The Battle of Camp Kill bepn in the early afternoon. It began suddenly and unexpectedly and rushed to a disastrous conclusion. Only a few hours after the Hightee Heller announcement had superimposed itself over Homeview, Lombar Hisst arrived at Spiteos in a monstrous flying tank. He landed on the parade ground, gave himself another speedball and, seating himself on the turret in the burning desert sun, began to supervise the landing of a hundred thousand reinforcements. Lombar Hisst felt ferociously good. He was at the height of his intellectual powers, he was achieving a sustained and elevated mood. He felt capable of superhuman feats. That was from the speed. The heroin was giving him a smooth-off of rough edges, a physical warmth and feeling of great satisfaction. And his underlying personality, psychotic paranoia, had shifted over to the kingly phase of megalomania. Up there on the tank, huge in his red uniform, he was indeed, not just in his imagination, a very dangerous man. The giant black castle of Spiteos loomed over to his left. It contained thousands of tons of opium and heroin in its upper storerooms, enough to bring an awful lot of population under control, to say nothing of a conclave of Lords. It was the amphetamine that worried him: while he had enough of the pure stuff for years of his own supply, he did not have enough to carry even the Lords on for another month no matter how hard he adulterated it. He was speculating as to when he could get the Earth invasion launched: he had not touched the ships and troops scheduled for it in the isolated staging areas. He was depending right now for reinforcements on the prisons he had almost emptied out: they might be a sorry lot and they might look weird in the ways they wore their uniforms and carried their arms but they were killers, make no mistake about that. Loosed upon the population with heavy weaponry, they could sweep the mobs away like chaff, screaming "Long Live Hisst!" for giving them the chance to murder, loot and rape. The million in from Calabar were already setting a fine example in the cities: they were like packs of lepertiges let loose on helpless wool animals. People had no way now to keep count of the civilian casualties. So Lombar, sitting there, felt very safe and confident. The Fleet and Army, not knowing whom to obey, were very neutral. Spiteos was easy to defend and Palace City was impregnable, utterly. Above his head, low in the atmosphere, were three hundred Apparatus war vessels. They might be old and cast off from the Fleet, for they were intended for raids on unconquered planets just to keep them busy and afraid, but they were better than anything less than the Fleet. Drifting up there, they were standing guard while the latest reinforcement freighters disgorged their hundred thousand on the hot sand just below the camp. The regiments were forming up. There were a hundred of them. They made a grand display. Lombar smiled a wolfish smile, tasting his power as the horde marched in to pass in parade and then prepare their close-by bivouacs. There was no music: that was not Apparatus style. But the thud of all those feet made the very ground quail. Lombar's smile broadened until he showed his teeth: the standard bearers as they passed had gotten the word– they were giving him the quick change of step and momentary kneel that was the Royal salute. Then a sharp sound penetrated his ears. It sounded like a rapid series of explosions, quite small. They seemed to come from the chasm across from the castle. It was quite like small arms fire. But the burst was very short. Nothing else happened. Believing it must be some squad practicing or executing somebody with guns instead of throwing them in the chasm, Lombar Hisst ignored it and looked back at his passing troops. The last of them were just now going by, the rest had already fanned out and were busy annealing together dirt huts in a clutter of trucks and poles: it appeared to be a new town of mean shacks that was magically manifesting out of the sand. What saved Lombar's life at that moment was the desire to cool his thirst. He dropped down through the turret into the capacious cabin of the flying tank, and one of the crew, to restrain the afternoon sun which had been streaming in to compete with the overloaded air coolers, let the turret cover snap shut. Lombar was standing just behind the explosion-proof observer port. He was pouring a canister full of sparklewater. From across the parade ground there was a terrible flash!
CHAPTER 2