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“All right,” I said. “I suppose I shouldn’t have asked. But if we can find a way to bring about a cease-fire, would your people be able to mediate? I understand that you can’t fight, but perhaps you could help to find a way to stop us fighting.”
There was another pause, and I realised that Kirk was in telepathic contact with his ship, and perhaps with his queen, though I didn’t know too much about how the command structure worked.
“That would be possible,” he said. “Bringing peace to warring parties would in no way contravene our rules.”
“Then we will try to find a way to bring one of your ships through,” I said. “That way you’ll be on hand if we are able to arrange a cease-fire.”
Actually I was hoping that the sight of the Tammid ship would draw the Greys into firing on it, at which point the Tammids would be entirely justified in firing back. But once again I was counting my chickens.
“We would be willing to have a ship available,” Kirk told me. “But it could not enter a war zone while fighting is taking place. We would have to remain on the ground and well away from the war zone.”
“Okay,” I said, realising I wasn’t going to get what I wanted here. “Then why don’t you go to the Institute in Strossburi and wait there? I should think the scientists there can open a portal big enough to bring your ship through to this side – or if not I’m sure your own computers can manage it. If things work out and we can use your services to mediate we’ll call you there. Thank you, Kirk.”
“We will await your signal,” he said, before turning and re-entering his ship. The hatch closed and the ship shot off vertically until it was hidden by the clouds. I sighed and walked back up the track to the hut.
“Where did you go?” Stefan asked me when I got back to the Hub.
“I went to talk to the Tammids. I thought they could help, only it seems that the Tammid version of the Prime Directive doesn’t allow them to get involved in wars on the planets they are visiting. They’re prepared to umpire a bit if we can organise a truce, but I can’t see any reason why the Greys should agree to one.”
“That’s a damned nuisance… look, Jake, I know the Kerpians are our friends, but please can you promise me we’ll leave before everything here falls to pieces? It was bad enough last time when they separated us at the mine. I really don’t want to risk it happening again.”
“I promise. Mr Narj said yesterday that they’re going to keep the Hub open for as long as possible to give themselves an escape route, so we’ll be able to get back to Elsass easily enough if the Greys break through. Besides, the Greys don’t know where this Hub is: the ones we fought here were taken out along the tunnel to Hub One, so they never saw Hub Two from the outside. They won’t know where to look until long after we’ve all left.”
“Well, let’s not leave it too late, all the same. I know you, Jake: you’ll hang on and hang on, hoping that something turns up, and when it doesn’t and you finally agree to go it’ll be too late.”
“I promise not to do that this time.”
“Good. Because if you try I’ll just bash you over the head and drag you away, understand?” And he kissed me and hugged me to show that he didn’t mean it… at least, I didn’t think he meant it.
The Hub itself remained fairly quiet as that day went by, though further south there was all sorts of frenzied activity: more bridges being mined or destroyed, more civilians evacuated, cameras being set up on every tall building and on as many of the foothills of the Vosges that allowed a clear field of vision, and artillery pieces being dug in south and west of Kolmar and in the low hills to the west of Molnarhass. Units of militia from Elsass and a small number of heavy guns came through the portal in Strossburi and rushed south to strengthen the Kerpian forces south of Kolmar. And at around eight o’clock in the evening, by which time we had eaten and moved down to the radio station, the first crawler arrived. It had come through a portal close to the Ill on the far side of Oriavar, and so the first we knew of it was when an alarm was raised as it appeared just to the south of us, having taken a route that avoided the town: had it followed the direct route through the town it would probably have demolished everything in its path.
We went outside the radio station to watch it approach. There was still half an hour until sunset, so we could see it clearly enough, and so I could tell that this wasn’t Lee’s crawler: the hanzi on the front was painted in black with a background of a circle of pale blue. It stopped just before the fence that surrounded the radio station and a couple of minutes later one of the open tracked vehicles appeared around the side of it, drove through the gates and stopped three metres away from us. There didn’t appear to be anyone in the back, but the passenger door of the cab opened and out stepped a motherly-looking woman in a fetching pale blue suit with black trim.
