Three Worlds to Conquer

by Poul Anderson

  The camera lingered on Swayne a minute and shifted away to a projection. The Stars and Stripes fluttered in a wind that had blown half a billion miles away, and the anthem crashed forth.

  No one stirred in Hoshi’s house. Lorraine Vlasek came into view. “You have heard Admiral Swayne’s proclamation,” she said. An unnatural steadiness armored her tone and the strong fair face. “Speaking for the interim colonial government, I would like to discuss what this means—”

  Hoshi jumped up and snapped the image to extinction. “I’ll leave the recorder going,” he said, “but right now I can’t take any more.”

  “The man’s insane,” Eve whispered from the shadows where she sat. “One ship against the whole Earth—he can’t!”

  “Insane, perhaps,” Fraser heard himself reply. “But they might carry it off at that. The situation will be chaotic for months to come, back home, until the new government has gotten firmly established. If its centers are smashed—Or the people may well revolt, in sheer panic. Do you remember what nuclear warheads can do? A thousand megatons exploded at satellite height will set half a million square miles afire simultaneously.”

  “Even if he tries and fails, there might not be much left of the country.” Hoshi nodded. “And let’s admit that there are some foreigners who’d pay off old grudges on what did survive.”

  “But then he’d have fought for nothing!” Mahoney protested.

  “His sort would rather bring the whole works down than surrender to what they hate,” Hoshi said.

  “A praiseworthy attitude—when our side has it,” Fraser remarked with acrid sarcasm.

  Hoshi regarded him out of narrowed slant eyes. “What do you mean by that, Mark?”

  “Nothing. Forget it.” Fraser stared out the port, at the ice and stars. “We’ve got to fight him, of course,” he sighed.

  “Yeah. I’m sure this speech of his will fetch in the outlier men that were doubtful when we talked to them earlier,” Hoshi said.

  He began to pace, up and down before the darkened screen, ticking his points off on work-roughened fingers. “We can count on several hundred, at least. Their cats travel fast. We’ll agree on several rendezvous points, and our sub-groups will move from them, converging in the eastern Sinus. With any luck, we can be at Aurora by eclipse time.”

  “What will you fight with?” Mahoney challenged.

  “We did pretty well in Shepard Pass, didn’t we?” Tom Hoshi replied.

  “Uh-huh,” his father said. “Industrial equipment isn’t too bad for close-in combat. We wouldn’t have a chance against regular military forces. But the Vega people are Navy. They’re short on small arms, and we outnumber them grossly. The ship can fire at us, but I don’t think many guns can be brought to bear; and anyhow, those warheads are meant to explode inside other ships. Bursting in vacuum, they don’t have much radius of destruction. We only need to get some sappers up to her. A few hundred pounds of tordenite, set off under the landing jacks, will put her quite out of action. Then we’ve got the whole bloody gang.”

  “If they haven’t lifted ship as soon as they saw us coming,” Fraser objected.

  “They won’t have a chance to. We can get over the horizon and up to the spacefield in half the time needed to raise a vessel that size, unless she’s on full alert. Which she won’t be, because that’d tie up too many of her crew for Swayne to get his production project started. Naturally, we’ve got to keep him from knowing about us beforehand. That shouldn’t be too hard. He can’t tap tight beams that aren’t aimed at Aurora, and he hasn’t the personnel to investigate the back country. Given a couple of weeks to get organized, he can send occasional patrols around to keep tabs on us. But we won’t give him those weeks. If anyone radiophones while we’re enroute, those who stay behind can fob off questions.”

  “Or tattle on us,” Colin said.

  “Don’t fear that,” Fraser assured him. “The outliers are the really rambunctious individualists. Otherwise they’d have stayed in Aurora. But belay that ‘us,’ boy. You’re staying here.”

  “The hell I am!”

  “The hell I am, sir” Fraser rose too, and went to his wife. She buried her face against him. “Somebody’s got to look after your mother and Ann, Colin. You’re elected.”

  And frankly, I envy you.

  VII

  Tom Hoshi looked at the inertial A locator dial on the control board, nodded, and stopped the cat. Its motor whirred to silence. “We’re here.”

