"What about the cable, Colonel?" Witzany asked.
"Leave it," Meredith said. "If that's all they want, they can take it and go."
"What?" Chang exploded. "Colonel, that cable is priceless—"
"What's priceless is the machinery that made it," Meredith cut him off. "And I'm betting that's what they're really after."
"Colonel," Brown spoke up. "Orders are out, but we've got a glitch re the flyers—one of them is at Olympus with Hafner's group."
"Damn." Hafner's daily attempts to locate the cable-making machinery had become so routine that Meredith had clean forgotten them. "Better have them stay put."
"Right. Flyer One is heading for the mountains now."
Meredith mentally crossed his fingers—Flyer One hadn't been up since limping back to base from its encounter with that high-gee field—and then put the matter out of his mind. Valuable as the flyer was, it held just two lives in its grip—two out of the nearly ten thousand Meredith was responsible for.
"All right. I'm heading back to Unie; I'll pick up coordination from you when I get there."
He had just passed Wright and hit real road once again when the inevitable ultimatum came. "They won't identify themselves," Brown relayed tensely, "but they order us to halt all aircraft and ground vehicles and to assemble outside our buildings."
"Any 'or else' come with that?"
"Not explicitly, but it seems pretty self-evident."
"Yeah. How's the evacuation going?"
"Slowly. The civilians just aren't moving fast enough."
Meredith swore under his breath. "Are the invaders close enough to spot car traffic yet?"
"Depends mainly on whether they know where to look, I'd say. One of the ships is already below geosync; the others are hanging back. So far they're ignoring the Pathfinder."
"Um. All right. Tell the aliens that until we have their identity and full intentions your commander refuses to knuckle under. Use as much slang as you can—out-ofdate slang, if you know any. That plus having to run their messages through you may buy us a little more time."
"Right. Even so, I don't think we'll be able to get everyone out of the towns.
Permission to set up defensive positions?"
"I suppose we'd better. The admin buildings are probably your best bet—you can use fertilizer sacks in lieu of sandbags."
"Already thought of that. Do you want to set up deployment now or wait until you're back in Unie with secure lines?"
Meredith hesitated. He very much wanted to handle that personally, but he had few illusions as to how long they could stall the enemy. "You'd better do that yourself," he told Brown. "Give the local commanders autonomy, consistent with the goal of defensive holding action. Use the computer net as much as possible—they'll at least have to work hard to tap into that."
"Yes, sir. I'll funnel the final plans through to your office; I think we can keep them confused up there until then."
Meredith wasn't at all convinced of that; but whether through confusion or a simple desire to take a good, long look at the landscape, the invaders did hold off long enough for the colonel to reach Unie. He was in his office, skimming through Andrews's hastily prepared defensive setup, when Brown informed him the close-orbiting ship had launched two craft. Bare minutes later a low rumble became audible, growing quickly to a sonic-boom crash as one of the craft shot directly overhead, heading east. Through his window, Meredith watched it brake to a midair halt on its repulsers and settle to the ground somewhere between Unie and Crosse. He tensed, waiting for the sound of gunfire
… but for the moment, at least, there was just a watchful silence.
So here we go, Meredith thought, reseating himself at his desk. The Battle for Astra has begun. I wonder what our chances are.
But that line of thought was unprofitable. Flipping on his phone, he began checking to see which of his communications lines were still open.
Chapter 13
"They're rolling out some kind of flyers now—bigger than ours," Hafner announced, adjusting the focus on his binoculars a bit. "Looks like they've got four of them. The rest of the troops are still fanning out toward Crosse and Unie."
Standing beside him, Carmen shaded her eyes with one hand as she peered off to the west; the other hand, pressed to her side, was clenched into a fist. Two-thirds of the way up Olympus's south face, Hafner's expedition had found themselves in a grandstand seat for the alien ships' landing—but for Carmen, at least, the ability to see but not to help was an almost suffocating combination. I should be down there, she thought over and over. I should be helping run tactical programming. I take off one day to run Peter up here and the whole world falls apart. "Shouldn't we call and warn them about the flyers?" she asked Hafner.
Binoculars still at his eyes, he shook his head. "I'm sure both Colonel Meredith and Major Barner have scouts within sight of that ship. No, if we radio anything now we'll just advertise our presence here. I'd rather save that for something really important."
"But we can't just sit here twiddling our thumbs," one of the others objected. "Isn't there something we can do with our flyer? A bombing run, evacuation—anything?"
"If you can whip together some bombs out of moissanite rock, be my guest,"
Hafner said tartly. "And as for evacuation, you wouldn't get half a kilometer before you'd have all four of those things on your back … "
He trailed off. "An idea?" Carmen asked.
"Maybe." He lowered the glasses and frowned off toward the south. "Do you remember the spot where the other flyer crashed, our first day here?"
"Flyer Two? Um … I've got a rough idea."
"They never did find an actual cause for it, did they?"
"Not that I know of. Why?"
"Well," he said slowly, "we know now that this mountain has some incredible collection of machinery underneath it. Could it be that the fields in the flyer's repulsers triggered a— oh, I don't know; a resonance or feedback type of reaction in something underground?"
She thought about that a long moment. "I suppose it's possible," she conceded.
"But I don't know what good that would do us. Besides, it seems to me we've flown over that spot ourselves, so whatever happened must have been a one-shot event."
Hafner was still gazing south. "Perhaps … " Abruptly, he took a deep breath and turned back to the west. "At any rate, that gives us an idea of the scale involved here. The aliens won't be able to just pack everything up in a suitcase and take off with it."
"Un-huh." But that's not what he was thinking, she told herself, studying his profile suspiciously. He's got something else in mind. What?
But for the moment, at least, he didn't seem inclined to talk about it. Swallowing her curiosity, Carmen turned her thoughts back to the drama unfolding to the west, wishing she were there.
Meredith had rather hoped the alien commander would use the communicator's vision attachment, but wasn't overly surprised when the screen remained blank.
Though off-planet radio was being thoroughly jammed he'd seen enough of the aliens to know they preferred to err on the side of caution. Of course, concealing their identity could also mean they were planning to keep their victims alive. It was a thought worth holding.
"I'm sorry, Commander," he said, for the fourth time in half that many minutes,
"but many of my people do not carry personal phones. I simply cannot whisk them back to their digs on a second's notice." A note from Major Gregory in Wright appeared across his computer screen: the second landing craft had set down in the fields just east of Wright and was disgorging spacesuited troops at an alarming rate. Preliminary estimates—
The alien's reply cut into his reading. "You seek to slow me with dialect variants, but such tactics are pointless. I do not intend to harm your people unless absolutely necessary. I similarly do not intend to allow them free movement. If necessary I can use infrared and composition sensors from low orbit to locate them individually. You have one planetary rotation to return them to their towns.