Jack Chalker - Balshazzar's Serpent

Cromwell was just about the last one out, and barely in the nick of time. The explosions could be heard both below and above, and the waters from that distant lake started flowing down through the network, washing through all they struck, on the way to even deeper pools that would lead eventually towards the far-off ocean.

They had worried about this flooding almost since they started planning the taking of the underground complex; teams had discovered the other ends, nicely sealed, when exploring the area around the downed ship and the burned-out villages and they’d guessed what the seals were for. Initially dry and airlocked so that they could be used to bring in all of the downed ship’s cargo and weaponry without any local prying eyes left to say what it was or where it went, they then became nice last-ditch suicidal defenses. The only thing was, anybody triggering them would have to be in either an upward elevation region of the caves or outside on the surface. Cromwell’s battle computers had taken a good guess at how long this would take once operations commenced, and as it turned out they were rather conservative, but it had weighed on his mind since the start.

The only reason he’d gone for it at all was that these sorts of people were criminals, not zealots. Captain Sapenza hadn’t sounded like a man of much faith, even if a man of great nerve, and he certainly couldn’t have sustained that kind of live conversation via Eve from much of a distance.

So, Captain, where are you now, eh? At the control center of one of those twelve ship’s naval guns you removed and built into this region, I’d say. Waiting.

Waiting for Olivet, its crew, tactical squads, Doctor, and all the rest, to take off in a desperate attempt to get those injured ones to hospital.

Cromwell looked around at the region, the village, the now packed-up Olivet, all the rest, and nodded to himself.

“Everybody on board? If not, five minutes. Five minutes or you learn to love it here.” He called on all frequencies, then walked towards the ship with a slow, deliberate military gait.

“All the children been set loose and returned to Mummy?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” the reply came. “We told the villagers to remain inside the village today at the risk of being burned out or worse, and they’ve complied. All the kids are back, but in the big barn, where they’re still more or less under our monitoring.”

As Cromwell went up the ramp and heard it close behind him, he asked, “Anybody here or above discovered those bloody guns yet?”

“No, sir. They’re pretty well hid. We can guess at a few, but there’s no way we can cover them all. Remember, they had thirty years to disguise them, and deploying, setting up, and hiding those guns was the number one priority. They were certain they were still being chased.”

“All right,” the security chief sighed. “I just hope the engineers are right on what sort of guns were removed and what their limitations are in planetary mounts,” he said. “Otherwise, this is going to be a very short trip.”

“Stand by for motion!” the ship’s intercom warned. “Secure all loose items, strap in if you can or hold on. Thirty seconds.”

Even Robey, who had yet to get rid of the ringing or hear much of anything else in spite of some treatment, knew what it meant when he felt the vibration in the deck and he was suddenly almost overcome with sheer panic.

My God in Heaven! he thought to himself. I’m about to be blown up!

It was one thing for the Doctor to have full faith in miracles, but having the same sort of faith in engineers and their computers was quite another. And only a miracle would keep this ship from being blown to bits in the next minute or so.

John couldn’t help it. Unable to move, to run, to do anything much at all, he instead just sat there in the Arm’s quarters and stared at the clock on the wall.

When first one minute dragged by, then another, he began to doubt his senses, then wonder if in fact they were really going anywhere. By all rights they should be dead by now.

Now he desperately wanted to see where they were, how far they’d gotten, how far it was to the safety of the union in The Mountain, but he dared not move while the red flashing danger light was on or his hearing might well be the least of his problems.

He couldn’t understand what was going on. They should be well up in the planetary stratosphere by now, essentially in space, yet the vibration continued at its maximum and there was a fair amount of buffeting, the kind of ride you got when you were maneuvering to land rather than blasting off at full speed.

Something was definitely wrong, yet it was impossible to tell what when you were inside such a massive flying structure.

When the clock passed the twenty-minute mark, he knew that they weren’t headed up to Sinai and he suspected that they weren’t headed up at all. The back and forth rolling and jerky motions were continuing, and even getting a little worse.

Suddenly, he realized what they were doing, what they had to be doing.

Olivet had taken off, all right, and it had gone straight up—for maybe a couple of meters. Then, with the landing sensors on, they had been moving not up but sideways, following the topography at just that couple of meters height. Somebody smart had figured out that you could not depress those naval guns so that they’d be useful as surface-to-surface weapons; instead, they were aimed at creating a crisscross defensive pattern that would be certain to nail any spaceship either landing or taking off.

Olivet was doing neither, but there were at most only twelve naval guns in place and they were large and required separate fire control positions when not networked into the ship as designed.

He could see the engineers now, working out the most effective and broadest pattern for total defense. Now, extend that from the lake area and their ship over to the village and perhaps even to the original colony headquarters site and you were already short a gun or two. Get beyond there, towards the other side of the continent, even a few hundred kilometers, and you would be out of range. Then you could launch on a trajectory that their firing patterns could not be altered to nail without moving the guns. Move those big guns and their power supplies and you were a sitting duck for Archangel.

It was a long, rough ride because this sort of lateral movement was something Olivet was never intended to do. But as a former orbit-to-ground-to-orbit cargo shuttle it had that capability, at least theoretically. Now it was more than theory, but it might well be a couple of hours before it could move beyond the curvature of the planet, far enough away so that even an orbital trajectory wouldn’t be anywhere in the line of sight of the armorers staffing those gun emplacements.

Robey let out a breath and relaxed as well as he could. Only the faces of those poor devils maimed and murdered kept him from feeling exhilarated at the now obvious escape. He wondered how the downed pirate captain was taking it. Certainly it would not do to be all that close to him physically right at this moment, he bet.

In point of fact, Olivet ’s lateral motion was barely fifty kilometers per hour; it was too massive to move any faster at such a low level, and the whole lateral movement capability designed into it was to make it move several meters one way or the other, not long distances. There was always the danger that the small engines would burn out before they made it far enough to feel safe; these were not the big engines designed for orbit, after all.

Still, while one was showing real signs of strain and another was giving intermittent readings, the movement was steady and solid as a rock as far as the bridge was concerned. They’d built these lifting bodies, as the engineers called them, for harsh conditions on planets never intended for humans and far from space dry-dock and repair facilities, and it was sure showing the quality of its construction now.