converted pump slaves.”
That was not the question Storm wanted answered. But Wulf was
waiting. “Sky Writer, Sky Writer, this is Andiron. I read
you, over.”
Wulf had the man carry a hand comm and patched him into the comm
net. There was a lot of back and forth about how to open the escape
hatch from outside. Wulf had a lot to say about hurrying it up
because the shadow generators would not last forever.
“What I wanted to know,” Storm told Blake,
“was why you couldn’t have used this method to rescue
that man Frog.”
“Because his tractor was built on the other side of the
hill where Noah was building the Ark. His only escape hatch was
under his cabin. The high-hatch modification came about because of
the trouble we had getting to him. Meacham picked up the idea the
same time we did.”
“I see.”
“I don’t
see anything but dead men, Colonel,” Wulf’s
investigator reported once he had effected entry. “I’m
starting forward to the control cabin.”
There was a minute of silence. Storm waited tensely, something
raising the hair at the back of his neck.
“Can’t figure what happened here, Colonel.
They’re all bluish and puffy-faced. Their screens are still
up and the oxy levels look
good . . . ”
“Wulf!” Storm thundered, ignoring the code rules.
“Get the hell out of there! I mean now!” The bad
feeling had bloomed into an intuition. “It’s some kind
of trap!”
His order came too late. It had been too late for an hour.
There was an instant of thunder on the net, then a silence
punctuated only by static.
“Andiron, Andiron, this is Honeycomb,” a tight voice
said, breaking the silence. “We have a visual and lase-radar
on a nuclear cloud at approximately Point Nine Twenty, fifteen
kilometers out. Over.”
And, “Andiron, Andiron, this is Charing Cross. I’m
getting heavy richters epicentered at approximately point Nine
Seventeen, fifteen kilometers out, accompanied by heavy gamma
radiation. Over.”
Similar and related reports came in from a dozen observers.
Storm responded to none. The communications technician acknowledge
in a dull voice.
Wulf. Dead. Along with hundreds of his men. Because of a
humanitarian impulse. It had been a trap. Dee work for sure,
predicated on a knowledge of mercenaries and miners.
Storm told Thurston, “That was Fearchild’s
doing.”
Thurston nodded sadly. “It’s his style. What are we
going to do, Father?”
Storm paused a moment before answering. “You take over
here.” His stomach felt as though the great-grand-daddy of
all ulcers were trying to gnaw its way out. “I’ve got
to tell Helmut. Try to get through to Cassius. He has to
know.”
He was surprised at himself. He should have been in an insane
rage. Instead, he was emotionally numb, still trying to convince
himself that it really had happened. Part of him kept thinking Wulf
would call in and say it was all a bad joke.
He scanned his people once before going to Helmut. Their faces
were all reflections of his own, he suspected. Each portrayed shock
and an inability to believe.
Nuclears had not been used on-planet, against people, even
during the most critical days of the Ulantonid War. They had joined
the list of banned-by-gentleman’s-agreement weapons ages ago.
One would expect chemical and biological weapons to see use first.
Their effects were less long-lasting . . .
He had been right. The Shadowline war was the swan song of the
freecorps. Confederation would move in and disarm them for sure,
now. The public outcry would leave the government no choice.
He overlooked one small fact while thinking that. The media were
completely indifferent to the Shadowline war. No one was covering
it. Hardly anyone off Blackworld knew anything about it. He, the
people in the war room, and perhaps a handful of men in Twilight,
were the only folks Darkside who knew that proscribed weaponry had
been employed.
“Father, Cassius needs you,” Thurston boomed from
ten meters away.
“What is it?”
Thurston shrugged. “Something’s shaping up.”
Evidently, he did not want to talk in front of civilians.
“Mr. Blake. Mrs. Blake. If you’ll excuse
me?”
“Of course,” Blake replied. “Wish I had an
excuse to slip out myself.”
“Creighton, Colonel Storm,” Grace said, her tiny
voice quavering, “could we go along?”
“Of course,” Storm replied. “Your husband is
the boss. I’d look silly keeping him away.”
“Albin, make my apologies,” Blake told Korando.
“Then join us in Colonel Storm’s war room.”
The war room was lively when they arrived. The Legion had added
a massive amount of specialized equipment to Blake Mining’s
Comm Center. The heartpiece was a gigantic display board on which
was imposed a computer-mastered chart of the Shadowline. The long,
dark river of the rift was alive with shoals of tiny moving lights.
