Alliance.

A week later, the ship arrived from Storisende; a hundred and sixty
feet, three thousand tons, small enough to be berthed inside a
hyperspace transport, and fast enough to get a load of ammunition to
troops at the front, unload, and get out again before the enemy could
zero in on her, and armed to fight off any Army Air Force combat
craft. The delay had been in recruiting officers and crew. The captain
and chief engineer were out-of-work shipline officers, the gunner was
a former Federation artillery officer, and the crew looked more like
pirates than most pirates did.

They christened her the _Lester Dawes_, because Dawes had secured her
and because the name began with the initials of Litchfield Exploration &
Salvage. From then on, it was a race to see whether the Tenth Army
attack-shelters would be emptied before the wine was all pressed, or
vice versa.

VII

Fifty-two years before, they had come to the mesa in the Badlands and
dug a pit on top of it, a thousand feet in diameter and more than five
hundred deep, and in it they built a duplicate of the headquarters for
Third Fleet-Army Force Command. They built a shaft a hundred feet in
diameter like a chimney at one side, and they ran a tunnel out through
solid rock to the head of a canyon half a mile away. Then they buried
the whole thing. Twelve years later, when the War was over, they
sealed both entrances and went away and left it.

For a month each winter, cold rains from the east lashed the desert;
for the rest of the year, it was swept by windblown sand. Wiregrass
sprouted, and thornbush grew; Nature, the master-camoufleur, completed
the work of hiding the forgotten headquarters. Little things not
unlike rabbits scampered over it, and bigger things, vaguely foxlike,
hunted them. Hunted men came, too, their aircars skimming low. None of
them had the least idea what was underneath.

The mesa-top came suddenly to life, just as the sun edged up out of
the east. Conn and his father and Anse Dawes came in first, in the
recon-car with which they had scouted and photographed the site a few
days before. They circled at a thousand feet, fired a smoke bomb, and
then let down near where Conn's map showed the head of the vertical
shaft. The rest followed, first a couple of combat cars that circled
slowly, scanning the ground, and then the _Lester Dawes_ with her big
guns and her load of equipment, and behind a queue of boats and scows
and heavy en