"This is the goldangdest thing I've ever seen."
Hank Umlani, Rustenberg's Chief of Industrial Fabrication, stared at the plans Senator had provided, understandably scratching his bushy grey hair and frowning at the technical specs he held. The thing was disarmingly simple. So simple, it didn't look like much of anything, let alone a weapon.
Alessandra asked patiently, "Yes, but can you make it? With the equipment and supplies on hand?"
Umlani looked up, raking a weary glance across the warehouse where they stood, a warehouse which now held the entirety of Rustenberg's surviving resources, moved into one protected location inside the perimeter wall, in a depressingly short time. Crews of miners were hard at work around them, conducting a hasty inventory. Ginger Gianesco, Rustenberg's Ops Director, had not been able to supply them with anything remotely resembling a psychotronics technician, let alone a Bolo systems engineer, which had forced Alessandra and Senator to get creative in planning the town's long-term defense.
The first step had been to list on a master inventory every weapon the miners could field. The colonists had come up with a surprising variety of personal arms: several very useful modern rifles brought out to defend mining parties from predators, plus sonic stunners, 20 kilowatt laser zappers, hypersonic needle guns, an honest-to-God anesthesia rifle, even a reproduction single-shot Sharps breechloader, which a hobbyist had brought with him.
"Isn't that buffalo gun a little primitive?" Alessandra had asked dubiously.
The owner, a burly man in his forties, gave her a nasty grin. "Wasn't too primitive for three of them damn turkeys."
They'd even counted the two longbows kept in the meeting hall, along with the colony's other recreational equipment. Senator had protested, saying, "Longbow projectiles wouldn't even scratch my armor," then had desisted, suitably impressed, when one of the women put an arrow through a chunk of beef taken from the shelter's refrigeration unit, demonstrating its effectiveness at piercing protoplasm. Alessandra had sent out crews with the modern guns, putting Senator in charge of turning them into an automated defense system. She could hear his voice booming in the cold air, through the open door of the warehouse.
"A simple computer system is all we will need. Something that will tell the guns to shoot back at anything which fires at the wall. The automated guns will use a triangulation system with range-finding lasers to determine the exact distance to anything shooting at the wall. This will trigger the guns in the most optimal position to fire back. The computers you already have on hand are more than adequate to run this system . . ."
His automated system wouldn't stop a crazed, lone Tersae with a satchel charge in its claws, but it would drop anything that fired a rifle, mortar, or missile. She'd also sent several parties of miners out into the icy darkness with hand lights and ropes to comb the fissures and narrow gorges surrounding the town, hunting for possible Tersae weapons caches and scouting out good spots to place remotely controlled ambushes.
Still others checked on the mining equipment and the oil refinery. And just in case evacuation became necessary, she'd also sent a search party out through the ruins, hunting up every surviving transport left in town. That, too, comprised a very short list: seven aircars used for two-person aerial surveying teams and three lumbering, automated ore carriers that would hold a lot of people, but wouldn't top more than ten kilometers an hour.
For God's sake, she prayed, don't let us have to evacuate this town. Not in a hurry, anyway. If she and Senator did their jobs properly, that wouldn't be necessary. But with Senator's malfunctions, she was hedging her bets every way possible. Alessandra fully expected more trouble, not much later than dawn. She just hoped one malfunctioning Bolo, one battle-rattled brigade captain, and a gaggle of exhausted colonists could put together the necessary defense works before then. Particularly since most of the colonists with military experience had already died.
She shook herself out of her grim thoughts and peered up at the burly fabrications engineer holding Senator's blueprints. His thick, calloused fingers were covered with the scars of his trade. She asked again, patiently, "Can you build this, Mr. Umlani?"
"Well, yeah," Umlani nodded, frowning down at the blueprints, "we've got the tools and the necessary materials to build these things, no problem. Simple as dickens, ain't it? We can even make the glass balls pretty quickly, I'd think, using the ore smelting equipment and ordinary sand. There's a whole hill of the stuff in the mine spoils. It's easy enough work, even the kids could handle it." He glanced up, curiosity lighting his dark eyes. "You say this thing really existed? Was used in battle, I mean?"
Alessandra smiled. "Indeed, it was. Senator found a mention of it in his military history archives. Dates back all the way to Old Terra's First World War, he said. It was fielded for a while alongside machine guns and poison gas. How many of them can you build? And how quickly?"
Umlani grinned, teeth white against the exhausted darkness of his face. "Lots and very."
