“Maybe,” James said. “With a large scoop of luck.”
“Not luck! We don’t need luck. Just enough men and good timing.”
“Well…” Jameson looked at Alec at last, then stuck out his hand. “Good luck anyway. You’re marching yourself right into the bear’s cave.”
Alec let his hand be engulfed by Jameson’s. “I’ll be back tomorrow. And inside of a week or two we’ll be home.”
“Yeah.” Jameson’s voice went dead flat, as if the word home was starting to take on a different meaning.
Alec thought about that as he and Angela rode through the woods that afternoon, heading up the gentle slopes of the hills toward the firebase.
Home is the settlement. The Moon. Where it’s safe and clean. Where Mother is. But another part of his mind added, Where it’s cramped and small.
Where life is rigidly determined by the amount of air and water available. Where the colors are whites and grays or pastels. Where you speak with polite restraint and wait your turn in the hierarchy that governs all.
Twisting around in his saddle, looking over the glorious autumn plumage of Mother Earth and the even wilder grandeur of the flaming sunset, Alec could understand why some of the men might be tempted to remain here. A flight of birds sped far overhead in a ragged vee formation and Alec’s heart leaped at the sight of them. Their queer honking sounds drifted across the landscape.
“Winter’s coming,” Angela said.
Alec nodded. The birds were heading roughly southward. He took another look at them as they faded into the distant purple-reds of the dying day.
It took an effort to force his thoughts back to the settlement. No winter there. No seasons at all.
How is Mother holding out? Can she still handle Kobol? Is the Council still loyal to her?
But as he asked himself these questions Alec found that he was watching Angela riding beside him, swaying softly and crooning to her horse as it plodded up the leaf-littered hillside.
They reached the crest of the final hill and Alec saw the firebase. It was small; it couldn’t hold more than twenty men. A wooden fence topped with metal spikes ringed it. The gate was open, but guarded by two alert youngsters with carbines slung over their shoulders.
Even in the twilight, they recognized Angela as she rode up.
“Angie! We thought you’d been taken prisoner down in the village. There’s some raider scum in the area…”
“I’m all right.” She smiled at them as she got down off her horse. “The raiders have left the village. This is Alec… he’s from the village. He came along with me, for protection.”
The two boys shook Alec’s hand. They were boys, no more than fifteen. But they carried their guns well and eyed Alec carefully, despite Angela’s lie.
Inside the pallisade, two ancient artillery pieces stood mounted on wooden wheels, their heavy snouts poking skyward. Alec had such weapons on history tapes. They fired lumbering inert projectiles that contained high explosives. Sure enough, there was a neat pile of shells next to each piece. It must take a pair of men just to lift one of them, Alec thought. He also noted that there were only six shells per gun. They must be as ancient as the guns themselves, or damned difficult to manufacture properly. There were plenty of smaller weapons in sight: machine guns mounted on the wall, small rocket launchers, cannisters crudely marked FLAMMABLE with hoses that ended in pistol-grip nozzles.
They unsaddled their horses and slung their bags over their shoulders. Alec’s bag had the extra weight of the radio transceiver. One of the boys led the horses to a roofed shelter that was already stocked with hay.
The other boy escorted them down narrow earthen steps that went into a complex of bunkers that honey-combed the ground under the firebase.
The firebase commander was an older man, graying at the temples. “Your father’s putting together dozens of search patrols to find you,” he told Angela sternly, as if she were a little girl who had wandered off into the woods.
“I’d better radio him right away and let him know I’m all right,” she said.
The commander nodded curtly and took them to the radio room. The equipment looked old and impossibly bulky to Alec. He stood at the doorway beside the glowering commander and looked over the power generator and its connections while Angela got the radio operator to put her in touch with headquarters.
At last she pulled off the headphones and looked up to Alec and the commander. “He’s already out in the field with Will Russo. They’ll send a rider out to tell him that I’m okay.”
“Good,” the commander said. “I suppose you’ll be spending the night here.” He made it sound like a cross between a challenge and a complaint.
“Yes, I’d rather not travel in the dark.”
The commander gave Angela his own bunk, set into a curtained niche cut into one end of the bunker’s main room. He showed Alec a cot among a dozen others in a separate room, connected to the main room by a low, narrow tunnel some two dozen paces long.
They ate in the main room with the commander and six other men. Everyone seemed to know Angela well, but no one questioned her in the slightest about what had happened in the village.
After the meal they went their separate ways. Alec stretched out on his bunk and actually fell asleep, almost at once. His last thought was that this bunker was like home, in the settlement.
He awoke to the sound of snoring. The room was dark. Slowly his eyes adjusted to the faint glow coming from the tunnel entrance. Most of the cots were occupied now by sleeping men, and in the darkness Alec thought that the form next to him was the commander himself.
Carefully, noiselessly, Alec got up and reached into the bag he had slipped under the cot. The radio felt solid and reassuring in his hands. He ducked into the tunnel and went slowly to the main room. It was empty and lit only by a single bare electric bulb hanging from a wire overhead.
The power generator hummed softly, bringing a smile to Alec’s lips. Pulling a wrinkled, weathered, hand-scribbled timetable from his shirt pocket, he checked the numbers carefully. Another half hour before the satellite could possibly be above the horizon.
After a moment’s hesitation, Alec quickly climbed the earthen steps and poked his head out of the bunker’s only entrance. Four men were standing by the pallisade, slumped with boredom or hunched against the cold, looking outward into the night. Two more sat by the fire, talking to each other in low, serious tones.
Alec ducked back inside. Angela was sleeping behind the curtain that partitioned off the commander’s cubicle. He nodded. Everything’s as good as it’s going to be.
He went swiftly to the unattended radio room and jammed the makeshift wooden door shut, as tightly as he could. There was no way to lock it. He put the transceiver down on the operator’s desk and spent the next few minutes connecting it properly to the antiquated power supply. Then he sat at the desk, slipped the single earphone over his head and swung the tiny microphone next to his lips. He waited an eternity to hear the satellite’s automatic beacon beep out against the steady hiss and sputter of cosmic static.
The eternity ended at last.
“Hello, hello,” he called as loudly as he dared.
“Come in satellite station. Answer. This is Alec Douglas.”
Another eternity, seconds long, and then, “Alec… Alec! Is it really you?”
“Yes. Can you hear me all right?”
“Faint but clear. Go ahead.”
Alec gave his approximate position, then said, “Get the Council to send the strongest force they can put together down here as soon as possible. Within the week, at most. We can locate the fissionables and take them if we move quickly. Tell my mother that one quick, decisive stroke can win everything for us. Airdrop me electric power supplies, weapons and ammunition. I’ll find it if you can drop it within ten kilometers of me.”