Each represented a particular unit. A susurrus of soft
communications chatter filled the air as commtechs monitored
Shadowline radio traffic. The theme of the moment was confusion on
the firing line, questions racketing back and forth among
“Foxbat,”
“Mirage I,” and
“Damocles.” The chatter was clear, but couched in
jargon that Storm’s companions could not interpret.
Cassius’ was on visual, and clearly impatient.
“Command clear trunk, scrambled,” the technician told
Storm. Storm nodded.
“Gneaus,” Cassius said the instant Storm moved in
front of the pickup, “they’re starting something. We
don’t know what yet, but it looks big.”
“What have you got? I don’t see anything on the big
board.”
“They started probing with infantry and armor two hours
ago. Pushed our observers back. We’ve had to withdraw past
the limit of reliable sonic discrimination, so nothing’s
sure. The computer enhancements make it look like there’s a
lot of heavy stuff moving.”
Storm glanced at the pictures from the sky-eye orbitals. The
damned satellites were next to useless. The demon sun burned them
out in a few days’ time, and what pictures they did send down
were no good. Too much contrast between the sunlighted plains and
the darkness of the Shadowline. “You get anything from
Intelligence?”
“There hasn’t been a crackle from an open carrier
since this morning. Looks like they’ve shut down
communications completely. Yesterday we did get confirmation of
your notion that Richard went back to Twilight.”
“Who’d he leave in charge?”
“Doskal
Mennike. The younger.”
“Richard wouldn’t set up a
push and then leave.”
“That’s why I called.
He’s been gone awhile, near as we can tell. He wasn’t
here for their spoiling raids last week, either. Something strange
is happening.”
“Where are they up top?” Storm’s own forces
had begun moving to break the laager that morning, after the
engineers, a month behind schedule, had completed the incline to
the upward side of the Shadowline cliffs. Any attack by Hawksblood
would catch the Legion overextended.
“About ready. They were getting into position the last report I had.”
“You have comm with Wulf?”
“A bad link. The sun is distorting the relay
beam.”
“Patch me in on Tac Two.” While he waited, Storm
asked, “Mr. Blake, is there any way we can find out
what’s going on in Twilight?”
“I have a man there, but I can’t get in touch in a
hurry. We have to wait till he finds some way to smuggle his
microtapes out.”
“That’s no good. I need an idea of what’s
happening right now, today, not what was going on last
month.”
“Why?”
“I smell something rotten.”
“Patched, Gneaus,” Cassius said. “You
won’t get anything but snow on visual.”
“I’ll see if we can enhance. Switch it.” He
waited a few seconds. A 2 appeared momentarily. “Sky Writer,
Sky Writer, this is Andiron, over.” No response. “Sky
Writer, Sky Writer, this is Andiron, do you read me,
over.”
“Andiron, Andiron, this is Blackwood. Sky Writer has lost
lasecomm, over.” The response was barely audible.
Storm whispered to a tech, “Who’s
Blackwood?”
The technician checked his charts. “Bill Allen, sir. In
one of Colonel Darksword’s crawlers.”
“Blackwood, Blackwood, this is Andiron. Relay to Sky
Writer. Query your position. Query can you relay visual of laager,
over.”
“Andiron, Andiron, this is Blackwood, relaying to Sky
Writer. I read you loud. Am at point Romeo Tango X-Ray, engaged.
Visual follows, over.”
“Picture coming in,” Storm said. “Enhance
it.”
A deep darkness, waxing and waning behind static snow, appeared
before Storm. It wavered till the computer found how best to
enhance it.
The darkness was broken occasionally by the fire-lances of
lasecannon or the flash of explosives. The view was down from the
rim of the Shadowline. Richard’s laager was spread out like
toys on a sand table. Here and there, jerkily in the flashes,
movements suggested armor and mobile artillery scuttling for better
cover. The visible crawlers began to glow.
“Why are they lighting up?” Storm asked. From behind
him, Korando replied, “They’re putting up their solar
screens. That will stop the lighter lasecannon.”
Storm leaned closer. “Those rigs look smaller than their
military crawlers. Korando. What kind of units are they?”
“Pumpers and charters. Mostly old stuff. What I’d guess
they’d be using for hauling supplies.”
“Blackwood, Blackwood, this is Andiron. Query, Classes of
defensive fire received, over.”
“Andiron, Andiron, this is Blackwood. Receiving light
projectile fire. Have silenced one lasecannon. Over.”
