Seven Conquests Read online

  “But with equal force it was true that Earth could no longer afford to cut back her technology. Too many people, too few resources. In the several years of their rule, the Humanists failed to keep their promises; their attempts led only to famine, social disruption, breakdown. Losing popular support, they had to become increasingly arbitrary, thus alienating the people still more.

  “At last the oppression of Earth became so brutal that the demoncratic governments of Mars and Venus brought pressure to bear. But the Humanists had gone too far to back down. Their only possible reaction was to pull Earth-Luna out of the Solar Union.

  “We could not see that happen, sir. The lesson of history is too plain. Without a Union council to arbitrate between planets and a Solar Guard to enforce its decisions—there will be war until man is extinct. Earth could not be allowed to secede. Therefore, Mars and Venus aided the counterrevolutionary, anti-Humanist cabal that wanted to restore liberty and Union membership to the mother planet. Therefore, too, a space fleet was raised to support the uprising when it came.

  ‘

  ‘Don’t you see? Every step was an unavoidable consequence, by the logic of survival, of all that had gone before.”

  “Correct so far, Professor,” I nodded. “But the success of the counterrevolution and the Mars-Venus intervention was by no means guaranteed. Mars and Venus were still frontiers, thinly populated, only recently made habitable. They didn’t have the military potential of Earth.

  “The cabal was well organized. Its well-timed mutinies swept Earth’s newly created pro-Humanist ground and air forces before it. The countryside, the oceans, even the cities were soon cleared of Humanist troops.

  “But Dictator Carnarvon and the men still loyal to him were holed up in a score of fortresses. Oh, it would have been easy enough to dig them out or blast them out—except that the navy of sovereign Earth, organized from seized units of the Solar Guard, had also remained loyal to Humanism. Its cine, Admiral K’ung, had acted promptly when the revolt began, jailing all personnel he wasn’t sure of…or shooting them. Only a few got away.

  “So there the pro-Union revolutionaries were, in possession of Earth but with a good five hundred enemy warships orbiting above them. K’ung’s strategy was simple. He broadcast that unless the rebels surrendered inside one week—or if meanwhile they made any attempt on Carnarvon’s remaining strongholds—he’d start bombarding with nuclear weapons. That, of course, would kill perhaps a hundred million civilians, flatten the factories, poison the sea ranches…he’d turn the planet into a butcher shop.

  “Under such a threat, the general population was no longer backing the Union cause. They clamored for surrender; they began raising armies. Suddenly the victorious rebels had enemies not merely in front and above them, but behind…everywhere!

  “Meanwhile, as you all know, the Unionist fleet under Dushanovitch-Alvarez had rendezvoused off Luna; as mixed a bunch of Martians, Venusians, and freedom-minded Earthmen as history ever saw. They were much inferior both in strength and organization; it was impossible for them to charge in and give battle with any hope of winning…but Dushanovitch-Alvarez had a plan. It depended on luring the Humanist fleet out to engage him.

  “Only Admiral K’ung wasn’t having any. The Unionist command knew, from deserters, that most of his captains wanted to go out and annihilate the invaders first, returning to deal with Earth at their leisure. It was a costly nuisance, the Unionists sneaking in, firing and retreating, blowing up ship after ship of the Humanist forces. But K’ung had the final word, and he would not accept the challenge until the rebels on the ground had capitulated. He was negotiating with them now, and it looked very much as if they would give in.

  “So there it was, the entire outcome of the war—the whole history of man, for if you will pardon my saying so, gentles, Earth is still the key planet—everything hanging on this one officer, Grand Admiral K’ung Li-Po, a grim man who had given his oath and had a damnably good grasp of the military facts of life.”

  I took a long draught from my mug and began the story, using the third-person form which is customary on Mars.

  The speedster blasted at four gees till she was a bare five hundred kilometers from the closest enemy vessels. Her radar screens jittered with their nearness and in the thunder of abused hearts her crew sat waiting for the doomsday of a homing missile. When she was at the calculated point, she spat her cargo out of the main lock and leaped ahead still more furiously. In moments the thin glare of her jets was lost among crowding a tars.

