The Fabulous Riverboat (28 page)

Then a big dark machine came through a wide breach in the wall. Sam cried out with dismay. It was the Firedragon III given to Hacking. But where were the three amphibians of Parolando?

Presently he saw two coming toward the hills. Of a sudden, the steam machine guns in the turrets began to stutter hissingly, and his men—to men!—were falling. The Soul Citizens had captured the amphibians!

Everywhere he looked, he saw a battle raging. There were men fighting around the Riverboat. He cried out again, because he could not endure the thought of its being damaged. But no cannon shells were delivered near it. Apparently the enemy was as concerned about it as he was.

Rockets from the hills behind them were soaring over their heads and blowing up among the army below. Enemy rockets rose in reply; scores of red flames streaked above them; some came so close they could see the blur of the cylindrical body, the long bamboo stick protruding from the rear, and a whoosh as an exceptionally large one shot about ten feet above their heads. It just missed the top of the hill and blew up with a tremendous blast on the other side. Leaves from a nearby irontree fluttered down.

The next half hour—or was it two hours?—was a shrieking, yelling, shouting, gunpowder-stinking, bloodstinking, sweating, bowel-churning chaos. Tune after time, the Soul Citizens charged up the hill, and tune after time they were repelled by rockets, by sixty-nine-caliber plastic bullets, by crossbow bolts and longbow arrows. Then a charge carried them through to the defenders, and it was rapier, broadsword, ax, club, spear and dagger that drove them back.

Joe Miller, ten feet high, eight hundred pounds heavy, his hairy hide drenched with blood—his own and others—swung his ax with its eighty-pound nickel-steel head at the end of an oak shaft three niches thick and six feet long. It crashed through oak shield and leather armor, brushed aside rapiers and spears and axes, split breastbones, took off arms and necks, halved skulls. When his enemies refused to come near him, he charged them. Time and again, he broke up charges that might otherwise have succeeded.

Many flintlock Mark I pistols were fired at him, but their shooters were so unnerved by him that they fired from too far away, and the big plastic bullets wobbled off to one side.

Then an arrow went through his left arm, and a man braver, or more foolhardy, than the rest stepped under bis ax and thrust a rapier into his thigh. The butt end of the shaft came back and broke his jaw and then the reversed ax severed his head. Joe could still walk, but he was losing blood fast. Sam ordered him to retreat to the other side of the hill, where the badly wounded were being treated.

Joe said, "No! I ain't going!" and he fell to his knees with a groan.

"Get back there! That's an order!" Sam screamed, and he ducked, though it was too late, as a bullet whistled by his ear and smashed to bits against the side of an irontree. Some of the plastic must have ricocheted; he felt a stinging in his arm and calf.

Joe managed to heave himself up, like a sick elephant, and shambled off. Cyrano de Bergerac appeared from the darkness; he was covered with gunpowder smoke and streaked with blood. He held the basket hilt of a long, thin, bloody rapier in one hand and a pistol in the other. Behind him, equally dirty and bloody, her long dark hair loose behind her, was Livy, She carried a pistol and a bag of ammunition, and her function was to reload the pistols. Seeing Sam, she smiled, her teeth white in the powderblackened face.

"My God, Sam! I thought you were dead! That rocket against your house... !" "I wish you were behind me in this," he said.

That was all he had time to say, though he would not have said anything more, whatever the case. The enemy came back in another charge, slipping and sliding up over the piles of the fallen or leaping over them. The bowmen by then were out of ammunition, and the pistoleers had only a few more charges. But the enemy had about expended its powder too, though it had more arrows.

Joe Miller was gone, but Cyrano de Bergerac tried to make up for it and came close to doing so. The man was a demon, seemingly as thin and as flexible and as swift as the rapier he wielded. From time to time, he shot the pistol with his left hand into an opponent's face and then lunged with the rapier, thrusting into another. He would toss the gun behind him, and Livy would stoop and pick it up and reload. Sam thought, briefly, of what a change had come about in Livy. He had never suspected her potentiality for action under conditions like these. That frail, often sickly, violence-loathing woman was coolly performing duties that many men would have run from.

