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The aggressors had a nasty habit of imposing special humiliations upon citizens who'd been prominent before they were conquered. He went unannounced into King Humphrey's study, where the monarch conferred dispiritedly with Captain Bors's uncle, the exiled Pretender of Tralee, who listened with interest. The king was talking doggedly to his old friend. "No. You're mistaken.
Only the mass counted. So there was spaciousness and freshness and something close to elation on Bors's ship on the day it was to fight for the high satisfaction of getting killed. Bors saw to it that his men breakfasted heartily. "We've got a party ahead," he told the watch at mess. "Eat plenty but give the other watch a chance to fill up, too."
He wanted to create the impression of men turned pirates because everything they lived for had been destroyed, and who now were running amok among the planets Mekin had subjugated. The broadcast was not incitement to revolt, because Bors's ship was posing as the only survivor of a planet's fleet.
"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!"
It could be nothing else. That officer knew that something was coming out from Tralee. It was on approximately a collision course. But a ship traveling under power should gain velocity as long as its drive was on. When traveling outward from the sun and not under power, it should lose velocity by so many feet per second to the sun's gravitational pull. Bors's ship did neither.
In overdrive, Bors's ship traveled almost with the speed of thought, but there was absolutely nothing to think about while journeying. Not about the journey, anyhow. While the ship drove on, however, the cargo-ship seized on Tralee made its way toward Glamis and a meeting with the fleet, then gloomily sweeping in orbit around Glamis Two.
All of them passed to its rear. For the fraction of a second it was visible as an object instead of a speck. That object swelled. It went by. Bors's voice, relayed, said, "Coup! You're out of action. Right?" The skipper of the ship just up from Kandar said grudgingly, "Hell, yes! We threw fifteen missiles at it, and missed with every one! This is magic!
The small space-navy of Kandar waited, aground, to take the king and some other persons on board at the last moment. When the Mekinese navy arrived or as much of it as was needed to make resistance hopeless the end for Kandar would have come. That was the impending disaster. If it came too soon, Bors's task of destruction couldn't be completed as was wished.
That couldn't be solved and the solution put into practice during one fleet-action. Once the enemy had experienced it, they could later duplicate it without doubt, but it would still be impossible to counter. So Bors's men were cheerful to the point of gaiety. They would fight magnificently because they were thinking of what they would do to the enemy instead of what the enemy might do to them.
Junior officers, in particular, would have examined the low-power overdrive tables, and would have studied longingly the reports of Bors's use of low-power overdrive against an enemy squadron off Meriden.
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