“Good evening,” she said in Horde Common. “I am General Cho. Who is in charge here?”
“Good evening, General,” I said, thinking that this was a thoroughly unlikely-looking general: she was short and plump and had grey hair done up in a bun; and she looked more like one of my mother’s shopping circle than a warrior. But I suppose it takes more to command a crawler than the ability to wave a sword about. “This is Colonel Narj. He’s in charge of this area. Did General Lee explain what is happening here?”
“He told us that there’s a good chance of some proper military action,” she said. “All I need to know is where the enemy are.”
“They’re not here yet, but we’re expecting them tomorrow,” I said. “They’ll be coming through a portal like the one you came through, somewhere south of here – at least, we hope it’s south of here, because otherwise all our guns are in the wrong place. They’ll have tanks – as many as four hundred of them if we can’t close their portal quickly - and lots of infantry with automatic weapons. And they don’t subscribe to our rules of warfare, either.”
“No, Lee said we probably shouldn’t use cavalry, at least to start with,” she said. “Do you have detailed local maps that I can look at? We’re not used to operating in terrain like this with buildings everywhere, and I imagine you’d prefer us not to drive over too many of them if we can avoid it.”
“I think that would be appreciated,” I said.
I conveyed the request to Mr Narj.
“The colonel will give you a full briefing now,” I explained to her. “We’ll then rely on you to pass the information to the other generals as they get here – if any of them do, of course. There are only two of us here who speak Common, but the other one is a trained radio operator, so we can co-ordinate our attack with the Kerpians through him. Now, there’s one other thing: we have a party here who got stranded away from their world when their portal was… let’s say taken off-line. Can we use your computers to try to find the co-ordinates for a portal to take them home?”
“I don’t see why not. Bring one of them to the crawler and ask for Captain Zeiss – he’ll arrange it.”
She spoke briefly to her driver, who nodded and drove back to the crawler.
“I’ll go and fetch Gordiss,” I said to Mr Narj. “Sam and Stefan can interpret for you and the general until I get back.”
Mr Narj assigned me a vehicle and a driver and we drove back up to the Hub. This time I didn’t put a helmet on, though before I went into the briefing room I explained to the militia NCO that if I came out with anyone other than the bald guy, or if I came out and started issuing new orders, they should ignore me and force a helmet onto my head straight away. But I needn’t have worried.
“The first crawler’s here,” I told them. “Gordiss, if you’d like to come with me and bring your computer we should be able to get you all out of here: between what’s on your hard drive and what’s in your head I’m fairly sure the Horde computer can crack it. They managed in my case, and I didn’t even understand the stuff I’d been reading on the Kerpian computers. And as soon as we have a portal we’ll come and get the rest of you.”
I took Gordiss back down to the radio station, accompanied him to the crawler and asked for Captain Zeiss, who turned out to be rather closer to the typical military type than his commanding officer: he was tall and muscular and had a very short haircut. He led us to the crawler’s testing and implanting room and installed Gordiss in one of the chairs, setting the helmet on his head.
“I don’t suppose there’s any record of this man’s language on your computers,” I said. “Will the system be able to translate for him?”
“Probably, though it might take a while for the system to set up a translation program from scratch.”
“I speak his language,” I said. “If I give the computer a few translations it might speed things up, mightn’t it?”
“It might,” he agreed. And so I spent the next half hour reading passages in Horde Common and translating them into Arvelan wearing one of the helmets until Zeiss said he thought the system had enough to be able to build up a working translation system.
“Then I’ll leave you to it,” I said. “If you can give him enough Common to get by he’ll be able to show you what’s on his computer, and then with any luck the central system will be able to work out the co-ordinates for a portal to take him home. I’ll be over in the radio station if you need me.”
