He turned to Themistocles M"zangwe. "In about two weeks, get a little task-force together. Say ten combat-cars, about twenty airjeeps, and a battalion of Kragan Rifles in troop-carriers. Oh, yes, and this good-for-nothing Konkrook Fencibles outfit of Prince Jaizerd"s; they can be used for beaters, and to block escape routes." He turned back to Lieutenant Kendall and Sergeant Garcia. "Good work, boys. And if the synchro-photos show that any of that first bunch got away, don"t feel too badly about it. These Jeels can hide on the top of a pool-table."
He climbed into the command-car, followed by Themistocles M"zangwe and Hideyoshi O"Leary. Sergeant Harry Quong and Corporal Ha.s.san Bogdanoff took their places on the front seat; the car lifted, turned to nose into the wind, and rose in a slow spiral. Below, the fort grew smaller, a flat-topped rectangle of masonry overlooking the pa.s.s, a gun covering each approach, and two more on the square keep to cover the rocky hogback on which the fort had been built, with the flagpole between them. Once that pole had lifted a banner of ragged black marsh-flopper skin bearing the device of the Kragan riever-chieftain whose family had built the castle; now it carried a neat rectangle of blue bunting emblazoned with the wreathed globe of the Terran Federation and, below that, the blue-gray pennant which bore the vermilion trademark of the Chartered Uller Company.
"Where now, sir?" Harry Quong asked.
He looked at his watch. Seventeen-hundred; there wasn"t time for a visit to Zortolk"s Old Fort, ten miles to the north at the next pa.s.s.
"Back to Konkrook, to the island."
The nose of the car swung east by south; the cold-jet rotors began humming and then the hot-jets were cut in. The car turned from the fort and the mountains and shot away over the foothills toward the coastal plain. Below were forests, yellow-green with new foliage of the second growing season of the equatorial year, veined with narrow dirt roads and spotted with occasional clearings. Farther east, the dirty gray woodsmoke of Uller marked the progress of the charcoal-burnings. It took forty years to burn the forests clear back to the flint cliffs; by the time the burners reached the mountains, the new trees at the seaward edge would be ready to cut. Off to the south, he could see the dark green squares, where the hemlocks and Norway spruce had been planted by the Company. With a little chemical fertilizer, they were doing well, and they made better charcoal than the silicate-heavy native wood. That was the only natural fuel on Uller; there was no coal, of course, since fallen timber and even standing dead trees petrified in a matter of a couple of years. There was too much silica on Uller, and not enough of anything else; what would be coal-seams on Terra were strata of silicified wood. And, of course, there was no petroleum. There was less charcoal being burned now than formerly; the Uller Company had been bringing in great quant.i.ties of synthetic thermoconcentrate-fuel, and had been setting up nuclear furnaces and nuclear-electric power-plants, wherever they gained a foothold on the planet.
Beyond the forests came the farmlands. Around the older estates, thick walls of flint and petrified wood had been built, and wide moats dug, to keep out the sh.e.l.losaurs. But now the moats were dry, and the walls falling into disrepair. Some of the newer farms, land devoted to agriculture with the declining demand for charcoal, had neither moats nor walls. That was the Company, too; the huge sh.e.l.l-armored beasts had become virtually extinct in the Konk Isthmus now, since the introduction of bazookas and recoilless rifles. There seemed to be quite a bit of power-equipment working in the fields, and big contragravity lorries were drifting back and forth, scattering fertilizer, mainly nitrates from Mimir or Yggdrasill. There were still a good number of animal-drawn plows and harrows in use, however.
