Storm, wearing a standard infantry combat suit, stood on a hill
overlooking the place where his men would fight. Silence and
darkness surrounded him. To the west there was a hint of glow
limning the Thunder Mountains, illuminated ions blowing on the
solar wind. Before him, invisible to the eye, stretched a long,
narrow plain flanked by the ringwalls of two immense meteor
craters. The hill on which he stood was the wall of a third and
smaller crater, which narrowed the nearer end of the plain to
little more than road width. It was a nice tight place to
defend.
The region had suffered intense meteoric bombardment over the
ages. The plain, over which the customary Twilight-Edgeward route
ran, was the only safe passage through the craters—unless
Michael swung hundreds of kilometers eastward to come in along the
route from The City of Night. Storm was sure Michael would be too
arrogantly self-certain to come in by the less obvious path.
And he would be too arrogantly sure of himself to charge south
as fast as he should. While he was tootling along, smirking about
having put one over on the best, his brother would have anticipated
him and would have chosen their place of battle. My brother, Storm thought. That’s what it comes down to
out here. A fight between me and my brother.
He now knew that Michael was coming. Dee’s convoy had been
detected by remotes an hour ago, ten kilometers to the north,
rolling south at a steady eight kilometers per.
Storm smiled grimly when he saw the first running lights appear
at the far end of the plain. The battle crawlers were leading.
Michael had six of the monsters. If those could be
wrecked . . .
Though it was pointless, he turned to survey his dispositions.
He could see nothing, of course, though he could vaguely sense the
presence of the gun crew in front of him and Thurston there beside
him. Here I stand, he thought. The Black Prince once stood like this
on the hill at Poitiers. I know my soldiers are the best that ever
were, but . . . He wondered how sure Edward had
been. From the literature it seemed that he had known his
Englishmen could handle ten times their weight in French, but those
histories had been written after the fact, with the outcome no
longer in doubt, and mainly by Englishmen. The Black Prince had
stalled for days, trying to negotiate his way out of the mess.
There would be no negotiation today. And these enemies would be
no gentlemen burdened by generations of chivalric tradition. If, as
he had begun to suspect when he had learned the size of
Michael’s force, these were Sangaree troops spirited in
through some city other than Twilight, he faced some rough
fighters. They would not be familiar with the terrain or their
equipment, but they would be as case-hardened as his own
people.
The fifteen-minute wait seemed endless. Storm caressed his
lasegun. It felt cold and hard through his suit gloves. He hummed
“Stranger on the Shore,” and wondered why he had never
learned to loaf through these final minutes. He had had a long life
in which to grow calloused, yet he was as nervous today as he had
been while waiting for the opening shot of his first battle.
“A time for living and a time for dying,” he
murmured. The leading Meacham crawler had entered the narrows
between ringwalls.
His one lasecannon flashed blindingly, drilling a neat hole
through the face of the lead tractor. It was a point-blank shot. In
the second flash Storm saw frozen air spewing from the wound.
His artillery opened up. His armor, using radar and the enemy
lights as guides, began scratching deadly graffiti on the
crawlers’ flanks. Their tracks were favored targets. His
infantrymen, bouncing in on their jump packs, concentrated
completely on tracks. Their guns and roeket launchers scrawled a
thousand bright lines on the face of a startled night.
A secondary explosion ripped the guts out of a slave in the
third crawler in line.
“A complete surprise!” Storm growled happily. He
descended the hill in hundred-meter bounds, the compressed gas of
his jump-pack rockets rippling the back of his suit stingingly. To
his right Thurston was bouncing mightily despite the heavy load of
satchel charges he carried. Thurston veered across Storm’s
path, heading for the stalled lead crawler. Storm followed him. The
lead vehicle was the most important target. Properly wrecked, it
would block Michael’s advance for a long time.
The Twilighters started shooting back. Their fire was wild.
Storm chuckled. They must have been riding along like tourists,
bored, sleeping, completely indifferent to the world outside.
One of his tanks took a bad hit. The crew scrambled out before
the ammunition blew. They joined the infantry, going to skirmish
with bewildered enemy troops disembarking from the transports up
the line.
The lasecannon disabled another battle crawler before dying of
its own illnesses. That put the lead three out. The others put
their solar screens up. The energy of the small arms could do
nothing against those.
Storm stayed close to Thurston. Almost fifty men converged on
the lead crawler. Though stalled, the machine was far from dead.