I’d missed the nine o’clock chat between Sam and General Lee, but Sam gave me the gist: Lee and Khan expected to be with us in mid-morning next day. One other crawler was expected at around the same time, and two more were on the move but would take longer to get here. We could only hope that the lack of bridges over the rivers would hold the Greys up for long enough for more crawlers to arrive.
We went back up to the Hub to sleep, and tonight Stefan and I did what we had done during our first stay here: we squeezed two beds into one of the side rooms and pushed them together to form a double bed. It was a bit rough on Sam, who had to sleep in the dormitory on his own, but this was the first chance Stefan and I had had for a bit of privacy at night in a very long time, and we made the most of it, even though that meant that we didn’t actually get to sleep until after midnight.
We would have liked to spend a little longer in bed the following morning, but we didn’t want to risk having the alarm go off or having someone burst in to get us while we were romantically engaged, and so reluctantly we got up, had a shower (with not too much distracting behaviour) and went to the dining hall for breakfast. And we were just finishing off when the siren sounded. We went downstairs to the office and found Mr Narj, once more in his militia uniform, talking to someone on his radio.
“They’re here,” he told us, unnecessarily. “We’re not sure exactly where yet, but their portal does seem to be south of the Thur, and that’s good news, because most of the bridges have gone. It ought to hold them up for a bit. Anyway, we need to get down to the radio station: we’re going to use it as a command post. It’ll pick up the camera feeds better than this place will. Where’s Sam?”
“He was just finishing his breakfast,” I said. “I’ll go and find him.”
I met Sam halfway down the stairs and saw that he’d changed into his Horde riding uniform.
“I thought that if there’s going to be fighting I ought to wear it,” he explained. “I expect I’ll be stuck in the radio station, but maybe I’ll get a chance to go and help Xan later on.”
“Sam, I really hope Xan won’t be leaving the crawler,” I replied. “It’ll be far too dangerous for cavalry out there.”
I sent Sam down to the office while I continued up the stairs to the briefing room, and here I made the decision to trust the Arvelans – after all, in our current situation it would hardly be in their interest to turn hostile: they needed us to fix them up with a way home. So I told the militia that we were all moving out and that they didn’t need to worry about the Arvelans any longer. The NCO made me repeat that wearing a steel helmet, but once he was satisfied that I wasn’t being controlled he let me into the briefing room and took his men off.
“We’re leaving,” I told Aarnist. “I don’t know whether Gordiss has managed to open a portal yet, but if not it’ll still be better if you’re down with us rather than stuck up here.”
They didn’t argue, just gathering up their belongings and following me back down the stairs. Nor did Mr Narj challenge me for bringing them with me.
By the time we got down to the radio station General Cho was waiting for us, looking the very picture of impatience.
“We need to get down there,” she said. “The reptiles already have engineers trying to bridge the Thur, and we need to stop them. Your infantry are finding it difficult because of the covering fire from the reptile tanks. I thought that if we cross the Ill and come at them from the side we can drive the engineers back. And I’ve got spotters out trying to locate the reptile portal. We’ll relay everything to you on the frequency Sam gave me last night.”
And with that she jumped into her vehicle and drove back to the crawler, and within a minute of her driving aboard the crawler itself started to move south, leaving a lone figure standing beside it. This turned out to be Gordiss.
“They haven’t got the co-ordinates yet,” he told us when he reached the station. “But they’ve given me everything their computers have done so far. They think that when your friend Lee gets here his system will be able to find a solution faster, because it’s already carrying the information it got from Jake. You know, that’s a really strange society: I’ve never seen such a mix of people, or such a lack of obvious hierarchy. It looks completely chaotic, but it seems to work.”
“That’s pretty much what I found,” I said. “They’re actually very well organised once you get past the initial impression.”
