“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.
Chapter Twelve
I am anxious to be on the ground again.
As we drop from orbit, plunging toward Thule’s turbulent surface, I see the curve of the planet’s snowy shoulder in triple images, one from my own sensors, one from telemetry provided by the Darknight, and a third from her destroyer escort. The Darknight and the Vengeance will remain in orbit as long as needed, guarding our vulnerable backs from potential space-based attacks by whatever alien race is providing high-tech weaponry to the Tersae. The ships track deployment of the battle group as my fellow Dinochrome Brigade comrades scatter across Thule’s four main continents. We drop from the blue-black edge of space into the blue-white haze of Thule’s thermosphere, which is merely a thin scattering of molecules here, at an altitude of 150 kilometers.