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“Security,” the male on the other end said.
“Not enough of it, evidently,” Atvar said, acid in his voice. “What was it that just impacted on us?”
The male in Security paused a moment, no doubt to check his caller’s code. When he realized to whom he was speaking, he got deferential in a hurry. “Exalted Fleetlord, that was a small, I would say locally made, rocket detonating against our armored facade here. No casualties, minimal damage. A lot of smoke, a lot of noise. Maybe the Big Uglies will think they really did something. They did not, and I will take an oath by the Emperor’s name on it.”
“Very well. Thank you.” Atvar broke the connection. He turned an eye turret toward Pshing. “The fanatics, as you could have guessed for yourself. I wonder which of the Deutsche or the Russkis or the British stirred them up to this latest round of madness.”
“Exalted Fleetlord, did anyone necessarily stir them up?” Pshing asked. “They are Tosevites, and so quite able to stir themselves up.”
“I wish I could say you were wrong,” Atvar said mournfully. “But you are correct, as we have seen again and again to our sorrow. And the male in Security believes it to have been a locally made rocket. Perhaps that is just as well. One of the independent not-empires might well have furnished the fanatics with something more lethal.”
He wished Tosev 3 had been as the Race fondly believed it would be. Had that been so, he would now have been turning over his duties to the fleetlord of the colonization fleet. He would have gone down in the records of four worlds as Atvar the Conqueror. For tens of thousands of years to come, hatchlings of four races would have learned of him in their lessons. Conquerors were rarer by far than Emperors, and more likely to stay in a student’s memory.
He hissed softly. He would go down in history, all right. He would go down as the first male the Emperor had designated a Conqueror to succeed incompletely. He hoped the landing of the colonization fleet would succeed in bringing Tosev 3 firmly within the Empire. On good days, he had some confidence that that would happen. On bad days, he wondered if the Big Uglies wouldn’t end up overwhelming the Race instead.
Today was a very bad day.
Pshing said, “Might it not perhaps be best to transfer our administrative center to the island continent called Australia, where the Tosevite survivors are relatively few and easy to control?”
“Security would be simpler,” Atvar admitted. “But to retreat from a long-established center like this one would be to confess weakness. The Tosevites have excellent scent receptors for weakness. They would only press us harder than ever. Firmness they grasp. Firmness they respect. Anything less, and you are theirs.”
“No doubt you are right, Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing said, resignation in his voice. “Our experience on this world certainly suggests as much, at any rate.”
Somewhere in the broad, empty reaches of the Indian Ocean, far, far from any land, a long, lean shark shape drew very near the surface of the sea. But it was vaster than any shark, vaster than any whale-and neither sharks nor whales evolved with conning towers on their backs.
This conning tower never broke the surface. No satellite, no airplane that chanced to be peering down on that particular stretch of sea, could have found a name or a nation to attach to the submarine. All cats are gray in the dark. All submarines look very much alike, seen underwater from above.
A radio mast rose. Ever so briefly, it plowed a tiny white wake in warm, blue-green water. Then it slid down again, down into silence, down into anonymity. The submarine dove deep.
Glen Johnson was harassing one of his Soviet opposite numbers on the radio: something to pass the time on what he expected to be a long, boring mission. “Why did they even bother putting you in the craft, Yuri Alekseyevich?” he asked. “All you are good for is pressing a couple of buttons. They could get a machine to do that. Soon, they probably will.”
“I can do what I have to do,” the Russian answered stolidly. “I am less likely to go wrong than a machine.”
“Cheaper, too,” Johnson suggested. He added an emphatic cough, to show how much cheaper. They were both speaking the Lizards’ language. It was the only one they had in common, which Johnson thought amusing. He didn’t know what the Russian spaceman-cosmonauts, they called themselves-thought of it. Somebody down on the ground was monitoring every word the Russian said. Somebody was monitoring every word Johnson said, too, but he didn’t have to worry about a grilling from the NKVD when he got home.