Its weapons spit shells and coherent light. Storm’s rocket
men concentrated on suppressing that fire.
He and Thurston reached the tractor. His son cut his jump pack,
tossed him a charge, then ran along the monster’s flank,
below its fire, limpeting charges to each slave. Storm attached his
own over the hole drilled by the lasecannon, dove for cover.
He felt the explosion in his hands and feet. There was no sound
and almost no concussion. He leaped up, yanked himself through the
hole he had blown. He used his weapon like a firehose.
The cabin was an undefended shambles. Storm sabotaged the power
controls. The men who followed him in moved to the hatch connecting
with the first trailer. Storm began moving from chair to chair,
peering into the faces of dead crewmen.
He could not tell. They looked human enough. He would have to
take a few back for dissection.
Would Michael really take that risk? he wondered. The provable
presence of Sangaree would bring Navy and the Corps whooping in
here as if they were a day late for Armageddon. It probably would
not be worth the trouble of lugging the bodies around.
Then he found the blue man.
“What the hell?”
He had seen blue men before, a long time ago. A lot more of them
than he had wanted during the Ulantonid War. There were no
Ulantonid in Richard’s forces, nor did any reside on
Blackworld. Cassius had said that the Sangaree Deeth employed men
of several races.
The crawler rocked as Thurston’s charges exploded in
series. His men burst through into the first slave. There was a
brief bit of gunplay. Storm ignored it. He pitched a corpse out of
the cabin, broke radio silence long enough to call a crawler in to
pick it up. He returned for another.
What would be going on in Michael’s head right now? Would
he be raging against the fates, the way he always did when things
went bad? Or would he be wondering why resistance was so light?
He chose a half-dozen corpses all told. His men loaded them
aboard the same crawler that had done passenger duty on the
Edgeward-to-Twilight run. The operator became increasingly nervous
as Dee’s infantry pushed closer and closer, but held on even
after spears of light began stabbing all around.
Storm’s force got mauled, as he expected. But even his
clerks and commtechs were Legionnaires. They delivered far more
damage than they took. When Storm had his corpse collection and was
satisfied that the lead battle crawlers were thoroughly disabled,
he withdrew in good order.
The mass of armor and infantry that poured around the lead
crawler, pursuing Storm, suddenly ceased to be, as a garden of mine
explosions devoured them. Dee’s caution afterward allowed
Storm to finish disengaging.
“Now we’ll see what Michael’s made of,”
he told Thurston.
“Father?”
“We’ll find out if he can control his temper. If he
can, he’ll go after the Whitlandsund. If he can’t,
he’ll come after Edgeward to get even.”
“He wouldn’t have much trouble taking the
city.”
“No. But he’d have to spend a week making
sure it was pacified. And he doesn’t have a day to waste. Go
up and tell the driver to stop at the top of the crater wall.
We’ll sit up there and see what Michael decides.”
Storm sat on that hill for a long, long time. He had done a
superb job of blocking Dee’s path.
Thurston wakened him. “He’s coming, Father.”
Storm went to the control cabin to watch the screens and displays.
Crawler after crawler came from the north, lumbered past, and
turned west. “Good. He had time to think it out.”
“I feel sorry for Havik,” Thurston said.
“So
do I, Son. But he’s got a better chance now than before.
Driver, take us in to Edgeward.”
An antsy Helmut awaited him at the depot. “Looks like
trouble,” Storm told Thurston.
“Gneaus, we’ve got trouble,” Helmut said when
Storm went to him.
“What now?”
“Ceislak has his ass in a bind. A Sangaree bind. They ran
a big raidfleet in on him. Our ships had to haul out. He’s
holding them off with the captured batteries, but he says they can
force a landing if they want to push it.”
“Looks like Cassius got his wish, then. We’ve pulled
the head spider into the game. Any word from Navy or Luna
Command?”
“Not peep one. Cassius is on his way in.”
“Eh?
Why?”
“He said that if Dee means Richard’s people to be
trapped out there, he’s cut the line to Twilight, so
there’s no need for us to hold on west of the shade station.
They’ll come to us. He’s just leaving a few men to help
them evacuate.”
“I wonder . . . You think Michael
figured Cassius would think that way? That this Darkside thrust is
just a feint to pull him in?”
“No. The
nuclear . . . ”
“Of course. That changed everything. He’s playing
for all the marbles, not just the Shadowline.”
