Battlefield Earth Part 114

Out of their sight on the other side of the dragon, he reached in, heard a soft "now" from Angus at the console, and ratcheted down the time fuse lever of the ultimate bomb, lying in the dragon's hollow belly, to five minutes. With the thumbnail of his other hand he pierced the cap of a smoke bomb used in mines to trace currents of air in shafts.

White smoke began to pour from the dragon's mouth in jets. Ferocious!

Jonnie skipped back off the platform. Angus. .h.i.t the firing b.u.t.ton.

Jonnie's wand pointed at the dragon. "Go! And don't come back until you have devoured Asart! Go!"

Wires hummed.

The dragon, smoke and all, s.h.i.+mmered and was gone.

There was a very small recoil.

Jonnie looked at his watch. Three and a half minutes to go.

He walked back across the platform. There was a cold, cold hangover on it where it had doubled with the icy s.p.a.ce of Asart.

"Now do any of you lords have a picto-recorder you can trust?" said Jonnie. "I do not want to use our own since you might not trust it. I want to borrow a picto-recorder, one that you can seal, that can't be tampered with."

The lord from Fowljopan, an empire of seven hundred worlds, said he'd oblige. He went to his apartment and got it out of his hamper. He came back and checked the loading. Jonnie made him wrap a metal seal around it and clench it and make sure it couldn't be tampered with.

The two mechanics now rushed to the platform and laid down a gyro cage from a drone. Jonnie asked the lord from Fowljopan to lay the recorder in the gyro slots. The lord glanced at the console to make sure it wasn't being operated, glanced up at the poles to be sure they weren't humming, and walked to the center of the platform and put his picto-recorder inside the cage, and, as Jonnie requested, locked it down. He left the platform.

Jonnie glanced at his watch. Seven minutes had gone by. That dragon had been laid exactly on the surface of Asart. The bomb should have gone off two minutes ago. This next shot would put the picto-recorder well up from that moon and to the side.

Now! said Angus. The wires hummed.

The picto-recorder and cage s.h.i.+mmered and vanished.

There was no recoil.

Numbers on Jonnie's watch whirred. Thirty-nine seconds.

There was a change in the humming.

There was a s.h.i.+mmer on the platform.

The picto-recorder and cage reappeared.

The humming went off. There was a slight recoil.

Two mechanics rolled up the dolly the projector sat on so that it was among the emissaries.

"Now if you please, my lord," said Jonnie to the Fowljopan, "would you please retrieve your recorder and take it to the projector and unseal it. And please be certain that it is your disc by putting a few words on the end of it. Then make sure there is no other disc or trace in the machine and put your disc in. If you please."

Lord of Fowljopan did exactly as requested. "The recorder is ice cold!" was all he said.

Jonnie held his breath. He had a pretty good idea of what the bomb did. But he was not sure. This was the touch-and-go moment!

He hit the remote. Off went the spotlights. On went the recorder picture.

There in the dark before them was Asart, three-dimensional. There were the five ellipses which identified it.

Used to bombs and explosions, they had indifferently expected to see some high tower of dust or smoke. Actually, they had not thought, most of them, that much would happen. Jonnie had been so calm, so polite, certainly not a mood in which one engaged in war.

They didn't see anything strange for a moment. And then as the picture rolled off the disc, they saw a hole. A hole occurring in the upper right surface of Asart. Just a hole. No, there was a bit of black around the edge of it.

Schleim, ear c.o.c.ked at the sky, felt a jar of alarm. What in the name of fifty devils was going on here? But he relaxed. Bombs went boom. There were no bombs that made just a hole. The picture went off and Fowljopan's "My voice here," came on.

"Theatrics!" laughed Schleim. "You're engaging in nonsense!"

"My lords," said Jonnie. "Does another one of you have a picto-recorder I can borrow?"

Yes, my Lord Dom had one. He went and got it and they went through the same procedure as before.

Angus updated the time, cast the recorder to a new angle, and got it back.

Lord Dom, a little bit frightened at the implications of this to the twelve hundred worlds of his republic, had a quaver in his voice when he put it on the disc.

Jonnie hit the switches.

Asart gleamed in the dark before them.

