Part 8 (1/2)
”That's right.”
”Well, tell him to get as many of his Kragans as he can spare down to the equipment-park.” He turned to Inez Malavez. ”You call Jarman; tell him what O'Leary reported, and tell him to get cracking on it. Tell him not to let those geeks get any of that equipment onto contragravity; knock it down as fast as they try to lift out with it.
And tell him to see what he can do in the way of troop-carriers or lorries, to get Falkenberg's Rifles to the equipment-park.... How's business at the lorry-hangars and maintenance-yard?”
”Kormork's still working on that,” the girl captain told him. ”Nothing definite, yet.”
In one corner of the big room, somebody had thumbtacked a ten-foot-square map of the Company area to the floor. Paula Quinton and Mrs. Jules Keaveney were on their knees beside it, pus.h.i.+ng out handfuls of little pink and white pills that somebody had brought in two bottles from the dispensary across the road, each using a billiard-bridge. The girl in the orange sweater had a handful of scribbled notes, and was telling them where to push the pills. There were other objects on the map, too--pistol-cartridges, and cigarettes, and foil-wrapped food-concentrate wafers. Paula, seeing him, straightened.
”The pink are ours, general,” she said. ”The white are the geeks.” Von Schlichten suppressed a grin; that was the second time he'd heard her use that word, this evening. ”The cigarettes are airjeeps, the cartridges are combat-cars, and the wafers are lorries or troop-carriers.”
”Not exactly regulation map-markers, but I've seen stranger things used.... Captain Malavez!”
”Yes, sir?” The girl captain, rus.h.i.+ng past, her hands full of teleprint-sheets, stopped in mid-stride.
”What we need,” he told her, ”is a big TV-screen, and a pickup mounted on some sort of a contragravity vehicle at about two to five thousand feet directly overhead, to give us an image of the whole area. Can do?”
”Can try, sir. We have an eight-foot circular screen that ought to do all right for two thousand feet. I'll implement that at once.”
Going into a temporarily idle telecast booth, he called Konkrook, and finally got Themistocles M'zangwe on the screen.
”How is it, now?” he asked.
”Getting a little better,” the Graeco-African replied. ”Half an hour ago, we were shooting geeks out the windows, here; now we have them contained between the s.p.a.ceport and the native-troops and labor barracks, and down the east side of the island to the farms. We have the wire around the farms on the island electrified, and we're using almost all our combat contragravity to keep the farms on the mainland clear.” He hesitated for a moment. ”Did you hear about Eric Blount and Lemoyne?”
Von Schlichten shook his head.
”The whole party that were at Orgzild's palace were ma.s.sacred. Some of them were lucky enough to get killed fighting. The geeks took Eric and Hendrik alive; rolled them in a puddle of thermoconcentrate fuel and set fire to them. When we can spare the contragravity, we're going to drop something on the Kee-geek emba.s.sy, over in town.”
Von Schlichten grimaced, but he'd expected something like it. He told M'zangwe about King Kankad's offer. ”His crowd ought to be coming in in a couple of hours. What can you sc.r.a.pe up to send to Kankad's Town to airlift Kragans in?”
”Well, we have three hundred-and-fifty-foot gun-cutters, one 90-mm.
apiece. The _Elmoran_, the _Gaucho_, and the _Bushranger_. But they're not much as transports, and we need them here pretty badly. Then, we have five fertilizer and charcoal scows, and a lot of heavy transport lorries, and two one-eighty-foot pickup boats.”
”How about the _Piet Joubert?_” von Schlichten asked. ”She was due in Konkrook from the east about 1300 today, wasn't she?”
M'zangwe swore. ”She got in, all right. But the geeks boarded her at the dock, within twenty minutes after things started. They tried to lift out with her, and the Channel Battery shot her down into Konkrook Channel, off the Fifty-sixth Street docks.”
”Well, you couldn't let the geeks have her, to use against us. What do you hear from the other s.h.i.+ps?”
”_Procyon's_ at Grank; we haven't had any reports of any kind from there, which doesn't look so good. The _Northern Lights_ is at Grank, too. The _Oom Paid Kruger_ should have been at Bwork, in the east, when the gun went off. And the _Jan s.m.u.ts_ and the _Christiaan De Wett_ were both at Keegark; we can a.s.sume Orgzild has both of them.”
”All right. I'm sending _Aldebaran_ to Kankad's, to pick up more reenforcements for you.”
Leaving the booth, he heard, above the clatter of communications-machines and the hubbub of voices, Jules Keaveney arguing contentiously. Evidently Colonel Cheng-Li's efforts to drag the Resident out of his despondency had been an excessive success.
”But it's crazy! Not just here; everywhere on Ullr!” Keaveney was saying. ”How did they do it? They have no telecast equipment.”