Krill had been adamant about that. “We will not hesitate again! There won’t be a third chance! When we get those codes, we shoot! And the consequences be damned!”
Littlefeet thought he wasn’t going to make it. The entrance was just ahead, but he’d slipped and fallen several times in the rubble. Now, though, he was determined to come out, even into the darkness lit only by an alien glow. He had been given a second life, and he was not going to forfeit it lightly.
“Colonel?” the mentat called.
“Yes?”
“You are still here?”
“I have no place else to go,” he responded, chuckling.
“You were murmuring unintelligibly. I was worried.”
“You needn’t be. I was just seeing a lot of faces all of a sudden, as if a large crowd of men and women stood with us here. It was quite strange. I knew them all, too, and they knew me. I can still almost make them out in the gloom. Soldiers, mostly. Good people, the finest. Everyone I ever ordered to their deaths. It’s almost a reunion, really. They seemed quite pleased to see me, and not at all holding a grudge. Not anymore.”
“I do not—”
“Let Colonel have who he wants here!” Hamille croaked. “Bigger the crowd for the end of the contest, the better the sporting victory!”
The mentat started to say something more, then decided not to. It did not understand what they were saying or thinking, but its logical brain also understood that whatever it was was now irrelevant. If it made it easier for them, so be it.
“They’re running traces on the energy leak,” the mentat told them. “Hector is in the sky, a bit lower than I would like for optimum accuracy but it will do. I am transmitting the codes now!”
The colonel smiled and looked into the darkness.
° “Send them to hell for me, Colonel,” Sergeant Mogutu called from the shadows.
The colonel raised his hand unsteadily and gave the victory sign.
A tremendous surge of energy sprang for less than three seconds from a point near the cliffs just beyond the old spaceport area. Almost immediately three egg-shaped craft of the Titans raced from the complex and zeroed in on the exact spot, focusing their energy drains first, then opening fire with full blasts of energy until the entire area for half a kilometer square was turned first red, then white hot, liquid and bubbling.
Their reaction time was incredible; they were at the spot in under ten seconds and had it reduced to molten rock within a minute.
Much too late.
The command and control board suddenly lit up with hundreds of fully active targets. It so startled Takamura that she failed to act for several seconds. Then it dawned on her what she was seeing and she screamed, “Krill!”
Juanita Krill was awake in an instant; she walked swiftly to the board. Van der Voort was not far behind, yawning.
“Take it easy,” Krill told the nearly hysterical physicist. “So far we’ve only received the codes in a broad beam. They still don’t know that we are here. To do that we’re going to have to power up our genholes and read in our optimum targets. Takamura, let me take the controls. Any of us can initiate the sequence on the bases but I’m going to have to take the initial ships manually until the command and control AI unit can get the hang of things and go automatic.”
She sat in the chair and pulled the command helmet down on her head. The whole system was now within her purview, a three-dimensional model that, unlike all the other times they’d done this in modeling, now glowed with both active targets in order and potentially active gates.
She had been prepared to wait until she had at least some of both continents of Helena in view, but she found that she didn’t have to. They were both there, although she’d lose one within forty minutes.
Well, she thought to herself. All this time you’ve played your security games and fooled with your codes and computer systems and let others fight and die. Now the whole thing is in your lap, Krill. And the only companions you have can’t help you because they don’t even believe in God.
“I’m powering up five and nine,” she told them. “Here we go!”
All targets hit in turn, order of battle gamma delta epsilon, she sent to the C C computer. Five and nine on. As soon as they are energized, fire at will.
Far off, more than a dozen light-years away, a signal came through the genhole to shut down the transfer and divert to a new location. Helena five and nine, in turn, now!
Colonel N’Gana screamed out into the darkness. “God damn it! Why don’t they shoot?”
“Have patience, my old friend,” responded the shade of Sergeant Mogutu. “It won’t be much longer now ”
“They are firing at the ground not far above us,” the mentat told them. “I think we will miss the final show. Just a minute or two more and they will be through to here, and they will also be finished tracing the energy surges. I am sorry.”
There was a sudden buzzing and then the entire ancient charged genhole plate, still on the crane above them, crackled with sudden life.
“C’mon, Krill, you beautiful bitch!” N’ Gana screamed. “SHOOT!”
Although within seconds Krill was quite confused at having not two but three shoot orders in her sequence, something not in the plan, the important thing was that it all happened.
They shot.
The plate suspended above cracked like thin ice. The jagged rupture spread through the side of the underground complex, and up into the left side of the Titan base itself. The one shot was too much for the small plate, which was never intended to be used in any way, much less like this, and it fell and shattered on the factory floor below.
The crack continued to spread. Where it struck the Titan base, the crystals shattered like so many thin glass bulbs under pressure.
From high on the hillside, two women, mouths open in awe, forgot their unconscious charge and watched as an indescribable sliver of something shot out of the very earth and shattered a large segment of the base. It was followed by a sonic boom the likes of which not even most space pilots had felt before—a boom that deafened them, flattened some trees on the plain below, and knocked both women down.
The base itself was in serious trouble. It flickered and shimmered as popping and crackling sounds were heard inside, and the whole center structure, all twenty-plus stories of it, began to collapse in on the already ruined left section, which could no longer provide structural support.
Two more Titan craft flew out as it collapsed, but they were unsteady, wobbling, and both crashed to the ground in front of the disintegrating base.
The towers anchoring the grid fell in as the structure imploded in dramatic slow motion. For a brief moment the grid shone brightly in the sky in spite of the glow, as if it had suddenly received more power than it ever had carried before, and then, just as suddenly, but completely, it winked out.
“They did it!” Spotty cried, still not sure she could hear after that big explosion but too excited to remain scared. “They killed the demon city!”
The plain was slowly dimming, going dark, as the base continued to collapse. A multitude of tiny figures were moving like excited insects all around in front of it, but from this distance it was impossible to tell who or what or how many they were.
A good dozen ships, however, had already left before the shot was taken or had managed to break out before the impending collapse; these now hovered over the area, save only the two finishing off the transmitter and the two others now turning to molten rock an area between the old spaceport and the base.