“Wormdoom, Wormdoom, this is Andiron, do you read me?
Over.”
“Andiron, Andiron, this is Wormdoom,” Cassius
replied. “Switching to secure comm. Wormdoom out.”
Shifting to the scrambled trunk, Storm said, “Cassius,
they’ve replaced their heavy stuff with obsolete mining
equipment. Watch for something coming out of sunlight. You might
move up some artillery and armor. Go ahead with the blast.
It’s too late for Wulf to help you anyway. Try to get this
lot to surrender. If you don’t get hurt, and can push far
enough past them, a sunlight sweep wouldn’t be able to get
back to friendly territory.”
“I’m working along those lines already,”
Cassius replied. “Gneaus, if that’s it, it’s
likely to be bloody. What’s wrong over there? This
isn’t Richard’s style. There’s no need for an
attack. And Mennike isn’t any glory hound either.”
Remembering what it had been like out there, penned in a suit
most of the time and always surrounded by natural dangers as well
as enemies, Storm posited, “Maybe he went around the
bend.”
“Maybe. But I can think of a more probable cause.
There are enough Dees over there to wreck a galaxy. I’ve
got to get back and stay on top of this. Keep watching. I’ll
check in later.”
“Later.” Storm rose, surveyed the room. He moved a
chair to its center, seated himself. From there he could hear all
the monitors and see the big board. He completely forgot his
guests. Thurston received a curt nod when he brought a tankard of
coffee.
The razor’s edge of Now swept forward, turning future into
past. Hours groaned away, creaking on rusty hinges. Wulf took the
laager under heavy fire. One of his crawlers ran on out along the
cliff top, planted charges that would drop a rockfall behind
Hawksblood’s men. Wulf’s fire wrecked several Meacham
crawlers. The laager broke. The big units, manned by flighty
civilians, fled into sunlight, abandoning everyone not already
aboard. Cassius immediately applied pressure with his armor.
Hawksblood’s people withdrew till Wulf’s rockfall
barred farther retreat.
The Twilight fighting crawlers swept in from sunlight on a
well-organized front two hundred kilometers wide, far behind
Cassius.
“No doubt about it,” Storm muttered as he watched
the situation develop.
“Father?” Thurston asked.
“There’s a crazy man running things out
there.”
The thirty Meacham crawlers attacked everything man-made,
including hospitals, refuge stations, and recreation domes, all of
which had been clearly marked for what they were. The crawlers
maintained a grim comm silence throughout the action.
Albin Korando observed, “It looks like they don’t
want each other to know what they’re doing. It doesn’t
take any military genius to know that our comm nets would let us
watch every one of them.”
“Curious, isn’t it?” Storm said.
The Legion bent. Forewarned, it broke nowhere. The attack was
still on when Storm said, “We’ve got them.
They’re going to be sorry they tried this. This might mean
the whole war.”
Before long the others began to see what he meant. One by one,
Hawksblood’s military crawlers were being disabled or forced
back into sunlight. The specially designed military units were
Richard’s most potent tool. He was losing them fast, and
would lose more when the retreating units tried to get back into
the Shadowline.
A Lt. Col. Gunter Havik commanded the forces opposite Cassius.
He had been Walters’s student in Academy and had served with
Storm in Confederation’s Marines. He was the archetypal
mercenary officer. He surrendered the moment it became clear that
his position was untenable.
The modern freecorps would fight no heroic, doomed Stalingrads.
Not when there was no known tactical or strategic justification.
Glory was an epitaph for fools.
Cassius immediately started ferrying troops round the rockfall
and digging them in for the return of Hawksblood’s fighting
crawlers. He did not expect to have much difficulty forcing their
surrender. Most would be running near their limits of solar
endurance and would be short of munitions. They would be eager to
get into shade, and unable to shoot their way in.
Wulf’s force withdrew to the Shadowline to recuperate from
its extended exposure to the demon sun.
Storm glanced at a clock and realized that he had been in the
war room, awake and intensely attentive, for twenty-two hours. Even
iron man Thurston had taken a few hours to nap. Thurston started to
suggest that he do the same.
“I was just thinking that,” Storm told his son.
“I can’t do anything here anyway. It’s all on
Cassius right now. Get me up if it begins to go sour.”
In the Shadowline, of course, the only sleep for the men
involved was the big one. No one would rest till the issue was
decided.
Blake was on hand when Storm returned. He did not seem
pleased.
