The Cosmic Computer, H. Beam Piper [best sci fi novels of all time .TXT] 📗

For a long time, nothing happened. Conn got out the plans of the volcano spaceport and the photomaps of the surrounding area. The principal entrance, the front door of the spaceport, was the crater of the extinct volcano itself. It was ringed, outside, with launching-sites and gun positions, and according to the data he had, some of the guns were as big as 250 mm. How many outlaws there were to man them was a question a lot of people could get killed trying to answer. The ship docks and shops were down on the level of the crater floor, in caverns, both natural and excavated, that extended far back into the mountain. There were two galleries, one above the other, extending entirely around the inside of the crater near the top; passages from them gave access to the outside gun and missile positions.

With a dozen ships the size of the Lester Dawes, about five thousand men, and a C.O. who wasn’t concerned with trivialities like casualties, they could have taken the place in half an hour. With what they had, trying to fight their way in at the top was out of the question.

There was another way in. He had known about it from the beginning, and he was trying desperately to think of a way not to utilize it. It was a tunnel two miles long, running into some of the bottom workshops and storerooms back of the ship berths from a big blowhole or small crater at the foot of the mountain. According to the fifty-year-old plans, it was big enough to take a gunboat in, and on paper it looked like a royal highway straight to the heart of the enemy’s stronghold.

To Conn, it looked like a wonderful place to commit suicide. He’d only had a short introductory course, in one semester, in military and protective robotics, just enough to give him a foundation if he wanted to go into that branch of the subject later. It was also enough to give him an idea of the sort of booby-traps that tunnel could be filled with. He knew what he’d have put into it if he’d been defending that place.

Colonel Zareff had sent one last message from Force Command when he lifted off with a flight of recon-cars. After that, he maintained a communication blackout. It was an hour and a half before he got close enough to be detected from the outlaw stronghold. Immediately, the volcano began spewing out missiles. Poole hastily took the Lester Dawes ten miles down the rift-valley in sixty seconds, while Stefan Jorisson put out a nuclear-warhead missile and left it circling about where the ship had been. From their respective positions, Fred Karski and Charley Gatworth filled the airspace midway to the volcano with counter-missiles, each loaded with four rockets. There were explosions, fireballs in the air and rising cumulus clouds of varicolored smoke and dust. Only about half the enemy missiles reached the Lester Dawes’ former position.

When their controllers, back at the volcano, couldn’t see the ship in their screens, the missiles bunched together. Immediately, Jorisson sent his missile up to join them and detonated it. Including his own, eight nuclear weapons went off together in a single blast that shook the ground like an earthquake and churned the air like a hurricane. Klem Zareff came on-screen at once.

“Now what did you do?” he demanded. “Blew the whole place up, didn’t you?”

Rodney Maxwell told him. Zareff laughed. “They might just think they got the ship; all the pickups would be smashed before they could see what really happened. You’re about ten miles south of that? Be with you in a few minutes.”

They got a screen on for his rearview pickup. Zareff had with him a dozen recon-cars, some of them under robo-control; six gunboats followed, and behind them, to the horizon, other craft were strung out⁠—airboats, troop carriers, and freight-scows. They could see enemy missiles approaching in Zareff’s front screen; counter-missiles got most of them, and a couple of pilotless recon-cars were sacrificed. The Lester Dawes blasted more missiles as they crossed the top of the mountain range. Then Zareff’s car was circling in and entering at one of the ship’s open cargo-ports. Zareff and Anse Dawes got out.

“Gunboats are only half an hour behind,” Zareff said. “Get some screens on to them, Anse; you know the combinations. Now let’s see what kind of a mess we’re in here.”

It was almost a miracle, the way the tottering old man Conn had seen on the dock at Litchfield when he had arrived from Terra had been rejuvenated.

The rest of the reinforcements arrived slowly, sending missiles and counter-missiles out ahead of them. Zareff began worrying about the supply; the enemy didn’t seem to be running short. By 1300⁠—Conn noted the time incredulously; the battle seemed to have been going on forever, instead of just four hours⁠—the Lester Dawes had moved halfway around the volcano and was almost due west of it, and the eight gunboats were spaced all around the perimeter. Then one stopped transmitting; in the other screens, there was a rising fireball where she had been. The radio was loud with verbal reports.

“Poltergeist,” Zareff said, naming half a dozen names. One or two of them had been schoolmates of Conn’s at the Academy; he knew how he’d feel about it later, but now it simply didn’t register.

“They’re launching missiles faster than we can shoot them down,” he said.

“That’s usually the beginning of the end,” Zareff said. “I saw it happen too often during the War. We’ve got to get inside that place. It’s a lot of harmless fun to send contragravity robots out to smash each other, but it doesn’t win battles. Battles are won by men, standing with their feet on the ground, using personal weapons.”

“We’ll have to win this one pretty soon,” Rodney Maxwell said. “The amount of nuclear energy we’ve been