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From their chimneys thick smoke poured out the criminal records were being incinerated in the Ministry of Police. Tax records were burning in the Ministry of Finance. Educational information about Kandarian citizens flamed and smoked in the Ministry of Education. Even voting and vehicle-registry lists were being wiped out of existence by flames and the crushing of ashes at appropriate agencies.
It ruthlessly made use of its local, concentrated strength. It was outnumbered in the whole battle area by not less than ten to one. But the Mekinese fleet was scattered. Where it struck, the Kandarian fleet was four and five, and sometimes twenty, ships to one.
The hopeless situation of the Kandarian fleet would become a hundred times worse. And Mekinese counter-intelligence would make a search for the origin of such improvements. Since Kandar was to have been attacked and occupied, it would be a place of special search. The only unsuspected source, of course, would be Talents, Incorporated.
But presently it was alone, and the battle was raging confusion scattered over light-minutes, and somebody went down in to the engine room and brazed in a low-power overdrive unit providentially made by a junior officer and the flagship of the Kandarian fleet waded in erratically, never knowing where it would come out, but rarely failing to find a Mekinese ship to launch at.
It was not even faintly like the ambush of a cruiser on the bottom of a Kandarian sea, waiting to assassinate a fleet when its complement went on board. But Bors didn't like what he'd just done. The figures wouldn't come out right. Impatiently, he sent for Logan. The mathematical Talent came into the control room. "Will you calculate this for me?" Bors asked irritably.
Then there were flashes brighter than the stars. A Kandar cruiser blew up soundlessly. But far, far away other things detonated, and what had been proud structures of steel and beryllium, armed and manned, became mere incandescent vapor. A third clumping of Mekinese ships. The Kandarian fleet overwhelmed it; overrode it; used exactly the tactics the Mekinese might have used.
The third phase of the battle was much more of an open fight, ship against ship, except that more and more Kandarian ships were using low-power overdrive clumsily and inefficiently, but to the very great detriment of Mekin's grand fleet. The Mekinese officers could not quite grasp that their antagonists were doing the impossible. They became confused.
And there would be the small tumult Bors had said was in preparation. The king and the Kandarian fleet would fight, quite hopelessly and to their own annihilation, when the Mekinese fleet appeared. It would be something Kandar would always remember. It was likely that she would not be the most docile of the worlds conquered by Mekin. The Mekinese would always and everywhere be resented.
There's plenty of time to prepare before they get here!" He smiled, as if at a joke. Young Captain Bors was not impressed. He and all the other officers of the Kandarian defense forces had searched desperately for something that could be done to avert the catastrophe before them. They'd failed to find even the promise of a hope.
He could re-compute not only the tables for the missiles, but the data for low-power overdrive which would make any fleet invincible. And there was the Kandarian fleet. If its existence became known, it would mean the destruction of Kandar. Every soul of all its millions would die with every tree and blade of grass, every flower, beast and singing bird, even the plankton in its seas.
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