“What’s his problem?” Storm asked
Thurston.
“Casualty figures been coming in.”
“Bad?”
“Not good.”
Battle’s confusion had begun to resolve itself into a grim
statistical portrait, Storm saw when he checked the unit
reports.
The first big battle in the Shadowline, still under way, would
be a resounding victory for Edgeward. The laager had been broken.
All but a handful of the attacking battle crawlers had been taken
out. Cassius, with every available man and machine, facing light
resistance, was racing toward the point where Twilight’s
supply line intercepted the Shadowline. He would reach it in four
days if Hawksblood could not stop him. The war could be over before
the end of the week.
And a thousand Legionnaires had died the
death-without-resurrection. More were missing. The survivors were
sifting the rubble. There were as many more injured and
resurrectable dead.
Storm was appalled. He was dazed. He could not accept the
figures. He had not encountered this much killing since the
Ulantonid War. “Richard didn’t do this,” he
murmured several times. “This’s the work of a
madman.” Michael’s face seemed to laugh silently from
nowhere and everywhere.
Only a Dee stratagem could have spilled so much blood.
He circulated around the war room, trying to find some positive
spark amid all the negatives. He found no promise anywhere but in
Cassius’s headlong sprint.
Suddenly, he caught one strained thread from amid the constant
babble being monitored. “ . . . you read,
Iron Legion? I’ve hit heat erosion fourteen kilometers off
Point Nine Hundred. Main track in. Can’t drop my slaves. I
have thirty-two men aboard. Can you help? Mayday, Mayday, This is
Twenty-ninth Brightside Main Battle Tractor, can you read, Iron
Legion? I’ve hit heat
erosion . . . ”
“How’s he sending?” Storm asked.
“Pulse-beam laser, sir. He’s bouncing it off the cliff
face.”
Storm turned to the big display board. It portrayed
incredible confusion. He wondered if even the computers were
keeping track.
Point Nine Hundred would be nine hundred kilometers out the
Shadowline, only about fifty kilometers east of the incline Wulf
had used to scale the cliffs. “How long have we been getting
this?”
The monitor checked the log for the previous watch.
“Nearly four hours, Colonel. Colonel Darksword began rescue
operations as soon as the message came in.”
Storm turned to Blake. “What’re the chances of
bailing them out?”
Blake shook his head. “About zit. We haven’t had a
successful daylight rescue since Moira Jackson brought her father
in. That was right after the Ulantonid War. And we get several
chances a year. Finding them is the hard part. Point Nine Hundred
and fourteen out don’t mean that much. It’s a
dead-reckoning guess. DR gets pretty loose after a few hours in
sunlight. If we ever develop the technology, we’ll put out
navigation beacons . . . Anyway, you have to be
right on top of another crawler to spot it. The charters have the
best instruments, and even they can’t see far. But we always
try, if only because we hope we’ll learn
something.”
The drama unfolded with painful slowness. Wulf had committed all
his units to a computer-mapped search spiral around the trapped
crawler’s estimated position.
The tractor’s commander grew more and more desperate as
his screens drew nearer overload.
Suddenly, “Hey! Got him! Hey, over here!”
Storm chuckled nervously.
Soberly, the same voice said, “Intrepid, Intrepid, this is
White Wing One. We have a contact bearing three four seven at six
one zero meters. Over.”
“White Wing One, White Wing One, this is Intrepid. Hold
your position, over.” Intrepid was Wulf on his own tactical
net. “Storm King, Storm King, this is Intrepid. Assemble on
White Wing One, immediate execute, over.” Wulf shifted to
command net. “Wormdoom, Wormdoom, this is Sky Writer. We have
a positive contact. Request instructions, over.”
There was no response from Cassius. Walters had outrun his
communications engineers.
Storm bent to a pickup. “Sky Writer, Sky Writer, this is
Andiron. Proceed with caution. Let one of the miners direct the
rescue. Andiron out.”
Storm stared at the big board again. He had a sudden bad feeling
about this. Something told him he should let it go. Yet he could
not overcome his feeling of moral obligation to a brother soldier.
He could not make himself call Wulf off.
“Andiron, Andiron, this is Sky Writer. Acknowledge proceed
with discretion under native direction. Sky Writer out.”
Storm told the tech, “Keep a close monitor. Let me know if
you smell anything funny.”
The communications technician frowned questioningly. Storm did
not expand.
