Back Cover:
The Commandos find themselves facing an enemy more awesome than anything mere human foes could present. They are on the planet Tambora seeking information about a stolen shipment of Navy arms when they realize the volcano dominating the world’s island capital is no longer dormant. The challenges confronting them are enormous, perhaps insurmountable. They must first convince the local population, who hate and fear off-worlders far more than the natural force with which they have always lived, of that fact. Once they do, they must still struggle with the task of evacuating the very low-tech population before the inevitable and imminent irruption. Connor and Sogan remain until the very end, with the eruption in full progress, in an attempt to save three youths who concealed themselves rather than evacuate. Can they escape annihilation in the massive cataclysm?
Excerpt
“Varn, look out! Above you!”
Islaen! He whirled at the call and then froze as he stared upslope, his eyes involuntarily seeking what he knew had to be the cause of such overwhelming fear.
His heart beat fast. He was too near and the grade above was too steep for him to see the crest, but a ruddy glow was emanating from the hidden crater.
Even as he watched, it grew perceptibly brighter. “Varn! Varn, run! Now!”
He raced for his machine, gained it.
There was nothing he could do here, and somehow, by some impossible, vicious chance, or more probably by her own choice, Islaen Connor was still in the city below. He had to get to her before the Dragon struck again!
There was another sharp explosion, and seconds afterward, bombs began to rain down, red-hot rock and blobs of semi-congealed magma. The rover was hit and hit again. Sogan could hear the sizzle of scorching metal and prayed fervently that nothing would come too near his fuel tanks.
Pain! Desperately, his mind reached out, groped for his consort’s.
Nothing. The Noreenan was still alive. That much he did know, but she was no longer transmitting, whether by her own will or because she could no longer do so.
Grimly, he forced more and still more speed from the straining, wildly jerking rover. Nothing mattered now, nothing at all, except that Islaen was hurt, probably severely, some-where in that doomed city.
The former admiral forced himself to concentrate on the two brief calls he had received from her. They were the only clues he had as to where she might be.
Not quite. Reason could supply more. The Commando-Colonel had been at the planeting field, but logic would send her to the docks, to the place where the Daber was moored. There, she would have the choice of waiting for him or of coming up after him along the course he must follow. It was to that place that he must go to find her.
* * * *
Varn had reached the city when the glow increased to the intensity of the rising of a very small sun.
He glanced in the rear viewing mirror and saw a sight that turned the life cold within him.
A great cloud was rising over the lip of the crater. Black, it was, but shot with lightning and bearing within itself its own dull red fires, the fires of the Empire’s direst hell. It remained there, swelling, churning, boiling, until it towered fully thirteen thousand feet above the enraged volcano.
The man hit the controls, demanding the last shred of speed from his vehicle.
He knew it. By the great Spirit ruling Space, he knew what that dread thing was. Nuée ardente, preflight Terrans had named it, a pyroclastic flow, a mass of superheated gas so heavy with incandescent ash it could not remain airborne and so powered by the forces ejecting it and those within its own self that nothing could halt or turn it, a wall of destruction hot enough to melt solar steel, hot enough to incinerate everything within its path.
There was no thought to his driving, no consideration for the ground over which he moved, only the absolute need to reach the docks and the Daber ahead of the Dragon’s deadly breath. Praise the great Spirit ruling Space the previous avalanche had not touched and destroyed this part of Strombolis, blocking the way against him…
Sogan came within sight of the docks. He spotted Islaen at once. She was at the pier’s edge, braced against a pillar and stiff with terror but unmoving. Terror or something else. The whole left side of her face was scarlet with blood.
The Daber was beside her, in the water and free.
He braked the rover and sprang from it. Varn stumbled but with a desperate effort regained his balance. If he went down now, he was lost. They were both lost.
The Arcturian ran toward his consort, but she did not turn as he thought she would or respond at all to his coming.
Was this already a dead woman? Had she in her last act of volition set what she had known would soon be her corpse up as a signal for him? Her injury looked severe enough to have killed her…
There was no time to waste. A shallow breath told him the Noreenan still lived. He caught her and flung her into the boat even as he leaped aboard himself.
The oars were ready in their locks. He blessed the colonel for that. If he had been forced to delay to set them now, neither of them would live long enough for him to use them.
The nuée was almost on them.
Sogan put the full of his skill and strength into his rowing. Their only hope was to get to one side of it, out of its path. There could be no outrunning it.
He would never make it! The glowing avalanche was too huge, covered too impossibly vast an area, and it was moving far too quickly for mere human muscle to outdistance it. Already, the air was growing hot!
The cave!
He pulled for it, knowing it represented their sole hope.
It was near, and he redoubled his efforts, grimly ignoring the debris once again falling all around, the ejecta of yet another explosion.
The dark mouth loomed before them. Another stroke, and they would be inside.
