The Horus arrived at Deccan, and called down the savage message of challenge.
There came a tumultuous, roaring reply.
“Captain Bors!” cried a voice from the ground exultantly. “Land and welcome! We didn’t hope you’d come here, but you’re a thousand times welcome! We’ve smashed the garrison here, Captain! We rose days ago and we hold the planet! We’ll join you! Come to ground, sir! We can supply you!”
Bors went tense all over. He’d been called by name! If he was known by name on this world—twenty light-years from Mekin and thirty-five from Kandar—then everything was lost.
“Can you send up a space-boat?” he asked in a voice he did not recognize. “I’d like to have your news.”
It must be a trap. It was possible that there’d been revolt on Deccan; he’d found proof of rebellion elsewhere. There’d been claims of revolt on Cassis, but he hadn’t been suspicious then. He’d sent down a missile to help the self-proclaimed rebels there. Now he wondered desperately if he’d been tricked there as, it was all too likely, he would be here. There’d been reported fighting on Avino. There was cheering for his men on Dover, and he might have landed there. But there were too many coincidences, far too many.
He waited, fifty thousand miles high, with the ship at combat-alert. He felt cold all over. Somehow, news had preceded him. It was garbled truth, but there was enough to make his spine feel like ice.
He spoke over the all-speaker hook-up, in a voice he could not keep steady by any effort of will.
“All hands attention,” he said heavily. “I just called ground. We have had a reply calling me by name. You will see the implication. It looks like somehow the Mekinese have managed to send word ahead of us. They’ve found out that no one can stand against us. They know we have new and deadly weapons. Probably there have been orders given to lure us to ground by the pretense of a successful revolt. It would be hoped that we can be fooled to the point where we will land and our ship can be captured undestroyed.—That’s the way it looks.”
He swallowed, with difficulty.
“If that’s so,” he said after an instant, “you can guess what’s been done about Kandar. The grand fleet was assembled on Mekin. It could have gone to Kandar.…”
He swallowed again. Then he said savagely, “Well make sure first. If the worst has happened we’ll take our fleet and head for Mekin and pour down every ounce of atomic explosive we’ve got. We may not be able to turn its air to poison, but if there are survivors, they won’t celebrate what they did to Kandar!”
He clicked off. His fists clenched. He paced back and forth in the control room. He almost did not wait to make sure. Almost. But he had never seen a Mekinese fighting man face to face. He’d gone into exile with his uncle when that unhappily reasonable man let Tralee surrender rather than be bombed to depopulation. He’d served in the Kandarian navy without ever managing to be in any port when a Mekinese ship was in. He’d fought in the battle off Kandar, he’d destroyed a Mekinese cruiser off Tralee, another in the Mekinese system itself and a squadron off Meriden. But he had never seen a Mekinese fighting-man face to face. Filled with such hatred as he felt, he meant to do so now.
A space-boat came up from the ground. The Horus trained weapons on it. Bors painstakingly arranged for its occupants to board the Horus in space-suits, which could not conceal bombs.
There were six men in the space-boat. They came into theHorus’s control room and he saw that they were young, almost boys. When they learned that he was Captain Bors, they looked at him with shining, admiring, worshipping eyes. It could not be a trick. It could not be a trap. He was incredulous.
The message from the ground was true.
Chapter 11
The news as Bors got it from the men of Deccan was remarkable for two reasons: that so much of it was true, and that all of it was glamorized and romanticized and garbled. It was astonishing to find any relation at all between such fabulously romantic tales and the facts, because there was no way for news to travel between solar systems except on ships, and no ships had carried stories like these!
Here on Deccan, the shining-eyed young men knew that Bors had landed on Tralee and on Garen. They knew that there was a fleet in being which had fought and annihilated a Mekinese task-force many times its size.
To the Captain, their knowledge was undiluted catastrophe!
They admired Bors because they believed he commanded that fleet, which he now had in hiding while he flashed splendidly about the subjugated worlds, performing prodigious feats of valor and destruction, half pirate and half hero. The story had it that he’d been driven from his native Tralee by the invaders, and that now he fought Mekin in magnificent knight-errantry, and that it was he who’d set alight the flame of rebellion on so many worlds.
