asked anxiously. “You’ve gone pale.”
“No, nothing,” he said. “I’m recovering fast, thanks to your kindness.”
“You should rest. I’ve noticed you hour after hour poring over that
report–” She saw his expression and stopped her speech.
In a second he eased his lips, undamped his fists, and raised memory of
what he had come from today up against that other memory. “I’d no
choice,” he said. To her husband: “Bodin, I’m ready to work again. With
you. You see, I’ve found your target.”
The Gospodar peered around. “What? Wait,” he cautioned.
“True, we can’t discuss it here,” Flandry agreed. “Especially, I
suppose, on holy ground … though she might not have minded.”
She’d never have been vindictive. But she’d have understood how much
this matters to her whole world: that in those broken mutterings of my
son’s I found what I thought I might find, the coordinates of Chereion,
Aycharaych’s planet.
XIX
—
The raiders from Dennitza met the guardians of the red sun, and
lightning awoke.
Within the command bridge of the Vatre Zvezda, Bodin Miyatovich stared
at a display tank. Color-coded motes moved around a stellar globe to
show where each vessel of his fleet was–and, as well as scouts and
instruments could learn, each of the enemy’s–and what it did and when
it died. But their firefly dance, of some use to a lifelong
professional, bewildered an unskilled eye; and it was merely a sideshow
put on by computers whose real language was numbers. He swore and looked
away in search of reality.
The nearest surrounded him in metal, meters, intricate consoles,
flashing signal bulbs, dark-uniformed men who stood to their duties, sat
as if wired in place, walked back and forth on rubbery-shod feet.
Beneath a hum of engines, ventilators, a thousand systems throughout the
great hull, their curt exchanges chopped. To stimulate them, it was cool
here, with a thunderstorm tang of ozone.
The Gospodar’s gaze traveled on, among the view-screens which studded
bulkheads, overhead, deck–again, scarcely more than a means for keeping
crew who did not have their ship’s esoteric senses from feeling trapped.
Glory brimmed the dark, stars in glittering flocks and Milky Way shoals,
faerie-remote glimmer of nebulae and a few sister galaxies. Here in the
outer reaches of its system, the target sun was barely the brightest, a
coal-glow under Bellatrix. At chance moments a spark would flare and
vanish, a nuclear burst close enough to see. But most were too distant;
and never another vessel showed, companion or foe. Such was the scale of
the battle.
And yet it was not large as space combats went. Springing from
hyperdrive to normal state, the Dennitzan force–strong, but hardly an
armada–encountered Merseian craft which sought to bar it from
accelerating inward. As more and more of the latter drew nigh and
matched courses with invaders, action spread across multimillions of
kilometers. Hours passed before two or three fighters came so near, at
such low relative speeds, that they could hope for a kill; and often
their encounter was the briefest spasm, followed by hours more of
maneuver. Those gave time to make repairs, care for the wounded, pray
for the dead.
“They’ve certainly got protection,” Miyatovich growled. “Who’d have
expected this much?”
Scouts had not been able to warn him. The stroke depended altogether on
swiftness. Merseian observers in the neighborhood of Zoria had surely
detected the fleet’s setting out. Some would have gone to tell their
masters, others would have dogged the force, trying to learn where it
was bound. (A few of those had been spotted and destroyed, but not
likely all.) No matter how carefully plotted its course, and no matter
that its destination was a thinly trafficked part of space, during the
three-week journey its hyperwake must have been picked up by several
travelers who passed within range. So many strange hulls together,
driving so hard through Merseian domains, was cause to bring in the
Navy.
If Miyatovich was to do anything to Chereion, he must get there, finish
his work, and be gone before reinforcements could arrive. Scouts of his,
prowling far in advance near a sun whose location seemed to be the
Roidhunate’s most tightly gripped secret, would have carried too big a