Suddenly Fragonard's thundering disruptor went silent. Brim looked up from his COMM cabinet—over the top! The big fieldpiece could no longer bear on the approach ramp to the bridge.
Soon the next cannon topped the bridge, then the next. When the sixth left off firing, Brim leaned out of the cabin in the roaring slipstream. Two thousand irals below, wide areas fronting the bridge approaches looked like they had been plowed by a large asteroid. Gaping holes here and there told of many near misses, but the area through which the cable had to pass was now a gigantic crater that glowed from within and vomited forth a dense smoke pillar as the underlying rock formations themselves burned from the hellfire of Brim's disruptors. While he watched, the first enemy tank pulled to a halt well short of the zone of destruction, firing off a desultory round now and ft then toward its escaping quarry.
Brim frowned as he drew his head back inside the cab.
"They're stopped," he told Barbousse.
The big rating expressed no surprise at Brim's announcement. "Makes sense, Lieutenant," he said. "I figure in their eyes we've made ourselves out to be a lot more trouble than ft we're worth." He grinned as the fieldpiece roared between two pylons and the cable disappeared once more into the ground.
"I suppose that's right," Brim said, watching the other machines regain the surface.
"It is, sir," Barbousse assured him. "If you can't beat somebody you're fightin', it never hurts to convince him he can't beat you, either." He grinned. "Besides," he added, "anybody who's spent his life followin' a cable isn't going to be too happy about pickin' his way through that mess of craters—probably fall in and never get out."
"Let's hope," Brim agreed, settling wearily back in his uncomfortable seat at the COMM console.
"Now all we've got to do is catch up with Colonel Hagbut."
"Beggin' the Lieutenant's pardon, but that bird's liable to be all the way to Avalon by now," Barbousse said.
Brim smothered a laugh—just as the landscape ahead erupted in flashes of light. Ticks later, the cascading, rolling thunder of high-energy artillery reached them. He looked at Barbousse and frowned.
"Another battle?" he whispered.
"Sounds like it to me, sir..." Barbousse started, then he was cut off by the screech of an emergency channel running overload on the COMM console.
"Brim! STAY CLEAR! WE'RE PRISONERS! Target is map locus 765jj. Everything up to you now..." The display globe went out in a manner similar to Fronze's demise.
Galvanized, Brim displayed the coordinates of the message on the COMM console. "Nine thirteen point five by E9g. Can you help me remember that, Barbousse?"
"Nine thirteen point five by E9g. I'll remember it, sir."
"Good," Brim said, his mind working furiously as he peered off along the cable right-of-way. "Now get reedy to stop us in that patch of trees coming up to starboard. We've got some serious thinking to do before we go any farther."
Scant cycles later, the convoy was hidden under the dense foliage of a large forest glen. Brim clambered onto the cool, fern-carpeted ground and motioned for the rest of the crews to stand down for the remainder of the day, then he leaned on a stump and breathed the clean fragrance of the trees, pondering what he ought to do next.
Suddenly, he found he was in total command.
Late into the long summer evening, Brim sat alone on the cool forest floor, back to a stump, hands/around his knees while he desperately tried to assemble a coherent mental picture of his predicament. Reduced to absolute basics, the situation appeared to consist of no more than three primary elements, which he absently counted on his fingers for the hundredth time: (1) his chances for calling anyone to assist him, (2) his mission (and what to do about it), and (3) the meager resources at his disposal.
The first element—assistance—was simply unattainable. He immediately dismissed it as such. The Fleet certainly couldn't help him. Even if he asked his BA1TLE COMMs to call, any starships they might find were powerless against his target—at least until he could contrive to achieve Hagbut's original mission and remove the A'zurnian hostages imprisoned there. And from the flood of combat messages that presently filled every B-range channel on his COMM cabinet, he knew full well he could expect little assistance from the hard-pressed Imperial Expeditionary Forces attacking other research centers around him.
The second element, his mission, was a different proposition altogether—in which the word
"impossible" had no meaning whatsoever. It represented a commitment to duty he absolutely intended to fulfill. Of course, that involved no less than capture of a major research facility (which he had never so much as seen), freeing a sizable group of hostages who unwillingly—but effectively—protected that same facility from attack, delivery of the hostages to safety (wherever that was), and, finally, getting himself and his charges back to Magalla'ana in time to escape before the mission terminated. All this, of course, had to be accomplished notwithstanding his secondary obligation to search for the captured Colonel Hagbut—if he found himself with spare time on his hands.
The third element, unfortunately, threatened ill for everything else. His resources were nowhere near to being suitable to the requirements of his mission—and that included himself. His fewer than twenty BAITLE COMMs, for example, had superb equipment for calling in destroyers—but before they could use any of it, they first had to double for 180 of Hagbut's highly trained foot soldiers!
The combined lack of help, impossible task load, and inadequate resources might have daunted many a normal Imperial. Carescrian Imperials, however, shared a unique background of adversity—one in which even the best of circumstances normally required making do with whatever expedients came to hand. He shrugged. He knew a way had to exist for getting the job done; no doubt about it. All he had to do was discover what that was.
He began early in the first watch of the night with Barbousse, poring over a three-dimensional map, scouring dusty corners of his mind to remember everything he ought to know about field operations from exercises at the Academy. As photo-mapped by an orbiting reconnaissance craft the previous morning, his research center sat astride the cableway in a wooded location at the extreme limits of Magalla'ana. A wide, narrow building, it cascaded down a hillside in three levels of attached terraces, courtyards, and glass-enclosed laboratory structures. Significantly, its doors were on the ground story. Surrounding this structure was a huge campus area protected by a Stout fence with gates at two opposing cable crossings.
Clearly, the big facility also doubled as a key checkpoint controlling the cableway—both gates appeared to be protected by large guardhouses. Inside the campus and considerably removed from the gates (as well as the research center itself), a rectangular compound with separate guardhouse was set off by its own double fence. The compound contained approximately ten rectangular buildings in two rows of five each.
"The hostages," Brim declared grimly, pointing with the magnifier for Barbousse.
"Looks like, sir," Barbousse said. "And only one entrance to the compound." He pursed his lips.
"Makes things a lot easier for us with all the guards concentrated in one place."
"First," Brim warned with a grin, "we've got to get there."
Barbousse nodded gravely. "I've been thinkin' about that, Lieutenant," he said with a frown.
"What's on your mind?" Brim asked.
"Well, sir," the big man said, "hasn't been much traffic on the cableway since we hid in these woods this afternoon—and during that firefight we had comin' up to the bridge, you just know somebody got a warning off to the lab." He frowned and shrugged. "So by now it pretty well stands to reason they've fixed a special welcome for anyone arriving at this side of the research center. I mean, we know they've got tanks around, so there's no tellin' what else they have in store."