"Good. Get cracking, if you please. The sooner they're built and in place, the better I'll feel. Particularly since the weather appears to be clearing out there. God knows how many warriors the Tersae will throw at us, once this freezing rain stops."
"Right." Umlani hurried away, bellowing for his fabrication technicians.
Alessandra hunted up Ginger Gianesco and found her handing out cups of coffee salvaged from the supplies as half-frozen miners came in from the work crews. Alessandra accepted a cup with a nod of thanks, then asked, "What can you tell me about the refinery?"
The operations director blinked in surprise and raked limp, silver hair back from her face. "What do you want to know about it?"
"Aside from why it's here at all, what've you been cracking the crude into? Diesel fuel? Gasoline? Heating oil?"
The older woman's face rearranged its series of wrinkles. "We built it to provide ourselves a cheap, local source of fuel. Oh, we don't need it now, but we're going to grow, or planned to, anyway, and it won't take much growth to outstrip the snap generators we brought along. Equipment like that is expensive to freight all the way out here." A grimace touched her mouth. "You wouldn't believe the hell we caught, putting in that refinery. There's a xeno-ecologist over at Eisenbrucke Station who sent her research assistant out to us a couple of months back, to set up wildlife monitors and conduct studies. I couldn't say what the xeno-ecologist's like, but that assistant of hers . . ."
Gianesco shook her head, eyes dark with pain. "Stupid, greenhorn kid," she said roughly, the tone of her voice belied by the shimmer of wetness in her eyes. "Brought himself out here with a brand-spanking-new degree and a bunch of crazy notions about not spoiling virgin wilderness. We didn't come out here to admire the birds and the bees, we came out here to mine saganium. And build a colony our kids will inherit. That boy threw an honest to God tantrum over the refinery. Didn't speak to anybody for weeks, after construction started, just glowered like we were mass murderers and muttered under his breath about industry raping yet another world."
"What happened to him?"
She blew unhappily across her coffee cup. "He spent most of his time communing with his data recorders. God knows what, exactly, he was looking for out there, but he obviously preferred it to us. Poor fool went into shock when the Tersae attacked. Literally couldn't believe it was happening." She stared bleakly into her cup. "He didn't survive the first attack wave."
Alessandra wasn't surprised. She'd seen the type before. Gentle, liberal, very young. Full of sincere and noble ideas. Dangerously naive. They died fast and messy when war broke out around their ears, the way it had on Thule. She frowned then, trying to pinpoint something Gianesco had said, something useful. Then she had it. Wildlife monitors.
"Did his equipment survive?"
Gianesco blinked. "Yes, I think it did." She consulted the inventory list on the handheld unit clipped to her belt. "Most of it, anyway. Yes, here it is."
"May I?" Alessandra held out one hand.
The operations director handed over the slim unit and Alessandra scanned the list, lips pursed thoughtfully. "I've been worried about how to spot the approach of war parties in those gullies out there, since Senator has only a limited number of aerial survey drones on board. Those model airplanes Harry Bingwa scrounged from the recreation workshop will help, since we can mount cameras in them, but the Tersae are likely to shoot those down as fast as we put them up. This," she tapped the palm-sized screen, "just might do the job. You said there was a map of the terrain immediately surrounding the town?"
Gianesco nodded. "It's a geological features map, pinpointing the richest saganium deposits in the region. We'll have to pull it up on the main computers, though. I don't have it loaded on my hand unit."
She led the way past crates and cartons of supplies and forlorn piles of personal goods scavenged from damaged houses and headed out through the open doors on the far side of the warehouse. A blast of icy wind caught them as they made their way across the frozen ground between the warehouse and the surviving meeting hall. The hall was crowded with refugees: people injured in the defense, volunteers trying to administer dwindling supplies of medications, harried mothers trying to cope with young children exposed to far too much trauma.
Gianesco stopped at their hastily rigged "war room" and tapped commands into the computer system they'd brought up from the underground bunker, installing it here as the colony's new command center. The map flashed onto the screen, showing narrow gulches, deep gorges, and snaking fissures spreading in every direction, as though Rustenberg were the center of a web spun by a spider on hallucinogens. Alessandra leaned down and jiggled controls, zooming the magnification. "Hmm . . . ordinary claymores and jump mines aren't going to work very well, are they?"
"Why not? And what's a 'jump mine'?"
"A mine that detects the approach of infantry and propels itself up to about here," she measured her own chest with one hand, "then detonates. Messy as hell. Effective, too, against unarmored personnel. Which I understand the Tersae are? Unarmored, I mean?"
Gianesco nodded. "None of the ones we've seen have worn anything but fur and weapons belts."
