Part 9 (1/2)
”_All s.h.i.+ps attention! With old-style missiles we could do everything we've accomplished so far. But the Mekinese are refusing battle now.
They'll begin to slip away in overdrive if we keep chopping them down in groups. We have to give them a chance or they'll run away. The new missile system works perfectly. All s.h.i.+ps break formation. Find your own Mekinese. Blast them!_”
Bors said in a conversational voice, ”There are three Mekin s.h.i.+ps yonder. They look like they're willing to start something. We'll take them on.”
He pointed carefully to a spot on the screen. His small s.h.i.+p swung away from the rest of the fleet. It plunged toward a battles.h.i.+p and two heavy cruisers who had joined forces and appeared to attempt to rally the still-stronger-than-Kandar invaders.
They became objects rather than specks upon the screens. They were visible things on the direct-vision ports. Something flashed, and rushed toward the little Kandarian s.p.a.ce-can.
”Fire one, two, three,” Bors ordered.
Things hurtled on before him. A screen showed that the missiles first fired by the enemy went off-course, chasing the later-fired missiles from the _Isis_. The Mekinese shots had automatically become interceptors when Kandarian missiles attacked their parent s.h.i.+ps. But they couldn't antic.i.p.ate a curved course and their built-in computers weren't designed to handle a rate of change of acceleration. The three Mekinese s.h.i.+ps ceased to exist.
”Let's head yonder,” said Bors.
He pointed again, on the screen. Within the radar's range there were hundreds of tiny blips. Some were marked with a nimbus apiece. They were friends. Many, many more were not.
The Mekinese fleet, too, could determine its own numbers in comparison to the defending fleet. Pride and rage swept through Mekinese commanders, as they saw the Kandarians deliberately break up their formation to get their s.h.i.+ps down to the level of the enemy. It was unthinkable for a Mekinese s.h.i.+p to refuse single combat! And when two and three could combine against a single s.h.i.+p of Kandar....
The invaders had reason to fight, rather than slip into overdrive. They still outnumbered the s.h.i.+ps from Kandar. And for a Mekinese commander to flee the battle area without having engaged or fired on an antagonist would be treason. No man who fled without fighting would stay alive.
There had to be a recording of battle offered or accepted, or the especially merciless court-martial system of Mekin would take over.
There was one problem, however, for the Mekinese skippers. When they engaged a s.h.i.+p from Kandar, they died. Still, no s.h.i.+p left the scene of the battle to report defeat.
It was absolute and complete. It was not only a defeat. It was annihilation. The Mekinese fleet was destroyed to the last s.h.i.+p, even to the armed transports carrying bureaucrats and police to set up a new government on Kandar. Those s.h.i.+ps which dared not run away without a token fight, discovered the fleet of Kandar wasn't fighting a token battle. It had started out to be just that, but somehow the plans had changed when the fighting started. For the aggressors, it was disaster.
When his fleet rea.s.sembled, King Humphrey issued a general order to all s.h.i.+ps. He read it in person, his voice strained and dead and hopeless.
”_I have to express my admiration for the men of my fleet_,” he said drearily. ”_An unexampled victory over unexampled odds is not only in keeping with the best traditions of the armed forces of Kandar, but raises those traditions to the highest possible level of valor and devotion. If it were not that in winning this victory we have doomed our home world to destruction, I would be as happy as I am, reluctantly, proud...._”
_Part Two_
Chapter 5
n.o.body had ever found any use for the Glamis solar system. There was a sun of highly irregular variability. There were two planets, of which the one farther out might have been useful for colonization except that it was subject to extreme changes of climate as its undependable sun burned brightly or dimly. The nearer planet was so close to its primary that it had long ceased to rotate. One hemisphere, forever in suns.h.i.+ne, remained in a low, red heat. Its night hemisphere, in perpetual darkness, had radiated away its heat until there were mountains of frozen atmosphere piled above what should have been a mineral surface.
It was a matter of record that a hundred standard years before, a s.h.i.+p had landed there and mined oxygen-containing snow, which its air apparatus was able to refine so the crew could breathe while they finished some rather improbable repairs and could go on to more hospitable worlds.
The farther-out planet was sometimes a place of green vegetation and sprawling seas, and sometimes of humid jungles with most of its oceans turned to a cloud-bank of impenetrable thickness. Also, sometimes, it was frozen waste from pole to pole. The vegetation of that planet had been studied with interest, but the world itself was simply of no use to anybody. Even the sun of the Glamis system was regarded with suspicion.
The fleet of Kandar made rendezvous at the galactic-north pole of the second planet. On arrival the ma.s.sed cruisers and battles.h.i.+ps went into orbit. The smaller craft went on a scouting mission, verifying that there was no new colony planted, that there was no man-made radiation anywhere in the system, that there was no likelihood of the fleet's presence--or for that matter its continued existence--becoming known to anybody not of its s.h.i.+p-crews.
The scout-s.h.i.+ps came back, reporting all clear. The great s.h.i.+ps drew close to one another and small s.p.a.ce-boats shuttled back and forth, taking commanders and captains and vice-admirals to the s.h.i.+p, which, by convention, was commanded by King Humphrey VIII of Kandar.
Captain Bors got to the conference late. There were some grave faces about the conference room, but there were also some whose expressions were unregenerate and grimly satisfied. As he entered the room the king was speaking.
”I don't deny that it was a splendid victory, but I'm saying that our victory was a catastrophe! To begin with, we happened to hit the Mekinese fleet when it was dispersed and disorganized. That was great good fortune--_if_ we'd wanted a victory. The enemy was scattered over light-minutes of s.p.a.ce. His s.h.i.+ps could not act as a ma.s.sed, maneuverable force. They were simply a mob of fighting s.h.i.+ps who had to fight as individuals against our combat formation.”
”Yes, Majesty,” said the gray vice-admiral, ”but even when we broke formation--”