  The cargo was three spacesuited men, linked to a giant air tank and burdened with a variety of tools. The orbit into which they had been flung was aligned with that of the Humanist fleet, so that relative velocity was low.

  In cosmic terms, that is. It still amounted to nearly a thousand kilometers per hour and was enough, unchecked, to spatter the men against an armored hull.

  Lieutenant Robert Crane pulled himself along the light cable that bound him, up to the tank. His hands groped in the pitchy gloom of shadowside. Then all at once rotation had brought him into the moonlight and he could see. He found the rungs and went hand over hand along the curve of the barrel, centrifugal force streaming his body outward. Damn the clumsiness of space armor! Awkwardly, he got one foot into a stirrup-like arrangement and scrambled around until he was in the”saddle” with both boots firmly locked; then he unclipped the line from his waist.

  The stars turned about him in a cold majestic wheel. Luna was nearly at the full, ashen pale, scored and pocked and filling his helmet with icy luminescence. Earth was an enormous grayness in the sky, a half ring of blinding light from the hidden sun along one side.

  Twisting a head made giddy by the spinning, he saw the other two mounted behind him. García was in the middle—you could always tell a Venusian; he painted his clan markings on his suit—and the Martian Wolf at the end. “Okay.” he said, incongruously aware that the throat mike pinched his Adam’s apple, “let’s stop this merry-go-round.”

  His hands moved across a simple control panel. A tangentially mounted nozzle opened, emitting an invisible stream of air. The stars slowed their lunatic dance, steadied…hell and sunfire, now he’d overcompensated, give it a blast from the other side…the tank was no longer in rotation. He was not hanging head downward, but falling, a long weightless tumble through a sterile infinity.

  Three men rode a barrel of compressed air toward the massed fleet of Earth.

  “Any radar reading?” García’s voice was tinny in the earphones.

  “A moment, if you please, till I have set up.” Wolf extended a telescoping mast, switched on the portable ‘scope, and began sweeping the sky. “Nearest indication…um…one o’clock, five degrees low, four hundred twenty-two kilometers distant.” He added radial and linear velocity, and García worked an astrogator’s slide rule, swearing at the tricky light.

  The base line was not the tank, but its-velocity, which could be assumed straight-line for so short a distance. Actually, the weird horse had its nose pointed a full thirty degrees off the direction of movement. “High” and “low,” in weightlessness, yere simply determined by the plane bisecting the tank, with the men’s heads arbitrarily designated as “aimed up.”

  The airbarrel had jets aligned in three planes, as well as the rotation-controlling tangential nozzles. With Wolf and García to correct him, Crane blended vectors until they were on a course that would nearly intercept the ship. Gas was released from the forward jet at a rate calculated to match velocity.

  Crane had nothing but the gauges to tell him that he was braking. Carefully dehydrated air emerges quite invisibly, and its ionization is negligible; there was no converter to radiate, and all equipment was painted a dead nonreflecting black.

  Soundless and invisible—too small and fast for a chance eye to see in the uncertain moonlight, for a chance radar beam to register as anything worth buzzing an alarm about. Not enough infrared for detection, not enough mass, no trail of ions—the machini
sts on the Thor had wrought well, the astrogators had figured as closely as men and computers are able. But in the end it was only a tank of compressed air, a bomb, a few tools, and three men frightened and lonely.

  “How long will it take us to get there?” asked Crane. His throat was dry and he swallowed hard.

  “About forty-five minutes to that ship we’re zeroed in on,” García told him. “After that, ¿quien sabe? We’ll have to locate the Monitor”

  “Be most economical with the air, if you please,” said Wolf. “We also have to get back.”

  “Tell me more,” snorted Crane.

  “If this works,” remarked García, “we’ll have added a new weapon to the System’s arsenals. That’s why I volunteered. If Antonio García of Hesperus gets his name in the history books, my whole clan will contribute to give me the biggest ranch on Venus.”