They reached the war room in time to receive Ceislak’s
message that he was being attacked by Sangaree. Storm connected
Cassius, brought him up to date on Helga’s World, Havik, and
his own recent action.
“Gneaus,” Cassius burred, “I have a suggestion
about those corpses. Send them over to Darkside Landing or The City
of Night for the autopsy. The more you spread the proof around, the
harder it’ll be for Dee to eliminate all the witnesses. And
they’ll pressure Meacham to stop backing him.”
“Good thinking. I’ll do it. Got to go. Havik’s
in action now.”
“Father,” Thurston called across the room,
“Instel from Helga’s World. Ceislak has Sangaree on the
ground now. Any special instructions?”
“Tell him to hold out as long as he can. Cassius’s
buddy will turn up one of these days. Helmut. Bring down the scale
on the Whitlandsund there. Michael’s dispositions look a
little strange.”
A half-hour later Thurston bellowed, “Yahoo! Hey, Father!
Hakes says he’s got ships in detection. They show Navy IFF,
and there’s a skillion of them.”
Storm chuckled at his son’s enthusiasm. “Calm down
and keep an eye on it. Tell Ceislak to keep the comm open.”
He felt like whooping himself. “Helmut, this friend of
Cassius’s is as crafty as a Dee. He had me scared, but he
knew what he was doing. Caught them with their pants down, making
an assault. Bet none of them get away.” Darksword’s
face lit with grim pleasure. Storm reveiwed the Whitlandsund
situation again.
Michael’s dispositions were not unusual after all, just
unimaginative. Havik would not be in bad trouble for a while.
Thurston called, “Ceislak says he has contact with Navy.
They brought in a full battle fleet. They’ve got them
bastards nailed to the wall.”
“Good. Good. Everything looks beautiful. I’m going
to my quarters. Before I collapse.”
He dreamed awful dreams. Something was nagging him. He had
forgotten something. He had overlooked something, and one dared not
do that when dealing with Sangaree and Dees.
Thurston shook his father. “Dad. Come on. Wake up.”
Storm opened his eyes. “What is it? You look awful.”
“They’re attacking the Fortress. The Sangaree are.
Another raidfleet. The Fishers just told me. They’re watching
and can’t do anything to help. They’ve lost touch with
Mouse.”
Storm, wearing a standard infantry combat suit, stood on a hill
overlooking the place where his men would fight. Silence and
darkness surrounded him. To the west there was a hint of glow
limning the Thunder Mountains, illuminated ions blowing on the
solar wind. Before him, invisible to the eye, stretched a long,
narrow plain flanked by the ringwalls of two immense meteor
craters. The hill on which he stood was the wall of a third and
smaller crater, which narrowed the nearer end of the plain to
little more than road width. It was a nice tight place to
defend.
The region had suffered intense meteoric bombardment over the
ages. The plain, over which the customary Twilight-Edgeward route
ran, was the only safe passage through the craters—unless
Michael swung hundreds of kilometers eastward to come in along the
route from The City of Night. Storm was sure Michael would be too
arrogantly self-certain to come in by the less obvious path.
And he would be too arrogantly sure of himself to charge south
as fast as he should. While he was tootling along, smirking about
having put one over on the best, his brother would have anticipated
him and would have chosen their place of battle. My brother, Storm thought. That’s what it comes down to
out here. A fight between me and my brother.
He now knew that Michael was coming. Dee’s convoy had been
detected by remotes an hour ago, ten kilometers to the north,
rolling south at a steady eight kilometers per.
Storm smiled grimly when he saw the first running lights appear
at the far end of the plain. The battle crawlers were leading.
Michael had six of the monsters. If those could be
wrecked . . .
Though it was pointless, he turned to survey his dispositions.
He could see nothing, of course, though he could vaguely sense the
presence of the gun crew in front of him and Thurston there beside
him. Here I stand, he thought. The Black Prince once stood like this
on the hill at Poitiers. I know my soldiers are the best that ever
were, but . . . He wondered how sure Edward had
been. From the literature it seemed that he had known his
Englishmen could handle ten times their weight in French, but those
histories had been written after the fact, with the outcome no
longer in doubt, and mainly by Englishmen. The Black Prince had
stalled for days, trying to negotiate his way out of the mess.
There would be no negotiation today. And these enemies would be
no gentlemen burdened by generations of chivalric tradition. If, as
he had begun to suspect when he had learned the size of
Michael’s force, these were Sangaree troops spirited in
through some city other than Twilight, he faced some rough
fighters. They would not be familiar with the terrain or their
equipment, but they would be as case-hardened as his own
people.