We went into the radio station and found it already buzzing: reports were coming in from the various units south of Kolmar, a number of officers were perusing the various camera feeds, trying to see where the Grey tanks were coming from, and on a table in the centre of the room was one of those large maps with pins stuck in to indicate the positions of the troops. I was surprised they were still using something so old-fashioned.
“It’s just a back-up,” Mr Narj explained when I raised the question. “We’re using the computers to give us a dynamic view, but if the power goes down – which could easily happen if the Greys get too close – the map will let us see what is happening until we can restore power to the computers. Now, if you and Sam could man the radio we were using last night to talk to the crawler…”
So we tuned in to Cho’s crawler, and their communications chief began to give us a commentary on what was happening. I’d wondered how the crawler was going to cross the Ill, but Sam had already worked out that, provided the river was no wider than half the length of the crawler, it would simply drive across. A wider river would slow them down because they would need to rig the skirt and use the hover engines, but the Ill was narrow enough not to need that approach.
Over the next two hours or so we heard how Cho’s crawler had destroyed a pontoon bridge over the Thur before it could be used and had then recrossed the Ill south of the Thur to attack the enemy directly, only to be driven back by the sheer number of Grey tanks and artillery pieces. They had retired back across the Ill and were attacking the enemy from across the river, though they were still taking damage and were uncertain how long they could stay in position.
The good news was that their spotters had located the portal. The bad news was that the Greys, by accident or design, had established it south of a fairly thick stretch of woodland to the east of Sennhass, which meant it was sheltered from direct attack by artillery and out of range of Cho’s main armament unless the crawler could get a lot closer than it was now. Cho had tried using a couple of spotters as flying bombs, but the portal was well defended by infantry and both spotters had been shot down before they got close enough to do any damage.
It was at about that point that General Lee arrived, having opened a portal a short distance north of us. The general drove the last couple of kilometres in one of the tracked vehicles, explaining when he arrived that the crawler had to remain connected to the portal, which they were keeping open for General Khan.
“He threw a couple of tracks about twenty li north of here,” he explained. “Normally he would just have kept going, but he’s already suffered engine failure on four other tracks, and he needs at least one more set running. He says it shouldn’t take more than an hour to fix it, though. So, what’s happening here?”
I filled him in and then he spent a few minutes talking to Cho’s communications man and then to the general herself.
“This is going to be interesting,” he said, handing the microphone back to Sam. “Normally our armour is fairly strong, but it sounds as though the reptiles have some quite powerful weapons, because they’ve cause a fair bit of damage to Cho’s crawler. On the other hand, even our secondary weapons can knock out one of their tanks with a direct hit, so things could be worse. Any sign of General Shen yet?”
“Not so far,” I told him.
“I’m not surprised. He’d basically settled down permanently in one place. Of course when I told him we had a genuine war for him he said he’d want a part of it, but he warned me that it might take a little while to get the crawler back into fighting order. He still thought he could be here this morning, though. As for the other two, they’re coming from a bit further away. Sung is beyond the Rhine, where the terrain isn’t exactly crawler-friendly, and Zhao is – last time I spoke to him, earlier this morning – about here.” And he indicated a space south and west of the town marked on the map as Szepavar, which I thought corresponded to Belfort. I thought that could be very useful indeed, since he would be approaching the Greys from an unexpected direction and might take them by surprise – but then again, it would still take him quite a long time to get close enough to matter.
“While you’re waiting for Khan,” I said, “could you take this man and carry on with the work Cho was doing?” I indicated Gordiss. “We’re trying to open a portal back into his world to get him and his colleagues home. Dec speaks his language, so he’ll be able to interpret for you.”
“Yes, I suppose so. I’ll get my driver to take him to the crawler. I’d like to stay here for a while and have a look at the maps. Give Valeriya a call and tell her to expect him.”
So we sent Gordiss to the crawler. Meanwhile things to the south of us weren’t going so well: the Greys had succeeded in bridging the Thur out of range of Cho’s guns and their tanks were starting to cross, supported by large numbers of infantry.
