Finally, after a detailed survey of comparative weaponry, he gave his conclusions:
5. As I have stated, their attack craft are numerous and adequately armed. However, their armament is in no way superior to that of our own equivalent vessels. Most important, they have neither ships nor vessels comparable to those of our cruiser class, capable of destroying large asteroids and even minor moons. In this regard we are superior and, to my mind, decisively so. Their fleet is as vulnerable as Calcutta or Bombay.
I shuddered, not just at his casual mention of those cities, but because he took so much for granted. Our own wars, for example, have shown that savagely primitive beliefs and a high level of science and technology are by no means incompatible. However, when I compared the Estimate to the report on fleet dispositions that I had received before leaving, I was to some extent reassured. Signed by General Cordeiro, a Deputy Chief of Staff, it shows every major unit, either deployed or on the way, and each positioned so that if the aliens actually attack, Earth can be defended—but each far enough away from Saturn Station, where Corua-Fanit suggested The Conquerors place themselves, to offer no suggestion of hostile intent on our part.
Our own ship, Aconcagua, and her complement are also reassuring. She corresponds to what, in Nelson’s day, would have been called a dispatch boat, very lightly armed, with perhaps a dozen in her crew, all very young, all unaccustomed to having a Space-Marshal aboard and terribly impressed, and all obviously frightened to death by Torkonnen’s KGB style of security. They are polite and very pleasant.
October 6
A great deal to report. We arrived at the Station on the twentieth, and of course Casimirski was expecting us. He was delighted to see me, and said so. He had been told of my new post, with strict instructions to keep the news from his personnel except for the very few who would come in contact with the Conquerors’ envoy, who naturally had been informed. We had passed the envoy’s vessel following in the Station’s orbit, and scarcely an hour elapsed before he himself appeared.
Casimirski and I were having a drink together when he was admitted, and I saw instantly that everything I had heard about The Conquerors was true. He had two officers with him and all wore the same uniform, severely cut and golden gray, and at first glance they looked as though they had been hatched from the same egg. Only their neck insignia distinguished them. The envoy’s was a studded disk, possibly of platinum, as big as the Order of the Garter and suspended from what looked like a gold-and-black enameled chain. His aides wore smaller ovals, green and rimmed with gold, hanging from narrower plain chains. All three wore rows of vertical metal ornaments, enameled, mysterious in design and color, but of fine craftsmanship; Faberge, I think, could have done no better. But the strangest thing was that although they indeed were men, they were men differently constructed. Their bones seemed not only flatter than our own, but hinged differently, ais if put together by a different Maker. They did not move as we move. And their eyes—well, all I can say is that they are alive but not in the same way as ours, or even as a tiger’s or a hawk’s.
They are profoundly disquieting.
Casimirski introduced us, and the envoy acknowledged the introduction with only a cursory movement of his right hand, raising it rigidly, palm upward, to his waist. Then he spoke, and as Casimirski had described, it was like a machine speaking.
“Our Supreme Commander is ready,” he informed me. “He will speak with you today, you understand? Decisions will be made.”
Casimirski was as surprised as I myself. “Where is he?” he asked.
“He is… aboard our ship. He came with us, from our fleet.”
We were taken aback.
“You can leave now, yes?” snapped the envoy.
“I shall leave”—I tried to keep my face as expressionless as his—“when I have refreshed myself and discussed matters with General Casimirski here. Let us say in one hour.”
Giving no evidence of whether or not he was annoyed by this, the envoy made the strange motion with his right hand again and withdrew.
Precisely an hour later he was back, and in a matter of minutes he and I and Casimirski, and Casimirski’s aide and Hardesty, were in their shuttle craft and on the way.
Their great ship opened to receive the craft. It settled gently to its berth. We left it and the envoy led us through seemingly endless corridors and compartments, all of metal but carpeted in a dark green, their indirect lighting glowing off walls that alternated between pleasant light grays and blues to soft yellows. I saw their women and children, their noncoms and their other ranks, their priest-scientists—and it was as though none of them saw me. As far as any outward demonstration was concerned, I simply wasn’t there.
Finally an elevator took us vertically at least three hundred feet, and we emerged into some sort of command center, complete with screens not too unlike ours, with communications and control consoles, but all reduced to an utter simplicity we could not have matched.
The room was semicircular, and at the very center of its radius was a crescent console with a single chair behind it. Here one man sat, and I realized immediately that their C-in-C and I now faced each other. I looked at him, and if his officers had seemed to be the quintessence of everything military—well, he was the quintessence of his people. He was tall, taller than any I had yet encountered, and everything about him was accentuated. His face was harder, harsher; his weird moss-agate eyes were colder and more penetrating. A clean white scar zigzagged across his forehead and ended on a cheekbone. His neck insignia was a glowing star hanging from a chain of small golden swords. His service badges swept across his chest.
I looked at him. He looked through me.
The envoy stopped, motioning the others to a halt. “Proceed,” he said.
I marched to within two feet of the console. I bowed.
Slowly he stood up and made the same right-hand gesture as the envoy.