As planets went, Uller was no bargain, he thought sourly. At times, he wished he had never followed the lure of rapid promotion and fantastically high pay and left the Federation regulars for the army of the Uller Company. If he hadn"t, he"d probably be a colonel, at five thousand sols a year, but maybe it would be better to be a middle-aged colonel on a decent planet--Odin, with its two moons, Hugin and Munin, and its wide gra.s.slands and its evergreen forests that looked and even smelled like the pinewoods of Terra, or Baldur, with snow-capped mountains, and clear, cold lakes, and rocky rivers dashing under great vine-hung trees, or Freya, where the people were human to the last degree and the women were so breathtakingly beautiful--than a Company army general at twenty-five thousand on this combination icebox, furnace, wind-tunnel and stonepile, where the water tasted like soapsuds and left a crackly film when it dried; where the temperature ranged, from pole to pole, between two hundred and fifty and minus a hundred and fifty Fahrenheit and the Beaufort-scale ran up to thirty; where nothing that ran or swam or grew was fit for a human to eat, and where the people....
Of course, there were worse planets than Uller. There was Nidhog, cold and foggy, its equatorial zone a gloomy marsh and the rest of the planet locked in eternal ice. There was Bifrost, which always kept the same face turned to its primary; one side blazingly hot and the other close to absolute zero, with a narrow and barely habitable twilight zone between. There was Mimir, swarming with a race of semi-intelligent quasi-rodents, murderous, treacherous, utterly vicious. Or Niflheim. The Uller Company had the franchise for Niflheim, too; they"d had to take that and agree to exploit the planet"s resources in order to get the franchise for Uller, which furnished a good quick measure of the comparative merits of the two.
Ahead, the city of Konkrook sprawled along the delta of the Konk river and extended itself inland. The river was dry, now. Except in spring, when it was a red-brown torrent, it never ran more than a trickle, and not at all this late in the northern summer. The aircar lost alt.i.tude, and the hot-jet stopped firing. They came gliding in over the suburbs and the yellow-green parks, over the low one-story dwellings and shops, the lofty temples and palaces, the fantastically twisted towers, following a street that became increasingly mean and squalid as it neared the industrial district along the waterfront.
Von Schlichten, on the right, glanced idly down, puffing slowly on his cigarette. Then he stiffened, the muscles around his right eye clamping tighter on the monocle. Leaning forward, he punched Harry Quong lightly on the shoulder.
"Circle back, sergeant; let"s have a look at that street again," he directed. "Something going on, down there; looks like a riot."
"Yes, sir; I saw it," the Chinese-Australian driver replied. "Terrans in trouble; bein" mobbed by geeks. Aircar parked right in the b.l.o.o.d.y middle of it."
The car made a twisting, banking loop and came back, more slowly.
Colonel Hideyoshi O"Leary was using the binoculars.
"That"s right," he said. "Terrans being mobbed. Two of them, backed up against a house. I saw one of them firing a pistol."
Von Schlichten had the handset of the car"s radio, and was punching out the combination of the Company guardhouse on Gongonk Island; he held down the signal b.u.t.ton until he got an answer.
"Von Schlichten, in car over Konkrook. Riot on Fourth Avenue, just off Seventy-second Street." No Terran could possibly remember the names of Konkrook"s streets; even native troops recruited from outside found the numbers easier to learn and remember. "Geeks mobbing a couple of Terrans. I"m going down, now, to do what I can to help; send troops in a hurry. Kragan Rifles. And stand by; my driver"ll give it to you as it happens."
The voice of somebody at the guardhouse, bawling orders, came out of the receiver as he tossed the phone forward over Harry Quong"s shoulder; Quong caught it and began speaking rapidly and urgently into it while he steered with the other hand. Von Schlichten took one of the five-pound spiked riot-maces out of the rack in front of him.
Themistocles M"zangwe had already drawn his pistol; he shifted it to his left hand and took a mace in his right. The Nipponese-Irish colonel, looking like a homicidally infuriated pixie, had an automatic in one hand and a long dagger in the other.
Harry Quong and Ha.s.san Bogdanoff were old Uller hands; they"d done this sort of work before. Bogdanoff rose into the ball-turret and swung the twin 15-mm"s around, cutting loose. Quong brought the car in fast, at about shoulder-height on the mob. Between them, they left a swath of mangled, killed, wounded, and stunned natives. Then, spinning the car around, Quong set it down hard on a clump of rioters as close as possible to the struggling group around the two Terrans. Von Schlichten threw back the canopy and jumped out of the car, O"Leary and M"zangwe behind him.