The fifteen-minute wait seemed endless. Storm caressed his
lasegun. It felt cold and hard through his suit gloves. He hummed
“Stranger on the Shore,” and wondered why he had never
learned to loaf through these final minutes. He had had a long life
in which to grow calloused, yet he was as nervous today as he had
been while waiting for the opening shot of his first battle.
“A time for living and a time for dying,” he
murmured. The leading Meacham crawler had entered the narrows
between ringwalls.
His one lasecannon flashed blindingly, drilling a neat hole
through the face of the lead tractor. It was a point-blank shot. In
the second flash Storm saw frozen air spewing from the wound.
His artillery opened up. His armor, using radar and the enemy
lights as guides, began scratching deadly graffiti on the
crawlers’ flanks. Their tracks were favored targets. His
infantrymen, bouncing in on their jump packs, concentrated
completely on tracks. Their guns and roeket launchers scrawled a
thousand bright lines on the face of a startled night.
A secondary explosion ripped the guts out of a slave in the
third crawler in line.
“A complete surprise!” Storm growled happily. He
descended the hill in hundred-meter bounds, the compressed gas of
his jump-pack rockets rippling the back of his suit stingingly. To
his right Thurston was bouncing mightily despite the heavy load of
satchel charges he carried. Thurston veered across Storm’s
path, heading for the stalled lead crawler. Storm followed him. The
lead vehicle was the most important target. Properly wrecked, it
would block Michael’s advance for a long time.
The Twilighters started shooting back. Their fire was wild.
Storm chuckled. They must have been riding along like tourists,
bored, sleeping, completely indifferent to the world outside.
One of his tanks took a bad hit. The crew scrambled out before
the ammunition blew. They joined the infantry, going to skirmish
with bewildered enemy troops disembarking from the transports up
the line.
The lasecannon disabled another battle crawler before dying of
its own illnesses. That put the lead three out. The others put
their solar screens up. The energy of the small arms could do
nothing against those.
Storm stayed close to Thurston. Almost fifty men converged on
the lead crawler. Though stalled, the machine was far from dead.
Its weapons spit shells and coherent light. Storm’s rocket
men concentrated on suppressing that fire.
He and Thurston reached the tractor. His son cut his jump pack,
tossed him a charge, then ran along the monster’s flank,
below its fire, limpeting charges to each slave. Storm attached his
own over the hole drilled by the lasecannon, dove for cover.
He felt the explosion in his hands and feet. There was no sound
and almost no concussion. He leaped up, yanked himself through the
hole he had blown. He used his weapon like a firehose.
The cabin was an undefended shambles. Storm sabotaged the power
controls. The men who followed him in moved to the hatch connecting
with the first trailer. Storm began moving from chair to chair,
peering into the faces of dead crewmen.
He could not tell. They looked human enough. He would have to
take a few back for dissection.
Would Michael really take that risk? he wondered. The provable
presence of Sangaree would bring Navy and the Corps whooping in
here as if they were a day late for Armageddon. It probably would
not be worth the trouble of lugging the bodies around.
Then he found the blue man.
“What the hell?”
He had seen blue men before, a long time ago. A lot more of them
than he had wanted during the Ulantonid War. There were no
Ulantonid in Richard’s forces, nor did any reside on
Blackworld. Cassius had said that the Sangaree Deeth employed men
of several races.
The crawler rocked as Thurston’s charges exploded in
series. His men burst through into the first slave. There was a
brief bit of gunplay. Storm ignored it. He pitched a corpse out of
the cabin, broke radio silence long enough to call a crawler in to
pick it up. He returned for another.
What would be going on in Michael’s head right now? Would
he be raging against the fates, the way he always did when things
went bad? Or would he be wondering why resistance was so light?
He chose a half-dozen corpses all told. His men loaded them
aboard the same crawler that had done passenger duty on the
Edgeward-to-Twilight run. The operator became increasingly nervous
as Dee’s infantry pushed closer and closer, but held on even
after spears of light began stabbing all around.
Storm’s force got mauled, as he expected. But even his
clerks and commtechs were Legionnaires. They delivered far more
damage than they took. When Storm had his corpse collection and was
satisfied that the lead battle crawlers were thoroughly disabled,
he withdrew in good order.
