Chain of Attack by Gene DeWeese Read Free Book Online

was "no' a superstitious mon," but there was no one on the bridge who didn't share the feeling to some small degree. Even Spock admitted that he expected the worst, though he insisted his expectation was only a logical deduction based on the observations they had already made.
    Finally, after a four-hour sublight approach, the Enterprise was in standard orbit about the earthlike planet. As expected—or feared—the sensors still showed no evidence of life.
    There was, however, ample evidence of death.
    What remained of an atmosphere was a veritable sea of radioactivity, and the surface was like the surface of earth's moon or Mercury, pitted by thousands of craters. But these craters were not caused by meteorites or volcanos but by an almost inconceivable bombardment of fusion bombs. Even the oceans had been sterilized of life, boiled away by the heat of destruction and turned into a radioactive soup as they recondensed and settled into the old seabeds and the countless craters.
    For several seconds no one on the bridge made a sound. They could only watch as the ghastly images flowed silently across the viewscreen. McCoy's teeth were clenched as he gripped one of the padded rails, and when he finally spoke, his voice was hushed with a kind of terrible awe.
    "My God, Jim! What kind of creatures could be capable of something like that? Even the Klingons…" His voice trailed away as he shook his head and wiped briefly at his eyes.
    "How long ago, Spock?" Kirk asked after another protracted silence.
    Spock, whose eyes, like everyone else's, had been riveted on the screen, turned abruptly back to his instruments, his Vulcan training clamping down on the emotion that struggled to emerge from the human half of his heritage.
    "Impossible to say precisely, Captain, without detailed information on the number and nature of the weapons used. Assuming the use of devices similar to those on board the object the Enterprise encountered earlier, I would estimate approximately eleven thousand standard years has passed since this bombardment took place, with a possible error of plus or minus three thousand."
    Spock's numbers and his carefully maintained matter-of-fact tone seemed to restore some measure of objectivity to the others, though McCoy still looked as grim-faced as before.
    "Is there any chance the planet's inhabitants could have done this to themselves, Spock?" Kirk asked softly. "Two factions fighting each other for control of the planet?"
    "Possible but extremely unlikely, Captain. Both combatants would have to have been totally irrational and suicidal. Less than one percent of the weapons used here would have been sufficient to effectively destroy all life outside the oceans, and anyone capable of launching such weapons would certainly have been aware of that fact. No, Captain, this amount of destruction and this amount of residual radiation are almost certainly the result of an attack by a fleet of spacecraft, an attack that was designed to do precisely what it did—destroy all life on the planet and ensure that the planet itself would be uninhabitable by any life forms for hundreds of thousands of years. Based on an analysis of the elements that are producing most of the radioactivity, it would, in fact, appear that most of the radioactivity is not the direct result of the fusion explosions themselves but the result of the materials in which the weapons were housed. 'Clean' fusion weapons, as I believe your ancestors called them, Captain, can destroy a world but allow life forms to return safely in a relatively short time. These weapons, however, would appear to have been deliberately designed to be as 'dirty' as it is possible to make them."
    McCoy shuddered. "What kind of madhouse have we fallen into, Jim?"
    "I don't know, Bones. But at least all this happened a long time ago. There's nothing to indicate that the ones responsible for this are still around."
    "And nothing to indicate they aren't, either," McCoy