A violent blow drove Varn against the Daber’s rail. He retched with the burning agony in his right shoulder but somehow caught the oar again before it went overboard and with his left hand gave the pull that sent them into the waiting shadows.
Back Cover
The Navy has located a shipment of stolen arms shipment on the planet Amazoon, and the Commando unit has been sent to retrieve it. Misfortune shadows the mission. Their transport crashes, killing all the on-world support troops, and the four must make their way through Amazoon’s dense and deadly jungle alone if they are to fulfill their assignment. Sogan’s ability to control and/or influence nonhuman life forms is tried to the breaking point as they encounter myriads of leeches, stinging wasps and other insects, and voracious frenzy-feeding fish. The unit struggles against a variety of navigational problems on the rivers that are their highway to their goal. When they finally reach their target, they find the raiders, whose affiliation is still unknown, are already loading the arms into their starships. Sogan faces a terrible decision: Let the ships lift with the munitions, dooming the population of some innocent planet to the horrors of a full military assault from space, or strike them down in a manner that will damn him forever in his own and in his comrades’ eyes.
Excerpt
The Arcturian swam with the current until he reached the great rock anchoring the gravel bar. This stood firm against all pressure. He clung to it, then raised himself upon it until he could look down over the edge of the falls.
His eyes closed momentarily in sheer relief. Bethe lived. She had somehow managed to avoid the chaos at the base of the drop, and she was now fighting to escape the hold of the whirlpool created by the falls.
His joy was short-lived. The situation was still desperate. The spacer was trapped, unable to break out of the water’s hold, and very soon now, her strength would fail or she would be smashed against one of the many huge rocks littering the place.
Her cause was not lost. Another approach could win her free…
There was no point in trying to shout directions to her. Between the roar of the falls and her own efforts, she simply would not be able to hear and piece together enough of what he said to guide herself out of her peril, even if her muscles and skill were equal to the task.
Once more, Sogan dove into the Maiden, into the place where the river surged over the edge of the hard rock shelf forming the falls.
His was a studied descent. He did not crash down the major face of the cascade as Bethe Danlo had done. Rather, he slithered along the channel where they intended to bring their boat. Varn went down fast despite his efforts to check his fall, but he kept control of himself, squirming his supple body around boulders and other obstructions so that he took no real hurt, and he hit bottom before fear had time to build into a significant force inside him.
It was impossible to remain on the surface in that place of impact, and he made no effort to do so. The War Prince went under, riding with instead of fighting the command of the Maiden, all the way to the bottom of the deep trench excavated by the eternal pulverizing force of the falling water.
The fear that had held off earlier began to grip him now so that he had to battle himself to keep it from taking control of him. The pressure of the dropping water and the currents it engendered were both worse than he had anticipated. Getting away from this place into which he had cast himself would be no simple matter.
The fall itself was a veritable wall because of the force and volume of the water involved. He could not pierce it. Worse, instead of turning outward when it struck bottom, the whole of it spun inward until it hit hard against the cliff and from thence shot upward, fashioning a vicious trap for a swimmer unfortunate enough to find himself within it.
Once again, the War Prince did not attempt to fight the river directly, knowing any such effort to be foredoomed. He worked his way diagonally through it, wielding his will with iron force to control his lungs’ ever-more-urgent demand for air.
He tried to figure out how Bethe had made her escape, what route she might have taken and the method she had used to gain it, but he gave the effort up even as he began it. The Commando-Sergeant had never been here. She had either jumped or been thrown out beyond the foot of the falls, or she would not now be alive and still fighting for her survival.
He went on grimly. All this water had to be exiting somewhere, making way for that coming after it, and the sweep of the outlet current was probably no minor power in its own right. It should be able to help him considerably if he could manage to position himself correctly within it.
To do that, he must first find it—before his hold over his lungs gave out and before he was struck by some debris missile tearing down from above…
The pressure pushing at him eased suddenly, almost too suddenly, but he identified the cause in time to benefit from it. The outflow was surprisingly gentle, but he followed it. When the turmoil lessened perceptibly, he surfaced to find himself in the quiet main pool of the waterfall.
Once his lungs’ hunger for air had been satisfied, Sogan shook his head to clear some of the water from his hair and eyes. He saw his quarry almost at once. She was clinging to a tall, smooth-worn tooth of stone rising out of the wild water near the whirlpool’s inner edge.
The woman, in her turn, felt a surge of joy at the sight of him. She had been certain he would never win free, that the falls would be his death.
Whatever her relief, she did not lose her head. There was no sense in both of them dying here. “Varn, head for shore!” she shouted. “There’s no getting to me! You can make it to land from where you are.”
“Not a chance, Sergeant!”
The Arcturian swam as close as he dared to her without falling into the grasp of the fierce current pummeling the tall stone.
He could reach her, he decided after several minutes’ close study, but not without enormous effort and a great deal more good luck than Bethe Danlo had enjoyed thus far. It was as much as he could manage to hold himself in place even in this comparatively still spot.