I introduced myself; obviously no one else was going to. “I am Space-Marshal Sir Francis Mackenzie Latrouche, Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the United Nations on Earth,” I said.
“I am Ar’hloyk’ú. I am… Supreme Commander. We are The Conquerors, you… understand?”
His words were recognizable, but his accent could scarcely have been reproduced.
“I shall inform you—yes?—of our demands. Everything then will… depend on you. We have learned much. We understand your wars. Your history is of betrayals, of broken treaties, of war-making against the… defenseless, even women, children, cities. You do not deny this?”
He did not invite me to sit down. He himself showed no sign of doing so. We stood there, staring into each other’s eyes, and I could not deny the statement he had made. “What you have said, Supreme Commander, is true—but only partly true. Not all our military men have been men of honor, but many have. I could name you any number whose sense of honor has been inflexible, who would never think of breaking an agreement, who would scorn to wage war against noncombatants.”
“This,” he said, “we know. We have heard of you and that you were—how do you say?—retired before your last war. Perhaps you, as a man, are capable of honor. Now we must know whether, as Commander-in-Chief, you have power to speak… for all your armed forces? The power to bind them with your word of… honor?”
“I have,” I said. “I can speak for all the nations, for all mankind.”
“That does not interest us. It is whether you can speak for warriors with the honor of a warrior, you understand?”
“I can.”
“Then this is what I say to you. We will bring our fleet within your system so that after you… hear our terms, there need be no delay in carrying them out.”
I nodded, not letting my face betray my surge of anger at his arrogance.
“We shall do this, and we require your word of honor that we shall neither be interfered with nor attacked.”
“You have it,” I replied. “However, there will be one condition.”
“Condition?” He made it sound absolutely unbelievable.
“One condition. The peoples on Earth have no experience of other races. As you know from our media broadcasts, they are already frightened almost to the point of panic. If you bring your fleet too close to Earth, chaos will result. I must request that you come no closer than the vicinity of our Saturn Station, where I met your envoy.”
He thought for a moment—at least he stood there staring at me. Finally, “For the time,” he said, “we will do this. Then we, you and I, will talk again about our terms… also about the status we will give you.”
“And our choice will be?”
His knowledge of English was not quite adequate to putting it concisely, and he had to search for terms to express his exact meaning. At last, however, I gathered that our status, depending on how they rated our capacity for honor, would range from the best, an equivalent of most favored barbarian, to the worst, utter subjugation.
“Your officers have been shown,” he declared. “It is not a desirable condition for men with… pride.”
“How do you accomplish it?” I asked.
He kept on staring through me. “As we have said, that is the one thing we will not tell you, for your decision then would not be your own… you understand?”
I nodded. Further questioning was useless.
“So, when our fleet arrives, a matter of perhaps five of your days, you and I will meet again. Between us, all will be settled. I have your word… of honor?”
“You have my word of honor,” I said.
Again the right-hand gesture. Again I bowed. The conference was at an end. The envoy said, “Come. We shall return.”
The trip back to the Station was a silent one. Only after we had arrived and the envoy’s ship was on its way did any of us give vent to how we felt. Casimirski swore in Polish for a full minute. “God in Heaven!” he cried. “What arrogant sons of bitches! Insufferable! And yet—sir, I hate to say this. I don’t want you, of all people, to think I am a coward, but, sir, I feel that they are a very old culture, incredibly strong, incredibly experienced, and far more dangerous than they look. I don’t care if their armament does seem inferior. There’s more to them than braggadocio, much more.”
“What do you think, Hardesty?”
“I agree, sir. I think we must walk very carefully and maybe even take our lumps, for a time at least, when you and he negotiate. If we have to, of course we’ll fight, but we ought to do it only as a last resort.”
“That is my view also,” I said. “I just hope Corua-Fanit agrees with us when it comes down to the nitty-gritty.”
I composed my report to the Secretary General, and Casimirski sent it off directly. With it, I asked for an up-to-the-minute report on the present disposition of our forces and for instructions as to how I was to take over command were military action to prove necessary. Then we waited for the hours to pass while the messages bridged those vast distances.
The answer came during supper. Corua-Fanit approved of how I’d handled things, assured me there had been no changes in dispositions since the Deputy Chief of Staff’s last report, and told me that when and if necessary, I could immediately assume command through normal staff channels.
Hardesty isn’t happy. He doesn’t trust Corua-Fanit. He doesn’t trust Torkonnen, even if he is somewhere on the other side of the system. However, he agrees that the course we have followed has been the only possible one and that everything does seem to be in order.
October 14
Yes, everything seemed to be in order. But it was not. On the eleventh, right on schedule, the thirteen alien ships neared Saturn and were in touch with us before we could pick them up visually. They said they’d prefer to hover on antigrav but would go into orbit if we so desired—evincing a degree of consideration that seemed foreign to them. I told them to take their choice but that we would prefer them within easy communicating distance.
And at that point all communication was cut off—all except a flood of signals from vessels of our own, vessels that were supposed to be far, far away. None of the signals were in the clear; we could make nothing of them.
“Christ!” shouted Hardesty. “It sounds like a bloody battle going on!”
“It is,” whispered Casimirski.
