Imperial Stars 1-The Stars at War (43 page)

Baker's lips drew back in a snarl. This was the enemy. To them, the inhibitor had meant nothing. They threw their guns away, sharpened their lances, and whooped down upon the gun crews, tankers, and machine-gunners who clubbed useless carbines and threw rocks. The first few weeks had been massacre. After that the Americans recovered somewhat from their shock, began to reorganize and pick up edged weapons, to fight their way back to the sea. They were outnumbered and outmaneuvered, they could not in a few days learn a type of warfare devoid of firepower and mechanized supply, and the retreat was mostly a rout.

During that time, only men who moved fast and learned quickly survived. Baker was only nineteen, but he had come all the way, in this fighting he was an old hand, a veteran who knew all the tricks. He could hardly remember what it felt like to ride in a truck, sleep on a full belly, or command weapons that killed in great bursts of flame or sleets of lead. The tools he knew were knife and spear, arbalest and sword. His enemy was not a plane or a tank, it was the flat-faced horseman with sword or lance.

The Americans now stood with their backs to the sea, waiting for evacuation complicated by lack of Diesel- or gasoline-powered landing craft. Their situation was not bad, really, there were not very many of them left to evacuate, most were dead in the hills and plains of the interior; and to some extent supply had caught up with them here, they ate more often and they had a weapon to at least harass the horsemen.

The leading squadrons were well into the valley now, the point abreast of Baker. He moved his magneto box around between his knees and squatted over it, his glasses on the man standing on a spiny ridge at the lower end of the valley. Presently the man signaled, and Baker pressed the plunger. In the valley below, a thin vapor began to creep out from all sides toward the horsemen in the center. Baker carefully checked his sector with his glasses. All cylinders had fired—they almost had to, poison gas was cheap in the United States but dear here where the cylinders were brought up on men's backs, and they had been spread thin.

"All right," he said finally, "let's get out of here before those gooks spot us."

His men needed no urging, they had been uncomfortably aware of their exposed position for some time. They picked up their weapons and moved off at a swift walk along the hillside. There was a small gully they must cross, and here they donned masks before they scrambled down. The bank on the other side was steep, they needed to boost each other up to make it, and they were not all up when half a troop of the enemy, red-eyed and wheezing, came stampeding up out of the valley at them.

Baker saw them coming only a few hundred yards away, with his little force split, half on the bank and half below. He dropped his arbalest to cock it and shouted a warning.

There were three pikes in the party, twelve-foot shafts with heavy, wicked points of razor-ground steel armor scrap. The men had been using these to climb the bank, they snatched them away now and swung out to set them with drilled precision. The other men in the gully had captured swords and bayoneted M-1's, except for Baker and one other with arbalests of jeep spring-leaves and the airplane cable mounted on M-1 stocks. One man, a swordsman, was hanging on the edge of the bank by his elbows, on the verge of hoisting himself over, he twisted his head to look over his shoulder, hesitated a moment, and then slid back down to join them. Baker was glad to see him come, there was another arbalest on the bank, that was a good place for him, but the swordsmen and spearmen up there were useless. Still he could not order them back down, this looked like a death trap. Their left flank anchored on the bank, but their right hung in the air, he grabbed two spearmen and swung them around to give some protection, but there were just not enough of them to cover it adequately. He and the other arbalestier stepped in behind the pikemen and spearmen, who had dropped to their knees, and Baker slipped in a quarrel.

The enemy point swerved in at them, settling his lance, and at five yards Baker shot the horse in the throat. The other arbalestier took the second. A swordsman flashed by on the right and swung viciously at Baker, who parried with the stock of his weapon. At the same moment, from the corner of his eye he saw a horse caught on two of the pikes and one of his spearmen leaping out, yelling, over the pikemen and struggling horses to bayonet its rider. After that there was only dust and confusion and flashing steel and yelling men, and then sudden quiet. It took some minutes for Baker to realize the clash was over and he still alive—actually the enemy had not been anxious to press their charge home or turn his flank, they had only been trying to get out of the valley as quickly as possible and the platoon had been in the way.

