"I thought you"d gone on as you were supposed to do. Yes. There is trouble. It amounts to shipwreck. How many of my men can you take off?"
"_We"ve lots of room!_" said Gwenlyn. "_My father kept most of the Talents with him. We"re heading your way, Captain._"
"Very good," said Bors. "Thank you." He was grateful, but help from a woman--from Gwenlyn!--galled him.
He heard her click off, and shivered.
Presently the _Sylva_ was alongside. The transfer of the _Isis"s_ crew began. Bors went over the ship for the last time. The ship"s log went aboard the _Sylva_, as did Logan"s calculated tables for low-power overdrive. Bors made quite sure that nothing else could be recovered from the _Isis_. He looked strained and irritable when he finally went into one of the lifeboat blisters on the _Isis_ left vacant by the sacrifice of two s.p.a.ce-boats in the Garen cutting-out expedition. A boat from the _Sylva_ was there to receive him.
"Technically," said Bors, "I should go down with my ship, or fly apart with it. But there"s no point in being romantic!"
"I"m the one," said his second-in-command, "who will stand court-martial!"
"I doubt it very much," said Bors. "They can"t court-martial you for partly accomplishing something they"re in trouble for failing at. Into the boat with you!"
He threw a switch and entered the boat. The blister opened. The small s.p.a.ce-boat floated free. Its drive hummed and it drove far and away from the seemingly unharmed but completely helpless _Isis_. Bors looked regretfully back at the abandoned light cruiser. Sunlight glinted on its hull. Somehow a slow rotary motion had been imparted to it during the process of abandoning ship. The little fighting ship pointed as though wistfully at all the stars about her, to none of which she would ever drive again.
The _Sylva_ loomed up. The last s.p.a.ce-boat nestled into its blister and the grapples clanked. The leaves closed. When the blister air-pressure showed normal and green lights flashed and flashed, Bors got out of the boat and went to the _Sylva"s_ control-room. Gwenlyn was there, quite casually controlling the operation of the yacht by giving suggestions to its official skipper. She turned and beamed at Bors.
"We"ll pull off a way," she observed, "and make sure your time-bomb works. You wouldn"t want her discovered and salvaged."
"No," said Bors.
He stood by a viewport as the _Sylva_ drove away. The _Isis_ ceased to be a shape and became the most minute of motes. Bors looked at his watch.
"Not far enough yet," he said depressedly. "Everything will go."
The yacht drove on. Fifteen--twenty minutes at steadily increasing solar-system speed.
"It"s about due," said Bors.
Gwenlyn came and stood beside him. They looked together out at the stars. There were myriads upon myriads of them, of all the colors of the spectrum, of all degrees of brightness, in every possible asymmetric distribution.
There was a spark in remoteness. Instantly it was vastly more than a spark. It was a globe of deadly, blue-white incandescence. It flamed brilliantly as all the _Isis"s_ fuel and the warheads on all its unexpended missiles turned to pure energy in the hundred-millionth of a second. It was many times brighter than a sun. Then it was not. And the violence of the explosion was such that there was not even glowing metal-vapor where it had been. Every atom of the ship"s substance had been volatilized and scattered through so many thousands of cubic miles of emptiness that it did not show even as a mist.
"A good ship," said Bors grimly. Then he growled. "I wonder if they saw that on Garen and what they thought about it!" He straightened himself.
"How did you know we were in trouble?"
"There"s a Talent," said Gwenlyn matter-of-factly, "who can always tell how people feel. She doesn"t know what they think or why. But she can tell when they"re uneasy and so on. Father uses her to tell him when people lie. When what they say doesn"t match how they feel, they"re lying."
"I think," said Bors, "that I"ll stay away from her. But that won"t do any good, will it?"
Gwenlyn smiled at him. It was a very nice smile.
"She could tell that things had gone wrong with the ship," she observed, "because of the way you felt. But I"ve forbidden her ever to tell when someone lies to me or anything like that. I don"t want to know people"s feelings when they want to hide them."
"Fine!" said Bors. "I feel better." Standing so close to Gwenlyn, he also felt light-headed.
She smiled at him again, as if she understood.
"We"ll head for Glamis now," she said. "The situation there should have changed a great deal because of what you"ve done."
"It would be my kind of luck," said Bors half joking, "for it to have changed for the worse."
It had.
Chapter 9
"The decision," said King Humphrey the Eighth, stubbornly, "is exactly what I have said. In full war council it has been agreed that the fleet, through a new use of missiles, is a stronger fighting force than ever before. This was evidenced in the late battle and no one questions it.
But it is also agreed that we remain hopelessly outnumbered. We are in a position where we simply cannot fight! For us to have fought would probably have been forgiven if we had been wiped out in the recent battle--preferably with only slight loss to the Mekinese. We offered battle expecting exactly that. Unfortunately, we annihilated the fleet that was to have occupied Kandar. In consequence we have had to pretend that we were destroyed along with them. And if we are discovered to be alive, and certainly if we offer to fight, Kandar will be exterminated as a living world, to punish us and as a warning to future victims of the Mekinese."
"Yes, Majesty," Bors said through tight lips. "But may I point out--"
"I know what you want to point out," the king broke in irritably. "With the help of these Talents, Incorporated people, you"ve worked out a new battle tactic you want to put into practice. You"ve explained it to the War Council. The War Council has decided that it is too risky. We cannot gamble the lives of the people on Kandar. We have not the right to expose them to Mekinese vengeance!"
"I agree, Majesty," said Bors, "but at the same time--"
The king leaned back in his chair.
"I don"t like it any better than you do," he said peevishly. "I expected to get killed in a s.p.a.ce-battle--not very gloriously, but at least with self-respect. Unfortunately we had bad luck. We won the fight. I do not like what we have to do in consequence, but we have to do it!"
Bors bit his lips. He liked and respected King Humphrey, as he had respect and affection for his uncle, the Pretender of Tralee. Both were honest and able men who"d been forced to learn the disheartening lesson that some things are impossible. But Bors believed that King Humphrey had learned the lesson too well.
"You plan, Majesty," he said after a moment, "to send me out again to capture food-ships if I can."
"Obviously," said the king.
"The idea being," Bors went on, "that if I can get enough food for the fleet so it can make a journey of several hundreds of light-years--"
"It is necessary to go a long way," the king confirmed unhappily. "We need to take the fleet to where Mekin is only a name and Kandar not even that."
"Where you will disband the fleet--"
"Yes."
"And hope that Mekin will not take vengeance anyhow for the fight the fleet has already put up."
The king said heavily, "It will be a very long time before word drifts back that the fleet of Kandar did not die in battle. It may never come.
If it does, it will come as a vague rumor, as an idle tale, as absurd gossip about a fleet whose home planet may not even be remembered when the tales are told. There will be trivial stories about a fleet which abandoned the world it should have defended, and fled so far that its enemies did not bother to follow it. If the tale reaches Mekin, it may not be believed. It may not ever be linked to Kandar. And if some day it is believed, by then Kandar will be long occupied. Perhaps it will be resigned to its status. It will be a valuable subject world. Mekin will not destroy it merely to punish scattered, forgotten men who will never know that they have been punished."
"And you want me," repeated Bors, "to find the stores of food that will let the fleet travel to--oblivion."
"Yes," said the king again. He looked very weary. "In a sense, of course, we will simply be doing what we set out to do--to throw away our lives. We intended to do that. We are doing no more now."