There was another aircar, a dark maroon civilian job, at the curb; its native driver was slumped forward over the controls, a short crossbow-bolt sticking out of his neck. Backed against the closed door of a house, a Terran with white hair and a small beard was clubbing futilely with an empty pistol. He was wounded, and blood was streaming over his face. His companion, a young woman in a long fur coat, was laying about her with a native bolo-knife.
Von Schlichten"s mace had a spiked ball-head, and a four-inch spike in front of that. He smashed the ball down on the back of one Ulleran"s head, and jabbed another in the rump with the spike.
"_Zak! Zak!_" he yelled, in pidgin-Ulleran. "_Jik-jik_, you lizard-faced Creator"s blunder!"
The Ulleran whirled, swinging a blade somewhere between a big butcherknife and a small machete. His mouth was open, and there was froth on his lips.
"_Znidd suddabit!_" he screamed.
Von Schlichten parried the cut on the steel shaft of his mace.
"_Suddabit_ yourself, you geek b.a.s.t.a.r.d!" he shouted back, ramming the spike-end into the opal-filled mouth. "And _znidd_ you, too," he added, recovering and slamming the ball-head down on the narrow saurian skull. The Ulleran went down, spurting a yellow fluid about the consistency of gun-oil. Then, without wasting words, he maced another of the things.
Ahead, one of the natives had caught the wounded Terran with both lower hands, and was raising a dagger with his upper right. The girl in the fur coat swung wildly, slashing the knife-arm, then chopped down on the creature"s neck. To one side, a native somewhat better dressed than the others, to the extent of a couple of belts with gold ornaments, drew a Terran automatic. Von Schlichten hurled his mace and drew his pistol, thumbing off the safety as he swung it up, but before he could fire, Ha.s.san Bogdanoff had seen and swung his guns around; the double burst caught the native in the chest and fairly tore him apart.
Another of them closed with the girl, grabbing her right arm with all four hands and biting at her; she screamed and kicked her attacker in the groin, where an Ulleran is, if anything, even more vulnerable than a Terran. The native howled hideously, and von Schlichten, jumping over a couple of corpses, shoved the muzzle of his pistol into the creature"s open mouth and pulled the trigger, blowing its head apart like a rotten pumpkin and splashing both himself and the girl with yellow blood and rancid-looking gray-green brains.
Hideyoshi O"Leary, jumping forward after von Schlichten, stuck his dagger into the neck of a rioter and left it there, then caught the girl around the waist with his free arm. Themistocles M"zangwe dropped his mace and swung the frail-looking man onto his back. Together, they struggled back to the command-car, von Schlichten covering the retreat with his pistol. Another rioter--a Zirk nomad from the North, he guessed--was aiming one of the long-barreled native air-rifles, holding the ten-inch globe of the air-chamber in both lower hands. Von Schlichten shot him, and the Zirk literally blew to pieces.
For an instant, he wondered how the small bursting-charge of a 10-mm explosive pistol-bullet could accomplish such havoc, and a.s.sumed that the native had been carrying a bomb in his belt. Then another explosion tossed fragmentary corpses nearby, and another and another.
Glancing quickly over his shoulder, he saw four combat-cars coming in, firing with 40-mm auto-cannon and 15-mm machine-guns. They swept between the hovels on one side and the warehouses on the other, strafing the mob, darted up to a thousand feet, looped, and came swooping back, and this time there were three long blue-gray troop-carriers behind them.
These landed in the hastily cleared street and began disgorging native Company soldiers--Kragan mercenaries, he noted with satisfaction. They carried a modified version of the regular Terran Federation infantry rifle, stocked and sighted to conform to their physical peculiarities, with long, thorn-like, triangular bayonets. One platoon ran forward, dropped to one knee, and began firing rapidly into what was left of the mob. Four-handed soldiers can deliver a simply astonishing volume of fire, particularly when armed with auto-rifles having twenty-shot drop-out magazines which can be changed with the lower hands without lowering the weapon.
