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Updated: June 8, 2025
When a submerged space-cruiser, planning assassination, was itself blown to bits with no chance to strike back, the Mekinese fleet was approximately somewhere else. When a cabinet meeting disheartened King Humphrey, the fleet was much nearer to Kandar. But days of highly-tedious eventlessness were still ahead of the war-fleet.
There were the tables of Logan's calculation. Bors found himself thinking sardonically that Logan should be shot because he had no obligation of loyalty to Kandar, and could as readily satisfy his hunger for recognition in the Mekinese service as in Kandar's. The crew.... That was the heart of the situation. The Isis could not be salvaged. She should be destroyed.
For a long time there was only blueness overhead, and the salt smell of the sea, and now and again flights of small birds which had no memory of the flight of their ancestors from ancient Earth. The planet Kandar rolled grandly in space, awaiting its destiny. The sun shone, the sun set; in another place it was midnight and at still another it was early dawn.
A curt and authoritative and well-recognized voice snapped, "All ships keep formation on flagship. Course coordinates...." The voice gave them. "There's a clump of enemy ships beginning to organize! We hit them!" The fleet of Kandar came around the gas-giant world and flung itself at the fleet of Mekin. It seemed that everything was subject to intolerable delay.
"What terms can you hope for?" it demanded. "You attacked our ships. You indulged in destruction! How can you hope for terms?" The Pretender scratched his ear thoughtfully. He regarded the radar screen with regret. "We ask life for the people of our planet," he said steadily. He was annoyed that he had to speak for the tardy King of Kandar. "We ask that they not be punished for our resistance."
It appeared in the middle of a Mekinese sub-formation, loosed missiles and vanished before anything could be intercepted. There was no target for Mekinese bombs to home on when they got to where the Liberty had been. Then the fleet of Kandar appeared. It broke out in single ships and in pairs, and then in groups of fives and tens.
They were surrounded by enemies, but when those enemies tried to gather together for strength, the mass of murderously-fighting ships of Kandar swung upon the incipient group and blasted it. Nearly half the Mekinese fleet was out of action before Bors's ship fired a single missile.
Captain Bors went back to the palace. He was savagely pleased. He and the air-fleet men had done something. They'd had some satisfaction. They'd killed some Mekinese and ruined a plan to assassinate the Kandar fleet. But they'd only gotten an immediate satisfaction. Kandar was still to be conquered. Nothing important had changed. Bors made his way to the king's study. He entered.
That's Talents, Incorporated information!" There was a fleet on the way to Kandar. It could not be said to be traveling in space, of course. If there had been an observer somewhere, he could not conceivably have detected the ships. There would be no occultations of stars; no blotting out of any of the hundreds and thousands of millions of bright specks which filled all the firmament.
He pointed, not out a port but at a screen where a boiling mass of bright specks showed the Mekinese fleet just out of overdrive and speeding toward the dummy formation, sorting itself into attack formation as it moved. "The king's not here on time," observed Bors grimly. "We have to play his hand for him, Uncle. We haven't the right to commit Kandar by beginning to fight ourselves.
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