Other

by Gordon R. Dickson

  The limousine stopped. Dahno got out hastily, and the others followed him, Bleys included. Bleys stood up, stretching himself to his full height with relief after sitting in the vehicle as long as he had.

  The emergency light was little more than a dim glow in front of them, not much more than a single candle would have shown; but by its illumination it outlined a number of figures reading large unfolded pieces of paper like maps; and apparently seeing very well through goggles. Bleys recognized one figure by the way he stood. It was Henry. The others had already started to move toward him, and Bleys went with them.

  When they reached the group and stopped, Henry alone looked up from his paper, and Bleys saw the dark lenses focusing on him.

  “I’m glad you’re here safely, Bleys,” he said.

  At that moment, something was thrust into Bleys’s hands; and, looking down, he saw that it was a pair of goggles like those the others were wearing. Night-glasses, of course, Bleys told himself. He should have realized.

  “Now you’ll be able to keep up with what we’re doing here,” Henry said.

  “Perhaps it would be better if Bleys Ahrens didn’t have a pair of those,” said Kaj Menowsky, just beside and behind Bleys.

  “Medician—” Bleys turned toward the voice. But he got out only the first word. Henry was already speaking before him.

  “No. Put the night-glasses on, Bleys,” Henry said.

  In fact, Bleys had already put them on. Once they were in place, the scene before him jumped into view, as clearly visible as it might have been on a heavily clouded day. Henry stood less than a long step from him, and there was a difference about him that registered on Bleys immediately.

  Henry MacLean had never been a particularly tall or big man; but here and now he looked larger, more impressive than any of them. A lot of it was an air of command that Bleys had never seen in him before. There was also something else that Bleys found it hard to put his finger on. It was almost as if there was an enthusiasm—what even might be called a glow of happiness or enjoyment in him—born of the present moment and the present situation.

  “Come, Bleys,” said Henry, turning away from the others. “I want you to look at the situation with me.”

  Chapter 35

  Henry and Bleys moved off together into the light the night-glasses alone found for them among the trees.

  They went in silence for some minutes, Henry saying nothing more and Bleys feeling no need to talk; winding their way through available openings, for the growth was even thicker here. Bleys recognized the imported variform Norway pine, intermixed with a low native bush. They stepped suddenly through a last screen of trees, out into an open space, and Bleys was blinded by the sudden glare of light against his night-glasses.

  Bleys felt a hand catch his arm and stop him, while another hand pushed the goggles up on his forehead. He blinked his vision clear to see that they were now out under open sky and the dawn was actually with them, although the daystar was not up. As his vision adjusted, Bleys saw that Henry had halted him no more than a step short of falling over the edge of an almost vertical cliff which plunged to the seemingly-unmoving gray-blue width of the river at its foot.

  The broad, pale strips of the two trafficways to and from the spaceport, crossing the bridge, were a little down the river to his right, with the reverse trafficway—the one coming from the spaceport to Woolsthorpe—just visible underneath the outbound way where they came together to use the bridge. Then both strips curved away, still one above the other in the limited space alongside the river, for a short distance before disappearing again through the ridge on that side.

  As his eyes adjusted, Bleys saw that work had been done on the outbound traffic strip on the bridge.

  Undoubtedly using the same quick-setting material that had been thrown up to make a solid barricade at the city exit, beehive-shaped structures which were plainly weapon-shelters had been built over holes excavated in the upper trafficway surface. The horizontal slits of the shelters’ openings looked toward the city end of the bridge; and were at, or rather just above, the surface of the outbound trafficway itself.

  At least four of these had been completed and others were under construction farther back. The foremost, already finished and armed, blocked the left passing lane; and the one behind that the next, speed-regulated lane. More building with the same material was also going on at the far end of the bridge, where larger structures were being erected, with half-buried, protected passageways between them.

  “They look serious about stopping us here,” Bleys said.

  Henry nodded briefly. “Those are the Woolsthorpe Headquarters space soldiers out there,” he said. “There were probably delays in getting them here, with the necessary equipment and building machinery. But since, they’ve been making up for lost time. But why I wanted you to look at this, Bleys, was to see whether it gave you any ideas that might help me. I’ve got a pretty fair notion of how to break through, but I’d like to hear anything that comes to your mind. Odds are I’ll stay with my own planning. But there’s a chance you’ll come up with something I haven’t thought of.”

  Bleys gazed hard at the bridge, the construction going on, and tried to put some order to his thoughts.

  “I never paid much attention to military strategy or tactics,” he said, more to himself than Henry. “I never thought it would be necessary. I suppose those places they’re building will stop needles, of course.”

  “Certainly,” Henry said. “It won’t stop our power guns, though. We’ll be able to break through those fire-shelters along the road and probably just about anything they have beyond—but it’ll take a number of bolts directly on them in each instance; and every time we fire, we’ll be giving away our position. Let alone the fact that to make the power weapons effective we’re going to have to move closer—out into the open space near this end of the bridge.”

