the planets at their closest positions, they’d have needed at least
twenty-six minutes to get that report. Charlie says they got it in
under four! That is absolutely, one-hundred-percent impossible!
Don, how sure are you of those numbers?”
“As sure as we are of any other Lunarian time units. If they’re
wrong, you might as well tear up that calendar you started out with
and go all the way back to square one.”
Hunt stared at the page for a long time, as if by sheer power of
concentration he could change the message contained in the neatly
formatted sheets of typescript. There was only one thing that these
figures could mean, and it put them right back to the beginning. At
length he carried on:
“The next bit tells how the whole Seltar area came under sustained
bombardment. A detachment including Charlie and Koriel was sent out
overland to man an emergency command post about eleven miles from
Seltar Base. . . I’ll skip the details of that .
Yes, here’s the next bit that worries me. Under Day Twelve: Set off
on time in a small convoy of two scout cars and three tracked
trucks. The journey was weird-miles of scorched rocks and glowing
pits. We could feel the heat inside the truck. Hope the shielding
was good. Our new home is a dome, and underneath it are levels
going down about fifty feet. Army units dug in the hills all
around. We have landline contact with Seltar, but they seem to have
lost touch with Main HQ at Gorda. Probably means all longdistance
landlines are out and our comsats are destroyed. Again no
broadcasts from Minerva. Lots of garbled military traffic. They
must have assumed (frequency priority?). Today was the first time
above surface for many days. The face of Minerva looks
dirty and blotchy. There,” Hunt said. “When I first read that, I
thought he was referring to a video transmission. But thinking
about it, why would he say it that way in that context? Why right
after ‘the first time above surface for many days’? But he couldn’t
have seen any detail of Minerva from where he was, could he?”
“Could have used a pretty ordinary telescope,” Maddson’s assistant
suggested.
“Could have, I suppose,” Hunt reflected. “But you’d think there’d
be more important things to worry about than star gazing in the
middle of all that. Anyhow, he goes on: About two-thirds is blotted
out by huge clouds of brown and gray, and coastal outlines are
visible only in places. There is a strange red spot glowing
through, somewhere just north of the equator, with black spreading
out from it hour by hour. Koriel reckons it’s a city on fire, but
it must be a tremendous blaze to be visible through all that. We’ve
been watching it move across all day as Minerva rotates. Huge
explosions over the ridge where Seltar Base is.”
The narrative continued and confirmed that Seltar was totally
destroyed as the fighting reached its climax. For two days the
whole area was systematically pounded, but miraculously the
underground parts of the dome remained intact, although the upper
levels were blown away. Afterward the scattered survivors from the
military units occupying the surrounding hills began straggling
back, some in vehicles and many on foot, to the dome, which by this
time was the only inhabitable place left for miles.
The expected waves of victorious Lambian troopships and armored
columns failed to materialize. From the regular pattern of incoming
salvos, the Cerian officers slowly realized that there was nothing
left of the enemy army that had moved forward into the mountains
around Seltar. In the fighting with the Cerian defenses, the
Lambians had suffered immense losses and their survivors had pulled
out, leaving missile batteries programmed to fire robot mode to
cover their withdrawal.
On Day Fifteen, Charlie wrote: Two more red spots on Minerva, one
northeast of the first and the other well south. The first has
elongated from northwest to southeast. The whole surface is now
just a snags of dirty brown with huge areas of black mixing in with
it. Nothing at all on radio or video from Minerva; everything
blotted out by atmospherics.