A weapon of the grounded Isis roared. A missile hurtled after the fugitive, and missed. It went on past its apparent target and did not even detonate at nearest proximity, as it should have done. It vanished, and the cargo-ship continued to rise in seemingly panicky fashion. It slanted from its headlong lift, and curved away and darted for emptiness at its maximum acceleration. A second missile from the fighting-ship missed. The cargo-ship dwindled, and dwindled, and now the Isis appeared to take deliberate measurements of the distance and acceleration of its target. It might be assumed that its radars needed to be readjusted from the long-range-finding required in space, to the shorter-range measurements called for now.
Something plunged after the fleeing cargo-boat, by now merely a pin-point in the blue. The rising object moved so swiftly that it was invisible. Then it detonated, and the fumes of the explosion blotted out the fugitive. When they cleared, the sky was empty.
There had now been a lapse of less than ten minutes from the first sighting of the Isis screaming toward the spaceport. The guard-ship had been destroyed and the cargo-ship which seemed to flee had apparently been destroyed. When someone had leisure to think, it would appear that the cargo-boat's crew had overcome the armed party which entered it and then taken the foolish course of flight.
Bors waited, listening absently. A voice:
"All clear on board the prize, sir. The cargo seems to be mostly foodstuffs, sir. Proceeding to rendezvous as ordered. Off."
Bors nodded automatically and resumed listening to the broadcast. Matters were going well. Everything had gone through with the precision of clockwork, which meant simply that Bors had planned in detail something that had never been anticipated and so had not been counter-planned. Before anyone on Tralee realized that anything had happened, everything had happened—the Isis aground, the guard-ship demolished, the grid taken over, and a fleeing cargo-ship apparently destroyed in the upper atmosphere. And a harsh voice now rasped out of loudspeakers everywhere, uttering threats, cursing Mekin—few could believe their ears—and rousing hopes which Bors knew regretfully were bound to be disappointed.
The rasping broadcast cut off in the middle of a syllable. Somebody had come to believe that he really heard what he thought he heard. Now there would be reaction. At the sunrise-line on Tralee only a handful of people were awake. They were dumbfounded. Where people breakfasted, the intentionally savage voice made food seem unimportant. Where it was midday, waves of violent emotion swept over the land.
"Call the defense forces," Bors commanded the grid office, by transmitter. "They'll be Mekinese—Mekinese-officered, anyhow. We don't want them to get ideas of attacking us, so identify us as the pirate ship Isis and order all police and garrison troops to stay exactly where they are. Say we've got all our fusion-bombs armed to go off in case of an artillery-fire hit."
This was the most valid of all possible threats against the most probable form of attack. Fusion-bombs could be used against enemies in space, or for the annihilation of a population, but they could not be used in police operations against a subject people. To coerce people one must avoid destroying them. So while a ship the size of the Isis could—and did—carry enough confined hellfire in its missile warheads to destroy an area hundreds of miles across, the occupation troops of Mekin could not use such weapons. They needed blast-rifles for minor threats and artillery for selective destruction. In any case no sane man would try to destroy the Isis aground after an announcement that its bombs were armed, and that they were fused to explode.
"Now repeat the demand for stores," ordered Bors. "We might as well stock up. Speed is essential. We can't use stores they've time to booby-trap or poison. Give them twenty minutes to start the stuff arriving. Demand fuel, extra rocket-fuel especially. Remind them about our bombs."