  “Yes, your power weapons—for that matter, all your weapons,” said Bleys. “Where did you get them? I know we’ve always landed on another world with your Soldiers carrying nothing but those small fingernail-trimming pocketknives. I know you had sidearms and pocket weapons coming in, in bond. But you never got the ones for Newton, here, did you?” ,

  “No, but the smallest knife is dangerous if you know how to use it,” said Henry. “You remember what I told you, Joshua and Will, as boys, about any sharp or pointed object. But about the weapons we’ve got—we got them the way the Soldiers of God and the outlaw Commands on both Harmony and Association have always gotten them. From Militia depots.”

  “There aren’t any Militia on Newton,” said Bleys.

  “No. But there’s the regular space troops those out there belong to, permanently quartered in Woolsthorpe,” Henry answered. “Remember my mentioning them yesterday? They’re here to act as personal bodyguards for the Council and government, if needed. They’ve got all sorts of weapons up to the heaviest possible—even some too heavy for use aboard space or atmosphere craft. Extra supplies are kept in the city’s military supply depots; and the first thing we did was locate them. That’s where most of the Soldiers were last night, getting all the weapons they could hand-carry.”

  Bleys looked again at the scene before him. The dawn sky had brightened even as they had stood there; and the river was now darker in color, closer to a deep-sea marine blue, rather than the slate-blue it had shown just a short time before.

  The dust-grayed white of the trafficways and the bridge was in contrast with the pure new white of the fire-shelters.

  The contrast stood out, even against the dark green background of the variform Norway pines and the native bushes—which had leaves very much the same color as the pine needles, except for a faint orange tinge around the rim of each leaf, making the bushes appear to glow in the fresh morning light.

  Bleys studied the fire-shelters, the construction still going on behind the manned ones, and entirely off the bridge on the far side as well; and sought for something that would be worth su
ggesting to Henry. But his mind was oddly tired and dull. No thoughts came.

  The river surface was so calm that it would have been easy to believe it was not moving. But with the slope of its bed from the foothills of the mountains to Bleys’s left, its current must be stiff. Yet only some small turbulence where it touched shore showed this; plus an occasional branch or tree limb that made a slight bump in the smooth liquid surface, moving swiftly toward the bridge.

  His thoughts wandered… like an Old Earth song…

  Mein Fader var ein Vandringsman, Ich hab’ es in das Blut…

  …Ezekiel MacLean, Henry’s brother, who had claimed fatherhood of Bleys, had had a knack of Old Earth languages and had taught Bleys bits of songs and stories in a number of them.

  But Ezekiel’s wandering could hardly have been called happy. Perhaps, Bleys thought, if he was actually Ezekiel’s son, he, too, would “have it in his blood” and be fated to wander—always the stranger…

  Bleys made himself concentrate once more on the bridge. But his mind failed to focus, and his eyes saw no pattern in which he could look for a weak point.

  “I’m not much help, Henry,” he said. “Maybe because I’ve been up for too long a time.”

  Even as he said it, he remembered that Henry and all the rest would have also been up at least as long.

  “—Perhaps,” Henry was saying, “we can arrange some kind of shelter for you to rest in while we go about this business of breaking through. A quiet spot in the woods—”

  “No!” Bleys said sharply. “I’m fine—just no ideas for you. If you move your power weapons out in the open to use them against those fire-shelters, the men holding them are going to be sitting ducks for the ones in the shelters. In fact, I don’t see any way to get at those shelters, unless you could get above them in aircraft, or somehow tunnel underneath them—and tunneling wouldn’t work beyond the edge of this cliff; because there’s the river; and nothing for you to fire at because the underside of the reverse trafficway would absorb the power-gun bolts. I’m no help, I’m afraid.”

  Henry nodded, without expression. “That’s all right. What you say backs up my own thinking. Do you want to wait here with me and see how things develop? Standing here, the trees around make us hard to pick out. Even if one of those space soldiers did, it would take a marksman with a needle rifle to be a threat to us. Actually, I don’t think they know we’re here yet.”

  “Henry, what actually are your plans?”

  “Stand here. You’ll see,” Henry said. “I had the attack movements begun as soon as you showed up with the rest of the Soldiers. We should be seeing the first effects of it, soon.”

  He lifted the wrist holding his control pad to his lips.

  “Anwar,” he said, into it. “Time to start draw-fire.”

  “Right, Henry,” said a small voice from his wrist. “Draw-fire in one minute or less.”

  Henry lowered his wrist and looked at Bleys.

  They did not have to wait even one minute. Before that time, from various points downstream in the trees overlooking the river—and apparently never from the same point twice—needle-gun fire and a few ineffectual bolts from power guns began to sound. Bleys frowned before realizing he was doing so. The fire-shelters were beyond effective range for the power guns in the woods, and the needle guns would do no good at all unless they happened to be so amazingly and luckily accurate in their aim that the needles would go through the small weapon slits in the fire-shelters.

  The fire-shelters had begun an answering fire almost immediately.

  “Didn’t you say that if we fired on them, we’d give our position away?” Bleys said to Henry.

