The Cosmic Computer H. Beam Piper (reader novel txt) 📖

“We mustn’t weaken our defense-perimeter; we’d be inviting disaster. Why, this whole country in here is simply swarming with outlaws. They fired on one of our gunboats, the Werewolf, yesterday.”

He’d heard about that; somebody had launched a missile from the ground, and the Werewolf had detonated it with a counter-missile. It had probably been some legitimate prospecting company who’d taken the L. E. & S. craft for a pirate.

“And there was a battle down in the Devil’s Pigpen day before yesterday.”

That had been outlaws; they had been annihilated by something calling itself Seekers for Merlin, Ltd., whose stock was still skyrocketing on the Exchange. He mentioned that.

“These other prospecting companies are doing a lot of our outlaw-fighting for us, and as long as the country’s full of small independent parties, the outlaws go after them and leave us alone.”

“Yes, and I have my doubts about a lot of these prospecting companies, and a lot of the outlaws, too,” Zareff said. “I think a lot of both are Federation agents; they’re waiting till we find Merlin, and then they’ll all jump us.”

“Well,” Conn adjusted his argument to the old Rebel’s obsession, “I’ll admit that, as a possibility. If so, we’ll need heavier weapons than we have. This spaceport on Barathrum might be just the place to get them.”

“Yes. It might. Defense armament, and stored ships’ weapons. Say, if we grab that place and move all the heavy guns and missiles here, we could stand off anybody.” The thought of a fight with minions of the Terran Federation seemed to have shaved ten years off his age in a twinkling. “You take the Lester Dawes, and, let’s say, three of these gunboats. Let me see. Goblin, Fred Karski. And Vampire, Charley Gatworth. And Dragon, Stefan Jorisson. They’re all good men. Home Guard; trained them myself.”

“Aren’t you coming, Colonel?”

“Oh, I’d like to, Conn, but I can’t. I don’t want to be away from here; no telling what might happen. But you keep in constant screen-contact; if you get into any trouble, I’ll come with everything I can put into the air.”

Barathrum was a grim land, naked black and gray. Spines and crags of bare rock jutted up, lava-flows like black glaciers twisting among them. It was split by faults and fissures, pimpled with ash-cones. Except for the seabirds that nested among the cliffs and the few thin patches of green where seeds windblown from the mainland had taken root, it was as lifeless as when some ancient convulsion had thrust it up from the sea, Barathrum was a dead Inferno, untenanted even by the damned; by comparison, the Badlands seemed lushly fertile.

The four craft crossed above the line of white breakers that marked the division of sea and land; the gunboat Goblin in the lead, her sisters, Vampire and Dragon to right and left and a little behind, and the Lester Dawes a few miles in the rear. Fred Karski was at the Goblin’s controls; Conn, beside him, was peering ahead into the teleview screen and shifting his eyes from it to the map and back again.

Somebody behind him was saying that it would be a nice place to be air-wrecked. Somebody else was telling him not to joke about it. From the radio, his father was asking: “Can you see it, yet?”

“Not yet. We’re on the right map-and-compass direction; we should before long.”

“We’re picking up radiation,” Fred Karski said. “Way above normal count. I hope the place isn’t hot.”

“We’re getting that, too,” Rodney Maxwell said. “Looks like power radiation; something must be on there.”

After forty years, that didn’t seem likely. He leaned over to look at the omnigeiger, then whistled. If that was normal leakage from inactive power units, there must be enough of them to power ten towns the size of Litchfield.

“Something’s operating there,” he said, and then realized what that meant. Somebody had beaten them to the spaceport. That would be one of the new companies formed after the opening of Force Command. He was wishing, now, that he hadn’t let himself be talked out of coming here first. Older and wiser heads indeed!

Fred Karski whistled shrilly into his radio phone. “Attention everybody! General alert. Prepare for combat; prepare to take immediate evasive action. We must assume that the spaceport is occupied, and that the occupants are hostile. Captain Poole, will you please make ready aboard your ship? Reduce both speed and altitude, and ready your guns and missiles at once.”

“Well, now, wait a minute, young fellow,” Poole began to argue. “You don’t know⁠—”

“No. I don’t. And I want all of us alive after we find out, too,” Karski replied.

Rodney Maxwell’s voice, in the background, said something indistinguishable. Poole said ungraciously, “Well, all right, if you think so⁠ ⁠…”

The Lester Dawes began dropping to the rear and going down toward the ground. Conn returned to the teleview screen in time to see the truncated cone of the extinct volcano rise on the horizon, dwarfing everything around it. Fred Karski was talking to Colonel Zareff, back at Force Command, giving him the radiation count.

“That’s occupied,” the old soldier replied. “Mass-energy converter going. Now, Fred, don’t start any shooting unless you have to, but don’t get yourself blown to M.C. waiting on them to fire the first shot.”

The dark cone bulked higher and higher in the screen. It must be seven miles around the crater, and a mile deep; when that thing blew out, ten or fifteen thousand years ago, it must have been something to see, preferably from a ship a thousand miles off-planet. It was so huge that it was hard to realize that the jumbled foothills around it were themselves respectably lofty mountains.

When they were within five miles of it, something twinkled slightly near the summit. An instant later, the missileman, in his turret overhead, shouted:

“Missile coming up; counter-missile off!”

“Grab onto something, everybody!” Karski yelled, bracing himself in his seat.

Conn,