The mass of armor and infantry that poured around the lead
crawler, pursuing Storm, suddenly ceased to be, as a garden of mine
explosions devoured them. Dee’s caution afterward allowed
Storm to finish disengaging.
“Now we’ll see what Michael’s made of,”
he told Thurston.
“Father?”
“We’ll find out if he can control his temper. If he
can, he’ll go after the Whitlandsund. If he can’t,
he’ll come after Edgeward to get even.”
“He wouldn’t have much trouble taking the
city.”
“No. But he’d have to spend a week making
sure it was pacified. And he doesn’t have a day to waste. Go
up and tell the driver to stop at the top of the crater wall.
We’ll sit up there and see what Michael decides.”
Storm sat on that hill for a long, long time. He had done a
superb job of blocking Dee’s path.
Thurston wakened him. “He’s coming, Father.”
Storm went to the control cabin to watch the screens and displays.
Crawler after crawler came from the north, lumbered past, and
turned west. “Good. He had time to think it out.”
“I feel sorry for Havik,” Thurston said.
“So
do I, Son. But he’s got a better chance now than before.
Driver, take us in to Edgeward.”
An antsy Helmut awaited him at the depot. “Looks like
trouble,” Storm told Thurston.
“Gneaus, we’ve got trouble,” Helmut said when
Storm went to him.
“What now?”
“Ceislak has his ass in a bind. A Sangaree bind. They ran
a big raidfleet in on him. Our ships had to haul out. He’s
holding them off with the captured batteries, but he says they can
force a landing if they want to push it.”
“Looks like Cassius got his wish, then. We’ve pulled
the head spider into the game. Any word from Navy or Luna
Command?”
“Not peep one. Cassius is on his way in.”
“Eh?
Why?”
“He said that if Dee means Richard’s people to be
trapped out there, he’s cut the line to Twilight, so
there’s no need for us to hold on west of the shade station.
They’ll come to us. He’s just leaving a few men to help
them evacuate.”
“I wonder . . . You think Michael
figured Cassius would think that way? That this Darkside thrust is
just a feint to pull him in?”
“No. The
nuclear . . . ”
“Of course. That changed everything. He’s playing
for all the marbles, not just the Shadowline.”
They reached the war room in time to receive Ceislak’s
message that he was being attacked by Sangaree. Storm connected
Cassius, brought him up to date on Helga’s World, Havik, and
his own recent action.
“Gneaus,” Cassius burred, “I have a suggestion
about those corpses. Send them over to Darkside Landing or The City
of Night for the autopsy. The more you spread the proof around, the
harder it’ll be for Dee to eliminate all the witnesses. And
they’ll pressure Meacham to stop backing him.”
“Good thinking. I’ll do it. Got to go. Havik’s
in action now.”
“Father,” Thurston called across the room,
“Instel from Helga’s World. Ceislak has Sangaree on the
ground now. Any special instructions?”
“Tell him to hold out as long as he can. Cassius’s
buddy will turn up one of these days. Helmut. Bring down the scale
on the Whitlandsund there. Michael’s dispositions look a
little strange.”
A half-hour later Thurston bellowed, “Yahoo! Hey, Father!
Hakes says he’s got ships in detection. They show Navy IFF,
and there’s a skillion of them.”
Storm chuckled at his son’s enthusiasm. “Calm down
and keep an eye on it. Tell Ceislak to keep the comm open.”
He felt like whooping himself. “Helmut, this friend of
Cassius’s is as crafty as a Dee. He had me scared, but he
knew what he was doing. Caught them with their pants down, making
an assault. Bet none of them get away.” Darksword’s
face lit with grim pleasure. Storm reveiwed the Whitlandsund
situation again.
Michael’s dispositions were not unusual after all, just
unimaginative. Havik would not be in bad trouble for a while.
Thurston called, “Ceislak says he has contact with Navy.
They brought in a full battle fleet. They’ve got them
bastards nailed to the wall.”
“Good. Good. Everything looks beautiful. I’m going
to my quarters. Before I collapse.”
He dreamed awful dreams. Something was nagging him. He had
forgotten something. He had overlooked something, and one dared not
do that when dealing with Sangaree and Dees.
Thurston shook his father. “Dad. Come on. Wake up.”
Storm opened his eyes. “What is it? You look awful.”
“They’re attacking the Fortress. The Sangaree are.
Another raidfleet. The Fishers just told me. They’re watching
and can’t do anything to help. They’ve lost touch with
Mouse.”