Book 3 - Star's End Read Free Page A

did without the shower that had
never existed. In Climb they used portable chamberpots and smelled
one another’s stinks as had the Climbermen of an age gone
by.
    One and all, they had come to see for themselves the growing
disaster Ulantonid explorers had been bemoaning for years.
    They had seen film. They had questioned witnesses. In some cases
they had begun to act. But they had had to see with their own eyes
before they could finally believe.
    They had to watch the war going on below. On the primary of the
moon.
    A race from farther in toward the galactic core was
systematically exterminating every sentient creature it
encountered. The natives of this world were their latest
victims.
    The people aboard the Climber came of races which had fought
bitterly in the past. There was little love among some of them now.
But never, in the most desperate, heated days of their contention,
had any considered eradicating their enemies. Their wars had been
tests of racial wills, with territorial causes.
    This world was the fourth assailed by the centerward race since
its discovery by Ulantonid explorers. The first three worlds were
lifeless now. The aggressors even shunned their use as bases.
    Even the Warriors of Toke could not comprehend the destruction
of intelligent life simply because it was intelligent.
    The Warriors believed battle to be a crucible for purification
of the soul, a road to honor and glory, grimly majestic and
godlike. For them combat was almost an end in itself. They fought
one another when there were no outsiders.
    They were perfectly aware of the distinction between victory and
obliteration. They were as appalled by the excesses of the
centerward race as were any of their shipmates.
    They had come to see for themselves. And the grim truth burned
in the Climber’s display tank.
    The world’s atmosphere was alive with spiderwebs of
coherent light. Energy and particle beams hacked air and space like
the flailing swords of a thousand ancient armies. The planet people
had the technological edge. The exterminators had the numbers and
determination. Their ships clouded the stars.
    They had overwhelmed the world’s off-planet protection
months ago. Now they were pounding the on-world defenses, and were
making their initial landings.
    Star-bright, short-lived pinpoints speckled the world’s
surface.
    “They’re using nuclears!” Ulant’s
Defender growled. Even during their war’s bitterest hour,
neither human nor Ulantonid had violated each other’s worlds
with nuclear weapons. By tacit agreement those had been confined to
vacuum.
    “They know we’re here,” Beckhart called out.
“Seven destroyer displacement ships are headed this
way.”
    “Very well,” Graf von Staufenberg replied.
“Melene, most of that looks like it’s happening in the
troposphere. They’re probably not pushing one in a thousand
warheads through to the surface.”
    The Star Lord who commanded all Star Lords boomed,
“Every one through destroys. The defense net weakness.
Soon it will be two of a thousand. Then four.”
    “Not to mention what the radioactivity will do in the long
run. Makes you wonder why they’re forcing it with landings.
Here. This south tropic archipelago. They’ve punched an open
corridor down there.”
    “Hell of a defense,” someone muttered. “Damn
near as tough as Stars’ End. I wouldn’t want to try
breaking it.”
    “How long till those destroyers are pushing us?” von
Staufenberg asked.
    “They’re humping it in Norm. Four or five minutes
for the closest. Looks like some other stuff starting to move,
too.”
    “Can’t we do anything?” the D.N.I.
demanded.
    Von Staufenberg replied, “We could bloody a few noses. It
wouldn’t change anything. We couldn’t do that with a
hundred Climbers. There’re just too damned many of them.
Okay, let’s give the people in the other compartments a look.
I want everybody to see it. We’ll have some decision to make
on our way home.”
    “The Warriors