His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction

The girl laughed briefly. "Don't be an ass," she said.

"It's true," said Bartok.

She rose and began to pace beside him. Finally she exploded: "They can't do this to us! They simply can't—why, we're the invaders; we always have been!"

Bartok looked sidewise at her. "That's the way I felt," he observed sagely. "I know what you mean. Question is, what do we do now?"

"I don't know. Let's hear the transcript from the communications outfit." Silently he turned on the rewind and replay. It said mechanically: "Office of Commander Bartok, Intelligence Wing, Fleet Command. Go ahead." That was a sort of letterhead.

Immediately there was the agitated voice of some man or other: "Barty?

This is Hogan, of the Aries Hogans. I jammed this through to you—

personal report. It's going to panic them if it gets out. Be very careful."

Bartok's voice: "I remember you—patrol duty for the Arided section.

Give me the facts in a hurry, son."

Hogan's voice: "Ships coming at us from everywhere, it seems. A big lineship was blown to pieces before it could report. I'm the only intelligence man in the district, I guess. I don't know whose the ships are—I don't know how they work. I'm speaking from the fourth planet of Arided—polyp-like natives, oxygenous atmosphere. They're systematically bombing the cities."

Bartok's voice: "Stop beating yourself over the head, Hogan. You're crazy!"

Hogan's voice: "If that's the way you feel. They're laying a line barrage along the planet, letting it rotate under their fire. We can't get a thing into the air—it's jammed up bad. I don't know, Barty, honest I don't know—" What Hogan didn't know remained a mystery, for the transcript ended right there with a strangled wail and a deafening report.

"Oho," said Babe MacNeice in a long exhalation. "He wasn't kidding."

Bartok was at the phone: "Get me Fitzjames," he said. "Yes—the all-highest Admiral of the Fleet, the slave-minded or windjammer in person." In a rapid aside to Babe he snapped: "I can't handle this. I'll leave it to the Navy—it's their baby."

Again at the phone. "Admiral? Shoot some patrollers out to Cygnus Arided. Don't be surprised if they don't come back. Invasion, Admiral. I wouldn't kid you." He hung up sharply.

"That," he said absent-mindedly, "is that. Whether their tactics are capable of defensive war remains to be seen. There is room for doubt."

The patrollers did not come back. However, one managed to keep unbroken contact with the flagship until it was blown out of the ether, and the story it told was plenty nasty. No description of the invading ships was given except what the patroller got over in the customary strangled wail just before it broke off sending. It could be assumed that they weren't reaction-type vessels. They moved faster than light, which meant knowledge of the unified field theory's most abstract implication. They had, without a doubt, bombed or rayed out of existence, the populations of about three score planets. This meant that either their science was something infinitely beyond the Terrestrial grasp, so far beyond it that it could not be called classified knowledge at all but must, necessarily, be lumped together as a divine attribute, or their ships were big.

The Fleet had successfully colonized a great deal of space and in the course of wiping out unsuitable native populations and encouraging others, battling moderately advanced peoples and races, suppressing the mutinies inevitable in a large, loose organization, and smacking down the romantic imbeciles who had a few tons of hard cash to throw away on what was considered a career of piracy, had developed an extraordinary amount of offensive technique and armament.

Their ships were marvelous things. They were so big that they were built at special dry-docks. When they took to the ether from these, they would never touch land again until they were scrapped. There simply wasn't anything firm enough to bear their weight. You could explore a lineship like a city; wander through its halls for a year and never cross the same point. When the big guns were fired they generally tore a hole in space; when the gunshells exploded they smashed asteroids to powder.

But the Fleet had nothing to show that could match the achievement of the as-yet-nameless invaders, who had rayed the life out of a major planet as it revolved beneath them. According to the reports the job had been done in the course of the planet's day. One ship could not send a ray powerful enough to do that; possibly twenty might, but they would inevitably foul one another if they got within a million miles nearness.

And a million miles clearance between each ship would meant that they'd separately be about eight million miles from the planet. And from that distance you can't work rays or bombs. From that distance you can just barely think unpleasantly of the planet, which doesn't do either good or harm.

From all accounts and from the terrified deductions, these invaders packed solid jack, and plenty of it.