The work on the strong points was well under way one day as, at the Command Base, back on Mara, Colmain was laying out a final development of strategy with his General Staff. An interruption occurred in the shape of an aide who came hurrying into the conference room without even the formality of asking permission first.
“What’s this?” growled Colmain, looking up from the submitted plans before him with a scowl on his swarthy face, which at sixty was still handsome enough to provide him compensation in the way of other female companionship for his wife’s lack of interest.
“Sir,” said the aide, “Zombri’s attacked—”
“What?” Colmain was suddenly on his feet; and the rest of the heads of the General Staff with him.
“Over two hundred ships, sir. We just got the signal.” The aide’s voice cracked a little—he was still in his early twenties. “Our men on Zombri are fighting with what they have—”
“Fighting?” Colmain took a sudden step toward the aide almost as if he would hold the man personally responsible. “They’ve started to land assault troops?”
“They’ve landed, sir—”
“How many?”
“We don’t know sir—”
“Knucklehead! How many ships went in to drop men?”
“None, sir,” gasped the aide. “They didn’t drop any men. They all landed.”
“Landed?”
For the fraction of a second, there was no sound at all in the long conference room.
“Do you mean to tell me—” shouted Colmain. “They landed two hundred ships of the first class on Zombri?”
“Yes, sir,” the aide’s voice had thinned almost to a squeak. “They’re cleaning out our forces there and digging in—”
He had no chance to finish. Colmain swung about on his Battle Ops and Patrol Chiefs.
“Hell and damnation!” he roared. “Intelligence!”
“Sir?” answered a Freilander officer halfway down the length of the table.
“What’s the meaning of this?”
“Sir—” stammered the officer. “I don’t know how it happened. The latest reports I had from Harmony, three days ago—”
“Damn the latest reports. I want every ship and every man we can get into space in five hours! I want every patrol ship of any class to rendezvous with everything we can muster here, off Zombri in ten hours. Move!”
The General Staff of the Exotics moved.
It was a tribute to the kind of fighting force that Colmain commanded that they were able to respond at all in so short a time as ten hours to such orders. The fact that they accomplished the rendezvous with nearly four hundred craft of all classes, all carrying near their full complement of crews and assault troops, was on the order of a minor miracle.
Colmain and his chief officers, aboard the flagship, regarded the moon, swimming below them in the Control Eye of the ship. There had been reports of fighting down there up until three hours ago. Now there was a silence that spoke eloquently of captured troops. In addition, Observation reported—in addition to the works instigated by the Exotic forces—another hundred and fifty newly mined entrances in the crust of the moon.
“They’re in there,” said Colmain, “ships and all.”
Now that the first shock of discovery had passed, he was once more a cool and capable commander of forces. He had even found time to make a mental note to get together with this Dorsai, Graeme. Supreme command was always sweet bait to a brilliant youngster; but he would find the Council of United Churches a difficult employer in time—and the drawback of a subordinate position under Colmain himself could be compensated for by the kind of salary the Exotics were always willing to pay. Concerning the outcome of the actual situation before him, Colmain saw no real need for fear, only for haste. It was fairly obvious now that Graeme had risked everything on one bold swoop. He had counted on surprise to get him onto the moon and so firmly entrenched there that the cost of rooting him out would be prohibitive—before reinforcements could arrive.
He had erred only—and Colmain gave him full credit for all but that single error—in underestimating the time it would take for Colmain to gather his strength to retaliate. And even that error was forgiveable. There was no other force on the known worlds that could have been gotten battle-ready in under three times the time.
“We’ll go in,” said Colmain. “All of us—and fight it out on the moon.” He looked around his officers. “Any comment?”
“Sir,” said his Blue Patrol chief, “maybe we could wait them out up here?”
“Don’t you think it,” said Colmain, good-humoredly. “They would not come and dig in, in our own system, without being fully supplied for long enough to establish an outpost we can’t take back.” He shook his head. “The time to operate is now, gentlemen, before the infection has a chance to get its hold. All ships down—even the ones without assault troops. We’ll fight them as if they were ground emplacements.”
His staff saluted and went off to execute his orders.
The Exotic fleet descended on the moon of Zombri like locusts upon an orchard. Colmain, pacing the floor of the control room in the flagship—which had gone in with the rest—grinned as the reports began to flood in of strong points quickly cleaned of the Friendly troops that had occupied them—or dug in ships quickly surrendering and beginning to dig themselves out of the deep shafts their mining equipment had provided for them. The invading troops were collapsing like cardboard soldiers; and Colmain’s opinion of their commander—which had risen sharply with the first news of the attack—began to slip decidedly. It was one thing to gamble boldly; it was quite another to gamble foolishly. It appeared from the morale and quality of the Friendly troops that there had, after all, been little chance of the surprise attack succeeding. This Graeme should have devoted a little more time to training his men and less to dreaming up dramatic actions. It was, Colmain thought, very much what you might expect of a young commander in supreme authority for the first time in his life.
He was enjoying the roseate glow of anticipated victory when it was suddenly all rudely shattered. There was a sudden ping from the deep-space communicator and suddenly two officers at the board spoke at once.