There was a clatter of shod hoofs, and a company of the King of Konkrook"s cavalry came trotting up on their six-legged, lizard-headed, quartz-speckled mounts. Some of these charged into side alleys, joyfully lancing and cutting down fleeing rioters, while others dismounted, three tossing their reins to a fourth, and went to work with their crossbows. Von Schlichten, who ordinarily entertained a dim opinion of the King of Konkrook"s soldiery, admitted, grudgingly, that it was smart work; four hands were a big help in using a crossbow, too.
A Terran captain of native infantry came over, saluting.
"Are you and your people all right, general?" he asked.
Von Schlichten glanced at the front seat of his car, where Harry Quong, a pistol in his right hand, was still talking into the radio-phone, and Ha.s.san Bogdanoff was putting fresh belts into his guns. Then he saw that the Graeco-African brigadier and the Irish-j.a.panese colonel had gotten the wounded man into the car. The girl, having dropped her bolo, was leaning against the side of the car, one foot heedlessly in what was left of an Ulleran who had gotten smashed under it, weak with nervous reaction.
"We seem to be, Captain Pedolsky. Very smart work; you must have those vehicles of yours on hypers.p.a.ce-drive.... How is he, colonel?"
"We"d better get him to the hospital, right away," O"Leary replied. "I think he has a concussion."
"Harry, call the hospital. Tell them what the score is, and tell them we"re bringing the casualty in to their top landing stage.... Why, we"ll make out very nicely, captain. You"d better stay around with your Kragans and make sure that these geeks of King Jaikark"s don"t let the riot flare up again and get away from them. And don"t let them get the impression that they can maintain order around here without our help; the Company would like to see that att.i.tude discouraged."
"Yes, sir, I understand." Captain Pedolsky opened the pouch on his belt and took out the false palate and tongue-clicker without which no Terran could do more than mouth a crude and barely comprehensible pidgin-Ulleran. Stuffing the gadget into his mouth, he turned and began jabbering orders.
Von Schlichten helped the girl into the car, placing her on his right.
The wounded civilian was propped up in the left corner of the seat, and Colonel O"Leary and Brigadier-General M"zangwe took the jump-seats. The driver put on the contragravity-field, and the car lifted up.
"Them, see if there"s a flask and a drinking-cup in the door pocket next to you," he said. "I think Miss Quinton could use a drink."
The girl turned. Even in her present disheveled condition, she was beautiful--a trifle on the pet.i.te side, with black hair and black eyes that quirked up oddly at the outer corners. Her nails were black-lacquered and spotted with little gold stars, evidently a new feminine fad from Terra.
"I certainly could, general.... How did you know my name?"
"You"ve been on Uller for the last three months; ever since the _City of Canberra_ got in from Niflheim. On Uller, there aren"t enough of us that everybody doesn"t know all about everybody else. You"re Dr. Paula Quinton; you"re an extraterrestrial sociographer, and you"re a field-agent for the Extraterrestrials" Rights a.s.sociation, like Mohammed Ferriera, here." He took the cup and flask from Themistocles M"zangwe and poured her a drink. "Take this easy, now; Baldur honey-rum, a hundred and fifty proof."
He watched her sip the stuff cautiously, cough over the first mouthful, and then get the rest of it down.
"More?" When she shook her head, he stoppered the flask and relieved her of the cup. "What were you doing in that district, anyhow?" he wanted to know. "I"d have thought Mohammed Ferriera would have had more sense than to take you there, or go there, himself, for that matter."
"We went to visit a friend of his, a native named Keeluk, who seems to be a sort of combination clergyman and labor leader," she replied.
"I"m going to observe labor conditions at the North Pole mines in a short while, and Mr. Keeluk was going to give me letters of introduction to friends of his at Skilk."
With the aid of his monocle, von Schlichten managed to keep a straight face. Neither M"zangwe nor O"Leary had any such aid; the African rolled his eyes and the j.a.panese-Irishman grimaced.