Bors listened, and was numbed. He heard references to the fight off Meriden, and the temporary escape of one of his enemies, and that he’d pursued it to the solar system of Mekin itself and there destroyed it while Mekin watched, helpless to interfere.
The distortion of facts was astounding. But the mere existence of facts at this distance was impossible! Then Bors found himself thinking that these tales sounded like fantasies or daydreams, and he went white. He knew what had happened.
Just before he’d left the fleet, he’d talked to a fat woman and a scowling man who, together, made up the Talents, Incorporated brand new Department for Disseminating Truthful Seditious Rumors, so that rumors of a high degree of detail got started, nobody knew how. If such rumors spread, and everybody heard them, nobody would doubt them. It was appallingly probable that the fighting on Cassis and Avino and Deccan had no greater justification in reason than that an enormously fat woman romantically pictured such things as resulting from the derring-do of one Captain Bors, of whom she thought sentimentally and glamorously and without much discrimination.
But she’d daydreamed about the fleet, too! And that it had destroyed a Mekinese squadron many times its size.…
He heard the leader of the young men from Deccan speaking humorously. “Your revolt, sir,” he told Bors, “is spreading everywhere! On Cela, sir, there are great space-ship yards, where they build craft for the Mekinese navy. Not long ago they finished one and it went out to space for a trial run. It didn’t come back. Sabotage. Everybody knew it. The Mekinese raged. A little while later they finished another ship. But the Mekinese were smart! They sent it off for its trial run with only Celans on board. If there were sabotage this time, it wouldn’t be Mekinese who died in space! But that ship didn’t come back either! It touched down here, sir, three weeks ago, and we supplied it with food and missiles and some of us joined it. It went off to try to find you.”
“I’d better—go after it,” said Bors, dry-throated. “It could blunder into trouble. At best—”
The youthful leader of Deccan’s revolt grinned widely.
“It’s got plenty of missiles,” he told Bors. “It can take care of itself! And it has plenty of food. We even gave them target-balloons to practice launching missiles on. We’ve been storing up missiles to lay an ambush for a Mekinese squadron if one comes by. A lot of us joined the ship, though.”
“In any case,” said Bors, with the feel of ashes in his throat, “I’ll track it down so it can join the fleet.”
He could not bring himself to tell these confident and admiring young men that there was no hope and never had been; that the tales of his achievements were only partly true and that they had popped into people’s minds because a very fat woman far away indulged in daydreams and fantasies.
They wouldn’t have understood. If they had, they wouldn’t have believed. He found that he savagely resisted the conviction himself. But there was no other way for such garbled tales with such a substratum of fact to be spread among the stars. And whoever spread them knew of events up to the last news sent back by Bors, but nothing after that. Undoubtedly, Talents, Incorporated’s Department for Disseminating Truthful Seditious Rumors had been at work on Mekin,
but the damage done elsewhere was a thousand times greater than any benefit done there.
It was too late to repair the damage, here or anywhere else. This planet and all the rest were too far committed to rebellion ever to be forgiven by Mekin. Mekin would take revenge. It was not pleasant to think about.
So the Horus departed, and traveled in high-speed overdrive for ship-days seemingly without end, toward Glamis. It knew nothing that happened outside its own cocoon of overdrive field. It knew nothing of any of the thousands of myriads of stars, whose planetary systems offered unlimited room for humanity to live in freedom and without fear.
During the journey Bors only endured being alive. All this disaster was ultimately his fault. The fleet’s survival was due to his work with Talents, Incorporated. The raids of a single ship—which now would have such disastrous results—were the fruits of his suggestion, the consequence of his actions.