Another hour went by, and then General Shen arrived. We gave him a quick briefing and then sent him down to the west of Kolmar to bolster the defences on that side of the town. His arrival helped to stop the Grey advance, but according to Cho’s surviving spotters tanks were still coming through the portal, and I felt sure that, sooner rather than later, sheer weight of numbers would be enough to push the Greys through our defensive line and into Kolmar. And once Kolmar fell our own position would be directly threatened.
“We need aircraft,” mused Stefan, looking at the map. “If we had bombers we could close the portal and flatten their tanks in no time.”
“What are aircraft?” asked Mr Narj.
“They’re flying machines, like the crawlers’ spotters, but much larger and manned.”
The Kerpian world, unfortunately, had no air travel. Elsass had air travel but no military aircraft, and the crawlers had nothing larger than their spotters, and they had precious few of those. Short of going up in a hot air balloon and lobbing hand grenades over the side I thought the whole concept was a non-starter.
Then Sam called across the room to tell me that Lee’s scientists had cracked the portal problem again and that they’d got the co-ordinates for the Arvelan world, and I realised that an aerial attack might not be impossible after all.
“We’ve got your co-ordinates,” I told Aarnist. “As soon as we get a portal open using them you’ll be able to go home. Except… are you still interested in learning more about portal technology?”
“Well, yes, but this is hardly the time, is it?”
“This is exactly the time. Look, your world has aircraft, hasn’t it? I mean, I’ve seen your helicopters – hoverers – and I know you’ve got bombers, too, because Terry told me the old Imperial Palace in Sanöve was destroyed in an air raid.”
“So?”
“So we need aircraft if we’re going to win this fight.”
“You want me to commit Arvel’s military to a war that has nothing to do with us at all and is being fought in a different world?”
“Yes. Look; High Captain, there are five worlds that we know about who have portal technology. The Greys are one. Doesn’t it stand to reason that the other four should stand together? After all, if the Greys win here, sooner or later you’re likely to end up fighting them yourselves, because they’re not the sort of people to stop using the portals now they’ve found out how to create them. If we stand together we can stop them: if not they’ll take us down and then come after you.”
“And your carrot is, if we help you’ll share the technology with us? So what’s the stick – help us or we won’t send you home?”
I shook my head. “That wouldn’t be fair. Actually it wouldn’t work, either, because we’d have to send you back in order to get your aircraft, wouldn’t we?”
“Well, you could keep everyone here except me,” he pointed out. “But… let’s say I’m interested. What makes you think I can swing it? As I told you before, I’m only a provincial copper.”
“This is your territory. Once you go back through the portal you’ll be where you belong, as the senior police officer for the region. That ought to give you some clout. Besides, we’re not asking for a complete air armada – a handful of planes will be enough, as long as they can take out the portal. I’m sure you can swing that, especially if you tell your bosses the benefits of being full members of the portal operators’ club. After all, one day you might open a portal into a hostile world, and then we’ll be able to help you.”
“I’d like to hear that from your man Narj,” he said. “It’s not that I don’t believe you, but I’d want to hear it from someone in authority.”
Mr Narj was not enthusiastic at first: he’d already expressed his distrust of a society that included slavery and mind-control among its operating principles. But I suppose that when you’re in danger of bleeding to death, any doctor is better than none.
“All right,” he said, finally. “We’ll give you access to our records. I might have a job selling it to the Ministry, but I’ll find a way. If we’re still here at the end of this because of your help, perhaps they’ll be less unhappy about it.”
Aarnist looked at Irfan, who nodded.
“He’s sincere,” he confirmed.
“Then I’ll see what I can do,” said Aarnist.
“You understand that my offer is conditional on results?” asked Mr Narj. “No flying machines, no information.”
“Obviously. In fact, I’ll go further: if we don’t close the portal, we won’t expect anything from you. Is that acceptable?”
