risk of giving away his intent. He must simply rush in full-armed, and
hope.
“We can take them, can’t we?” he asked.
Rear Admiral Raich, director of operations, nodded.
“Oh, yes. They’re outnumbered, outgunned. I wonder why they don’t
withdraw.”
“Merseians aren’t cowards,” Captain Yulinatz, skipper of the
dreadnaught, remarked. “Would you abandon a trust?”
“If my orders included the sensible proviso that I not contest lost
cases when it’s possible to scramble clear and fight another day–yes, I
would,” Raich said. “Merseians aren’t idiots either.”
“Could they be expecting help?” Miyatovich wondered. He gnawed his
mustache and scowled.
“I doubt it,” Raich replied. “We know nothing significant can reach us
soon.” He did keep scouts far-flung throughout this stellar vicinity,
now that he was in it. “They must have the same information to base the
same conclusions on.”
Flandry, who stood among them, his Terran red-white-and-blue gaudy
against their indigo or gray, cleared his throat. “Well, then,” he said,
“the answer’s obvious. They do have orders to fight to the death. Under
no circumstances may they abandon Chereion. If nothing else, they must
try to reduce our capability of damaging whatever is on the planet.”
“Bonebrain doctrine,” Raich grunted.
“Not if they’re guarding something vital,” Miyatovich said. “What might
it be?”
“We can try for captures,” Yulinatz suggested: reluctantly, because it
multiplied the hazard to his men.
Flandry shook his head. “No point in that,” he declared. “Weren’t you
listening when he talked en route? Nobody lands on Chereion except by
special permission which is damn hard to get–needs approval of both the
regional tribune and the planet’s own authorities, and movements are
severely restricted. I don’t imagine a single one of the personnel we’re
killing and being killed by has come within an astronomical unit of the
globe.”
“Yes, yes, I heard,” Yulinatz snapped. “What influence those beings must
have.”
“That’s why we’ve come to hit them,” the Gospodar said in his beard.
Yulinatz’s glance went to the tank. A green point blinked: a cruiser was
suffering heavily from three enemy craft which paced her. A yellow point
went out, and quickly another: two corvettes lost. His tone grew raw.
“Will it be worth the price to us?”
“That we can’t tell till afterward.” Miyatovich squared his shoulders.
“We could disengage and go home, knowing we’ve thrown a scare into the
enemy. But we’d never know what opportunity we did or did not forever
miss. We will proceed.”
In the end, a chieftain’s main duty is to say, “On my head be it.”
“Gentlemen.”
Flandry’s word brought their eyes to him. “I anticipated some such
quandary,” he stated. “What we need is a quick survey–a forerunner to
get a rough idea of what is on Chereion and report back. Then we can
decide.”
Raich snorted. “We need veto rights over the laws of statistics too.”
“If the guard is this thick at this distance,” Yulinatz added, “what
chance has the best speedster ever built for any navy of getting
anywhere near?”
Miyatovich, comprehending, swallowed hard.
“I brought along my personal boat,” Flandry said. “She was not built for
a navy.”
“No, Dominic,” Miyatovich protested.
“Yes, Bodin,” Flandry answered.
Vatre Zvezda unleashed a salvo. No foes were close. None could match a
Nova-class vessel. She was huge, heavy-armored, intricately
compartmented, monster-powered in engines, weapons, shielding fields,
less to join battle than to keep battle away from the command posts at
her heart. Under present conditions, it was not mad, but it was
unreasonable that she fired at opponents more than a million kilometers
distant. They would have time to track those missiles, avoid them or
blow them up.
The reason was to cover Hooligan’s takeoff.
She slipped from a boat lock, through a lane opened momentarily in the
fields, outward like an outsize torpedo. Briefly in her aft-looking
viewscreens the dreadnaught bulked, glimmering spheroid abristle with
guns, turrets, launch tubes, projectors, sensors, generators, snatchers,
hatches, watchdomes, misshapen moon adrift among the stars. Acceleration
dwindled her so fast that Yovan Vymezal gasped, as if the interior were
not at a steady Dennitzan gravity but the full unbalanced force had
crushed the breath from him.
In the pilot’s chair, Flandry took readings, ran off computations,