“Sir, unidentified call from—”
“Sir, ships above us—”
Colmain, who had been watching the Zombri surface through his Control Eye, jabbed suddenly at his buttons and the seeker circuit on it swung him dizzily upward and toward the stars, coming to rest abruptly, on full magnification, on a ship of the first class which unmistakably bore the mark of Friendly design and manufacture. Incredulously, he widened his scope, and in one swift survey, picked out more than twenty such ships in orbit around Zombri, within the limited range of his ground-restricted Eye, alone.
“Who is it?” he shouted, turning on the officer who had reported a call.
“Sir—” the officer’s voice was hesitantly incredulous, “he says he’s the Commander of the Friendlies.”
“What?” Colmain’s fist came down on a stud beside the controls of the Eye. A wall screen lit up and a lean young Dorsai with odd, indefinite-colored eyes looked out at him.
“Graeme!” roared Colmain. “What kind of an imitation fleet are you trying to bluff me with?”
“Look again, commander,” answered the young man. “The imitation are digging their way out down there on the surface by you. They’re my sub-class ships. Why’d you think they would be taken so easily? These are my ships of the first class—one hundred and eighty-three of them.”
Colmain jammed down the button and blanked the screen. He turned on his officers at the control panel.
“Report!”
But the officers had already been busy. Confirmations were flooding in. The first of the attacking ships had been dug out and proved to be sub-class ships with sheathing around their phase-shift grids, little weapons, and less armor. Colmain swung back to the screen again, activated it, and found Donal in the same position, waiting for him.
> “We’ll be up to see you in ten minutes,” he promised, between his teeth.
“You’ve got more sense than that, commander,” replied Donal, from the screen. “Your ships aren’t even dug in. They’re sitting ducks as they are; and in no kind of formation to cover each other as they try to jump off. We can annihilate you if you try to climb up here, and lying as you are we can pound you to pieces on the ground. You’re not equipped from the standpoint of supplies to dig in there; and I’m well enough informed about your total strength to know you’ve got no force left at large that’s strong enough to do us any damage.” He paused. “I suggest you come up here yourself in a single ship and discuss terms of surrender.”
Colmain stood, glaring at the screen. But there was, in fact, no alternative to surrender. He would not have been a commander of the caliber he was, if he had not recognized the fact. He nodded, finally, grudgingly.
“Coming up,” he said; and blanked the screen. Shoulders a little humped, he went off to take the little courier boat that was attached to the flagship for his own personal use.
“By heaven,” were the words with which he greeted Donal, when he at last came face to face with him aboard the Friendly flagship, “you’ve ruined me. I’ll be lucky to get the command of five C-class and a tender, on Dunnin’s World, after this.”
It was not far from the truth.
Donal returned to Harmony two days later, and was cheered in triumph even by the sourest of that world’s fanatics, as he rode through the streets to Government Center. A different sort of reception awaited him there, however, when he arrived and went alone to report to Eldest Bright.
The head of the United Council of Churches for the worlds of Harmony and Association looked up grimly as Donal came in, still wearing the coverall of his battle dress under a barrel-cut jacket he had thrown on hastily for the ride from the spaceport. The platform on which he had ridden had been open for the admiration of the crowds along the way; and Harmony was in the chill fall of its short year.
“Evening, gentlemen,” said Donal, taking in not only Bright in the greeting, but two other members of the Council who sat alongside him at his desk. These two did not answer. Donal had hardly expected them to. Bright was in charge here. Bright nodded at three armed soldiers of the native elite guard that had been holding post by the door and they went out, closing the door behind them.
“So you’ve come back,” said Bright.
Donal smiled.
“Did you expect me to go some place else?” he asked.
“This is no time for humor!” Bright’s large hand came down with a crack on the top of the desk. “What kind of an explanation have you got for us, for this outrageous conduct of yours?”
“If you don’t mind, Eldest!” Donal’s voice rang against the gray walls of the room, with a slight cutting edge the three had never heard before and hardly expected on this occasion. “I believe in politeness and good manners for myself; and see no reason why others shouldn’t reciprocate in kind. What’re you talking about?”
Bright rose. Standing wide-legged and shoulder-bent above the smooth, almost reflective surface of the gray desk, the resemblance to the back-alley scrapper for the moment outweighed the Torquemada in his appearance.
“You come back to us,” he said, slowly and harshly, “and pretend not to know how you betrayed us?”
“Betrayed you?” Donal considered him with a quietness that was almost ominous. “How—betrayed you?”
“We sent you out to do a job.”
“I believe I did it,” said Donal dryly. “You wanted a watchtower over the Godless. You wanted a permanent installation on Zombri to spot any buildup on the part of the Exotics to attack you. You remember I asked you to set out in plain terms what you were after, a few days back. You were quite explicit about that being just what you wanted. Well—you’ve got it!”