  Fraser checked the clock. “None too soon, either,” he said. He wasn’t sure if he spoke thickly or not. His head felt light, and his heart seemed about to burst through his ribs. But he calculated with habitual ease. “Approximately three quarters of an hour for us, to Aurora. Allow another fifteen minutes for snafu and extras—yeah, we’ll get there shortly after eclipse. Right about when we’re supposed to.”

  The five brothers crowded in with him seemed as unshakeable as the father whose plan they were enacting. Fraser wondered if they were also scared down underneath. They snapped shut their faceplates and shrugged the loads of explosive over their shoulders, awkward bundles above the recycler tanks. Fraser waited till the last minute, when Tom was at the door, to close his own helmet. He didn’t relish being locked in with himself.

  Not waiting for the economy pump to finish its work, Tom opened the door as soon as pressure had dropped enough to allow it. Air puffed out in a frost-white cloud, that expanded momentarily against rock and stars and then was gone. Fraser climbed through into blindness.

  A wall rose before him, dizzily upward to a jagged rim. Half the sky was visible, because Dante Chasm is so wide that either edge lies below the horizon of the other. Jupiter could be seen, a thin gold crescent and the rest of the oblate disc a coalsack faintly rimmed with light. The sun was very near it. But crags and steeps threw their shadows from the east, over that place where the dozen cats had halted, so that night prevailed there and in the abyss below. Fraser could see nothing except bobbing blobs of undiffused light from flashtubes, where men moved about and called to each other. Even given radar and a map of the way, he didn’t quite understand how Tom had guided the caravan so far, without toppling over some brink to shatter in the deeps.

  As if reading his mind, the driver snorted: “Huh! Combat’ll be a relief after that ride. I thought I was used to poking around in craters and rifts . . . till today.”

  But it was one way of approaching undetected. Sam Hoshi counted on ground curvature to hide his army. The enemy might have patrols out, though. And men on foot, widely dispersed, would be a less profitable target than vehicles. They might even reach the Vega unseen, given a fight to distract the crew’s attention.

  Very nice and clear, Fraser thought in the hammering. Sam makes a good general. What I don’t quite get is why I, at my age, volunteered to go with this party. I do know spaceships better than average, I can tell where to put a demolition charge to do the most good, but I’m not the only one who can. Was it for Colin’s sake? I suppose I’m fighting for him and Ann more than anything else, more than for the United States or freedom or Eve, even. But I wish l had a pill!

  Stim, euphoriac, all drugs, were in short supply while Aurora remained in enemy hands. They must be saved for the wounded.

  “Everybody set?” Tom’s voice came to him as if from very far away. “Up we go. Keep in Indian file, keep your light on the feet of the guy ahead.” He turned from the cat and began to climb.

  Fraser scrambled immediately after. The stone was hard beneath his gauntlets, boots, and knee-pieces. Uneroded, the slope had few loose rocks, and the weak gravity helped too, making the ascent less difficult than it looked. But he fumbled in murk. His breath rasped through his mouth; heat and sweat turned his suit into a steam bath. Now and then a radio curse leaped vividly at him. By the time he had emerged on top, his legs shook. He sat down and panted.

  One by one, the bulky shapes appeared beside him. Thin harsh sunlight etched the faces in the helmets against a gl
ittering sky, then drew darknesses under brow and nose and cheekbones until they seemed no more than sketches of men crowded around. Tom counted off stolidly, “—fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty, sixty-one. That’s the lot of us. March!” He started north across the blue-black lava plain. Nothing broke its bareness except the stipple of meteorite pocks, the ringwall of Dakato Crater, the distant sawtooth of the Glenns and the men’s own flying shadows. Fraser fell into the mileeating rhythm, push with a foot, relax while you curved over the surface, strike with the other foot, feeling the global mass push back at you, continue on momentum until that leg was in position to shove . . .

  Pat Mahoney drew alongside him, face a-grin. “Some fun, hey, boss?” Fraser must clear his throat before he could say, “Remind me to fire you for that, after the war’s over.”