“Perfectly.”
“Just one question,” asked Irfan. “How are we supposed to get our planes into your world?”
“Well, through a portal, obviously. The General here can open one for you.”
“No, I mean how do we move them? Planes can’t generally move on the ground very well, and they certainly won’t be able to roll across a field.”
“I don’t suppose you have any vertical take-off planes?” I asked.
“No. Do such things exist?”
“They do in my world. Well, could you use the motorway? We know there’s a motorway in your world and this one.”
“It’ll be astonishing if they’re in exactly the same place,” said Aarnist, looking at the map. “In fact, I’m certain ours runs east of the one in this world. Our pilots would have to land on our motorway and then we’d have to find a way to tow them through a portal and carry the planes to your motorway so that they could take off again. And I don’t see how we could move a plane on the ground from one place to another across farmland without damaging it.”
“Could we take a crawler to your air base and open a portal at the end of a runway?” suggested Stefan.
“I don’t think so. The plane would have to time its take-off to absolute perfection: if it leaves the runway too far before it reaches the portal it could miss it, and if it leaves it too late it would crash, because if it was still on the ground beyond the portal it wouldn’t be on a runway any more.”
“Well, could it fly through a portal?” I asked. “I’ve seen film of planes flying under bridges and along narrow canyons and stuff. If we set up the biggest portal we can manage, would your pilots be good enough to be able to fly right through it?”
“Well, I’m no pilot, but I wouldn’t want to try it,” said Aarnist. “Get it a little bit wrong and you leave part of your plane in the wrong world, and that really can’t be good. But I can ask. How big can you make the portal?”
“Big enough for a crawler to pass through, and perhaps bigger than that,” I said. “General, could you find out from your scientists how big a portal they think they could create?”
Lee went to the radio and called the question through.
“They say that if we have a proper frame they can probably make it a fair bit bigger,” he reported. “But only as long as the weather stays like it is now. If the wind gets up it’ll be very difficult to maintain a large portal for any length of time.”
I translated this for Aarnist.
“If the wind could disrupt it, I would imagine that a jet engine could disrupt it, too,” he said. “If this is going to work we’d probably have to send one through and then re-establish the portal before the next one can use it. We’d need a proper type of air traffic control to let the pilots know when it’s safe to go.”
“I’m sure we could have a radio post on both sides of the portal,” I said.
“Could we use the radio masts?” asked Sam – he’d heard the crawler’s reply to Lee, of course. “They’re quite far apart, and they’re high enough, too – about two hundred feet, I think. If you could open a portal between two of them it ought to give the pilots something big enough to aim at, oughtn’t it?”
And in the end that’s what we did: Lee confirmed that his scientists could open a portal that large, and Aarnist said that he thought his pilots should be able to fly through it, provided there were no tall buildings close by on either side of the portal. Lee’s crawler had to hold its current position until Khan arrived, but once Khan’s crawler was safely in our world Lee closed the portal to his own world and set about opening one from Kerpia to Arvel between two of the four radio masts. And it worked, though apparently it was taking a fair bit of power to maintain it. Normally portals are self-sustaining, but this was too big for that and needed a constant power input from the crawler.
The next problem was the fact that the radio station didn’t exist in Arvel, so although there was a hazy image of the masts from their side, it wouldn’t be clear enough for the approaching pilots, and so we had to mark out where they were on the ground. Aarnist borrowed one of Lee’s tracked vehicles to drive the short distance into Arvelan Sélestat, where he commandeered a road-marking machine and its crew from the local highways depot, and they set about painting white lines from the base of each mast and broad arrows to show the pilots where to aim. As soon as they had started work, Aarnist collected his colleagues, got back into the vehicle and drove off, presumably to the nearest airfield. Meanwhile Mr Narj set up a temporary radio on the Arvelan side of the portal to give instructions to the pilots. As we were short of Arvelan speakers we walked to Lee’s crawler, found Dec and asked him to man it for us.