Half an hour later we found out what had happened. An Aconcagua-class ship pulled in, torn almost to ribbons. We winkled out her crew, what was left of it. Torkonnen had put practically all of our main strength hovering behind Saturn—after all, Corua-Fanit, with my unwitting aid, had set the aliens up for him; and they had decelerated almost completely when he struck. There was no way they could have escaped him—
But then, they didn’t need to.
They did not move. Around each of their vessels there appeared a faint nimbus, extending out to four or five diameters, and whenever a weapon—whether a missile, a laser, a particle beam, anything—was directed at it, it glowed momentarily and then the weapon was either absorbed or exploded or deflected. Each of those halos was impenetrable.
The C.O. of the Aconcagua class sat there having the station medics dress his wounds, gasping out his story. Each of the great ships had opened its maw, and the attack craft had poured forth in swarms—and they too were surrounded by the protective shields. “The bastards must have something combining antigrav and their FTL drives,” said the C.O., shaking his head. “They must. How else could they have managed it? How else?”
Of course it didn’t matter, not in the least. We could tell by the frantic signals sputtering out that Torkonnen’s forces were being swiftly and ruthlessly destroyed, as swiftly and as ruthlessly as he had destroyed those cities.
He had betrayed me. He had tried to betray The Conquerors. He had betrayed Earth and all mankind.
I only hoped that he would be on Earth when I arrived.
Half an hour later, with as many of the Station’s people as we could crowd aboard, we were on our way; and we made it in two and a half days, setting down at Geneva Spaceport. We knew The Conquerors would be coming, but we also knew that they’d be in no hurry. They had no need to be.
Ashore, I was immediately surrounded by a gaggle of staff officers and hysterical civilians. I pushed through them to a limo I recognized as Corua-Fanit’s, waited for Hardesty to get in with me, and told the driver, “Take me to your leader.”
“He’s at Armed Forces Headquarters,” he said.
“Get there!” ordered Hardesty.
We rode in silence, and it took only a few minutes to reach the old League of Nations building by the lake where I, as C-in-C, would have had my office.
We marched directly, Hardesty and I, to the office of the Chief of Staff, and there we found them both: Corua-Fanit, looking as though he had been suddenly pumped out, then filled with cold, gray dishwater, and Torkonnen, massive and lowering, frightened now but still hostile and defiant. Whether he had returned from space or whether he had even been off Earth, I did not know. Nor did I care.
I said nothing to them. There would have been no point to it. And if they spoke, I did not hear it.
Instead, I drew the pistol I had taken from the Station and shot each of them. I shot them in the forehead, killing each instantly. Then I sent Hardesty to find men to get them out of there, to dispose of them.
I sat down at the desk, began this entry in my journal, and waited for The Conquerors to come down. Hardesty took a chair next to me.
We waited patiently. What else could we do? Now they are here. Through the window I can see the sky filled with their small assault craft, each surrounded by its protective field, the field that renders it invulnerable. They are coming down swiftly. In the distance, they look almost like falling leaves.
Now their first craft has landed, on the lawn across the road and directly in front of Headquarters.
Five of them have marched out of it, and they are striding, in their precise, strangely jointed way, toward us. In moments they will be here. And they are no longer expressionless.
I must say that I do not like the look on their fa—
Editor's Introduction to:
LEPANTO
by Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Constantinople, the City of the Golden Horn, capital of Byzantium, fell in 1453 to the cannon of the Ottoman Turks; with it fell the last of the Eastern Roman Empire. For the next hundred years all Europe was threatened. Soliman, known to Europe as Suleiman the Magnificent, besieged Vienna in 1529 and came within an ace of taking the city.
In 1571 the Turks struck at the Venetian lion’s holdings, and threatened to turn the Mediterranean into a Turkish lake. It was no idle threat. The Turkish fleet of galleys was the largest in the world, and Christendom was hopelessly divided. France had made alliance with the Turks.
One man saw the danger. Pius V prevailed upon the Spanish and the Venetians to join forces in a grand alliance. Philip II of Spain, son of Charles V, sent his fleet under the command of his bastard half brother Don John of Austria. John, at 26, was the most able commander of his time. (He is not the fickle “Don John” of Mozart’s opera.) The Turkish fleet concentrated at the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth near the fortified town of Lepanto. The Turkish fleet boasted 270 galleys to oppose Don John’s 220; but the Christian fleet included six “super galleys,” known as galeasses, which were deployed in front of the Christian battle line.
The fleets met in the narrow straits. Ali Pasha, the Turkish commander, had 400 Janissary shock troops aboard his flagship. He steered directly for Don John’s flagship Real. The ships crashed together and became entangled. Ali called for reinforcements from the galleys in reserve behind his line. Other Christian ships rushed to aid the Real.
Twice the Janissaries boarded the Real and were swept back by her 300 arquebusiers. Twice again Don John’s soldiers boarded the Turkish flagship and reached the mainmast, before Colonna in the Papal flagship came alongside the Turk and raked her decks with musket fire. Don John’s third charge carried, and the whole of the Turkish center fled.
There Will Be War Volume IV Page 12
