ite sling.

"What the hell have you been doing to yourself?" von Schlichten wanted
to know.

"Crossbow-bolt, about half an hour ago. A couple of inches lower and
acting Brigadier-General Colbert'd have been talking to you, now,
instead of me."

"Lucky it didn't have a nitro-capsule on the end. How are you making
out? Have Kankad's people started coming in, yet?"

"Oh, yes, about six hundred of them have gotten in already, in the
damnedest collection of vehicles you ever saw. Kankad must be using
every scrap of contragravity he has; it's a regular airborne
Dunkirk-in-reverse. Kankad sent word that he's coming here in person,
as soon as he has things organized at his place. And the geeks here
have scraped together an air-force of their own--farm-lorries,
aircars, that sort of thing--and they're using them to bomb us here
and at the mainland farm, mostly with nitroglycerine. We've shot down
about twenty of them, but they're still coming. They tried a
boat-attack across the Channel; that's how I got this. We've been
doing some bombing, ourselves; we made a down payment for Eric Blount
and Hendrik Lemoyne. Took a fifty-ton tank off a fuel-lorry, fitted it
with a detonator, filled it with thermoconcentrate, and ferried it
over on the _Elmoran_ and dumped it on the Keegarkan Embassy. It must
have landed in the middle of the central court; in about fifteen
seconds, flames were coming out every window in the place." His face
became less jovial. "We had something pretty bad happen here, too," he
said. "That Konkrook Fencibles rabble of Prince Jaizerd's mutinied,
along with the others; they got into the hospital and butchered
everybody in the place, patients and staff. The Kragans got there too
late to save anybody, but they wiped out the Fencibles. Jaizerd
himself was the only one they took alive, and he didn't stay that way
very long."

"How are you making out with your Civil Administration crowd?"

M'zangwe grimaced. "I haven't had to put any of them under actual
arrest, so far, but we've had to keep Buhrmann away from the
communications equipment by force. He wanted to call you up and chew
you out for not evacuating everybody in the north to Konkrook."

"Is he crazy?"

"No, just scared. He says you're going to get everybody on Uller
massacred by detail, when you could save Konkrook by bringing them
all here."

"You tell him I'm going to hold this planet, not just one city. Tell
him I have a sense of my duty to the