"So you say," Hlott growled. "Your record to date hardly justifies belief."
"Most honored captain," Ger begged, "I have inspected the work of these people. My feeble powers were insufficient to grasp their concepts. I could only gape in awe at what was demonstrated. But scholars in the physical sciences, who have studied more deeply, assure me—"
"I don't give a curse in nonexistence what they assure you, honorable steersman," Hlott answered. "If it pleases them to tinker with a new idea, let them. Something worthwhile may or may not come from it. But I am responsible for the survival of Vorlak as an independent world—and I am not going to gamble half our resources on as crazy an effort as this, masterminded by a mouthful of planetless lunatics. Go!"
Ger wrung his hands. "Noble master—"
Hlott rose to his feet. "Go," he shouted. "Before I chop you both in pieces!"
The borren snarled and crouched.
"But the noble President of Council does not realize—"
Donnan waved Ger back. "Never mind, pal," he said. "I know you hate to come right out and say this. But it's got to be done."
He planted himself solidly before the Draga and stated: "You must know I've got the backing of several Councillors. They liked what we showed them."
"Yes." Hlott relaxed enough to snort a laugh. "I have heard. Praalan, Seva, Urlant. The weakest and most impressionable members of the entire Draga class. What does that mean?"
"Exactly this, my captain." Donnan's lips bent into a sort of smile. He ticked the points off on his fingers. "One: they agree with me that if the stalemate drags on much longer, Kandemir is going to win for sure. The nomad empire has more resources in the long run. Two: once equipped with the new detectors, and the prospect of still fancier gadgets—remember, Kandemir's vassals include sedentary industrial cultures that do know how to organize weapons development—Tarkamat is going to come out looking for a showdown. So we haven't got very much time in any case. Three: if we prepare for it, we, the anti-Kandemirian alliance, can force the showdown ourselves, with a pretty fair chance of winning. Four: this is so important that Praalan and Company can't continue to support a President of the Council too bullheaded to realize the simple facts."
Muscles bunched and knotted along the warlord's body. Almost, the borren went for Donnan's throat. Hlott seized its neck and expended enough temper restraining that huge mass to retort, slit-eyed but self-possessed:
"Ah, you have gone behind my back, then, and awakened intrigues against me, eh? That shall certainly be repaid you."
"I couldn't help going behind your back," Donnan snapped. "You kept it turned on me, in spite of my loudest hollering."
"Praalan, Seva, and Urlant! What can they accomplish? Let them try to force an election. Just let them dare."
"Oh, they won't by themselves, my lord. I talked 'em out of that. Persuaded them they don't, none of them, have the following—or the brains and toughness—to boss these roughneck admirals. They wouldn't last a week. However . . . they do have some resources. In cahoots, their power is not negligible. So if they were to join forces with Yenta Saeter, who is very nearly as strong as you—"
"What!"
"Got the idea? My three chums will support Yenta because I've talked them into the idea that it's more important what weapons Vorlak can get than what master Vorlak has. Yenta doesn't think too much of me and my schemes, but he's agreed to organize my project once he gets the Presidency, in return for the help of my three Dragar."
Hlott cursed and struck. Donnan sidestepped the blow. The borren glided forward. Donnan closed with Hlott. He didn't try to hurt the noble, but he went into a clinch. The unhuman body struggled to break loose. Cable-strong arms threw Donnan from side to side. Teeth sought his shoulder.
"Easy, friend. Easy!" Donnan gasped. As the borren lunged, the man forced Hlott around as a shield. The great jaws nearly closed on the Draga's leg. The borren roared and drew back.
"Let's not fight, my captain," the Terrestrial said. His teeth rattled with being shaken. He bit his tongue and choked on an oath. "If . . . wait, call off your pet, will you?—if I meant you any harm, would I . . . have come here . . . and told you?"
Momentarily balked, the borren turned on Ger, who scuttled around a couch. "Farlak!" Hlott yelled. The beast flattened its ears and snarled. Hlott shouted again. It lay down stiff and reluctant.
Donnan let go, staggered to a couch, sat down and panted. "My . . . my captain . . . is strong as a devil," he wheezed, rather more noisily than he had to. "I couldn't . . . have held out . . . another minute."
A flicker of smugness softened the wrath on the lutrine face. Hlott said frigidly, "Your presumption deserves a very slow death."
"Pardon me, my captain," Donnan said. "You know I'm not up on your customs. Back home, in my country, one person was pretty much equal to another. I can't remember what's good manners in a society as different as this."
