Cassius frowned for a moment. Then understanding lit his gray eyes. Rock-still, a terrible change came over him. His was a fierce intensity. He held every muscle rigid to prevent them from trembling in anticipation of swift death.
From the strange smell and the muttering, it was clear that neutraloids were behind him, altered humans. They were blue-skinned, and each had been castrated. They were the Praetor’s invention. The Praetor was presently in the Earth System, and the Praetor was his greatest enemy among the Highborn.
It was possible this was a crude ploy of assassination on the Praetor’s part. Either that or one of the Praetor’s supporters hoped to present the Praetor with an amazing victory.
Cassius used the viewing port. But he no longer watched the blue planet, the jewel of the Solar System. Instead, he used the faint reflection of the viewing port glass. He watched the neutraloids shuffle into the chamber behind him.
They were muscular to an intense degree. Some held stunners. Others gripped vibroknives. Each wore a harness around his blue-tattooed torso. The Grand Admiral had read the reports on the neutraloids. They were dangerous, certainly, but their conditioned rage made it difficult for them to use anything but their hands in combat.
Cassius nodded to himself. This assassination attempt was due to insufficient danger. The Highborn needed deadly goals to concentrate their thinking. When they lacked deadly goals, the infighting began. The trouble was that Cassius was waiting for the premen of Social Unity to make their grand move. He had studied the files concerning their directors and this General Hawthorne. Cassius thought South America might be the location of the big push on the premen’s part. Until that push occurred, he kept most of his Highborn out of combat there. Let the premen bled each other. The FEC armies had their uses.
Ah, the neutraloids hesitated. That hesitation might allow one or two of them time to use their wits.
“Come on then,” said Cassius. “If you’re going to do it, do it!”
Behind him, the neutraloids snarled. They were so easily enraged. An enraged foe usually made critical blunders. He would have to enrage the Praetor in a subtle way. Yet, the Praetor had a following, and the Praetor possessed powerful friends in high command. He would have to handle that delicately.
Behind him, one of the neutraloids hurled his stunner.
Grand Admiral Cassius shifted. The stunner flew past him and cracked against the viewing port. He allowed himself a low, taunting chuckle.
The snarling intensified. The small creatures shuffled nearer. One of them actually lifted his stunner as if to aim.
Had the Praetor’s Training Masters made a breakthrough among the neutraloids? Cassius decided he would have to change that. These neutraloids, he despised the entire angle of them. Castration—it was disgusting.
Grand Admiral Cassius whirled around as a leaner neutraloid lifted his stunner and fired. The charge took Cassius in the gut, caused him to stagger backward. A numb sensation spread across his stomach.
The seven neutraloids howled and gnashed their teeth. Stunners and vibroblades hit the deck, but not all of them. Another stunner numbed the Grand Admiral’s left thigh. Then the neutraloids charged in a pack, screaming in their high-pitched voices, taunting him with obscenities. They shouted what they would do to his corpse.
Grand Admiral Cassius was a nine-foot giant with impossible strength and abnormal reflexes. He used his fists like sledgehammers and waded among the berserk creatures. He took a deep gash in the side and another in his numbed thigh. Neutraloids bounced off the walls, hit the deck with broken bones and fell with crushed skulls.
The survivors screamed wild cries. Cassius roared with joy, with battle-madness. He tore the last neutraloids apart as a shredding machine might pulp wood. Combat, he loved it. To win, to crush, it was the joy of life.
He lifted the last neutraloid above his head and heaved the creature against the bulkhead. The sound of breaking bones was beautiful. In such a manner, he would break the Praetor and break the premen who sought to survive against their genetic superiors, the new lords of the Solar System.
-8-
Twelve days after taking the title of Supreme Commander, Hawthorne sat at his desk. His eyes ached from reading endless reports.
He turned off the vidscreen and leaned back, rubbing his temples. Then he opened a drawer, took out a bottle and twisted the cap, dumping three white capsules onto his palm. He popped them into his mouth and chewed. The pills were dry, with a bitter taste. He swallowed several times, wishing he had a glass of water.
His security team lacked Political Harmony Corps’ subtlety. If only he could trust Yezhov. Then they could pull Earth’s resources together and aim them all solely at the Highborn. The deadly infighting between directors and between the various governmental agencies sapped too much energy, stole too much time and misdirected the focus of too many powerful personalities. That this power-struggle was part of man’s inherent nature didn’t make it any easier to accept. One would have thought that with such a frightening enemy as the Highborn, everyone’s focus would be on species-survival.
A blue light blinked on his vidscreen. He pressed the communication’s button and Captain Mune’s harsh features appeared.
“I have a priority message from Commodore Blackstone of the Vladimir Lenin,” said Mune.
“How did to it come to route through you?”
“It has a Security Gold clearance.”
Hawthorne massaged his forehead, bewildered. Then he realized that Security Gold was from the old days, before the Highborn attack that had taken out Geneva.
Hawthorne split the vidscreen and typed in, Vladimir Lenin. Ah, it was a Zhukov-class battleship. They had too few of those. It was stationed in a far-Mars orbit.
“A priority message?” Hawthorne asked.
“Shall I patch it through, sir?”
“Please.”
Hawthorne sat up as he became aware of what he was reading from Commodore Blackstone. The Vladimir Lenin had been in far-Mars orbit for a singular reason. That a Zhukov-class battleship had been used instead of a picket ship was incredible and almost criminally wasteful of space combat resources. Through powerful teleoptic scopes, the battleship had monitored the nearly invisible cyborg battle pods. The only reason the Vladimir Lenin had been able to do that was that the tracking officer there had been given the exact coordinates to watch.
The critical part of the Security Gold message read: The battle pods have begun deceleration. According to the computer’s estimates, that will bring them into near-Mars orbit in fifty-seven days.
According to Hawthorne’s information, the cyborgs were supposed to head directly to Earth. Why then had they begun deceleration for Mars? Hawthorne lurched to his feet and began to pace. He strode back and forth along the worn lane in his carpet. He ignored a call on his communicator. Captain Mune knocked on the door several minutes later.
“Handle it!” Hawthorne shouted through the door. “I’m thinking.” There was no second knock and no further communication interruptions.
Hawthorne clasped his bony hands behind his back. His head tilted forward to what many of his officers would have recognized as his ‘deep thinking’ pose. As he churned his way back and forth across his carpet, the headache receded and then disappeared altogether. He examined many apparently disparate facts. Then he began to think about Doom Stars, the bedrock of Highborn power.
When he was like this, Hawthorne had likened his mind to a computer that pulled up one file and examined it with complete concentration. He brought up the next file and gave his complete concentration to it in turn. He halted once and looked up in wonder. He had been so consumed with cyborgs, directors and maintaining political power, that strategy for the war had fallen into second place.