Battlefield Earth

Chapter 16

The next weeks were filled with tension. They were driving along the vein in hopes of a second pocket but as yet saw only white quartz, no gold. And without gold, nothing else was going to work.

The incident of the horse herd caused an uproar among them. They had trained those horses and they had become pets, left at the Academy where there was grazing, waiting for better days. The Scots were outraged, not only because of the loss, but because of the sickening way it had been done. It brought home to all of them the nature of the enemy. Were all Psychlos like that? Yes, unfortunately. Lookouts had spotted other crippled animals around the compound. Didn’t this put the girls in great danger? Yes, but one had to grit one’s teeth and make sure their plan came off on schedule. By all that was holy, they mustn’t muff a single thing! It was like playing a violent kind of chess with maniacs.

In other areas than the gold they were making progress.

Angus had made keys to everything in sight. It was very risky: heat-shielded bodies, silent feet in the snow of night, impressions in wax, dusted-over tracks. There was double jeopardy in this, for any discovery might not only cost the man his life but also alert the Psychlos that something was intended.

They had a good break in studying the old battle of a thousand years ago. The records were all in order now, all satellite overviews of it in sequence.

Jonnie and Doctor MacDermott had been going over them, looking for something that might help. There were numerous reports on the battleplanes in that one-sided struggle.

An oddity was that a Psychlo battleplane had dive-bombed a tank in downtown Denver, but there was no tank detailed to downtown Denver according to US Army statements on it. This attracted Jonnie’s attention and led him to discover a second report on the same plane.

After bombing the tank that the report said was not there, the battleplane took off at high speed to the northwest and was sighted colliding with a snow-covered mountainside. It didn’t explode. The spotting gave the exact position.

They looked it up on their maps. It was only about three hundred miles to the north of them.

Dunneldeen verified it with an overfly and metal detector, and the battleplane was still there, buried—all but a tip of its tail—in perpetual snows.

Using two flying ore platforms, they dug it out and airlifted it at night to avoid detection to the old base, and there in the heliport, subjected it to minute study.

The battleplane was unserviceable, but it contained a host of information that could not be gained by a stealthy scout to the compound. The two Psychlo pilots had been killed on impact, but their equipment, though decayed, was intact.

They went over every detail of the breathe-masks. They found there was a compartment that contained jet-driven backpacks as a form of parachute in case of necessary bailout. The security belts were no different from those used in the mine vehicles. The pilots also wore beltguns.

The controls of the plane were identical to the passenger mining ships. The only additions were the g*n triggers and switches for a magnetic “grappler.”

Examining the skids on which the plane stood, they found, indeed, that they were electromagnetic. The plane could be fixed with this to any metal surface and obviated the necessity of tying it down.

They also located the key slots and determined the type of keys.

They cleaned it up as best they could and used it for drilling their pilots.

The dead, mummified Psychlos were dissected by the parson to ascertain where their vital organs were located. Their hearts were in back of their belt buckles and their lungs were high in their shoulders. Their brains were very low in the back of the head and the rest of the head was bone. The parson then buried them with proper solemnity.

They were busy on many projects. They built a large-scale model of the compound in the huge loft of the Empire Dauntless Mining building and drilled every team member.

They marked out approximate distances in a meadow—without betraying anything to a drone—and timed everything: how fast did one have to go to get from this place to that, what were the starting times from zero time in order to converge simultaneously. There was much information they did not have and could not get, so they made up for it with flexibility.

A problem they had to solve was replacing the horses. By rounding up and training wild ones, and working very fast, a small group was able to do this.

They had all become excellent marksmen with the assault rifles and bazookas.

With the relentless drilling by Robert the Fox, that past master of raids, they were really getting someplace.

“If we miss,” Robert the Fox repeatedly told them, “and slip up on the tiniest detail, those plains out there will once again be crawling with transshipped Psychlo tanks and the sky studded with battleplanes. The home planet of the Psychlos would retaliate with ferocity. We would have no course open save to withdraw into the old military base and probably perish of asphyxiation when they resort to gas. We have one thin chance. We must not miss in any tiniest detail. Let’s go through it all again.”

A strike force of only threescore men taking on the whole Psychlo Empire? They would harden their determination and go through the drill again. And again and again.

But they did not yet have the vital, crucial chip: the gold.

gold