And then, from the castle, a horn blew.
Huge, brazen, bellows-driven, it howled across the city. The hills echoed. Birds stormed from trees. Hoo-hoo! Fire, flood, or foe! To arms, to arms! Hoo, hoo-hoo, hoo-oo!
“What the wreck?” Ferok was on his feet, snatching sword and shield from the wall, before Flandry had seen him move. Iguraz took his ponderous battleax. Dragoika crouched where she was and snarled. Bronze and crystal shivered.
“Attack?” Flandry cried among the hornblasts. “But they can’t!”
The picture unreeled for him. The mouth of Golden Bay was guarded by anchored hulks. Swimmers underwater might come fairly close, unseen by those garrisons, but never past. And supposing they did, they still had kilometers to go before they reached the docks, which with Seatraders’ Castle commanded that whole face of Ujanka. They might, of course, come ashore well outside, as at Whitestrands, and march overland on their mechanical legs. The city was unwalled. But no, each outlying house was a defense post; and thousands of Tigeries would swarm from town to meet them; and—
Terran HQ had worried about assaults on the archipelago colonies. Ujanka, though, had not seen war for hundreds of years, and that was with other Tigeries … Hoo, hoo!
“We’ll go look.” Dragoika’s gorgeous fur stood on end, her tail was rigid, her ears aquiver; but now she spoke as if suggesting dinner and flowed from her couch with no obvious haste. On the way, she slung a sword over her back.
Blaster in hand, Flandry followed her into a hall dominated by a contorted stone figure, three meters high, from the Ice Islands. Beyond an archway, a stair spiraled upward. His shoulders scraped the walls. Arrow slits gave some light. Ferok padded behind him, Iguraz wheezed in the rear.
They were halfway to the top when the world said Crump! and stones trembled. Dragoika was thrown back against Flandry. He caught her. It was like holding steel and rubber, sheathed in velvet. A rumble of collapsing masonry beat through his helmet. Screams came thin and remote.
“What’s happened?” Iguraz bawled. Ferok cursed. Even then, Flandry noted some of his expressions for later use. If there was a later. Dragoika regained balance. “Thanks,” she murmured, and stroked the human’s arm. “Come.” She bounded on.
They emerged on the house tower as a second explosion went off. That one was further away. But thunder rolled loud in Starkad’s air. Flandry ran to the parapet. He stared across steeply pitched red tile roofs whose beam ends were carved with flowers and monster heads. Northward, beyond these old gray walls, the High Housing lifted emerald green, agleam with villas. He could see the Concourse pylon, where Pride’s Way, the Upland Way, the Great East Road, and The Sun And Moons came together. Smoke made a pillar more tall.
“There!” Ferok yelled. He pointed to sea. Dragoika went to a telescope mounted under a canopy.
Flandry squinted. Light dazzled him off the water. He found the hulks, out past the Long Moles. They lay ablaze. Past them—Dragoika nodded grimly and pulled him to her telescope.
Where the bay broadened, between Whitestrands to west and Sorrow Cliff to east, a whale shape basked. Its hide was wet metal. A turret projected amidships; Flandry could just see that it stood open and held a few shapes not unlike men. Fore and aft were turrets more low, flat, with jutting tubes.
As he looked, fire spat from one of those dragon snouts. A moment later, smoke puffed off the high square wall of Sea-Traders’ Castle. Stones avalanched onto the wharf below. One of the ships which crowded the harbor was caught under them. Her mast reeled and broke, her hull settled. Noise rolled from waterfront to hills and back again. “Lucifer! That’s a submarine!”
And nothing like what he had fought. Yonder was a Merseian job, probably nuclear-propelled, surely Merseian crewed. She wasn’t very big, some twenty meters in length, must have been assembled here on Starkad. Her guns, though of large caliber, were throwing chemical H.E. So the enemy wasn’t introducing atomics into this war. (Yet. When somebody did, all hell would let out for noon.) But in this soup of an atmosphere, the shock waves were ample to knock down a city which had no defenses against them.
“We’ll burn!” Ferok wailed.
On this planet, no one was ashamed to stand in terror of fire. Flandry raced through an assessment. Detested hours and years of psych drill at the Academy paid off. He knew rage and fear, his mouth was dry and his heart slammed, but emotion didn’t get in the way of logic. Ujanka wouldn’t go up fast. Over the centuries, stone and tile had replaced wood nearly everywhere. But if fire started among the ships, there went something like half the strength of Kursoviki. And not many shells were needed for that.
Dragoika had had the same thought. She wheeled to glare across the Pechaniki, where the Sisterhood centrum lifted a green copper dome from the West Housing. Her mane fluttered wild. “Why haven’t they rung Quarters?”
“Surely none need reminding,” Iguraz puffed. To Flandry: “Law is that when aught may threaten the ships, their crews are to report aboard and take them out on the bay.” A shell trundled overhead. Its impact gouted near Humpback Bridge.
“But today they may indeed forget,” Dragoika said between her fangs. “They may panic. Those tallywhackers yonder must’ve done so, not to be hanging on the bell ropes now.”
She started forward. “Best I go there myself. Ferok, tell them not to await me on the Archer.”
Flandry stopped her. She mewed anger. “Apology-of-courage,” he said. “Let’s try calling first.”
“Call—argh, yes, you’ve given ’em a radio, haven’t you? My brain’s beaten flat.”
Crash! Crash!
The bombardment was increasing. As yet it seemed almost random. The idea must be to cause terror and conflagration as fast as possible.
Flandry lifted wristcom to helmet speaker and tuned the Sisters’ waveband. His hope that someone would be at the other end was not great. He let out a breath when a female voice replied, insect small beneath whistle and boom: “Ey-ya, do you belong to the vaz-Terran? I could not raise anyone of you.”
No doubt all switchboards’re flooded with yammer from Our Men In Ujanka, Flandry thought. He couldn’t see their dome in the hills, but he could imagine the scene. Those were Navy too, of course—but engineers, technicians, hitherto concerned merely with providing a few gadgets and training Tigeries in the use of same. Nor was their staff large. Other regions, where the war was intense, claimed most of what Terra could offer. (Five thousand or so men get spread horribly thin across an entire world; and then a third of them are not technical but combat and Intelligence units, lest Runei feel free to gobble the whole mission.) Like him, the Ujanka team had sidearms and weaponless flitters: nothing else.
“Why haven’t Quarters been rung?” Flandry demanded as if he’d known the law his whole life.
“But no one thought—”
“So start thinking!” Dragoika put her lips close to Flandry’s wrist. Her bosom crowded against him. “I see no sign of craft readying to stand out.”
“When that thing waits for them?”
“They’ll be safer scattered than docked,” Dragoika said. “Ring the call.”
“Aye. But when do the vaz-Terran come?”
“Soon,” Flandry said. He switched to the team band.
“I go now,” Dragoika said.
“No, wait, I beg you. I may need you to … to help.”
It would be so lonely on this tower.
Flandry worked the signal button with an unsteady forefinger. This microunit couldn’t reach Highport unless the local ’caster relayed, but he could talk to someone in the dome, if anybody noticed a signal light, if every circuit wasn’t tied up—Brrum! A female loped down Shiv Alley. Two males followed, their young in their arms, screaming.