By now we could tell for ourselves that things weren’t going well at all: we could clearly hear the noise of the artillery now, and there was smoke rising from the direction of Kolmar.
”We’ve got problems,” Sam told me when I got back inside the radio room. “Shen decided he could get close enough to destroy the portal, but he underestimated the reptiles: they’ve worked out that if you can destroy enough tracks you can immobilise a crawler, and Shen got too far south before he lost his engines. The reptiles blew a hole in the side of the crawler and they’re fighting hand-to-hand inside. Shen’s guns are still firing, but probably not for much longer. Khan tried to go to help, but his crawler is already lacking too many engines, and when he realised that the reptiles were deliberately targeting his tracks he had to fall back.
“Cho’s taken a lot of damage and has had to fall back, too, but she and Khan are just about keeping the reptiles south of Kolmar. And Sung has broken down somewhere in Bavaria and isn’t going to make it at all. At least Zhao should be in range in an hour or so.”
“If it isn’t too late by then,” I said, pessimistically. “What about the Arvelans? Any sign yet?”
“Not yet, but then they haven’t been gone long.”
Sam gave Dec a quick crash course in radio procedures and then we sent him through to man the station on the Arvelan side.
News continued to come in, none of it good. The Kerpian engineers had spent the past couple of days digging ditches and tank traps as well as demolishing bridges, but despite all of this the Greys’ armour had managed to break through the defensive line and were now actually in Kolmar. The wings were holding better because there was a crawler on each side of the town, but in the centre the Greys were definitely winning.
Then, just when I was beginning to wonder if Aarnist had been turned down by his military or by his government, or even if he’d actually bothered talking to them at all, his borrowed vehicle came back through the portal. Irfan and Gordiss were still with him, though the other three Konjässiem had been replaced by an older man whom Aarnist introduced as “Air-General Lorness of Maarvuishippe.”
“Is everything ready on this side?” he asked. “The first plane should be here in a few minutes.”
“Everything is ready,” Mr Narj told him – I was translating, of course. “That radio is set up on the wavelength you asked for. Did you manage to give the targeting information to the pilots?”
“They know what they’re looking for,” Aarnist confirmed.
Three minutes later the first plane arrived…and it was a complete disaster. The pilot flew marginally too high, and as a result his tailfin didn’t make it through the portal. It was like a double-decker bus trying to drive under a ten-feet-tall bridge: the top gets sliced off. The plane crashed in a fireball a couple of hundred metres beyond the portal.
As we’d expected, the jet engines had also disrupted the portal, but as soon as it was re-established we got Dec to warn incoming pilots that they must keep low, as close to the ground as possible. And the second plane passed through the portal successfully and flew off southwards. Over the next five minutes another four planes followed it, all passing through the portal without mishap. These were mid-sized fighter-bombers that carried rockets as well as bombs, and I felt confident that they would be able to close the portal, especially as the Greys appeared to have brought no ant-aircraft weapons with them. Since they knew that Kerpia had no aircraft, it was an understandable omission.
Ten minutes later the lead pilot called through to say that the portal had been destroyed, but of course that wasn’t the end of it: there would be nothing to stop the Greys opening a new one ten metres away. So I advised the Arvelans to bomb the entire area with everything they had, as this would make it much harder for the Greys to find a place where there wasn’t a large hole on the ground - which would of course prevent the portal from opening - on our side. The pilots did that and then flew back through the portal to refuel and rearm on their own side.
The Greys did manage to open the portal twice more: the first time it was bombed closed again quite quickly, and the second time it was far enough away from cover that the pilots were able to fire rockets through the portal. I don’t know whether these killed the scientists or destroyed the equipment that was being used to open the portals, but after that the portal failed to reappear.
There were still a lot of Grey tanks and troops in our world, but provided we could prevent them from being reinforced it seemed likely that we were going to survive this after all. And then General Lee received a report from one of his spotters that there was a Grey column heading straight for us.