Among them me, he thought, if I had any time to think about it.

And especially now that Joe Miller was not by his side to protect him physically and to give him moral support, both of which he needed badly.

Cyrano thrust beneath a shield which a shrieking Wahhabi Arab lifted too high in his frenzy, and then Livy, seeing that she had to do it, that Cyrano could not, held the pistol in both hands and fired. The hammer made the barrel swerve, she brought it back into line, smoke and flame spurted out, and an Arab fell back with his shoulder torn off.

A massively built Negro leaped over the body with his ax raised in both hands and Cyrano, withdrawing the blade from the first man before he hit the ground, ran the axman through the adam's apple.

Then the enemy retreated down the hill again. But now they waited while the big dark-gray amphibian, like a Merrimac on wheels, huffed toward them. Lothar von Richthofen pushed against Sam who stepped aside when he saw the aluminum-alloy tube and the rocket with its ten-pound warhead. A man knelt while Lothar loaded the rocket into the bazooka and then aimed it. Lothar was very good at this, and the rocket sailed down, its fiery arc ending against the front of the amphibian, its bull's eye the single beam of light in its nose. Smoke covered it, and then the wind carried that away. The amphibian had stopped, but it came on now, its turrets turning and the steam guns lifting.

"Well, that was the last one," Lothar said. "We might as well get to hell out of here. We can't fight that. Who should know better than we, heh?"

The enemy was re-forming behind the armored vehicle. Many of them were uttering the ululating cries which the Ulmaks, the pre-Amerinds across The River, made during charges. Apparently, Hacking had enlisted those Ulmaks not yet conquered by Iyeyasu.

Suddenly, Sam could not see as well. Only the fires from the burning houses and from the open hearths and smelters, which were still operating, enabled him to see anything at all. The rain clouds had come as swiftly as they always did, like wolves chasing the stars, and within a few minutes it would rain savagely.

He looked around him. Every attack had thinned them out. He doubted that they could have withstood the next one, even if the amphibian had not come.

There was still fighting going on to the north and the south on the plains and the hills along the plains. But the shooting and the cries had lessened.

The plains seemed to be darker than ever with the enemy.

He wondered if Publiujo and Tifonujo had joined the invasion.

He took a last look at the giant hull of the Riverboat with its two paddle-wheels, half hidden beneath the scaffolding and behind the colossal cranes. Then he turned. He felt like weeping, but he was too numbed. It would be some time before the tears would come.

It was more likely that his blood would run out before then, after which there would be no tears. Not in this body, anyway.

Guided by the fires of a dozen scattered huts, he stumbled down the other side. Then the rains smashed down. And, at the same tune, a tentacle of the enemy ran toward them from the left. Sam turned and pulled the trigger of his flintlock, and the rain, of course, drowned out the spark. But the enemy's pistols were also rendered useless, except as clubs.

They came at the Parolandanoj with their swords and spears and axes. Joe Miller lunged forward, growling with a voice as deep as a cave bear's. Though wounded, he was still a formidable and terrifying fighter. By the flashes of lightning and the rumbling of thunder, his ax cut them down. The others jumped in to help him, and in a few seconds the Soul Citizen survivors decided they had had enough. They would run off and wait for reinforcements. Why get killed now when victory was theirs?

Sam climbed two more hills. The enemy attacked from the right. A wing had broken through and raced on ahead to cut down the men and take the women captive. Joe Miller and Cyrano met them, and the attackers ran away, slipping and sliding through the wet roots of the cutaway grass.

Sam counted the survivors. He was shaken. There were about fifteen. Where had they all gone? He would have sworn that at least a hundred had been with him when he ordered them to cut and run for it.

Livy was still close behind Cyrano. Since the guns were no good now, she kept at Cyrano's back and helped him with a spear thrust when she could.