He was about to rib Yuri some more when a flash of light off to one side of them drew his notice. “What was that?” the Russian asked-he’d seen it, too, then, though his craft had only a couple of little windows, not a canopy with better all-around vision than Johnson had enjoyed in his first fighter plane.
“I don’t know,” he said, and asked a question of his own: “Whose is it?”
Yuri was silent for a little while: probably getting permission from downstairs to talk. “I do not know, either,” he said at last. “Orbits have been confused lately, even worse than usual.”
Johnson gave another emphatic cough-barbarous jargon by Lizard standards, for it modified no previous words, but something humans often did and had no trouble understanding. Then he spoke in English, not for the Russian’s benefit but for his own: “Jesus H. Christ! Somebody’s launched something. Somebody’s launched something big!”
Orbiting fortresses these days could carry a dozen separate rockets and weapons, which could be aimed at either other targets in space or at the ground below. They made Johnson’s blood run cold-they made a lot of people’s blood run cold-because they could start a really big war with bare minutes of warning.
He changed frequencies and spoke urgently into his microphone: “Ground, this is Peregrine. Emergency. Someone has launched. Repeat: someone has launched. I am unable to identify whose satellite it is. Over.”
A voice came back up from a ship in the South Pacific: “Roger that. We are going to alert. Over.”
“Roger.” Johnson knew that meant he would have to run another check on all of his craft’s weapons. He scratched an itch on his scalp. Close-cropped, sandy brown hair rasped against his fingers. He’d had a lot of training. He’d flown a lot of routine missions. Now things counted again. If the fighting started way up here, odds were he wouldn’t make it back down again.
He checked the radar. “Ground, all launches appear to be outbound. Repeat: all launches appear to be outbound.” Intuition leapt. The man broke through the Marine lieutenant colonel for a moment: “Christ, somebody’s gone and launched at the colonization fleet!” After that one shocked sentence, the officer resumed command: “Over.”
“That appears to be correct, Peregrine, ” the inhumanly calm voice on the ground said. Then the fellow’s calm cracked, as Johnson’s had: “What in God’s name are the Lizards going to do about that? Over.”
“I hope they can knock down some of those rockets,” Johnson said. During the Lizards’ invasion, he’d never imagined rooting for them. But he was. The colonization fleet was unarmed; the Lizards had never imagined its ships would need to carry weapons. Attacking them was murder, nothing else but. They couldn’t shoot back. They couldn’t even run.
And, if those ships did go up, what would the Lizards do? That was the wild card, one that made his stubbly hair try to stand on end. During the war, they’d played tit for tat. Every time the humans had touched off a nuclear bomb in a city they controlled, a human-held city went up in smoke immediately afterwards. How much was a ship from the colonization fleet worth?
“Ground,” he said urgently, “whose launch is that?”
“Peregrine, we don’t know,” replied the man at the other end of the radio link.
“Do the Lizards know?” Johnson demanded. “What will they do if they know? What will they do if they don’t know?”
“Those are good questions, Peregrine. If you’ve got any other good questions, please save them for after class.”
Afte
r class was coming fast. Johnson would have launched his own missiles, but they couldn’t match the acceleration of the ones already under way. And, had he launched, the Lizards might have thought he was aiming at them. They knew who he was. Would that make them drop the hammer on the USA?
He didn’t dare find out. All he could do was watch his radar. The Lizards, even counting the ones from the conquest fleet alone, had a lot more stuff in space than mankind did. Surely they would be able to do something. But, from what Johnson could read, none of their installations was close enough to have much chance of knocking out those missiles.
Sitting ducks, he thought. They weren’t sitting, of course; they were orbiting the Earth at several miles per second, as he was. But they had no chance of matching the acceleration of the missiles bearing down on them, and so they might as well have been sitting. A couple of them did start to change their orbits. Several, Johnson was convinced, hadn’t the faintest notion they were under attack.