  “Huh?” Mahoney’s eyes probed at him through the tricky light. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to be sophomoric. But still, this is fun. Beats the hell out of baseball.”

  Fraser returned the look. “Are you serious?”

  “I always did like a scrap.”

  Fraser had no reply. He’d outgrown such tastes thirty years ago. It came as a shock to him to realize, not from books but in the living and present flesh, that there were decent, kindly, civilized men who had not. If “outgrowing” is the right word. Maybe I’m the mistake of nature. Readiness to fight is a survival trait, I suppose. He worried the problem for some time. It was better than brooding on what was to come.

  The sun slipped behind Jupiter. Night fell like a bomb. As eyes readapted, the plain changed from inkiness to a ghostly gray, and stars trod splendidly forth. The planet was a blank well among them, outlined in red where atmosphere refracted sunlight. The eclipse would last a little over three hours. Fraser wondered how Theor was doing. Had the dark gathered him up too? But memory refused to tell how Nyarr lay with relation to the sun at this time. Let’s see, about twenty degrees north latitude—who cared, when they were almost at Aurora?

  “There! The main radio mast!”

  Fraser didn’t recognize the voice that yelped in his earplugs. He squinted ahead and identified the shape, gaunt across the Milky Way. There was no sign or whisper of movement. He wondered sickly if Hoshi’s other detachments had arrived yet.

  “Okay,” said Tom, “now we scatter. Keep about a hundred feet apart, maintain radio silence as long as possible, let me stay ahead—and run like the devil!”

  They burst into speed. Foot-thrust sucked at Fraser’s strength and wind, impact jarred his teeth, his harsh breathing filled his ears.

  The destination didn’t seem to come any nearer. He ran and ran across emptiness, as a man runs in nightmare . . . and then in an instant Aurora lifted white before him, less than a mile away, with the topmost curve of the battleship’s hull glimmering above, on the far side; and he saw the battle to the east.

  The land seemed to crawl with gannycats, tiny beetle shapes that veered and darted, barely visible in the night. Shells burst among them, soundlessly blooming in fire. Smoke and rock chips flew high each time in a cloud but settled quickly, so that while everything was in motion nothing really seemed to change. Now that he was over the horizon, his receiver screamed with voices.

  “—here, this way, Tim!”

  “Arnesen’s squadron, deploy!”

  “Steinmeier, get your men out on foot!”

  “—goddamnit, goddamnit, goddamnit—”

  —until the racket ceased to have meaning, became one with his pulse and pant and slamming footfalls. He switched his own transmitter back on. Under these conditions, it couldn’t give him away to a detector. There was no longer time to be afraid. He had only a second in which to try to cherish the memory of Eve, and fail to conjure up her face; then he was too busy.

  Tom Hoshi’s band swung west, to approach the spaceport from an uncontested direction. As they neared Aurora, Fraser glimpsed men in the open, not far from the east side of town. They dashed about in ways that appeared merely Brownian. He wasn’t even sure whose side they were on. Both, perhaps. Swayne would likely have assigned such of his men as he could spare from operating the ship’s guns and keeping the city dwellers corked up, to double as infantry with what small arms were available.

  The buildings were now alongside, now behind. They hid the battle and cut off much of the radio noise. Fraser saw Tom turn at right angles and plunge toward the spacefield.

  Something grabbed and threw him. He landed with a shock that smashed blackness through his head.

  A moment he lay in whirling and ringing. The world came back to him, he sat up and knew with vague amazement that he was alive. His skull throbbed and there was a hot salt trickle across his lips. But he lived.

  Automatically he checked for an air leak. No sign of any. A craterlet had opened in the lava some yards away. Must have been a near miss by a shell, he thought in an impersonal fashion. The expanding gases had bowled him over, but done no serious harm. If the warhead had been designed to scatter shrapnel in a horizontal plane—but it was intended for use against ships and space stations. He got to his feet and bounded zigzag after the others. Pain touched his side. He ignored it.

  Rock gave way to concrete. The Olympia loomed near, an ugly, heavy outline in the half-light. They saw us coming, Fraser told himself, but now we’re inside the artillery’s area of coverage. The men had converged near the Jupiter vessel. Tom’s voice slashed through: “Go get ’er!”