Still, it had not been fun, the brief flurry had cost them men. Baker cursed the enemy and the raiders, both, thinking how much difference even one stinking Browning would have made—

After twenty years, the inhibitor against high-pressure chemical reaction lost its effectiveness and needed to be re-seeded. It was a routine task for one cruiser, there was no real reason for the former task commander, now deputy fleet admiral, to go along. At the moment, however, things were quiet and Galactic Security labored under an economy budget. The admiral needed the flight-time, and besides he was curious. He held a peculiar affection for Earth, the action of twenty years before had been his first independent task command, and still stood in his mind as a perfectly planned and executed job.

The civilian observer from the Department of Minorities and Backward Peoples went along because the Department wanted a check and he had asked for the assignment. He, too, was curious, this had been an unorthodox and controversial experiment from the start, and he was still unconvinced of its overall desirability.

They came in over the pole on almost the same course they had flown twenty years before, and the admiral was first to notice the change.

"No radar," he said, watching the instruments.

Where before a whole continent had quivered and reacted with alert savagery to their appearance, they now coasted alone through the bright sky, apparently unheeded and unknown to men. It made the admiral vaguely uneasy.

The seeding was to be done at two hundred thousand, in a crisscross pattern which would take several hours, and the Department observer wanted to go down in the tender and make some checks at a lower altitude. The admiral decided to go with him.

They glided down to five thousand feet before applying power, careless of who might see the disk-shaped flier drifting overhead; there was no particular reason to avoid observation now, this planet had already known them.

Over the northern United States, there was superficially little change, the admiral had little difficulty in orienting himself by the photo-charts made more than twenty years before, railroads and highways still cut in straight lines across the plains checker-boarded by wheatfields. Not till they came over the lakes region did they begin to notice significant differences. Here, small villages spotted crossroads where they had not appeared on the old charts, and cities had shrunk and drawn in upon themselves. Once again, the United States was a predominantly rural nation.

In the days immediately after the raid, there had been little change in those cities not directly affected. There were deaths from radiation sickness and poisoning as the debris of the raid sifted through the atmosphere, and film badges and gas masks became a part of the everyday costume of those who could afford them; automobiles rusted where they stood and there were minor inconveniences; but the streetcars still ran, electric signs flashed, and the plumbling worked. In those first days, aside from the blasted areas, the farms and suburbs were hardest hit. Life there had tied itself tightly to the internal-combustion engine, to tractors and trucks and aircraft and Diesel engines.

There were not very many crops planted or harvested in North America that year.

As summer wore on, the cities also began to feel the pinch. Distribution was difficult without trucks, highlands and reservoirs needed helicopters and power boats for maintenance. Prices rose and inconveniences multiplied.

By fall, in the poorer sections, people were starving.

By the next spring, the population of the United States was less than sixty million and the machinery of civilization rusted unattended while people scrabbled for food. The bones of Paul Bonner and his pretty wife lay in a roadside ditch, with spring rains melting the ice and flesh from them.

That summer was bad, too, but the seeds of resurgence were sprouting. The federal gold hoard came out of its vaults to buy food men would not sell for paper, and when the hard yellow coin began to circulate people forgot their despair and their wits sharpened and they looked about for opportunity. Old stern-wheelers slid off the banks and creaked out of sloughs to push tons of Argentine beef and horses and grain up the inland waters from New Orleans. Independent train crews hauled loads for speculators out from St. Louis and Cincinnati and Kansas City. People drifted back to the cities to build steam tractors.

In another year the trains were running on schedules of a sort and a few turbine-powered automobiles and trucks were on the highways.

Five years after the raid, the country was back on its feet, but it was not the same country. Cultures, like individuals, discard patterns of behavior associated with defeat and cherish jealously those associated with gratification. The trauma of sudden almost mortal disaster is apt to intensify these reactions to the point of mania.

From five thousand feet, the country now looked green and prosperous, even the scars of Brookhaven were growing over. The admiral studied the peacefully pastoral scene, the bustling but not overcrowded cities, with approval.

