The Elmoran ran alongside, with her Maasai-warrior figurehead and the black cylinder on her catapult aft. Somebody had painted, on the bomb: Dire Dawn by Hildegarde Hernandez. Compliments of the author to H.M. King Orgzild of Keegark.
A canvas-entubed gangway was run out to connect the ship with the cutter. Von Schlichten and Kent Pickering went down the ladder from the bridge, the others accompanying them. As he stepped into the gangway, Paula Quinton fell in behind him.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he demanded.
“Along with you,” she replied. “I’m your adjutant, I believe.”
“You definitely are not going along. Personally, I don’t believe there’s any danger, but I’m not having you run any unnecessary risks. …”
“Von, I don’t know much about the way Terrans think, except about fighting and about making things,” Kankad told him. “And I don’t know anything at all about the kind of Terrans who have young. But I believe this is something important to Paula. Let her go with you, because if you go alone and don’t come back, I don’t think she will ever be happy again.”
He looked at Kankad curiously, wondering, as he had so often before, just what went on inside that lizard-skull. Then he looked at Paula, and, after a moment, he nodded.
“All right, colonel, objection withdrawn,” he said.
Aboard the Elmoran, they gave the bomb a last-minute inspection and checked the catapult and the bombsight, and then went up on the bridge.
“Ready for the bombing mission, sir?” the skipper, a Lieutenant (j.g.) Morrison, asked.
“Ready if you are, lieutenant. Carry on; we’re just passengers.”
“Thank you, sir. We’d thought of going in over the city at about five thousand for a target-check, turning when we’re halfway back to the mountains, and coming back for our bombing-run at fifteen thousand. Is that all right, sir?”
Von Schlichten nodded. “You’re the skipper, lieutenant. You’d better make sure, though, that as soon as the bomb-off signal is flashed, your engineer hits his auxiliary rocket-propulsion button. We want to be about fifteen miles from where that thing goes off.”
The lieutenant (j.g.) muttered something that sounded unmilitarily like, “You ain’t foolin’, brother!”
“No, I’m not,” von Schlichten agreed. “I saw the Jan Smuts on the TV-screen.”
The Elmoran pointed her bow, and the long blade of the figurehead warrior’s spear, toward Keegark. The city grew out of the ground-mist, a parti-colored blur at the delta of the dry Hoork River, and then a color-splashed triangle between the river and the bay and the hills on the landward side, and then it took shape, cross-ruled with streets and granulated with buildings. As they came in, von Schlichten, who had approached it from the air many times before, could distinguish the landmarks—the site of King Orgzild’s nitroglycerin plant, now a crater surrounded by a quarter-mile radius of ruins; the Residency, another crater since Rodolfo MacKinnon had blown it up under him; the smashed Christiaan De Wett at the Company docks; King Orgzild’s Palace, fire-stained and with a hole blown in one corner by the Aldebaran’s bombs. … Then they were past the city and over open country.
“I wish we had some idea where the rest of those bombs are stored, sir,” Lieutenant Morrison said. “We don’t seem to have gotten anything significant when we flew reconnaissance with the radiation detectors.”
“No, about all that was picked up was the main power-plant, and the radiation-escape from there was normal,” Pickering agreed. “The bombs themselves wouldn’t be detectable, except to the extent that, say, a nuclear-conversion engine for an airboat would be. They probably have them underground, somewhere, well shielded.”
“Those prisoners Kankad’s commandos dragged in only knew that they were in the city somewhere,” von Schlichten considered. “How about midway between the Palace and the Residency for our ground-zero, lieutenant? That looks like the center of the city.”
The cutter turned and started back, having risen another ten thousand feet. Morrison passed the word to the bombardier. The city, with the sea beyond it now, came rushing at them, and von Schlichten, standing at the front of the bridge, discovered that he had his arm around Paula’s waist and was holding her a little more closely than was military. He made no attempt to release her, however.
“There’s nothing to worry about, really,” he was assuring her. “Pickering’s boys built this thing according to the best principles of engineering, and the stuff they got out of that big-economy-size shilling-shocker all checked mathematically. …”
The red light on the bridge flashed, and the intercom shouted, “Bomb off!” He forced Paula down on the bridge deck and crouched beside her.
“Cover your eyes,” he warned. “You remember what the flash was like in the screen when the Jan Smuts blew up. And we didn’t get the worst of it; the pickup on the Gaucho was knocked out too soon.”
He kept on lecturing her about gamma-rays and ultraviolet rays and X-rays and cosmic rays, trying to keep making some sort of intelligent sounds while they clung together and waited, and, with the other half of his mind, trying not to think of everything that could go wrong with that jerry-built improvisation they had just dumped onto Keegark. If it didn’t blow, and the geeks found it, they’d know that another one would be along shortly, and. …
An invisible hand caught the gun-cutter and hurled her end-over-end, sending von Schlichten and Paula sprawling at full length on the deck, still clinging to one another. There was a blast of almost palpable sound, and a sensation of heat that penetrated even the airtight superstructure of the Elmoran. An instant later, there was another, and another, similar shock. Two more bombs had gone off behind them, in
