With the Confederation armies spread out, fragmented, in the process of putting down a score of rebellions in distant, isolated areas, Sternheimer had thought that a full-scale invasion of blood-hungry mountaineers might very well be just the thing to utterly dismember this troublesome Confederation.
To effect this, he had had Drs. Erica Arenstein and Harry Braun and Major Jay Corbett transfer into the bodies of captured Ahrmehnee, after having been hypno-taped in the oral and written language of the tribesmen, their religious practices, superstitions and folk ways. Then they three and a few Broomtown men had established a camp just south of Ahrmehnee territory where the Broomtowners stayed while the three agents rode on in search of the nahkhahrah, the paramount chief of the Ahrmehnee stahn, with most of the functions of a priest-king.
When found, the old man—at least eighty, though still strong, erect, active and appearing twenty years younger— showed himself to be shrewd, intelligent and anything but ingenuous. However, his hatred of all lowlanders ran deep, and these People of Powers, as he soon came to call them, were saying things that he had prayed to one day hear.
He sent out word for all warriors of the stahn to gather around the village that he called his home, then sent Erica, a wise woman from his tribe and an honor guard of warriors to the Hold of the Maidens of the Moon—fierce, man-hating amazons who were distantly related to the Ahrmehnee and who sometimes allied with them on larger raids.
Within the sprawling, natural fortress of the Moon Maidens, Erica discovered not only a few hundred of the hard-muscled, lithe and savage female warriors ready to join with the Ahrmehnee against the western marches of the Confederation, but a true treasure trove of artifacts and printed matter from the long-vanished twentieth-century world. Such had been her elation that she had hardly been able to wait to get back to the nahkhahrah’s village to confer with Corbett and Braun.
Their task of arousing the fierce Ahrmehnee accomplished, the three agents had ridden south, but only as far as their base camp and its long-range, battery-powered transceiver. Sternheimer’s response to notification of the find—the books and manuals, the various well-preserved machines and devices, the spare parts and rare metals and, most especially, the vast assortment of transistors—had been prompt and lavish.
The Director had personally supervised the immediate assembly of every pack animal upon which his people could quickly lay hands at Broomtown, loaded a few of them with the special supplies requested by Dr. Arenstein and Major Corbett, then dispatched them north escorted by a troop and a half of Broomtown dragoons under the command of Sergeant Major Vance, an experienced and highly respected Broomtown Regular.
Fast as Vance had marched his column—and in view of the general conditions, he had marched them fast indeed—by the time he and the column had reached the camp of the waiting agents, conferred with them, and trailed them at a discreet distance back up to the Hold of the Maidens, the marshaling of the Ahrmehnee host was well underway. No men of fighting age remained in the Ahrmehnee villages through which they rode, and all three hundred-odd of the young Moon Maidens had ridden forth behind their hereditary war leader, the brahbehrnuh, leaving the near-impregnable hold guarded by girls and women under fifteen and over thirty; the men of the hold were not allowed to bear weapons or know the proper use of them.
With the Broomtown riflemen hidden within range of her small, personal transceiver, Erica reentered the Hold of the Moon Maidens, trailed by a couple of laden pack mules and her two male “slaves”—-Dr. Braun and Major Corbett. Despite the frigidity of the mountain winter outside the hold, within lay a warmth that was almost oppressive in its intensity. But it was this continuous warmth that enabled the folk of the hold to grow two and three crops per year and thereby become wealthy through trading their constant surplus.
None of the women paid much attention to the curious pokings about of a brace of unarmed men, slaves at that, and so Dr. Braun was not long in confirming Erica’s estimate of the great value of her finds within the warren of natural and man-made caves honeycombing the mountain. He also confirmed her other assumption.
The hot, sometimes boiling, mineral springs which fed the shallow lakes and helped to heat the hold, the unnatural warmth of the very rocks and soil of the place, and in particular a crescent-shaped crack near the entrance to the caverns—called by the inhabitants the Sacred Hoofprint of the Lady’s Steed— all indicated that the hold was sitting squarely atop a barely quiescent volcano.
Judging by its frequent forcible ejections of fumes and searing jets of gases, Braun and Corbett agreed that the Hoofprint was a large vent for the indescribable pressures beneath the hold and that were that vent to be plugged in some way, enough of an eruption might be triggered to cover any traces of their looting of the hold caverns after they had gassed most of the folk to sleep and slain the rest.
So it was decided, and, riding widely and seemingly aimlessly, Braun and Corbett emplaced their gas bombs, all set to be triggered by a single radio signal. Broomtown snipers were signaled to infiltrate closely enough to pick off the women manning the watchtowers and the single entry tunnel. When Erica felt the time was ripe, she coolly poisoned her hostesses, then she and the other two agents donned their masks, set off the gas bombs and radioed the snipers to begin their deadly task.
While the troopers and packers, all masked against the gas, bore manload after manload of the ancient artifacts and metals up from the labyrinthine caverns, across the central valley and through the tunnel to be loaded onto the pack animals waiting in the chill, clear air beyond, Dr. Braun, Major Corbett and a few selected Broomtown men fashioned an explosive device and positioned it on a ledge just below the lip of the Sacred Hoofprint, its timer set to give them all enough of a lead to be well away when its explosion sealed the vent.
Those few men and women of the hold who were not fully overcome by the gas were coldly shot, that there might be no living witnesses to the rape of the hold. When the last loads and last men were clear of the entry tunnel, it too was sealed by explosives. Then the agents, troopers and pack train began the long journey back south to Broomtown.
But, as Fate would have it, the agents and their Broomtowners had truly been hoisted by their own petard. The eruption, when at length it came, had affected far more than the area of the Hold of the Moon Maidens. The eruption had spawned and been preceded by terrific earthquakes, and one of the most intense of these had shaken down a plateau at the very time that the bulk of the pack train was passing down the section of trail that skirted it. Now, the corpses of the Broomtowners, their animals and the precious loads they had borne lay buried beneath the resultant rockslides.
None of the three agents had been killed, although Dr. Braun had suffered a badly broken leg when his big mule fell and pinned him against the rocky ground. Then, however, had come the actual eruption with rains of cinders and ash and white-hot rocks which had fired square miles of mountain forests and brush. But under the leadership of Jay Corbett and Erica, the survivors of the rockslides had survived the fiery holocaust, as well.
Because the large, long-range transceiver and almost all of their supplies lay buried with the rest of their original party under tons of rock, they had had no option but to press on southward as rapidly as possible, once Erica had used her surgical skills on Dr. Harry Braun.
During their first day’s march, another Broomtown noncom and a few troopers rejoined them after having been separated from the main column in the aftermath of the quakes and the fires. They brought with them a bound prisoner—a shaggy, unkempt and very filthy man who averred himself to be a “Ganik,” a term unfamiliar to any of the agents or the troopers.