This makes me a little happier, dear, he thought. I didn’t feel it was fitting that they mean to build you a big tomb on Founders’ Hill. I wanted your ashes strewn over land and sea, into sun and wind. Then if ever I came back here I could dream every brightness was yours. But they understand what they do, your people. A corner of his mouth bent upward. It’s I who am the sentimental old fool. Would you laugh if you could know?
He stooped closer. You believed you would know, Kossara. If you do, won’t you help me believe too—believe that you still are?
His sole answer was the priest’s voice rising and falling through archaic words. Flandry nodded. He hadn’t expected more. He couldn’t keep himself from telling her, I’m sorry, darling.
And I won’t kiss what’s left, I who kissed you. He searched among his languages for the best final word. Sayonara. Since it must be so. Stepping back a pace, he bowed three times very deeply, turned, and departed.
Bodin Miyatovich and his wife waited outside. The weather was milder than before, as if a ghost of springtime flitted fugitive ahead of winter. Traffic boomed in the street. Walkers cast glances at the three on the stairs, spoke to whatever companions they had, but didn’t stop; they taught good manners on Dennitza.
Draga Miyatovich took Flandry by the elbow. “Are you well, Dominic?” she asked anxiously. “You’ve gone pale.”
“No, nothing,” he said. “I’m recovering fast, thanks to your kindness.”
“You should rest. I’ve noticed you hour after hour poring over that report—” She saw his expression and stopped her speech.
In a second he eased his lips, undamped his fists, and raised memory of what he had come from today up against that other memory. “I’d no choice,” he said. To her husband: “Bodin, I’m ready to work again. With you. You see, I’ve found your target.”
The Gospodar peered around. “What? Wait,” he cautioned.
“True, we can’t discuss it here,” Flandry agreed. “Especially, I suppose, on holy ground … though she might not have minded.”
She’d never have been vindictive. But she’d have understood how much this matters to her whole world: that in those broken mutterings of my son’s I found what I thought I might find, the coordinates of Chereion, Aycharaych’s planet.
XIX
The raiders from Dennitza met the guardians of the red sun, and lightning awoke.
Within the command bridge of the Vatre Zvezda, Bodin Miyatovich stared at a display tank. Color-coded motes moved around a stellar globe to show where each vessel of his fleet was—and, as well as scouts and instruments could learn, each of the enemy’s—and what it did and when it died. But their firefly dance, of some use to a lifelong professional, bewildered an unskilled eye; and it was merely a sideshow put on by computers whose real language was numbers. He swore and looked away in search of reality.
The nearest surrounded him in metal, meters, intricate consoles, flashing signal bulbs, dark-uniformed men who stood to their duties, sat as if wired in place, walked back and forth on rubbery-shod feet. Beneath a hum of engines, ventilators, a thousand systems throughout the great hull, their curt exchanges chopped. To stimulate them, it was cool here, with a thunderstorm tang of ozone.
The Gospodar’s gaze traveled on, among the view-screens which studded bulkheads, overhead, deck—again, scarcely more than a means for keeping crew who did not have their ship’s esoteric senses from feeling trapped. Glory brimmed the dark, stars in glittering flocks and Milky Way shoals, faerie-remote glimmer of nebulae and a few sister galaxies. Here in the outer reaches of its system, the target sun was barely the brightest, a coal-glow under Bellatrix. At chance moments a spark would flare and vanish, a nuclear burst close enough to see. But most were too distant; and never another vessel showed, companion or foe. Such was the scale of the battle.
And yet it was not large as space combats went. Springing from hyperdrive to normal state, the Dennitzan force—strong, but hardly an armada—encountered Merseian craft which sought to bar it from accelerating inward. As more and more of the latter drew nigh and matched courses with invaders, action spread across multimillions of kilometers. Hours passed before two or three fighters came so near, at such low relative speeds, that they could hope for a kill; and often their encounter was the briefest spasm, followed by hours more of maneuver. Those gave time to make repairs, care for the wounded, pray for the dead.
“They’ve certainly got protection,” Miyatovich growled. “Who’d have expected this much?”
Scouts had not been able to warn him. The stroke depended altogether on swiftness. Merseian observers in the neighborhood of Zoria had surely detected the fleet’s setting out. Some would have gone to tell their masters, others would have dogged the force, trying to learn where it was bound. (A few of those had been spotted and destroyed, but not likely all.) No matter how carefully plotted its course, and no matter that its destination was a thinly trafficked part of space, during the three-week journey its hyperwake must have been picked up by several travelers who passed within range. So many strange hulls together, driving so hard through Merseian domains, was cause to bring in the Navy.
If Miyatovich was to do anything to Chereion, he must get there, finish his work, and be gone before reinforcements could arrive. Scouts of his, prowling far in advance near a sun whose location seemed to be the Roidhunate’s most tightly gripped secret, would have carried too big a risk of giving away his intent. He must simply rush in full-armed, and hope.
“We can take them, can’t we?” he asked.
Rear Admiral Raich, director of operations, nodded.
“Oh, yes. They’re outnumbered, outgunned. I wonder why they don’t withdraw.”
“Merseians aren’t cowards,” Captain Yulinatz, skipper of the dreadnaught, remarked. “Would you abandon a trust?”
“If my orders included the sensible proviso that I not contest lost cases when it’s possible to scramble clear and fight another day—yes, I would,” Raich said. “Merseians aren’t idiots either.”
“Could they be expecting help?” Miyatovich wondered. He gnawed his mustache and scowled.
“I doubt it,” Raich replied. “We know nothing significant can reach us soon.” He did keep scouts far-flung throughout this stellar vicinity, now that he was in it. “They must have the same information to base the same conclusions on.”
Flandry, who stood among them, his Terran red-white-and-blue gaudy against their indigo or gray, cleared his throat. “Well, then,” he said, “the answer’s obvious. They do have orders to fight to the death. Under no circumstances may they abandon Chereion. If nothing else, they must try to reduce our capability of damaging whatever is on the planet.”
“Bonebrain doctrine,” Raich grunted.
“Not if they’re guarding something vital,” Miyatovich said. “What might it be?”
“We can try for captures,” Yulinatz suggested: reluctantly, because it multiplied the hazard to his men.
Flandry shook his head. “No point in that,” he declared. “Weren’t you listening when he talked en route? Nobody lands on Chereion except by special permission which is damn hard to get—needs approval of both the regional tribune and the planet’s own authorities, and movements are severely restricted. I don’t imagine a single one of the personnel we’re killing and being killed by has come within an astronomical unit of the globe.”