Empire of Two Worlds

“The first thing is to move on Blue Space Valley to give us some property to bargain with. I guess I should really send you to do that job, but I want you to stay here with me. Give Grale and the others the low-down and they can sort it out.”

“It’s liable to get pretty hot around here, boss. After all we don’t know an awful lot about what these Moon guys can do.”

“We’ll play it by ear,” he said, unperturbed.

The sloop left the next day. I didn’t feel nearly so self-confident without it. Bec had given Harmen the option of leaving with the sloop or staying. He elected to stay and Bec conceived a plan for him to help us make contact.

“We might need an amount of bluff here,” he explained. “It won’t do for them to meet the boss straight away. We’ll use Harmen for a front man. You know the old ‘Organisation Routine’? You think you’ve met the top man, then suddenly you find out he’s not the top man and you find yourself faced with somebody he’s dirt to. It makes a good impression.”

He grinned sourly. “Besides, it might save us from getting our heads blown off.”

We prepared a bunker at the opposite end of the village to that which the Meramites were approaching. Bec posted lookouts. He told the villagers he would handle things for them, but that was only to secure their co-operation. I guess they were better off with Bec in charge, though. He told them not to resist but to surrender, sending out envoys to say that the village was in the hands of an alien power not of Rheatt.

He had reckoned without the Meramites’ way of doing things, however. Hesha was only a small village to them, an outpost of a nation they had already conquered, and they believed in a policy of punishment-in-advance. From the hillside we watched the approach of the Meramite column, sending up a cloud of dust. The Meramites were riding on wheeled platforms, circular in shape, carrying about twenty men apiece. They stopped not far outside the village and we saw our messengers deliver their news. We saw them slaughter those messengers and then roll forward mercilessly.

“Get to the bunker,” Bec said in clipped tones. “This isn’t going to be so easy.”

A withering fire swept the village, starting fires here and there. The Meramite soldiery carried lance-like poles that fired gouts of hot metal. You could just about see them when they shot from the tip of the lance, streaking out like a line of light. They didn’t seem to be very accurate, but they didn’t have to be in the circumstances.

We made it to the bunker through clouds of smoke. It was a well-set-up position at the end of the main street, backed up by solid brick buildings. Its upper parts, jutting up above the road, had a step-like construction, one block being set more forward than the other, and into these two blocks we had set the Jains. The arrangement gave absolute command of the street ahead of us and good control over the environs, each gun being able to cover the other from attack from any side.

Bec thrust guns into the hands of Harmen and two Heshans we had trained to use repeaters. We nestled down behind the Jains, peering through the firing slits in their shields.

“Here they come!” yelled Bec. “Let ’em have it!”

The Meramite carrier platforms appeared at the other end of the wide street. We saw big grey figures, considerably bigger than the Rheattites, arrogantly directing their glowing lances this way and that, indulging in the arbitrary destruction we later came to expect of them.

We let them get well into the street before letting loose. They scarcely knew what had hit them. Deadly though their hot-lead poles were, they just weren’t in the same class as a pair of good Jains, the most effective, withering machine-guns ever designed. An almost solid sheet of lead ripped down the length of the street, the racket reverberating between the walls of the houses with a noise like ten thousand rivet-guns. We put in a mixture of explosive and spin-bullets, too. You can do a variety of such mixtures on a Jain gun, say one explosive, one spin to every ten straight. If a spin-bullet hits you it more or less turns you into a jelly.

Our blast lasted only seconds. We had to watch the ammo. But the Meramites were wiped out, their riding platforms leaning crazily.

“That’ll show them they’re up against something,” Bec grinned.

Three times they tried to send men down the street, with the same result. We were beginning to conclude that the Meramites weren’t too bright, or else weren’t very skilled in war. By now the village was blazing merrily. We could hear screams and the zip-zip of the hot-lead poles. I wondered if they treated every village this way or if it was only us they were after.

A few times they tried to infiltrate in from the sides but couldn’t get at us until our ammunition ran out, and we had enough to last for a while. However, this wasn’t quite as Bec had planned it, as far as I knew. We were bound to run out eventually.

I looked across at him. “Still planning on contact?”

“Sure.”