impressively big. Beyond it would lie the golden, circular palaces, in all their artificially lit parks and splendors. All that was hidden from him as yet. Over on the other side he knew there would be forests of manned artillery today and troops beyond count. Although his absorbo-coat would make him relatively invisible, reflecting no light back, he was liable to get between some illumination on the mountain and observers down there and silhouette. He would be, at best, a sitting duck for them. He hadn't had a Fleet base available to prepare his ship. He had done the best he could. He had mounted a couple of tubes on the top of the tug's hull: he had no guns. He had mounted a container for mines under the tug's belly. Suspending the tug in this twilight gloom, he lifted the T-shaped nose up. He only had one chance with this one: he had better not miscalculate. He pressed a firing button. With a swoosh, a hexagonally faced object flashed out of a tube. It soared higher and higher. It sailed over the top of the mountain. He could only hope that it would land properly on the opposite slope. It was an attractor-target. Any automatically aimed weapon, seeking to shoot, would find that target irresistible: even though his ship was spotted and fire opened up, the gun controls would choose instead the attractor-target-he hoped. So far so good. He now raised the tug's nose a little higher. He might find it useful to create a new diversion. He had some radio-triggered balls in the second tube, several thousand of them. He pressed a second firing pin: a hundred thousand pellets spewed out, much like firing a sawed-off shotgun. In this high trajectory, they would patter down across dozens of acres, amongst the parks and palaces. Unless somebody actually got hit with one, he doubted they would even be noticed. He checked the remote firing box that would trigger them: its safety was on. He put it in his pocket. Now he would get to work. He had mounted what was called a disintegrator-slasher in the compartment over the flight deck. The plans that had been used to install this nuclear black hole were so long gone that he could only depend upon the rumors he had heard as a cadet. The black hole was, supposedly, in the upper third of the mountain. He turned on his screens and began to triangulate for position. There was a trickle of gamma rays to follow up-leaks from around the shielding, not dangerous. The hole itself was fully encased. Its power was bled off in line conduits. The microwave reflectors on the other side of the mountain were simply radiation detectors. He had already used them and he would not use them twice. They would be wise to that now. He fished in the black hole's position by its leaks. It was not good news: the thing was at the absolute bottom of the third. It was a lot more mountain than he liked to tackle. You couldn't put a beam into it: it would just absorb anything like that. You couldn't throw a bomb at it: it would take half of Voltar with it. Heller was simply going to saw the mountaintop off and tow it away-if he could! He had the thing's position now. He went to work with the disintegrator-slasher. It could make a cut one molecule thick through anything, but Heller did not think its manufacturer had ever intended it for use in sawing off the top of a mountain. A high, high whine began to hurt his ears. He stopped and put some earplugs in. The manufacturers had designed it for levelling building sites by making a cut and then removing sections. They had never thought a Fleet combat engineer would need QUIET! Sooner or later somebody down in Palace City was going to wonder where that twenty-thousand-cycle screech was coming from. The work was slow. He was going through basalt and it was HARD! A thin line of heat began to glow all along the mountainside. That meant there would also soon be a line like that on the other side of the mountain. VISIBLE! Heller jockeyed the tug back and forth, left to right. He could
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