"Good. As to the other" —she tapped the screen with one fingernail— "the way these fissures twist and turn, an ordinary mine, even something relatively directional like a claymore, won't be very effective, because the blast won't go around these corners. We need something that will."
"Like what?" Gianesco frowned. "What kind of weapon turns corners?"
Alessandra smiled. "You might just be surprised. What kind of industrial gasses do you have on hand? Anything heavier than air will do."
Light began to dawn in the older woman's tired eyes. "Good lord, yes. Fuel-air explosions, down in those ravines . . ."
"Exactly," Alessandra grinned.
The look in Ginger Gianesco's eyes made Alessandra feel about eight feet tall. To see a woman go from bitter, exhausted hopelessness to the dawning realization that there was something her people could do, after all, besides cower behind the Bolo's malfunctioning guns, went a long way toward erasing the worst of the hell Alessandra had suffered against the Deng.
Gianesco flagged down one of the older kids detailed to courier jobs. "Jennifer, go find Hank and Amanda. Tell 'em we need to bleed off the main natural gas tank at the refinery, into every portable gas cylinder they can lay hands on."
"Yes, ma'am!" The girl sped off, vanishing through the doorway with a slam of the meeting hall doors that set the nearest little ones whimpering.
Alessandra thinned her lips, seeing that. She coldly hated the Tersae for creating the fear she could see shining in the children's wide eyes, trembling on unsteady little lips. She'd seen, as well, the bodies of children who'd died with guns and spotting scopes in their hands, defending the walls as their parents finished the desperate effort of pouring the last stretches of defensive perimeter. And she'd seen the eyes of the kids who'd survived, eyes that would've looked old and hard in a fifty-year-old's face. The Tersae would pay for what they'd done here. Pay dearly. She and Senator had only just got started on ways to make those furry bastards pay.
"What else can we do, Captain?" Gianesco asked quietly. "And how can we deliver the fuel-air cylinders to the targets?"
Alessandra frowned down at the map again, unsure how to answer the second question. "About that refinery. You never did mention what you're cracking the crude oil into."
"Gasoline, mostly, to power some of the smaller tools. It's still one of the cheapest fuels around, particularly on worlds with a decent supply of crude oil, which Thule has. Evidently," one corner of her mouth quirked, "the climate wasn't always so chilly."
"Good thing, too," Alessandra muttered. "I wonder . . ."
"Commander?" her Bolo asked through the comm link at her belt.
"Yes, Senator? What is it?"
"I have been listening to your conversation, Commander, while supervising the field crews. May I make a suggestion?"
"Name it."
"I've been studying the ore carriers, Commander," Senator went on. "Their design has suggested a delivery system for some of the fuel-air mixture cylinders you were just discussing. It will be necessary for me to leave the town relatively undefended, in order to locate and destroy the enemy's home base. The computer-controlled gun systems we are setting up along the wall tonight will not be effective for indirect-fire scenarios."
"Yes, I've been worried about that," Alessandra agreed. "What do you suggest?"
"We could rig a carbon-arm trebuchet from some of the mining equipment out here, piggyback it onto an ore carrier to deliver a payload to a predetermined selection of ravines, computer controlled and preprogrammed for distance to target and depth of the selected gully. A computer could determine where in the arc of the throwing arm the payload should be released. We could predetermine various places to park the trebuchet, to reach a number of predetermined targets. We might even be able to rig a computer-deployed parachute system to provide drag on the projectiles, so they drop more accurately into the ravines."
"That's good," Alessandra blinked in surprise. "That's very good. We'll put somebody on it. What else?"
"Ms. Gianesco, how much sugar do you have in storage?"
"Sugar?" The operations director blinked in astonishment.
"Yes, Ms. Gianesco. Refined sugar."
Alessandra saw abruptly what her Bolo had in mind. "My God, that's wicked . . ."
"Thank you, Commander. About that sugar?"
"Uh . . ." Gianesco was consulting her handheld unit. "Not a lot. Maybe fifty pounds."
"More than enough," the Bolo replied firmly. "We will need to begin immediately, Commander, to prepare the mixture in time to field it before the next attack."
"Right. And we'll need someone to haul the sugar out to the refinery."
Gianesco, expression baffled, flagged down another courier. Then she stared at Alessandra, eyes begging the question.
Alessandra grinned. "Ever hear of foo gas?"
The mining ops director frowned and shook her head. "Should I have? I've mined a lot of things over the last forty years, but I've never heard of that."