The rescue attempt followed procedures which were little more
than paper theory. It went smoothly, according to Korando and
Blake, one or the other of whom was always present.
Charters moved into position sunward of the stricken crawler.
They set up portable shadow generators which were themselves
protected by a series of disposable molybdenum-ceramic ablation
sails. Pumpers, the leviathan crawlers which took liquid metals
aboard and hauled them in for processing, ran their pump trunks to
emergency locks designed to receive them. The inner diameter of the
trunks was large enough to permit passage of a small man.
“Makes a hog more comfortable, knowing he has a
theoretical chance,” Korando observed. “Even if
it’s so slim it only pays off once a century. Knowing
somebody will try means a lot when you’re crawling
Brightside.”
“Andiron, Andiron, this is Sky Writer. We’re getting
no response from the crawler. We’re sending a man from Main
Battle One. Over.”
Storm turned to Blake, frowning a question. “The battle
crawlers are modified pumpers,” Blake told him. “The
first few have converted pump slaves.”
That was not the question Storm wanted answered. But Wulf was
waiting. “Sky Writer, Sky Writer, this is Andiron. I read
you, over.”
Wulf had the man carry a hand comm and patched him into the comm
net. There was a lot of back and forth about how to open the escape
hatch from outside. Wulf had a lot to say about hurrying it up
because the shadow generators would not last forever.
“What I wanted to know,” Storm told Blake,
“was why you couldn’t have used this method to rescue
that man Frog.”
“Because his tractor was built on the other side of the
hill where Noah was building the Ark. His only escape hatch was
under his cabin. The high-hatch modification came about because of
the trouble we had getting to him. Meacham picked up the idea the
same time we did.”
“I see.”
“I don’t
see anything but dead men, Colonel,” Wulf’s
investigator reported once he had effected entry. “I’m
starting forward to the control cabin.”
There was a minute of silence. Storm waited tensely, something
raising the hair at the back of his neck.
“Can’t figure what happened here, Colonel.
They’re all bluish and puffy-faced. Their screens are still
up and the oxy levels look
good . . . ”
“Wulf!” Storm thundered, ignoring the code rules.
“Get the hell out of there! I mean now!” The bad
feeling had bloomed into an intuition. “It’s some kind
of trap!”
His order came too late. It had been too late for an hour.
There was an instant of thunder on the net, then a silence
punctuated only by static.
“Andiron, Andiron, this is Honeycomb,” a tight voice
said, breaking the silence. “We have a visual and lase-radar
on a nuclear cloud at approximately Point Nine Twenty, fifteen
kilometers out. Over.”
And, “Andiron, Andiron, this is Charing Cross. I’m
getting heavy richters epicentered at approximately point Nine
Seventeen, fifteen kilometers out, accompanied by heavy gamma
radiation. Over.”
Similar and related reports came in from a dozen observers.
Storm responded to none. The communications technician acknowledge
in a dull voice.
Wulf. Dead. Along with hundreds of his men. Because of a
humanitarian impulse. It had been a trap. Dee work for sure,
predicated on a knowledge of mercenaries and miners.
Storm told Thurston, “That was Fearchild’s
doing.”
Thurston nodded sadly. “It’s his style. What are we
going to do, Father?”
Storm paused a moment before answering. “You take over
here.” His stomach felt as though the great-grand-daddy of
all ulcers were trying to gnaw its way out. “I’ve got
to tell Helmut. Try to get through to Cassius. He has to
know.”
He was surprised at himself. He should have been in an insane
rage. Instead, he was emotionally numb, still trying to convince
himself that it really had happened. Part of him kept thinking Wulf
would call in and say it was all a bad joke.
He scanned his people once before going to Helmut. Their faces
were all reflections of his own, he suspected. Each portrayed shock
and an inability to believe.
Nuclears had not been used on-planet, against people, even
during the most critical days of the Ulantonid War. They had joined
the list of banned-by-gentleman’s-agreement weapons ages ago.
One would expect chemical and biological weapons to see use first.
Their effects were less long-lasting . . .
He had been right. The Shadowline war was the swan song of the
freecorps. Confederation would move in and disarm them for sure,
now. The public outcry would leave the government no choice.
He overlooked one small fact while thinking that. The media were
completely indifferent to the Shadowline war. No one was covering
it. Hardly anyone off Blackworld knew anything about it. He, the
people in the war room, and perhaps a handful of men in Twilight,
were the only folks Darkside who knew that proscribed weaponry had
been employed.