About a hundredth of the moon had become a hole edged in curling black clouds. And just before the view went off, down in the lower left, it looked like a door had opened in the crust, not part of the growing hole.

A breath of terror trembled through the gathering. But Jonnie was not going to let it become a riot.

"You see, my lords, the dragon hungry." He laughed lightly. "He is also a very obedient dragon. Told to eat the moon, he is eating Asart! A very controllable dragon after all."

Had he hit them with ice water he could not have produced a more chilling effect. Their eyes focused on him in growing horror.

Schleim broke the spell. It had occurred to him that he had a new way to guarantee success. He had a spare gun in his hamper as well as a recorder. He had just felt in his boot and discovered the weapon gone.

d.a.m.n that valet! Hawvin slaves were never any good.

"All you are doing," said Schleim, "is casting that recorder out somewhere to a model you've made in the hills. And you have people regulating a model for it to photograph! You're a fraud!" And Schleim really believed it. But he had to make sure before he went off the edge. "There's a recorder in my hamper."

"Go get it," said Jonnie.

Schleim rushed to his apartment. He scrambled through the hamper. Ah! Not just a spare gun but also a spare scepter hidden in the bottom, a spare with another paralysis beam in its heel. He could leave one on in a chair while he carried the other one out to turn the power cable off. Ha-ha! Three blast grenades! After he turned the beam on he'd pitch one into the ops room and use the other two to silence anyone rus.h.i.+ng out of another door. Perfect! He wouldn't torture the Hawvin slave after all. Good fellow!

Schleim carried the whole hamper back to the gathering and set it beside his chair. Cautiously opening it so they wouldn't see what else was in it, he removed the picto-recorder. It was a different make and type but it played a disc.

"Devil," said Schleim, "we will end your fraud here and now. You would not know, not being a native of a proper planet, that on the back of Asart is a huge diamond with a slash. It is done with hyperband nullifying material to act as a navigation and identification marker. It is unknown to practically everyone except a fleet officer. The marker will not show up on your standard recorders. And you have none like this one that takes the hyper-spectrum as well as what you call visible light. It will show that diamond and slash. Yours won't. So of course you didn't put one on your fake model. I am about to expose you as the fraud of all time!"

He sounded confident. But before that rig was destroyed he really had to know. Was it a model up in the hills or was that Asart? If it was Asart...should he be sure his torturer got the secret of teleportation? What a weapon!

He slithered over and put his recorder into the gyrocage, sealed the cage shut with a claw pattern, and walked off the platform.

Angus had heard it all. He s.h.i.+fted coordinates so that the recorder would view both the back of Asart and the hole.

He fired it and recalled it, and when the recoil died, Lord Schleim raced up to it, checked the claw pattern. It had not been broken.

He came back to the projector. He made absolutely sure it was not projecting something else. He put, "This is Lord Schleim!" on the disc and put it into the machine.

Did his ear detect a far-off whine in the sky?

Chapter 8.

Lord Schleim felt there would be no diamond and slash beacon in the picture that would, in a moment, be shown. Only Tolnep eyes would ever detect that and only a Tolnep modified picto-recorder could film it. He would use this moment to distract the others.

Yes! That was a whine in the sky. The fleet would be over them in moments.

The timing was just right. How clever of him. But he had a well-deserved reputation as a slippery diplomat. Formidable in fact.

He walked over to his chair, made very sure his hamper was well within reach. He glanced back at the a.s.sembled emissaries. They were all craning forward tensely, waiting for the picture to come on- totally off guard. He spotted exactly where the devil was standing, slightly in front of them all and well clear of the projector. Schleim fingered the bottom ring of the scepter.

"Turn on the latest picture of your fake model!" jeered Schleim.

Jonnie hit the b.u.t.tons. Off went the mine spotlights. On went the three-dimensional picture of Asart.

It was a new angle. It showed the back side of the moon as well as some of the front. Filtration gave it a bluish hue, but it was Asart. It seemed to float hugely before them.

And right there in the center, ma.s.sive and unmistakable, was the diamond and slash insignia of Tolnep, jet-black on the surface of the moon.

Schleim gasped. It was real. That really was Asart.

