with his rifle while the other three
checked on their own casualties, used the short, leaf-shaped swords
they carried to slash off the heads of enemy wounded, and collected
weapons and ammunition. A couple of hundred more Kragans, led by
Native-Major Kormork, the co-parent of young with King Kankad, came up
at the double and stopped in front of Company House.

"We were in quarters, aboard the _Aldebaran_ and in the guesthouse at
the airport," Kormork reported. "We were attacked, fifteen minutes
ago, by a mob. We took ten minutes beating them off, and five more
getting here. I sent Native-Captain Zeerjeek and the rest of the force
to retake the supply-depot and the shops and lorry hangars, which had
been taken, and relieve the military airport, which is under attack."

There was still firing from the commercial airport and the smaller
military airfield. Once there was a string of heavy explosions that
sounded like 80-mm rockets.

"Good enough. I hope you didn't spread yourself out too thin. What's
the situation at the commercial airport?"

"The two ships, the _Aldebaran_ and the freighter _Northern Star_, are
both safe," Kormork replied. "I saw them go on contragravity and rise
to about a hundred feet."

"Whose crowd is that you have?" he asked the Terran lieutenant who had
taken over command of the first force of Kragans.

"Company 6, Eighteenth Rifles, sir. We were on duty at the guardhouse;
fighting broke out in the direction of the native barracks. A couple
of runners from Captain Retief of Company 4 came in with word that he
was being attacked by mutineers from the Tenth N.U.N.I. but that he
was holding them back. So Captain Charbonneau, who was killed a few
minutes ago, left a Terran lieutenant and a Kragan native-lieutenant
and a couple of native-sergeants and thirty Kragans to hold the
guardhouse, and brought the rest of us here."

Von Schlichten nodded. "You'd pass the military airport and the
power-plant, wouldn't you?" he asked.

"Yes, sir. The military airport's holding out, and I saw the
red-and-yellow danger-lights on the fence around the power-plant."

That meant the power-plant was, for the time, safe; somebody'd turned
twenty thousand volts into the fence.

"All right. I'm setting up my command post at the telecast station,
where the communication equipment is." He turned to the crowd that had
come out onto the porch from inside. "Where's Colonel Cheng-Li?"

"Here, general." The Intelligence