  They were an anachronism, thought Crane, a resurrection from old days when war was a wilder business. The psychotechs had not picked a team for compatibility, nor welded them into an unbreakable brotherhood. They had merely grabbed the first three willing to try an untested scheme. There wasn’t time for anything else. In another forty hours, the pro-Union armies on Earth would either have surrendered or the bombardment would begin.

  “Why are you lads here?” went on the Venusian. “We might as well get acquainted.”

  “I took an oath,” said Wolf. There was nothing priggish about it; Martians thought that way.

  “What of you, Crane?”

  “I…it looked like fun,” said the Earthman lamely. “And it might end this damned war.”

  He lied and he knew so, but how do you explain? Do you admit it was an escape from your shipmates’ eyes?

  Not that his going over to the rebels had shamed him. Everyone aboard the Marduk had done so, except for a couple of CPO’s who were now under guard in Aphrodite. The cruiser had been on patrol off Venus when word of Earth’s secession had flashed. Her captain had declared for the Union and the Guard to which he belonged, and the crew cheered him for it.

  For two years, while Dushanovitch-Alvarez, half idealist and half buccaneer, was assembling the Unionist fleet, intelligence reports trickled in from those Guard vessels—the bulk of the old space service—that had been at the mother planet and were seized to make a navy. Just before the Unionists accelerated for rendezvous, a list of the new captains appointed by K’ung had been received. And the skipper of the Huitzilopochtli was named Benjamin Crane.

  Ben…what did you do when your brother was on the enemy side? Dushanovitch-Alvarez had let the System know that a bombardment of Earth would be regarded as genocide and all officers partaking in it would be punished under Union law. It seemed unlikely that there would be any Union to try the case, but Lieutenant Robert Crane of the Marduk had protested: this was not a normal police operation, it was war, and executing men who merely obeyed the government they had pledged to uphold was opening the gates to a darker barbarism than the fighting itself. The Unionist force was too shorthanded, it could not give Lieutenant Crane more than a public reproof for insubordination, but his messmates had tended to grow silent when he entered the wardroom.

  If the superdreadnaught Monitor could be destroyed, and K’ung with it, Earth might not be bombarded. Then if the Unionists won, Ben would go free, or he would die cleanly in battle—reason enough to ride this thing into the Humanist fleet!

  Silence was cold in their helmets.

  “I’ve been thinking,” said García. “Suppose we do carry this off, but they decide to blast Earth anyway before dealing with our boats. What then?”

  “Then they blast Earth,” said Wolf. “Though most likely they won’t have to. Last I heard, the threat alone was making folk rise against our friends on the ground there.” Moonlight shimmered along his arm as he pointed at the darkened planet-shield before them. “So the Humanists will be back in power, and even if we chop up their navy, we won’t win unless we do some bombarding of our own.”

  “¡Madre de Dios!” García crossed himself, a barely visible gesture in the unreal flood of undiffused light. “I’ll mutiny before I give my name to such a thing.”

  “And I,” said Wolf shortly. “And most of us, I think.” .

  It was not that the Union fleet was crewed by saints, thought Crane. Most of its personnel had signed on for booty; the System knew how much treasure was locked in the vaults of Earth’s dictators.

  But the horror of nuclear war had been too deeply graven for anyone but a fanatic at the point of desperation to think of using it.

  Even in K’ung’s command, there must be talk of revolt. Since his ultimatum, deserters in lifeboats had brought Dushanovitch-Alvarez a mountain of precise information. But the Humanists had had ten years in which to build a hard cadre of handpicked young officers to keep the men obedient.

  Strange to know that Ben was with them—why?

  I haven’t seen you in more than two years now, Ben—nor my own wife and children, but tonight it is you who dwell in me, and I have not felt such pain for many years. Not since that time we were boys together, and you were sick one day, and I went alone down the steep bluffs above the Mississippi. There I found the old man denned up under the trees, a tramp, one of many millions for whom there was no place in this new world of shining machines—but he was not embittered, he drew his citizen’s allowance and tramped the planet and he had stories to tell me which our world of bright hard metal had forgotten. He told me about Br’er Rabbit and the briar patch; never had I heard such a story, it was the first time I knew the rich dark humor of the earth itself. And you got well, Ben, and I took you down to his camp, but he was gone and you never heard the story of Brer Rabbit. On that day, Ben, I was as close to weeping as I am this night of murder.

