Night fell, and the smell of the sea made all of them keep their masks on for a great deal of the time. Those who didn't, sneezed. Trent turned on the space-phone he'd removed from a suit of space armor. He listened. If there were any communications going on, he'd hear it. He could have heard if the Yarrow's mate tried to reach him from the ship. But he heard no voices nor any other sound in the space-phones.
There were things to hear when he took off the ear pieces, though. Noises that he'd become accustomed to were suddenly loud and distinct. The landing party was resting where they were, a thousand feet above the sea, when there came a deep, deep bass rumbling underground. Now, paying close heed to such things, Trent could detect occasional tremors in the rock he rested on. And suddenly he heard a strange, rumbling sound to seaward. It came nearer. It became a bellow and then a roaring and a more-than-thunderous shout.
The sea rose below them. A volcanic tidal wave hurled itself against the shoreline. The noise was ear-shattering. It meant utterly irresistible power and thousands of millions of tons of sulfur-smelling seawater flinging itself against the land.
It subsided. For a long, long time there were trickling, pouring, washing sounds from the rocks between the landing party and the sea. The water the tidal wave had flung upon the land was running back. The smell of the ocean was overpowering. If Trent and his followers had been in the way of that monstrous ocean movement, they'd not be alive now.
"There's always something going on, isn't there?" said Trent in a dry voice. "We might as well carry on."
He led the landing party on through the night. They marched, and they stumbled, and now and again Trent looked at his watch. Then they rested for ten minutes. They saw glowings in the sky, and the ground rumbled underfoot, and now and then there were perceptible tremors. And time passed, and the stars moved westward in the smoky sky. But miles passed, too. And at long, long last they went down a ravine. They'd been so long in the darkness that starlight was now enough for them to pick their way by.
The pirate rendezvous had been inspiredly chosen. There were mountains on nearly every hand, but these seemed not to be volcanoes. Their edge against the stars spoke of an upheaval so gigantic that instead of a mountain, a mountain range resulted. The pirate's ships stood in a remarkably flat valley-bottom between rows of peaks. There was a partial gap to the southward, though, and very many miles away something seemed to explode. The sound of a racking detonation arrived, turned to deepest bass by the distance. The ground shook, and then a flame appeared. But instead of rising it flowed downward. It was incandescent lava pouring down a distant mountain flank. Even so many miles away, it cast a faint light into the valley, and the silent, upright ships of space were outlined by it.
Trent said very quietly,
"I showed you the ships you're to work on. You can be certain in the dark by feeling the ground. If there's something on the order of grass underfoot, that's wrong. The ones you want have only ashes under them. Get set. I'll give you time. When my first bomb goes off, go ahead!"
He moved away in the dimmest of possible starshine with a single companion, the burly man with the scarred cheek. His other followers separated. Then for a long, long time there were no noises that could be attributed to them. The far-away mountain exploded again. White-hot rocks rose above its top, fire-bombs flung skyward by the titanic forces at work yonder. There were flickerings of light where the pirate ships stood upright. The intermittent glare of the eruption reached so far.
Trent and the scar-faced man went quietly through the night. It was not likely that the tumult in the distance was unusual. This world was in a state of vulcanism such as seems always to occur on third-orbit planets of type G suns, just as all such worlds are denser for their size than their sister-planets. The pirates who'd chosen this spot for their base must have accumulated the looted ships during a considerable period of time. They'd be familiar with such phenomena as went on now. Those who were asleep would hardly stir. There would not be many awake an hour before sunrise. Discipline would be of the slackest among pirates, anyhow. Secure in their hiding-place, they couldn't be made to keep a conscientious watch except against their prisoners. And the captives would most likely have been put into a looted ship whose locks and cargo doors could be welded shut. Imprisoned so, they could find their own food, and attend to their own necessities, and if they happened to run out of food and water in those hulks, there was neither any way to ask nor any hope in asking for food from the pirates.
Trent found a ship with only ashes around its bottom. He and the burly man conferred in whispers. Trent set a satchel bomb in place. When it went off it should blow one of the ship's three landing-fins to scrap-metal. The ship could not stay upright on two supports. It would topple. And then they could take further action. The explosion of the first bomb would be the signal for the rest of his spacemen to begin their work. It had not been pictured to them as high or noble adventure and they wouldn't act that way. They'd make no dramatic gestures. But they would feel a fine zest, some part of which would come of acting as a team under a leader like Trent. This was quite independent of any prospects of profit. They followed Trent. It was even more satisfying than that brawl outside the spaceport on Sira.
There were many stars shining in a smoky sky. There were distant, muted explosions on a diminished scale. Trent set the timer on the satchel bomb. He and his companion drew off.
Seconds passed. The satchel bomb went off. Its shaped charge flashed blue-white and made a detonation sound so sharp and savage that it was like a blow on the chest. Then, very sedately and with a certain enormous leisureliness, the hull of this spaceship leaned. The first second it leaned only a little. But it gathered speed as it fell.
Before it had fallen a quarter of the way, other blue-white flashes began. Like super-super photographer's strobe-lights, they illuminated all the valley and the mountainsides about it. It would have been an impressive sight had the flashes been continuous. Twelve spaceships, pointing toward the sky, formed an indefinite group. Seven of them leaned and fell. They struck each other. They struck still-upright other ships. They crumpled, or they bent, or they went down in straightforward crashes that made the ground jump when they landed. And all this happened in the fraction of a minute.
There was a curious stillness for a moment. The lesser explosions of the mountain to southward increased. They became practically continuous. They sounded like a faraway cannonade, but no man in this generation had ever heard a cannonade save in recordings of ancient warfare. The fallen ships made strange small squeakings as vibrations of the ground helped them to settle in more stable relationships to each other.
Somebody bawled, "Cap'n! Cap'n Trent!"
Trent did not answer. He made his way toward the voice. Twice, as he went past fallen ships, and once under a vast cylinder which had fallen across another, he heard batterings. Men had been wakened by the falling of their ships. Those who did not die then hysterically tried to escape. But there were many who were actually trapped. A good and considerable number had been killed. And whatever might happen to Trent and his landing party, these strained, twisted, racked and not infrequently torn-open ships could never be taken to space again by the pirates who'd brought them here. For one thing, they'd have to be raised to vertical positions. Equipment for that purpose couldn't be improvised.
The voice bawled again, "Cap'n! Cap'n Trent!"