Alexander Kazantsev - The Destruction of Faena

All the Faetians on the station assembled in the observatory, except for the imprisoned Brat Lua.

Mrak Luton personally came to fetch him.

“Let him watch!” he said, pushing Lua into the observatory and showing him the mass of Mar in the porthole. “Let him watch with his own eyes!”

“Are you so sure that’ll knock some sense into him?” asked Nega Luton quietly.

Her husband grinned complacently.

“I know the inner world of the Faetians too well to be wrong. Otherwise I wouldn’t be Supreme Officer of the Blood Guard.”

The six Faetians on Deimo saw another star flare up in space and go out again.

“They’ve knocked out our torpedo!” And Mrak Luton stamped his foot.

Then, on the surface of Mar, two disintegration explosions occurred in succession. In the russet deserts, the trunks of fabulous trees could be seen from space as they soared up into the sky, billowing out into swirling canopies. The distinct shadows of first one and then a second gigantic mushroom lay across the sandy wilderness.

“What did I tell you!” roared Mrak Luton. “They wanted to be the .first to wipe us out. Their ship with its warhead exploded first. But you were just whining, you were talking about living Faetians.”

“The station chief is right,” sighed Tycho Veg. “He can see into the Faetian soul.”

“Engineer Tycho Veg! Stop drivelling! I know what I’m worth! Go back to the greenhouse at once and fit one more ship with a torpedo.”

“But we won’t have any more ships left,” said Tycho in an attempt at protest.

“Victory! Victory at all costs! A ship will be sent for us as heroes of the disintegration war from the triumphant continent of the Superiors.”

“To hear is to obey,” said Tycho Veg with a covert glance at Ala Veg.

But she sat with bowed head, her hands dangling down in despair.

Tycho Veg left to set up another ship-torpedo.

However, this second missile was also knocked out by defence rockets fired by the Culture Is on Phobo.

A second volley of defence rockets was launched from Deimo to beat off yet another ship that was glittering in the rays of Sol and might also have been primed with a disintegration warhead.

Both ships, the one from Phobo and the one from Deimo, blew up almost side by side in the deserts of Mar. First, monstrous mushrooms on stalks of smoke rose up on the site of the explosions, and then, when the smoke had dispersed, it was possible to see from above craters in the deserts of Mar which had not been there before.

“How amazed the astronomers would be,” said Ala Veg in a sinking voice, “if they found craters like that on Mar.”

Tycho did not react at all to these words. He had barely reached the Central Console from which he had been discharging the defence rockets. He was feeling really ill this time. It seemed to him that there had been children flying to them in the ships and that they had been killed.

Sheltering in the deep abandoned mine-shaft, Kutsi Merc had survived the disintegration blast. The thunder above had long since died away.

It was damp underfoot. The raindrops were falling from above as if counting the moments. It seemed to Kutsi that they were measuring out infinite time. He sat there without strength or thoughts, dozing or in a faint. Only hunger made him rise to his feet. But he was afraid to see what awaited him above; he was afraid even to imagine it.

The raindrops were falling noisily, the only sounds to indicate that the world still existed. The world? What world? Dead puddles and dead raindrops?

His ravenous hunger drove Kutsi up the slippery metal rungs. Some of them wobbled. Kutsi could fall to the bottom of the well. And it would all be over. But the metal rungs held. There was a little blue circle high up above. Strange! The Nepts’ cabin had been built directly over the mine-shaft.

The sky! With stars in it! Was it really night?

Kutsi climbed on upwards. The circle above him was growing bigger and brighter, and the stars were gradually disappearing. But certainly not because day was breaking. It was simply the effect of a darkened chimney, when stars are visible from the bottom in the daytime. The circle overhead was growing bigger while they were disappearing. Kutsi climbed out on to the surface.

Sol was at its zenith. The Nepts’ cabin no longer existed. It had evidently been blown away when the stones were falling on to his shoulders.

The Faetian looked round and was dumbfounded. Not only had the Nepts’ cabin disappeared, not a single roundhead shack was left standing. Everything around had been turned into an enormous refuse tip of garbage, pathetic kitchen utensils, smashed furniture and rubble. A jagged wall rose at an angle in the distance.

Kutsi made his way over to it. And immediately stumbled on the first corpses. The Faetians had been killed by the windstorm that had followed the disintegration explosion. Many were buried under the wreckage of their shacks, many had been carried through the air and dashed against any solid object in their way.

That was what had happened to the old Nept couple. Kutsi recognised their mangled bodies by their clothes.

A chill ran up and down Kutsi’s spine. He had heard plenty about the disintegration weapon, but had never imagined that it would look like this after an explosion.

The wall he had reached proved to be part of some huge workshops in a suburb of Pleasure City. The building had collapsed, burying machines and the Faetians who worked in it. In its place towered an ugly pile of rubble.

Had no one survived at all?

Kutsi Merc’s two hearts were thudding painfully in his breast and his temples throbbed accordingly. Why had the wounded one recovered?

Himself not knowing why, perhaps in the hope of meeting at least one living Faetian, Kutsi began wandering round Pleasure City.

His hunger, dulled by the initial horror, made itself felt again. Kutsi’s mind was in shock, and instinct was forcing him to look for something edible in the mass of rubble.

Two mountainous ramparts rose like grey barkhans on either side of what had been a street. In one place, under the fused stones, he thought he saw food containers. He began digging into the pile and came upon a protruding hand. He could not force himself to dig any further and went on between the dunes of ash-covered rubble.

He had the feeling that he was wandering along an enormous dump of builders’ rubble.

Kutsi had never thought that the devastation could be so complete. It was even impossible to make out the shapes of former buildings. There could be no thought of finding something to eat in this pile of rubble.

Kutsi was suffering the torments of hunger. And this combination of horror with the pangs of hunger was unnatural. He was disgusting even to himself.

However, a more powerful emotion was beginning to get the better of Kutsi.

Who was to blame for what had been done? Who had made a war of disintegration the purpose of his doctrine? Who had turned the continent into such a wilderness strewn with ashes?

Kutsi was overcome by a frenzied hatred of Dictator Yar Jupi; it flooded his whole being, it overshadowed everything that he had known, even the stipulations which the Great Circle of the proprietors had made about unleashing a disintegration war and which he had once reported to Dobr Mar. Kutsi Merc had failed to carry out his mission! The automatic systems console was intact. Yar Jupi had begun the disintegration war first!

When he climbed up the cone of rubble, Kutsi saw the ocean. Its shore was disfigured by a gigantic crater, now flooded with sea water. A torpedo had evidently exploded in the port. The enormous crater was ringed by a rampart that had covered part of the ruins. Clouds of sand and ooze had been thrown up from the seabed into the air during the explosion and had then fallen as dry ash onto the ruins.