“How did it get past the crawlers?” he wanted to know.
“It came straight through the centre of Kolmar. Once it broke through the defensive line south of the town there was nothing to hold it back.”
“If they hit either of the masts it’ll destroy the portal, and that’ll be the end of our air cover,” said Lee. “And almost all of the crawler’s power output is being used to maintain the portal: we don’t have the power to operate our guns as well. Are there any militia units that can help?”
“Everything is already in the line. We don’t have any reserves,” Mr Narj told him.
“Then I’ll have to use my crew. We don’t have much in the way of anti-tank weapons, but we can at least try to slow them down until the planes get back from rearming. I must go and organise things.”
“General, do you have any spare weapons we could use?” I asked. “I don’t think anyone here is armed, except for the officers with pistols. If you can lend us a dozen rifles, at least everyone in here will be able to defend himself.”
“I’ll see what I can find. I’ll send someone with as many rifles as I can find for you.”
The general left, and five minutes later an infantry patrol came in carrying spare weapons and ammunition. I really didn’t want to find myself having to fight in a gun battle against Grey soldiers again: I’d survived two of them, but I was afraid that a third one might prove to be a case of pushing my luck too far. But the Kerpian radio operators, at least, seemed to welcome the chance to fight back, and Stefan was already stripping his rifle down and checking that everything was clean and oiled and generally ready for action.
Another ten minutes or so went by, and then we could hear the tanks starting to fire. Apparently they were shooting at the crawler, rather than at the masts: presumably they weren’t aware of the portal between them. But if they did enough damage to the crawler, the effect would be the same: the power would fail and the portal would close.
“Any sign of the aircraft?” I asked Dec through the radio.
“Not yet.”
“Can you send them a message anyway? Tell them that the radio station is under attack and we need help urgently. The first aircraft through should try to take out the tanks attacking us, because if they get too close we might lose the portal.”
Now I could hear small arms fire, and there was also the sound of shells and bullets hitting the crawler and, occasionally, the buildings around the one we were in. At one point a shell hit our building full on and demolished part of the wall, and after that we could hear the noises of fighting much more easily. And then, finally, the first plane arrived and attacked the tanks with its rockets. A second plane came through and joined in, but then one of the tanks, whether it was aiming for it or not, hit one of the masts and brought it crashing down.
“No more air cover,” commented Mr Narj. ”Jake, tell the pilots to destroy all the tanks in that column and then to conserve what weapons they have left. They should stay aloft and visible for as long as they can. They can land on the motorway if they start to get low on fuel, unless we can establish a new portal using the other masts straight away. Though maybe it would be better to let the crawler use its guns for a bit first. Ask Sam to let the general know we’ve lost the portal, anyway. He can use his own judgement on whether to use his guns or try for a new portal.”
Sam relayed that message. The sounds of fighting outside were growing louder, and I thought that the general would probably want to use his guns – assuming that they were still manned, of course: quite possibly most of his gunners were outside operating as infantry. I wondered if I should go back to the crawler and offer my services, but decided that I was more use here as an interpreter.
”General Zhao reports that he is in range and has started his attack,” Sam announced a couple of minutes later. And I thought that really ought to be the final nail in the Greys’ coffin: no reinforcements, no avenue of retreat, and a new enemy attacking from their rear. But nobody seemed to have told the Greys outside the base: it sounded as if the fighting was right outside the door now. And when the door was blown off its hinges and the first Grey soldier charged through I wondered if maybe this time I really had stretched my luck too far…
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Ah, the return of Peril: Jake's in trouble again. How many times is that now? Anyway, the next chapter is also the final chapter, so if he can get through this in one piece maybe he'll be safe.
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Copyright 2011: all rights reserved. Please do not reprint, repost or otherwise reproduce this or any part of it anywhere without my written permission.
David Clarke