The people still on Moon 39 were told these reenforcements had to be above the Ghost River Valley battlefield before eleven o'clock that morning, now just two hours away. If not, Deaux would personally disintegrate the head of any officer found responsible for causing even a minute's delay.
25
By the time the surviving artillerymen arrived on foot from the convoy disaster, the scene atop Fire Rock Ridge was total chaos.
Other scout shuttles had landed, and their occupants had found sixty-five dead comrades in the trenches and thirty-three shell-shocked ones in the woods. Deaux's own personal transport craft had arrived as well, along with another dozen shuttle-craft. The huge shuttles had flown west from St. Louis, carrying shock troops and equipment. They were disgorging themselves of cargo and soldiers, then quickly leaving the area and heading back East to pick up more troops.
The BMK's massive deployment west had begun. But as a result, there were now more than twelve thousand BMK troops along the ridge, including the few survivors of the advance scouting unit. The ridge was way too small to hold all these soldiers properly. They were crowded together so tightly, many could not see more than a few feet in any direction. Some were standing, others were sitting on the ground. Still others were asleep, and a few were even suffocating. Their officers didn't know what to do. With Deaux himself on the scene, all orders were coming from behind the sealed hatch of his private, very luxurious Shuttle #1.
It was now about ten o'clock, and Deaux had yet to emerge from his trailer.
No sooner had the artillerymen appeared on Fire Rock when the senior-most soldier was brought into Deaux's command vehicle.
The man was a sergeant major, and he had the unpleasant task of telling Deaux just how eight of the Master Blasters the BMK had been relying on for this battle had fallen into enemy hands, leaving the four others to be destroyed. Deaux did not take his report well.
The BMK leader finally stormed out of his command vehicle, dragging the artilleryman behind him. Against the advice of his security detail, Deaux pushed his way through the crowd of troops and marched the artilleryman right up to the lip of the ridge itself. Gazing down at the enemy's camp, they could clearly see the Americans setting up the eight stolen artillery pieces. Suddenly, an army that had previously fought mostly with ancient rifles and machine guns now possessed eight examples of the deadliest weapon in the Galaxy. Readings from a nearby TVZ scanner said the big ray guns would be operational within the hour.
Deaux was so infuriated, he drew out one of Xirstix's silver-handled ray guns, put it against the artilleryman's forehead, and pulled the trigger… but nothing happened. Deaux had failed to hit the weapon's activation switch first. Otherwise the man's head would have disappeared in a cloud to subatomic particles.
Deaux's security troops were able to hustle the terrified man away, but not before Deaux called after them that this man and all of the other survivors from the convoy would be put up on the line, unarmed, for the inevitable BMK attack.
When the long march across the plain began, he said, these men would be right out front, human targets facing the same Master Blasters they'd been carrying to the battle just a few hours before.
Adding more confusion to the scene atop the ridge were the lightning-quick strafing passes still being made by the robot 33418.
The airborne clanker would show up periodically, sometimes approaching from the south or sometimes from over the top of the small mountain to the BMK's rear. He would streak over the BMK position, flying very low, dispensing short bursts from his very narrow-field destructo-beam. The ridge was so crowded with troops, the robot's lethal rays usually found at least a dozen victims with each pass and sometimes a piece of equipment, too. The loss of manpower from these attacks was not great, and Deaux's shuttle was being protected by a crude but effective energy shield (the only one in the BMK's inventory), so he was in no immediate danger. But the harassment factor from the clanker's hit-and-run attacks was tremendous. Those soldiers in the vicinity of the robot's last pass were obsessed with searching the sky, thinking they'd be next.
Yet there was so much confusion on top of the ridge that many of the other soldiers didn't realize their position was being attacked at all.
It was quickly clear that there were too many troops on Fire Rock Ridge and not enough down on the Plain of Stars itself.
Again, a logistics problem had emerged. All of the available troop shuttles were in service carrying soldiers over from St. Louis and Chicago. So a quick airlift down to the valley floor would not be possible. When told of this, Deaux lapsed into one of his dark moods. He ordered his field commanders to have the troops climb down the ridge to the valley below. This would be no easy task; the ridge sat about eight hundred feet above the plain, and its western face was practically sheer rock all the way down. When informed of these dangers, Deaux issued another decree. The first men to climb down should be officers and key sublieutenants only. This way, when the bulk of the troops reached the valley floor, the officers would already be in place to command them. Deaux's field commanders knew this was foolishness, but they had no other choice than to carry out the orders. No matter who went down the cliff first, the purloined Blasters would be operational very soon, and any large deployment after that would be disastrous.
So the commanders gathered what units they could and had their officers step out. They were briefed on the new plan and told to use their electron torches to fashion thick ropes of steel weave. Several hundred of these lines were produced in just a few minutes. The steel ropes were then secured to the top of the ridge by melting their fibers into the cliff rock itself.
Then the BMK officers began the long climb down.
It was just about this time when a message from space came in.
At first, it seemed to carry some good news for the BMK position. One of the space cruisers dispatched from Moon 39
had already arrived in orbit, a full thirty-four minutes ahead of Deaux's deadline. It was carrying 11,500 third-tier trqpps, fully armed and fitted for combat. The five other ships were on their way in as well.
Deaux was delighted upon hearing this news. Army Central was reported moving quickly to the front, and Army South was approaching, too. Now that the Moon 39 troops were on hand, Deaux believed he'd overcome the loss of the Master Blasters by providing more fodder for them to shoot at once the ground attack finally began.
He ordered the huge space cruiser — it was nearly a half mile long, and shaped like a gigantic wedge — to come down on the Plain of Stars itself to dispatch its troops. With the handful of cruisers right behind it, if all went well, the BMK would have more than seventy thousand soldiers — though not top-notch ones — on the ground within the next few minutes. The ship reported that it would begin its descent immediately.
By this time, the first elements of the BMK officers climbing down off the ridge had reached the plain below. There were more than five hundred steel ropes hanging off the cliff, and the officers were descending at a fairly quick pace. Once on the ground, they could clearly see the Ghost River about a mile and a half away. Two thousand feet beyond that was the enemy's first line of fortifications. When the BMK finally began its advance and its troops reached the river, they would be able to quickly construct bridges with their electron torches to carry them across the two hundred-foot-wide stream. Once they reached the other side, the ground attack would begin in earnest.