Talents, Incorporated was involved, to be sure, but only because he’d allowed it to be. He should have realized that Madame Porvis would work havoc if her talent was as described. No mere romantic daydreamer would fashion fantasies with military secrecy in mind and security as a principle. Everything was betrayed. Everything was ruined. And if he, Bors, had only been properly skeptical, the fleet would have been destroyed and Kandar now occupied by the Mekinese—doomed to servitude but not necessarily to annihilation—and other worlds would also be safely servile. They’d still be resentful and they’d bitterly hate Mekin, but they would not have before them the monstrous vengeance now in store.
Bors, in fact, felt guilty because he was still alive.
There was only one small thing he could still try to set aright. He could insist that Morgan take Gwenlyn far away from the dangerous possibility that Mekin might somehow find her. He had to make Morgan see the need for it. If necessary, he would convince King Humphrey that a royal order must be issued to send the Sylva light-centuries away, before the Mekinese empire began to restore itself to devastated calm—if that process hadn’t already begun.
Mekin had its grand fleet assembled and ready. If convincing and, unfortunately, truthful rumors ran about Mekin, as elsewhere, concerning the fleet and Bors’s attempts to hide it, then their dictator need only give a single order and the grand fleet would lift off. When it found Kandar unoccupied it would leave Kandar dead. Then it would seek out the fleet, and destroy it, and then it would move from one to another of its rebellious tributaries and take revenge upon them.…
And Bors could only hope to salvage the life of one girl from the wreckage of everything that human beings prefer to believe in. He could only hope to send Gwenlyn away—if he was not already too late.
The Horus broke out into normal space twelve days after leaving Deccan. The untrustworthy sun of Glamis still shone brightly. The inner planet revolved about it with one side glowing low red heat and the other side piled high with frozen atmosphere. The useless outer planet remained a lush green, save for its seas. And the fleet still circled it from pole to pole.
Bors had himself ferried to the flagship by space-boat, because what he had to report was too disheartening to be spoken where all the fleet might hear. Gwenlyn met him at the flagship’s airlock. She looked very glad, as if she’d been uneasy about him.
“Call for a boat,” Bors commanded her curtly, “to take you to the Sylva. Go on board with anybody else who belongs on it, your father, anybody. I’m going to ask the king to insist that the Sylva get away from here—fast! Before the Mekinese turn up.”
Gwenlyn shook her head, her eyes searching his face.
“The Sylva’s not here. It’s gone to Kandar as a sort of dispatch-boat.”
Bors groaned.
“Then I’ll try to get another ship assigned to take you away,” he said formidably. “Maybe one of the captured cargo-ships I sent back.”
“No,” said Gwenlyn. “They’re going to be released. They’ll go to Mekin, and we couldn’t go there!”
Bors groaned again. Then he said savagely, “Wait here for me. I’ll arrange something as soon as I’ve seen the king.”
He strode down the corridor to King Humphrey’s cabin. A sentry came to attention. Bors passed through a door. The king and half a dozen of the top-ranking officers of the fleet were listening apathetically to Morgan, at once vexed and positive and uncertain.
“But you can’t ignore it!” protested Morgan. “I don’t understand it either, but you’ll agree that since my precognizer said no ship but Bors’s is coming here—and he precognized every one of the prizes before they arrived—you’ll concede that the Mekinese aren’t coming here. So you’re going out to meet them.”
He saw Bors, and breathed an audible sigh of relief.
“Bors!” he said in a changed tone. “I’m glad you’re back!”
Bors said grimly, “Majesty, I’ve very bad news.”
King Humphrey shrugged. He spoke in a listless voice.
“I doubt it differs from ours. You captured a passenger-liner off Mekin, you will remember. You sent it here. When it arrived we found that all its passengers knew that Kandar was not occupied and that the fleet sent to capture it had not reported back.”
“My news is worse,” said Bors. “The continued existence of our fleet, and the fact that it defeated a Mekinese force, is common knowledge on at least five planets—all of them now in revolt against Mekin.”
The king’s expression had reached the limit of reaction to disaster. It did not change. He looked almost apathetic.
