At 11:00, Paula Quinton and Barney Mordkovitz virtually ordered him to get some sleep. He went to his quarters at Company House, downed a spaceship-captain’s-size drink of honey-rum, and slept until 16:00. As he dressed and shaved, he could hear, through the open window, the slow sputter of small-arms’ fire, punctuated by the occasional whump-whump-whump of 40 mm auto-cannon or the hammering of a machine-gun.
Returning to his command-post at the telecast station, the terrain-board showed that the perimeter of defense had been pushed out in a bulge at the northwest corner; the TV-screen pictured a crude breastwork of petrified tree-trunks, sandbags, mining machinery, packing-cases and odds-and-ends, upon which Wallingsby’s native laborers were working under guard while a skirmish-line of Kragans had been thrown out another four or five hundred yards and were exchanging potshots with Skilkans on the gullied hillside.
“Where’s Colonel Quinton?” he asked. “She ought to be taking a turn in the sack, now.”
“She’s taking one,” Major Falkenberg, who had commanded the action at the native-troops barracks and the labor-camp, the night before, told him. “General Mordkovitz chased her off to bed a couple of hours ago, called me in to take her place, and then went out to replace me. Colonel Guilliford’s in the hospital; got hit about thirteen hundred. They’re afraid he’s going to lose a leg.”
“That’s a bloody shame!” He pointed to the northwest corner of the perimeter on the screen. “Whose idea was that?” he asked. “It’s a good one; I ought to have thought of it, myself.”
“Your new adjutant,” Falkenberg grinned. “She asked somebody what those big domes, up there, were. When they told her there were ten thousand tons of thermoconcentrate, five thousand tons of blasting-explosives, and five tons of plutonium, under them, she damned near fainted, and then she ordered that, right away.”
More reports came in. The entire garrison of the small Residency at Kwurk, the most northern of the eastern shore Free Cities, had arrived at Kankad’s Town in two hundred-foot contragravity scows and five aircars. Two of the aircars arrived half an hour behind the rest of the refugee flotilla, having turned off at Keegark to pay their respects to King Orgzild. They reported the Keegark Residency in ruins, its central buildings vanished in a huge crater; the Jan Smuts and the Christiaan De Wett were still in the Company docks, both apparently damaged by the blast which had destroyed the Residency. One of the aircars had rocketed and machine-gunned some Keegarkans who appeared to be trying to repair them; the other blew up King Orgzild’s nitroglycerine plant. Von Schlichten called Konkrook and ordered a bombing-mission against Keegark organized, to make sure the two ships stayed out of service.
The Northern Star was still bringing loyal troops into Krink. King Jonkvank, whom von Schlichten called, was highly elated.
“We are killing traitors wherever we find them!” he exulted. “The city is yellow with their blood; their heads are piled everywhere! How is it with you at Skilk?”
“We have killed many, also,” von Schlichten boasted. “And tonight, we will kill more; we are preparing bombs of great destruction, which we will rain down upon Skilk until there is not one stone left upon another, or one infant of a day’s age left alive!”
Jonkvank reacted as he was intended to. “Oh, no, general, don’t do all that!” he exclaimed. “You promised me that I should have Skilk, on the word of a Terran. Are you going to give me a city of ruins and corpses? Ruins are no good to anybody, and I am not a Jeel, to eat corpses.”
Von Schlichten shrugged. “When you are strong, you can flog your enemies with a whip; when you are weak, all you can do is kill them. If I had five thousand more troops, here. …”
“Oh, I will send troops, as soon as I can,” Jonkvank hastened to promise. “All my best regiments: the Murderers, the Jeel-Feeders, the Corpse-Reapers, the Devastators, the Fear-Makers. But, now that we have stopped this sinful rebellion, here, I can’t take chances that it will break out again as soon as I strip the city of troops.”
Von Schlichten nodded. Jonkvank’s argument made sense; he would have taken a similar position, himself.
“Well, get as many as you can over here, as soon as possible,” he said. “We’ll try to do as little damage to Skilk as we can, but …”
At 18:30, Paula joined him for her breakfast, while he sat in front of the big screen, eating his dinner. There had been light ground-action along the southern end of the perimeter—King Firkked’s regulars,