"Foo gas isn't a specific substance, it's more of a generic effect. It's what you get when you toss a burning liquid, like jellied gasoline, say, through a burning substance like white phosphorus. The jellied fuel ignites in a burning wave that fries anything in its path. Like, say, Tersae warriors in a gully."
"With no way to climb out," Gianesco breathed. "My God, that's horrible." A faint, dreadful smile touched her eyes. "The sugar gels the gasoline?"
"Very effectively."
Her eyes went hard as blue gunflints. "Good. Show me what to do."
Dawn was a grey sliver along the horizon when Alessandra walked the perimeter one last time, inspecting the new installations in person. Ginger Gianesco walked at her side, along with Hank Umlani, who showed them his night's handiwork with a justifiable flourish of pride.
"What is it?" Gianesco asked dubiously, staring at the device Umlani had set into a mound of dirt and rock about four feet high.
"It's elegant, that's what it is," Umlani grinned.
The flat, meter-wide metal disk didn't look like much, even to Alessandra, let alone an effective weapon. It sat quietly on a spindle that ran through a hole in its center, with a simple conveyor mechanism that arched over the top, ready to deliver its payload to the waiting weapon.
"What's it supposed to do?" the operations director frowned.
Umlani chuckled. "This bar" —he tapped a crosspiece fastened to the spindle, turning it so that it swept in a flat circle around the metal platter— "spins at 100 revolutions per second." The end of the bar reached almost to the edge of the platter, describing a meter-wide circle as it turned. "At 100 revolutions per second, you get 60,000 revolutions a minute. At 60,000 RPM, the end of the bar will be moving at 314 meters per second."
"Yes, but what does it do? And why is there a hole in the end of the bar?"
Umlani reached into a coverall pocket and dropped an ordinary glass marble onto the platter, near the spindle in the center, his fingers simulating the action of the conveyor mechanism. The glass sphere was roughly made, with no polish of any sort, just a simple orb that Hank Umlani's fabricators and Rustenberg's children had churned out by the thousands during the night. "When the bar spins," he said, moving the crosspiece slowly by hand again, "it bumps the marble like so. Centrifugal force operates to keep the marble moving in a straight line." As he turned the crosspiece, the marble did just that, moving from the center of the platter out to the rim, walked along by the movement of the bar. "By the time it reaches the edge, it's moving at the same speed as the end of the bar. And 314 meters per second is fast, as fast as some guns throw a bullet."
Gianesco suddenly saw it. "The marble slips through the hole in the end of the bar! And goes flying off the edge! How accurate is this thing?"
Umlani chuckled again. "The Bolo says it's nothing like as accurate as an ordinary rifle, but it's plenty good enough for our purpose. We've put 'em in a circle all the way around the original edge of town, one every five meters. This'll fling a marble at a slight upward angle, so the projectile never goes higher than five feet or so off the ground. The marble drops in an ordinary ballistic parabola down to four feet off the ground again, out to a range of about 150, maybe 200 meters. When we activate the system, we'll end up with a glass curtain of death, one those damned birds will have to run through to get close enough to our wall to use satchel charges or small arms. Ought to be as effective as machine gun fire. Bolo says they were actually tested in battle, centuries back, but they were dropped from the arsenals because machine guns were more accurate."
Alessandra nodded. "They worked just fine in trench warfare, though, and that's pretty much what we've got here. Trench warfare." Alessandra gestured in the growing dawnlight toward the gullies and ravines. More nasty surprises waited silently in the shadows at the bottoms of Rustenberg's natural stone trenches.
Gianesco was about to ask another question when Senator interrupted. "Commander, our wildlife monitors have picked up enemy troop movements in the ravines. We face a heavy concentration of enemy warriors. I will cover your return to town."
Ginger Gianesco paled. Hank Umlani swore. Alessandra broke into a run across the icy ground. The civilians panted at her heels. Alessandra didn't bother looking over her shoulder. Senator would be watching and the last thing they needed was to put a foot wrong in the broad swath of rubble strewn like caltrops between themselves and the defended wall. A massive rumble shook the ground, then Senator bulked huge, gun snouts black against the pale grey dawn as he charged straight past them, interposing his bulk between them and some unknown—
The world shook.
And the whole sky erupted into the colors of hell.
They fell flat in the rubble, knocked down by the shock wave from the Bolo's twin Hellbores. Alessandra panted into the dirt and tightened her fingers around broken chunks of plascrete. What the hell was shooting at us, for him to unlimber the Hellbores? Whatever it was, it didn't shoot back. Alessandra scrambled to her feet and snatched the others up by the backs of their coveralls. "Run!"
They needed no second urging.