Sam was cold and wet. And he was as miserable as Napoleon must have been on the retreat from Russia. All, all gone! His proud little nation and its nickel-iron mines and its factories and its invulnerable amphibians with their steam guns and its two airplanes and the fabulous Riverboat! All gone! The technological triumphs and marvels and the Magna Carta with the most democratic constitution any country had ever known and the goal of the greatest journey ever to be made! All gone! And how? Through treachery, base treachery!

At least, King John had not been part of the betrayal. His palace had been demolished and he along with it, in all probability. The Great Betrayer had been betrayed.

Sam quit grieving then. He was still too frozen with the terror of battle to think much about anything except survival. When they got to the base of the mountain, he led them north along it until they were opposite the dam. A lake about a quarter of a mile long and a half a mile wide was before them. They cut down along it, coming after a while to a thick concrete wall across the top of which they walked. Then they were on top of the dam itself.

Sam walked back and forth a few paces until he found a sunken symbol, a diagonal cross, in the concrete. He called, "Here it is! Now, if only nobody squeals on us or some spy hasn't found out about it!"

He let himself down into the cold water while the lightning streaked and the thunder bellowed far away. He shivered but he kept on going down, and when the water was up to his armpits his foot struck the first rung. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and sank down, his hand running along the concrete until it encountered the first rung. After that he pulled himself down by other rungs and at the sixth knew that the entrance was a few inches below it. He went under it and then up, and his head popped up into air and light. A platform a few inches higher than the water was in front of him. Overhead was a dome the highest point of which was ten feet. Beyond the platform was an entrance. Six big electric light bulbs lit the chamber harshly.

Shivering, gasping, he climbed onto the platform and went to the entranceway. Joe followed him a moment later. He called weakly, and Sam had to turn back and help him crawl onto the platform. He was bleeding from a dozen places.

The others came after him, one by one. They helped him get the titanthrop through the entrance and down an incline into a large chamber. There were beds, towels, food, liquor, weapons and medicine. Sam had prepared this place for just such an emergency, but he had thought he was being foolishly cautious. Only the heads of the state and the workers who had built this place knew about it.

Another entrance, at the bottom of the dam, was hidden beneath the flow which powered the wheels connected to the generators. This led to a shaft up which a man could climb only to come to a seemingly blank wall. But the man who knew how could open that wall.

The whole project was, he knew, a product of the romantic foolishness of which he had not entirely rid himself. The idea of secret doors under a waterfall and under the lake and of hidden apartments where he could rest and plan his revenge while his enemies hunted in vain for him was irresistible. He had laughed at himself at times for having built the refuge. Now he was glad. Romanticism did have its uses.

Also hidden was a detonator. To set off the tons of dynamite inside the base of the dam he had only to connect two wires, and the dam would go up and the water of the lake would roar out and carry the central part of Parolando out into The River.

Sam Clemens and his Riverboat would also be destroyed, but that was the price to be paid.

The wounded were treated and put under the sedation of dreamgum or liquor. Sometimes, chewing the gum deadened the pain and other times it seemed to increase it. The only way to neutralize the pain-expanding effects then was to pour liquor down the patient.

They ate and slept while the guard watched at both entrances. Joe Miller was half unconscious most of the time, and Sam sat beside him and nursed him as best he could. Cyrano came back from bis vigil at the door under the waterfall to report that it was night again outside. That was all he knew about the conditions outside. He had seen or heard no one through the waterfall.

Lothar and Sam were the least wounded. Sam decided that they should sneak out past the waterfall exit and spy. Cyrano protested that he should go, too, but Sam refused. Livy did not say anything, but she looked gratefully at Sam. He turned away; he did not want any thanks for sparing her mate.

He wondered if Gwenafra was dead or if she had been captured. Lothar said that she had disappeared during the last attack and that he had tried to get to her but had been driven back. He now felt ashamed of himself for not having done more, even though it had not been possible.

The two applied a dark stain all over their bodies and then went down the steel rungs of the shaft. The walls were damp here, and the rungs were slippery with moisture. Electric lights illuminated the shaft.