One of the ends of the slash was supposed to point to a hangar door. And even as they looked, that door finished opening. The huge, yawning mouth of a Tolnep-made cavern!

The moon had deflated further now. It resembled a blue balloon with one side being poked relentlessly in, a great pucker that was growing bigger now and at a more rapid rate.

What appeared to be black gases were eddying up to fill the sunken part.

And then out of that yawning hangar bolted a war vessel! Although it must have been traveling very fast, the enormous size of it caused it to seem to move in slow motion. At least thirty thousand tons of Tolnep capital s.h.i.+p was seeking to escape into s.p.a.ce.

But it was too late. It had already been touched by the pucker within the moon. A whole back section of the s.h.i.+p was gone!

Before the fixated eyes of the delegates, the vast s.p.a.ce vessel was eaten up from tail to nose, its ma.s.sive metal turned to gases.

Other hangar doors were starting to open.

But that was the extent of the picture. One last puff of black gas as the final bit of capital s.h.i.+p was overtaken by disaster and the recorded voice said "This is Lord Schleim!"

Schleim screamed! Then he acted.

He popped his earplugs shut. He leaped up. He wrenched at the bottom ring of the scepter and, as though it were a machine gun, swept it in an arc from left to right to freeze them all.

"Paralyze!" screamed Schleim. "Stand dead! d.a.m.n you, stand dead!"

It wasn't happening fast enough! There was a surge of emissaries away from him, some falling.

He s.n.a.t.c.hed the other scepter from the basket. He twisted the bottom ring and swept it all around, taking in guards in rifle pits.

They were not falling quickly enough.

Schleim dove into the hamper and came up with three grenades. With all his considerable might he hurled one into the open door of the ops room. He sent another at the bowl entrance. He hurled the third at the devil.

Before they could even land, such was his speed of reaction, he had the gun out of the hamper. He lined it up on the devil, square at his face thirty feet away. With joy he pulled the trigger.

It did not fire.

Lord Dom, a bulbous creature from a mostly liquid world, was bouncing to his feet and coming at him.

Schleim raised the pistol on high, preparing to bring it down on Dom and splatter him. A Tolnep could physically smash them all.

Straight as a sizzling arrow, Jonnie threw his k.n.o.bkerrie. The hard b.u.t.t end smashed into Schleim's eye filters.

Lord Browl, the ma.s.sive tree-like emissary who had sat behind him, wrapped Schleim in foot-diameter arms and held him from behind in a creaking vise.

"Hold him still!" shouted Fowljopan. "Don't let him touch his body!" With a flick of his wrist, Fowljopan snapped a beaklike knife into his right claw and advanced upon Schleim.

The Tolnep struggled but the huge arms held. Fowljopan peered with beady eyes all around the steel-like neck of the Tolnep. "Ah!" he said finally. "There is the half-healed incision!" His knife moved in and began to cut. Grey drops of Tolnep blood oozed from the shallow gash that was being made. Fowljopan squeezed the wound and a fragile gla.s.sine capsule popped out of it. It was intact.

"His suicide capsule," said Fowljopan. "All he had to do was strike the side of his neck and he would have been dead." He looked reprovingly at Jonnie. "Had you hit this with that throwing stick, we would have had no defendant!"

It was Jonnie's first intimation that all was not going to go exactly as planned, and that all was not well.

Fowljopan turned to the others now crowding around. He shouted in a squawling voice, "Is it the will of the conference that this emissary be under conference arrest and be brought to trial?"

They thought. They pondered. They looked at one another. One said something about "invoking Clause 32."

Jonnie could only think of getting in there and getting the war stopped now. Didn't these lords realize people were dying? And as for Schleim, hadn't they seen him try to use weapons on all of them? But he had collided with the ponderous idiocies for which governments and courts were renowned. There was even a growing whine in the sky. It threatened their own safety.

"I move that he be properly tried," a lord at the back called out.

"All those in favor?" shouted another. All noncombatant lords said "Aye."

The combatant ones said "No!"

"I hereby declare," said Fowljopan, "that the emissary of Tolnep is a prisoner of the conference and is to be duly tried under Clause 32, threatening physical violence to the conference!"