“You limb of Satan!” blared Bright, suddenly losing control. “Do you pretend to believe that you thought that was all we wanted? Did you mink the anointed of the Lord would hesitate on the threshold of the Godless?” He turned and stalked suddenly around the desk to stand face to face with Donal. “You had them in your power and you asked them only for an unarmed observation station on a barren moon. You had them by the throat and you slew none of them when you should have wiped them from the face of the stars, to the last ship—to the last man!”
He paused and Donal could hear his teeth gritting in the sudden silence.
“How much did they pay you?” Bright snarled.
Donal stood in an unnatural stillness.
“I will pretend,” he said, after a moment, “that I didn’t hear that last remark. As for your questions as to why I asked only for the observation station, that was all you had said you wanted. As to why I did not wipe them out—wanton killing is not my trade. Nor the needless expenditure of my own men in the pursuit of wanton killing.” He looked coldly into Blight’s eyes. “I suggest you could have been a little more honest with me, Eldest, about what you wanted. It was the destruction of the Exotic power, wasn’t it?”
“It was,” gritted Bright.
“I thought as much,” said Donal. “But it never occurred to you that I would be a good enough commander to find myself in the position to accomplish that. I think,” said Donal, letting his eyes stray to the other two black-clad elders as well, “you are hoist by your own petard, gentlemen.” He relaxed; and smiling slightly, turned back to Bright. “There are reasons,” he said, “why it would be very unwise tactically for the Friendly Worlds to break the back of Mara and Kultis. If you’ll allow me to give you a small lesson in power dis—”
“You’ll come up with better answers than you have!” burst out Bright. “Unless you want to be tried for betrayal of your employer!”
“Oh, come now!” Donal laughed out loud.
Bright whirled away from him and strode across the gray room. Flinging wide the door by which Donal had entered, and they had exited, he revealed the three elite guard soldiers. He whirled about, arm outstretched to its full length, finger quivering.
“Arrest that traitor!” he cried.
The guards took a step toward Donal—and in that same moment, before they had any of them moved their own length’s-worth of distance toward him—three faint blue beams traced their way through the intervening space past Bright, leaving a sharp scent of ionized air behind them. And the three dropped.
Like a man stunned by a blow from behind, Bright stared down at the bodies of his three guards. He swayed about to see Donal reholstering his handgun.
“Did you think I was fool enough to come here unarmed?” asked Donal, a little sadly. “And did you think I’d submit to arrest?” He shook his head. “You should have wit enough to see now I’ve just saved you from yourselves.”
He looked at their disbelieving faces.
“Oh, yes,” he said. He gestured to the open wall at the far end of the office. Sounds of celebration from the city outside drifted lightly in on the evening breeze. “The better forty per cent of your fighting forces are out there. Mercenaries. Mercenaries who appreciate a commander who can give them a victory at the cost of next to no casualties at all. What do you suppose their reaction would be if you tried me for betrayal, and found me guilty, and had me executed?” He paused to let the thought sink in. “Consider it, gentlemen.”
He pinched his jacket shut and looked grimly at the three dead elite guards; and then turned back to the elders, again.
“I consider this sufficient grounds for breach of contract,” he said. “You can find yourself another War Chief.”
He turned and walked toward the door. As he passed through it, Bright shouted after him.
“Go to them, then! Go to the Godless on Mara and Kultis!”
Donal paused and turned. He inclined his head gravely.
“Thank you, gentlemen,” he said. “Remember—The suggestion was yours.”
Part-Maran
There remained the interview with
Sayona the Bond. Going up some wide and shallow steps into the establishment—it could not be called merely a building, or group of buildings—that housed the most important individual of the two Exotic planets, Donal found cause for amusement in the manner of his approach.
Farther out, among some shrubbery at the entrance to the—estate?—he had encountered a tall, gray-eyed woman and explained his presence.
“Go right ahead,” the woman had said, waving him onward. “You’ll find him.” The odd part of it was, Donal had no doubt that he would. And the unreasonable certainty of it tickled his own strange sense of humor.
He wandered on by a sunlit corridor that broadened imperceptibly into a roofless garden, past paintings, and pools of water with colorful fish in them—through a house that was not a house, in rooms and out until he came to a small sunken patio, half-roofed over; and at the far end of it, under the shade of the half-roof, was a tall bald man of indeterminate age, wrapped in a blue robe and seated on a little patch of captive turf, surrounded by a low, stone wall.
Donal went down three stone steps, across the patio, and up the three stone steps at the far side until he stood over the tall, seated man.
“Sir,” said Donal. “I’m Donal Graeme.”
The tall man waved him down on the turf.
“Unless you’d rather sit on the wall, of course,” he smiled. “Sitting cross-legged doesn’t agree with everyone.”
“Not at all, sir,” answered Donal, and sat down cross-legged himself.
“Good,” said the tall man; and apparently lost himself in thought, gazing out over the patio.
Donal also relaxed, waiting. A certain peace had crept into him in the way through this place. It seemed to beckon to meditation; and—Donal had no doubt—was probably cleverly constructed and designed for just that purpose. He sat, comfortably now, and let his mind wander where it chose; and it happened—not so oddly at all—to choose to wander in the direction of the man beside him.