  They charged in a body at the battleship. She loomed before them big as the universe, the landing jacks like cathedral buttresses. But once the tordenite had been planted, yes, there and there and there, and touched off, the giant must fall. Her own mass must crush the thin hull; and then a few more explosive sticks in the jets—

  Fire pencilled from the shadows underneath. A colonist threw up his arms and flopped on his back. Another man died as he ran and crashed into the supports. The beams shot forth, again and yet again, until the dead lay in windrows with fog streaming from their pierced suits. The charge broke and reeled away. Fraser found himself in retreat with Mahoney. They stopped at the Olympia. Fraser could only struggle for air, but Mahoney stood forth under the stars, waved and roared and drew men to him until a couple of score had rallied. Tom Hoshi was not among them. He must have fallen at the first barrage.

  “Laser guns,” Mahoney snarled. “They got a platoon under there, must’ve figured what we were up to. Come on, we can still swamp the bastards!”

  Someone stated an obscenity. “You’ve got to get within a yard of a man before a torch’ll burn him down. One of those guns’ll pick you off before you’re halfway.”

  “We outnumber them,” Mahoney said.

  “Not that much. Wait till the other guys have fought through to the field. Then we’ll outnumber them enough, maybe.”

  “By heaven, I’ll go by myself—now if you’re too gutless!”

  Fraser clamped a hand on Mahoney’s arm. “No, you don’t,” he said. His breath had come back to him. And he noted that his mind was working again, with engineer precision and a cold commitment. “We can’t spare anybody for heroics. The only thing that matters is to get that damned ship before she can blast off. Swayne saw at once what our intention is. Well, that’s obvious, but we didn’t expect he’d expect an attack from this quarter. Maybe he didn’t, exactly, but he did have the foresight to provide against one. So we can’t do anything but wait till Sam Hoshi breaks through. Those few men below the ship have the firepower to stop us, but not to stop a hundred or more.”

  “If Hoshi breaks through, you mean,” Mahoney said.

  “Wait here and I’ll go have a look,” Fraser offered.

  He left the others and trotted north, past the parked moonships until he overlooked the battlefield. Slowly he interpreted the shadows and glints that flitted about out there. The cats and the men afoot had no clear formation that he could see. Shellbursts inhibited that. Wreckage and corpses lay scattered to show that the artillery fire had taken effect. But casualti
es seemed fairly light, as hoped, and the colonists were advancing by fits and starts toward the spacefield. One powerful assault—

  A starburst rocket went up. Sam Hoshi’s signal!

  Cats and men ceased dodging. As one, the Ganymedeans poured forward.

  Another shell flashed in the gloom. A vehicle rose in two pieces, strewing human shapes. But then Hoshi’s van was inside the minimum range of the turrets—and the missile tubes weren’t oriented right for—

  Fraser pelted back. The darkling mass of his own group stirred beside the Olympia, broke into individuals and clustered around. “They’re on their way,” he cried. “A couple minutes more, and we can start.”

  Aurora’s buildings had cut off most of the radio racket. Now abruptly it became a hurricane. The ground trembled underfoot. Fire sheeted at the opposite end of the field. The main colonial force had won through.

  “Go!” Mahoney yelled, and sprinted ahead.

  Fraser followed, as near as he dared. Hit from two sides at once, the few men guarding the Vega could not but be overwhelmed. His hands fumbled at the packstraps.

  The laser beams raked out. Air puffed from Mahoney’s suit. He went to his knees. Another man leaped over him with a battle shout and was killed in midspring, fell with a terrible slowness and bounced when he struck.

  Over and over the noiseless lightning spat. Instinct flung Fraser onto his belly. He raised his head and saw what looked like a wall of wrecked cats at the other end of the field. Guns were going off, energy casters and machine guns, improvised mines, to smash the colonial wave and hurl it back.

  Oh, God, oh, God! Swayne had not put more than the barest minimum of crew in ship and city, and none in the field. He had concentrated his force in emplacements dug out of the concrete, nobody had seen them in the wan starlight.

  And Hoshi had charged into a man-mower.