There was another way. “Give me your hand if you can,” he told her. “I will try to pull you free.”
Bethe bit her lip when she looked at the distance separating them, but she tightened her grip on her support with one arm and extended the other to him.
Varn stretched as far as he could in an effort to grasp that pathetically tiny hand, but the space between them was too great.
Back Cover
Sogan, still writhing under the shame of his role in what he considers the Amazoonan atrocity and hungering for vengeance against the mastermind of the arms robbery, welcomes Connor’s announcement that the man has been discovered – until he learns their quarry is located not only on her and Karmikel’s homeworld, but on a farm adjacent to her family’s home. They accept the challenging mission, but their investigation proves time consuming, frustrating, and increasingly perilous as several assassination attempts are made against them. Of greater peril still are the planet’s fearsome storms, which threaten the entire unit with annihilation. Above all is the nagging fear that even if they get the needed evidence, they may well be unable to profit by it. Their on-world opponents are a large company heavily armed and well able to use their weapons. Their enemies in space control a large, deadly fleet. Failure against either party guarantees untold suffering and death for the people of the peaceful agrarian world, yet how can four Commandos and their surplanetary allies hope to thwart such powerful foes?
Excerpt
Varn Tarl Sogan cautiously mounted the stairs, bracing himself for the task of clearing out the upper level. It would be a perilous one.
Only when he had reached the top and positioned himself to defend the entrance did he signal the squad under his command to come ahead. That narrow flight of steps could turn into a massacre site if it were not well guarded.
When the first of the on-worlders, Will Connor, joined him, Sogan turned that task over to him and gave his attention to the work that had brought him here. His mouth felt dry, and his pulse ran fast. Danger lurked in every shadow of this accursed place. He could all but taste it. He had lost a lot of good men on Thorne of Brandine under conditions not too very different from those reigning here.
The Arcturian wished heartily for his consort’s talent, although he knew full well that she could not really use it during battle. Any help at all would be welcome at this stage.
He steeled himself to go on. He would have to trust in his own experience, in the skills honed in the long years of bitter on-world war, and in the strong nerves and keen shooting of his Noreenan companions.
The militiamen were worthy of trust. Even now, he could be certain of that. He had seen enough of how they handled themselves outside and below to confirm his initial impression of them. Their approach had been disciplined, their conduct professional. Had he not known this was their first action, at least as a guerrilla unit, he would not have realized it from observing them. Islaen’s people were not blaster shy, nor were they cursed with the overconfidence too often found in green troops, and when they discharged a pellet, it nearly invariable found its target. With a fleet, or even a single battlecraft, manned with such soldiers, he could…
The War Prince cut off that thought. Let his mind wander again, and he would probably be carried down from here with a hole burned through his heart.
* * * *
The fighting on the second level proved hard. It was dirty, nerve-wrenching work. Those up here had been given time in which to conceal themselves, and most of them had no interest at all in being taken. These were for the most part the leaders in Thatcher’s plot and formerly officers in the Albionan Auxiliaries. If everything had been uncovered, as the Commandos’ attack testified to be the case, it was the executioner, not imprisonment, that they faced. If they could not elude capture and the fate that would follow it, the primary desire of all of them, then they might as well go quickly, and they were determined to a man to take at least one of their opponents out with them.
There were more hiding places up here to aid their cause than on the ground floor, and every one had to be checked out thoroughly.
The danger was greatest on the approach to a site. Anyone hidden there would realize the only hope of avoiding detection was to kill the searcher before he could shoot or sound the alarm, drag the body into his hole, then carefully move back to an already examined area himself. With luck, he might just be able to slip out before the hunter was missed and what remained of him was discovered. Three times, he fired a scant moment before one of the renegades cut him down, and he began to wonder how much longer he would be able to elude the Grim Commandant’s summons like this. On Thorne, a building would conceal one or perhaps two partisans. Here, there were many more, far too many…
A shadow, black among the grays to his right!
Once again, almost without conscious thought, his blaster discharged. This time, he had an extra second’s warning, and so his peril had not been so extreme, but still, his heart hammered hard. He wished passionately that this business was over. If it did not end soon, he knew he would lose some of his companions even if he survived it himself. Two had been felled already. Their wounds had proven light thanks to the speed of their reflexes, but time and their exposed position were against his party. It would not be much longer now before their luck turned.
There was not a great deal more of the barn to search, he saw with relief. A few minutes longer, and they would all be able to go down.
Sogan glanced to his left, to the great multitiered rack of bins where angora hair would be sorted by grade and color had this been a working barn. Will Connor had the unenviable task of searching them. It was a job the War Prince was glad enough to forego, for the complex offered a honeycomb of bolt holes to desperate men and women.
His breath caught. One of their quarry, at least, had recognized its potential. He was there, lying full length along the support beam of the uppermost bin. The Albionan knew Will would spot him momentarily and had taken aim. Even as Sogan saw him, he was tensing to fire.