  The minutes dragged past. Only numbers went between the three men on the tank, astrogational corrections. They sat, each in his own skull with his own thoughts.

  The vessel on which they had zeroed came into plain view, a long black shark swimming against the Milky Way. They passed within two kilometers of her. Wolf was busy now, flicking his radar around the sky, telling off ships. It was mostly seat-of-the-pants piloting, low relative velocities and small distances, edging into the mass of Earth’s fleet. That was not a very dense mass; kilometers gaped between each unit. The Monitor was in the inner ring; a deserter had given them the approximate orbit.

  “You’re pretty good at this, boy,” said García.

  “I rode a scooter in the asteroids for a couple of years,” answered Crane. “Patrol and rescue duty.”

  That was when there had still been only the Guard, one fleet and one flag. Crane had never liked the revolutionary government of Earth, but while the Union remained and the only navy was the Guard and its only task to help any and all men, he had been reasonably content. Please God, that day would come again.

  Slowly, over the minutes, the Monitor grew before him, a giant spheroid never meant to land on a planet. He could see gun turrets scrawled black across remote star-clouds. There was more reason for destroying her than basic strategy—luring the Humanists out to do battle; more than good tactics—built only last year, she was the most formidable engine of war in the Solar System. It would be the annihilation of a symbol. The Monitor, alone among ships that rode the sky, was -designed with no other purpose than killing.

  Slow, now, easy, gauge the speeds by eye, remember how much inertia you’ve got…Edge up, brake, throw out a magnetic anchor and grapple fast. Crane turned a small winch, the cable tautened and he bumped against the hull.

  Nobody spoke. They had work to do, and their short-range radio might have been detected. García unshipped the bomb. Crane held it while the Venusian scrambled from the saddle and got a firm boot-grip on the dreadnaught. The bomb didn’t have a large mass. Crane handed it over, and García slapped it onto the hull, gripped by a magnetic plate. Stooping, he wound a spring and jerked a lever. Then, with spaceman’s finicking care, he returned to the saddle. Crane pa
id out the cable till it ran off the drum; they were free of their grapple.

  In twenty minutes, the clockwork was to set off the bomb. It was a little one, plutonium fission, and most of its energy would be wasted on vacuum. Enough would remain to smash the Monitor into a hundred fragments.

  Crane worked the airjets, forcing himself to be calm and deliberate. The barrel swung about to point at Luna, and he opened the rear throttle wide. Acceleration tugged at him, he braced his feet in the stirrups and hung on with both hands. Behind them, the Monitor receded, borne on her own orbit around a planet where terror walked.

  When they were a good fifteen kilometers away, he asked for a course. His voice felt remote, as if it came from outside his prickling skin. Most of him wondered just how many men were aboard the dreadnaught and how many wives and children they had to weep for them. Wolf squinted through a sextant and gave his readings to García. Corrections made, they rode toward the point of rendezvous: a point so tricky to compute, in this Solar System where the planets were never still, that they would doubtless not come within a hundred kilometers of the speedster that was to pick them up. But they had a hand-cranked radio that would broadcast a signal for the boat to get a fix on them.

  How many minutes had they been going? Ten…? Crane looked at the clock in the control panel. Yes, ten. Another five or so, in this acceleration, ought to see them beyond the outermost orbit of the Humanist ships-

  . He did not hear the explosion. A swift and terrible glare opened inside his helmet, enough light reflected off the inner surface for his eyes to swim in white-hot blindness. He clung to his seat, nerves and muscles tensed against the hammer blow that never came. The haze parted raggedly, and he turned his head back toward Earth. A wan nimbus of incandescent gas hung there. A few tattered stars glowed blue as they fled from it.

  Wolf’s voice whispered in his ears: “She’s gone already. The bomb went off ahead of schedule. Something in the clockwork—”