He rose again. "I didn't come to threaten you or any such thing," he continued, feeling how big a liar he was. "Let's say I just wanted to warn you . . . let you know what the sentiments of your colleagues are. I'd hate to see our side lose a leader as brilliant as yourself. If you'd only consider this one question of policy, you could swing back Seva, Urlant, and Praalan to your side. And—uh—" he laid a finger alongside his nose and winked—"if this move were made precisely right, the honorable Yenta could be enticed out on a nice breezy limb . . . and suddenly discover he was alone there, and you stood behind him with a bucksaw."
Hlott poised in silence. Donnan could almost watch the fury drain from him and the calculation rise. Muscle by muscle, the human allowed himself to relax. He'd probably won his case.
Practical politics was another art which had been more highly developed on Earth than it was here.
XIII
THE BATTLE OF BRANDOBAR
Annotated English version
To the literary historian, this ballad is notable as the first important work of art (as opposed to factual records, scientific treatises, or translations from planetary languages) composed in Uru. However, the student of military technics can best explain various passages which, couched in epical terms, convey the general sense but not the details.
The naval engagement in question was fought near the Brandobar Cluster, an otherwise undistinguished group of stars between Vorlak and Mayast. On the one side was the alliance of Vorlak, Monwaing, and several lesser races. Secret demonstrations of new weapons, combined with indignation at the ruin of Earth, had induced a number of hitherto neutral planets to declare war on Kandemir. Opposed to them was the Grand Fleet of the nomads, which included not only their clan units but various auxiliaries recruited from non-Kandemirian subjects of their empire. Their force was numerically much stronger than the attackers.
* * *
Three kings rode out on the way of war
(The stars burn bitterly clear):
Three in league against Tarkamat,
Master of Kandemir.
And the proudest king, the Vorlak lord,
(The stormwinds clamor their grief)
Had been made the servant in all but name
Of a planetless wanderer chief.
And the secondmost king was a wingless bird
(A bugle: the gods defied!)
Who leagued at last with the Vorlak lord
When the exiles were allied.
And the foremost king in all but name
(New centuries scream in birth)
Was the captain of one lonely ship
That had fled from murdered Earth.
For the world called Earth was horribly slain
(The stars burn bitterly clear)
By one unknown; but the corpse's guards
Were built on Kandemir.
The Earthlings fled—to seek revenge
(The stormwinds clamor their grief)
For ashen homes and sundered hopes
First seen in unbelief.
And haughty Vorlak spoke t
o them
(A bugle: the gods defied!):
"Kandemir prowls beyond our gates.
Can ye, then, stay the tide?"
And the Monwaing wisemen spoke to them
(New centuries scream in birth):
"Can ye arm us well, we will league with you,
Exiles from shattered Earth."
And the wanderer captain told the kings
(The stars burn bitterly clear):
"I have harnessed and broken to my will
Space and Force and Fear."
Tarkamat, Master of Kandemir,
(The stormwinds clamor their grief)
Laughed aloud: "I will hurl them down
Like a gale-blown autumn leaf."
And he gathered his ships to meet the three
(A bugle: the gods defied!)
As an archer rattles his arrow sheaf
And shakes his bow in pride.
Forth from their lairs, by torchlight suns,
(New centuries scream in birth)
The nomad ships came eager to eat
The wanderers from Earth.
And hard by a cluster of youthful suns
(The stars burn bitterly clear)
Known by the name of Brandobar,
They saw the enemy near.
And the three great kings beheld their foe
(The stormwinds clamor their grief)
With half again the ships they had,
Like arrows in a sheaf.
"Now hurl your vessels, my nomad lords,
(A bugle: the gods defied!)
One single shattering time, and then
Their worlds we shall bestride."
"Sleep ye or wake ye, wanderer chief,
(New centuries scream in birth)
That ye stir no hand while they seek our throats,
Yon murderers of Earth?"
Militechnicians can see from the phrasing alone, without consulting records, that the allied fleet must have proceeded at a high uniform velocity—free fall—in close formation. This offered the most tempting of targets to the Kandemirians, whose ships had carefully avoided building up much intrinsic speed and thus were more maneuverable. Tarkamat moved to englobe the allies and fire on them from all sides.
"Have done, have done, my comrades twain.
(The stars burn bitterly clear)
Mine eyes have tallied each splinter and nail
In yonder burning spear.
"Let them come who slew my folk.
(The stormwinds clamor their grief)
We wait for them as waits in a sea
The steel-sharp, hidden reef."
The reference here is, of course, to the highly developed interferometric paragravity detectors with which the whole allied fleet was equipped, and which presented to the main computer in their flagship a continuous picture of the enemy dispositions. The nomads had some too, but fewer and of a less efficient model.
Now Kandemir did spurt so close
(A bugle: the gods defied!)
They saw his guns and missiles plain
Go raking for their side.
The exile captain smiled a smile
(New centuries scream in birth)
And woke the first of the wizardries
Born from the death of Earth.