“Mekin,” he said dully, “sent a second squadron to Kandar to investigate the rumors of defeat. We have a very tiny force there—three ships. Of course our ships won’t attack the Mekinese, but they might as well. Knowing that we destroyed their first fleet and that we still live, Mekin will assuredly retaliate.”
“And not only on Kandar,” said Bors. “On Tralee and Garen and Cassis and Meriden—”
Morgan interrupted.
“Majesty! All this is more reason to listen to me! I’ve been telling you that all my Talents agree—”
King Humphrey interrupted tonelessly, “We’ve made our final arrangements, Bors. We are going to release the cargo-ships and the passenger-ship you sent us. We will use them as messengers. We are going to send a message of surrender, to Mekin.”
Bors swallowed. His most dismal forebodings had produced nothing more hopeless than this moment.
“Majesty—”
“We have to sacrifice,” said the king in a leaden voice, “not only our lives but our self-respect, to try to gain something less than the total annihilation of Kandar. We shall tell the Mekinese that we will return to Kandar and form up in space. If they send a small force to accept our surrender, they shall have it. If they prefer to destroy us, they can do that also. But we submit ourselves to punishment for having resisted the original fleet. We admit our guilt. And we beg Mekin not to avenge that resistance upon our people, who are not guilty.”
Bors tried to speak, and could not. There was a sodden, utterly unresilient stillness in the room, as if all the high officers of the fleet were corpses and the king himself, though he spoke, was not less dead.
Then Morgan moved decisively. He moved away from the spot where he had been engaged in impassioned argument. He took Bors by the arm, and hustled him through the door.
“Come along!” he said urgently. “Something’s got to be done! You have the knack of thinking of things to do! The king’s intentions—”
The door closed behind him and he broke off. He wiped sweat from his forehead with one hand while he thrust Bors on with the other. They came to a cabin evidently assigned to him. Gwenlyn waited there.
“Craziness!” said Morgan bitterly. “Craziness! I get the finest group of Talents that ever existed! I teach them to think! I instruct them! And they can’t think of what is going to happen. And everything depends on it! Everything!”
“When will the Sylva be back?” demanded Bors.
Morgan automatically look
ed at his watch. Gwenlyn opened her mouth to speak. Morgan shook his head impatiently. Gwenlyn was silent.
“My ship-arrival Talent’s with the Sylva,” said Morgan harassedly. “We sent him to Kandar to find out if the Mekinese fleet’s coming there, and when. It isn’t coming here. He said so.”
“It’ll go to Kandar,” said Bors bitterly, “to destroy it. I imagine we’ll go there too, to be destroyed.”
“But it’s insane!” protested Morgan. “Look! You captured a passenger-ship off Mekin. Right?”
“Yes.”
“You sent it here with all its passengers. Right?”
“Yes.”
“One of the passengers said he was a clairvoyant. Hah!” Morgan expressed the ultimate of disgust. “He was a fortune-teller! He didn’t know there was anything better than that! A fortune-teller! But he’s a Talent! He’s a born charlatan, but he’s an authentic Talent, and he doesn’t know what that is! He thinks predictions as Madame Porvis thinks scandals! And they’re just as crazy! But he is a Talent and they have to be right!”
Bors said, “You’re going to take Gwenlyn away from here,—and fast!”
Morgan paid no attention. He was embittered, and agitated, and in particular, he was frustrated.
“It’s all madness!” he protested almost hysterically. “Here we’ve got a firm precognition that King Humphrey’s going to open parliament on Kandar next year, and there’s another one—”
Gwenlyn said quickly, “Which you won’t tell!”
“Which I won’t tell. But something’s got to happen! Something’s got to be done! And this crazy Talent gives me a crazy precognition and looks proud because I can’t make sense of it! What the hell can you make out of a precognition that Mekin will be defeated when an enemy fleet submits to destruction, lying still in space? There’s no sense to it! My Talents wouldn’t think of anything idiotic like that! They’ve got better sense! But when this lunatic said it, they could precognize it too! It’s so! They couldn’t think of it themselves, but when this Mekinese Talent does, they know it’s true. But it can’t be!”
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 225