From five thousand feet, he could not see the scavenger-gnawed skeletons still tangled in obscure briar-patches, nor the scars and bitterness and hatred still tangled in people's hearts. If he saw, he did not particularly note the little groups of hard-faced observers here and there who studied his craft through binoculars and carefully filmed its every move.

The Department observer could not see them either, but he was better versed in social phenomena than the military man, and he was not so sure.

"Let's see what Europe looks like," he said.

In Asia, after the debacle, the Americans evacuated about twelve thousand troops to Japan. Most of these, being veteran and reliable, were brought back to restore order when the domestic military establishment fell apart. Now again there were detachments in the Philippines and the Pacific Islands, and in Malaya to protect the growing rubber demand, but the mainland of Asia was left to the warlords and khans.

In Europe, defeat had not been so disastrous. The enemy there were almost as heavily mechanized as the NATO nations, and as discomfitted to find themselves suddenly disarmed. Also, they experienced internal troubles from those of their own peoples who had never taken kindly to statism. These troubles were compounded by the fact that the dissident elements were mainly just those who clung to and were most adept with yataghan and knife, bow and lance, horse and camel; many a Muscovite commissar fumbled uselessly with his pistol while Finnish knife or Montenegrin dagger or Ukrainian scythe bit into him.

Still, the enemy had numbers, and under the urge of famine he swept across Europe, looting and burning and killing to the Rhine, sending isolated raiding parties as far as the Pyrenees, then decomposed from internal stresses. His troops frittered away and disappeared, but Europe lacked the energy to recover. When the first great wave of horsemen from the steppes came, the only organized opposition they met was from the scattered American garrisons along the Rhine, and they foraged to the channel, so that in middle Europe hardly stone stood on stone and one might go for miles without seeing a living man.

Here, the admiral could see the skulls even from the air. In Potsdamer-Platz, they were piled in the neat Asiatic habit into a pyramid over fifty feet high.

They swung back across Bavaria then, and along the Rhine, staring wordlessly at the desolation below, livened only by the occasional disorderly gaggle of squat dark riders with their trains of loot. The admiral tugged uneasily at his collar and glanced sidelong at the civilian, but the latter said nothing, and then the admiral suddenly brightened. Away across the Rhine his trained eye had caught a hint of order, a flash of steel. He tapped the pilot's arm and pointed, and they swung down over a marching column of men, coming with burnished arms and steady step and even formation along a highway to cut behind a swarm of the savages.

Colonel Albert Baker pulled his horse off to the side and reined around to watch his regiment come up into the battle-line. They were rugged and tough, veterans with a sprinkling of husky recruits from midwestern prairies and Norman farms and Scotch hills, the fastest marching infantry since Grant's, and, with allowances for fire-power, perhaps the deadliest. Still, this was the time they were vulnerable, the next few minutes while they maneuvered directly from the column of march into the line. The colonel did not like it, but he was working on Evaluation's clockwork schedule, and there was nothing much he could do about it. The forward elements of his flanking archers began to drift out onto the plain, and he debated whether to throw them forward as a screen, slowing down his disposition but making a tactically sounder maneuver. Just then a squadron of dragoons jingled past at a trot, and he breathed easier. Corps had promised the cavalry screen, but he distrusted cavalry, they were always skittering off somewhere else when you needed them most, and he had not really believed they would show up.

The 103rd was next in the line, his right flank would rest on them, and he watched now as they moved into position smartly. When they were clear the colonel raised his hand, bugles screamed, and with drums beating to set the step his regiment swung out onto the plain and up into line. Standard-bearers ran forward and dressed and set guidons, squads and companies wheeled and marked time and countermarched, dust rose and swirled in choking clouds, lieutenants and sergeants back-pedaled anxiously and shouted hoarse commands and blew on whistles. The pattern began to fill in. Lines grew out of seeming chaos and weaved back and forth, dressing, and then the regiment was blocked solidly in its place, left flank on the river and right on the 103rd. The colonel eased himself in his saddle and lit a cigar, turning to survey the field as a whole.