Then Space arose like a wind-blown wave
(The stars burn bitterly clear)
That thunders and smokes and tosses ships
Helpless to sail or steer.
And the angry bees from the nomad hive
(The stormwinds clamor their grief)
Were whirled away past Brandobar
Like a gale-blown autumn leaf.
This was the first combat use of the space distorter. The artificial production of interference phenomena enabled the allied craft to create powerful repulsion fields about themselves, or change the curvature of the world lines of outside matter—two equivalent verbalizations of Goldspring's famous fourth equation. In effect, the oncoming enemy missiles were suddenly pushed to an immense distance, as if equipped with faster-than-light engines of their own.
Tarkamat recoiled. That is, he allowed the two fleets to interpenetrate and pass each other. The allies decelerated and re-approached him. He acted similarly. For, in the hours that this required, his scientists had pondered what they observed. Already possessing some knowledge of the physical principles which underlay this new defense, they assured Tarkamat that it must obey the conservation-of-energy law. A ship's power plant could accelerate a missile away, but not another ship of comparable size. Nor could electromagnetic phenomena be much affected.
Tarkamat accordingly decided to match velocities and slug it out at short range with his clumsy but immensely destructive blaster cannon. He would suffer heavy losses, but the greater numbers at his command made victory seem inevitable.
Tarkamat, Master of Kandemir,
(A bugle: the gods defied!)
Rallied his heart. "Close in with them!
Smite them with fire!" he cried.
The nomad vessels hurtled near
(New centuries scream in birth)
And the second wizardry awoke,
Born from the death of Earth.
Then Force flew clear of its iron sheath.
(The stars burn bitterly clear)
Remorseless lightnings cracked and crashed
In the ships of Kandemir.
And some exploded like bursting suns
(The stormwinds clamor their grief)
And some were broken in twain, and some
Fled shrieking unbelief.
Over small distances, such allied vessels as there had been time to equip with it could use the awkward, still largely experimental, but altogether deadly space-interference fusion inductor. The principle here was the production of a non-space band so narrow that particles within the nucleus itself were brought into contiguity. Atoms with positive packing fractions were thus caused to explode. Only a very low proportion of any ship's mass was disintegrated, but that usually served to destroy the vessel. More than half the Kandemirian fleet perished in a few nova-like minutes.
Tarkamat, unquestionably one of the greatest naval geniuses in galactic history, managed to withdraw the rest and re-form beyond range of the allied weapon. He saw that—as yet—it was too restricted in distance to be effective against a fortified planet, and ordered a retreat to Mayast II.
Tarkamat, Master of Kandemir,
(A bugle: the gods defied!)
Told his folk, "We have lost this day,
But the next we may abide.
"Hearten yourselves, good nomad lords.
(New centuries scream in birth)
Retreat with me to our own stronghold.
Show now what ye are worth!"
The third of those wizardries awoke
(The stars burn bitterly clear)
Born from the death of Earth. It spoke,
And the name of it was Fear.
For sudden as death by thunderbolt,
(The stormwinds clamor their grief)
Ringing within the nomad ships
Came the voice of the exile chief.
Tarkamat, Master of Kandemir,
(New centuries scream in birth)
Heard with the least of his men the words
Spoken from cindered Earth.
On the relatively coarse molecular level, the space-interference inductor was both reliable and long-range. Carl Donnan simply caused the enemy hulls to vibrate slightly, modulated this with his voice through a microphone, and filled each Kandemirian ship with his message.
"We have broken ye here by Brandobar.
(The stars burn bitterly clear)
If ye will not yield, we shall follow you
Even to Kandemir.
"But our wish is not for ashen homes,
(The stormwinds clamor their grief)
But to make you freemen once again
And not a nomad fief.
"If ye fight, we will hur
l the sky on your heads.
(A bugle: the gods defied!)
If ye yield, we will bring to your homes and hearts
Freedom to be your bride.
"Have done, have done; make an end of war
(New centuries sing in birth)
And an end of woe and of tyrant rule—
In the name of living Earth!"
Tarkamat reached a cosmic interference fringe and went into faster-than-light retreat. The allies, though now numerically superior, did not pursue. They doubted their ability to capture Mayast II. Instead, they proceeded against lesser Kandemirian outposts, taking these one by one without great difficulty. Mayast could thus be isolated and nullified.
The effect of Donnan's words was considerable. Not only did this shockingly unexpected voice from nowhere strike at the cracked Kandemirian morale; it offered their vassals a way out. If these would help throw off the nomad yoke, they would not be taken over by the winning side, but given independence, even assistance. There was no immediate overt response; but the opening wedge had been driven. Soon allied agents were being smuggled onto those planets, to disseminate propaganda and organize underground movements along lines familiar to Earth's history.
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