  “Our general position, yes, but this is just light firing to concentrate their attention here. Shots by a few Soldiers only, moving about, and nowhere concentrated enough for them to be targeted by the Newtonians; unless one of our people moves back to a previous position—and my people all know better than to do that. Meanwhile, we find out what they have in the way of weapons and sharpshooters in those shelters. It shouldn’t take long.”

  In fact, the firing from the woods was already dying down; and, even as Bleys noticed this, it stopped. Almost immediately, the return fire from the fire-shelters stopped; and a silence took its place that had something unnatural about it—as if the whole scene was somehow holding its breath.

  Bleys was abruptly conscious of a pulse in his neck and the fact that he had been unconsciously counting his own heartbeats. To take his mind off them, he reached for something to say to Henry. If nothing else, he knew the difference in sound, from his practice in shooting galleries through ear protectors, between that of a hand-held power gun and a hand-powered cannon, such as the one that had blasted an opening in the barricade for their vehicles.

  “Well,” he said, “at least you know they haven’t got any hand cannons in those fire-shelters.”

  “I think they have,” said Henry. He paused. “You can hold the trigger button down on a needle gun and spray an area by moving your point of aim across it. But a power weapon of any size fires one energy burst at a single point and then another, again at a single point. At the range we are from those fire-shelters, a bolt from a hand cannon wouldn’t be any more effective than one from a hand-held power gun. That’s why they’re answering with needle fire. The few power guns they’re firing are simply to warn us to stay back. They’ll hold fire from their heavier weapons until they can hit effectively.”

  “Yes,” Bleys said, mechanically. His voice sounded odd to his own ears.

  Henry lifted his control pad to his lips. “Begin primary attack.”

  The firing began again from the woods, this time supplemented by an increase in the occasional sharp explosion-like sound of hand power weapons—though as far as Bleys could see the shelters were still beyond effective range. The shelters replied. But then, unexpectedly, power guns opened up from the two cable towers at the near end of the bridge; but against the shelters, not with them into the woods. At that range, they were effective against the shelters. Immediately, there was the sound of power weapons from Newtonian positions, but with the occasional deeper boom of hand cannons speaking against the towers.

  “You’ve got Soldiers in the towers!” Bleys said.

  “We were here first,” Henry said.

  “But those towers can’t have a fraction of the protection in their walls that the fire-shelters have,” said Bleys. “It seems to me—”

  But before he could finish, the firing of power weapons toward the towers ceased abruptly; though the towers continued to fire back. The firing from the woods continued; and now Soldiers began to dart out from the woods, one by one, running a short distance into the open space, and dropping to the ground in anything as slight as a small depression, but which gave them shelter from either needles or bolts from the fire-shelters.

  Still, Bleys saw one Soldier hit almost immediately, though he was already on the ground. He jerked convulsively and began rolling over and over like a child enjoying the sport of being taken by gravity down a slope. Bleys stared at him, his own body tensing as if it, too, was rolling in pain across open ground. He looked away from the man who had been hit.

  Look at him, he told himself fiercely and forced his gaze back to the Soldier. But the man was already dead. Another almost-exhausted bolt from a power weapon had hit him, not with enough energy to tear him apart, but enough to pick him up and toss him some little distance away, so that he now lay huddled and still.

  Another death, Bleys thought. The counting of it was an iciness in what seemed to be the hollow shell of his body.

  “We must take any hurt or killed with us,” he said to Henry. “The spaceship can carry them to Harmony. Then any dead can be shipped to relatives or their homes, wherever they are.”

  “God willing,” Henry said.

  “We have to take them with us.”

  “As we can,” said Henry. “In any case, the soul of the Soldier who just died is in the Lord’s
hands now.”

  “Even,” said Bleys, “if he’s died for me—I, who am in Satan’s hands?”

  He was remembering the words, almost the first Henry had greeted him with when Henry had come to join him on Association.

  “God will judge,” Henry answered; and, looking at this man he had always called his uncle, Bleys saw his face as still as the naked stone of the distant mountain walls.

  The deep sound of the hand cannon drew Bleys’s attention back to the bridge; and he saw the nearer of the two towers now trembling, evidently from the impact of the heavy bolt. But, abruptly, the firing of all power weapons against the tower ceased as if they had been suddenly ordered to do so. The firing from the towers against the shelters continued. They were blasting away sections of the forward shelters; and meanwhile the shooting from the Soldiers in the clearing was continuing and they were continuing to move forward, while other Soldiers emerged from the wood, behind, to run, drop, rise and run again, as they all moved on toward the bridge.

  Bleys stared at them.

  “Look at the river, Bleys,” said Henry’s voice.

  Bleys pulled his attention from the bridge and looked instead at the peacefully flowing ribbon of water.

  “Why did the shelters stop firing at the towers?” he asked. But even before Henry replied he realized he had known what that answer was. Power weapons could not only break through the thin shell of the towers easily, but would also cut the cables inside it, the cables helping to support the bridge on that side.

  If only some of these were cut, the bridge could tear itself loose. The whole section with its two freeways could fall into the river beneath. As yet only the defenders were on that part of the bridge that was over water.

  “Cables,” Henry had answered, even while Bleys was thinking this.