Particularly were they vulnerable when inter-tribal jealousies did more to help than another fleetful of guns. A half-day’s travel from Ganelash, for instance, was a numerous force of Vilks. If Henlo knew of them, they assuredly knew of Henlo and what he was doing. But those ships were busy idling, waiting until the Farlans were through. The Vilk commander was a sworn blood-enemy of Ganelash’s defender, and he preferred to wait and then move in to finish the job—and pick up the loot. Whether he would even bother to swipe at the Farlans was problematical.
And as far as Henlo knew, Vice-Admiral Gem’s detachment had yet to detect even one Vilkan ship blazing toward Farla.
Henlo surveyed the ruined planet below and signaled for the action to be broken off. It might be just as well to leave those hungry Vilks some unbroken loot to occupy them.
The fleet rendezvoused around Gern, and Henlo noticed that there had been few casualties—fewer even than he’d anticipated. Once he’d listened to his brother officers, he discovered the reason. They were almost unanimous in their nearly un-Farlan admiration for Miranid, and were working with a coordination no previous Admiral-in-Chief had been able to beg out of them.
Henlo scratched the side of his nose, telling himself that if he were the Minister for Preparedness, he would most certainly have the man killed the instant victory was assured.
But how could anyone have anticipated this development? It had so come about that the man had been wise beyond his knowledge. However, the final battle was still a good time away and might never come. He had leisure in which to investigate—and meanwhile there was a war to prosecute…
The war continued in much the same pattern as before, at least in its early months. Miranid was continually nipping at soft spots, then gouging away the even softer areas which their defense would expose. It was Miranid’s initiative at every battle, and he carried it off well.
He persistently refused to close with Vilkan fleets in space, where the only available loot and glory would be in the destruction of his own fleet, and thus he avoided overwhelming opposition. Instead, he attacked planetary bases, which were difficult to defend but easy to destroy. He attacked with utter ruthlessness, devoting no thought, apparently, to the fact that the bases were almost completely inhabited by subject nationals of former independent empires, and only garrisoned by Vilks.
There was logic behind that, too. Each planet constituted the loot and physical embodiment of glory belonging to some Vilkan war-prince. His cousin princes were invariably only too glad to assign that loot to their own coffers after the Farlans had left. Then, with their ships crammed, they would retreat to their faraway home planets to celebrate before returning to the now perceptibly diminishing frontier. If they returned at all, for, after all, they had anxious heirs at home.
The Farlan power was not in their guns—it was in Miranid’s phenomenal mind.
VI
Once again, the fleet rendezvoused, and once again Miranid conferred with Vice-Admiral Henlo. Henlo had his own flagship now, for the fleet had been reinforced to almost half-again its original strength, and functioned as a loose group of semi-autonomous units.
Henlo’s old executive officer had Torener now, and Henlo occasionally wondered what inspirations the man drew from pacing the same bridge that Miranid had trod. Grandiose ones, probably, for he noticed that Torener was constantly being crippled in over-audacious actions. Well, so much the better. Perhaps, someday, Torener might not rendezvous at all.
His Vice-Admiralty, Henlo reflected, together with the fleet’s strength being so augmented as to give him a substantial command, was strongly indicative of sentiments in the ministries. They looked for a speedy end to the fabulously successful war—and to L’ Miranid. To hasten the day, Henlo’s own position was being strengthened.
That reckless gamble with the unpredictable might yet prove the costliest mistake their august ministerial ambitions could make. The over-paid assassin might sometimes thus be provided with the price of empire.
But that was for another, albeit hastened, day, he reminded himself as his aide knocked on Miranid’s door.
There was the usual exchange of formulas, and then Henlo, leaving his aide in the companionway, entered Miranid’s cabin.
“Henlo, I compliment you on your evident good health.”
“And I you on yours, Admiral,” Henlo replied. Miranid, as usual, was alone in his quarters, and the chart in his hand, and the desk on which he laid it, might have been the same as those aboard the now-forgotten Torener.
But the situation, Admiral, Henlo commented to himself, is not precisely the same.
Miranid had not changed. The thick fur was just as thick—and just as lifeless in sheen—and the tail was as stiff and rigidly unmoving as ever. It was Henlo who had changed—Henlo, whose horizons became more glowingly attainable with every planet that marked the smoking, death-blazoned track into Vilkai.
“Well, Henlo, it seems we constantly meet in situations which are superficially the same, but fundamentally different,” Miranid remarked, and for a moment Henlo’s heart stood still. He’d been away from the admiral too long. He had forgotten the man’s almost terrifying perception of mind.
Not for the first time—but for the first time so strongly— Henlo wondered if that perception could possibly be so limited as not to fully comprehend what the ministries had in mind for him—and whom they had chosen to supplant him.
But Miranid, apparently at least, was referring to something else.
“As you’ve no doubt realized,” he said, “we can no longer hope to capitalize so successfully on the inherent barbarian weaknesses of our enemies. Up to now, we have been operating entirely outside their actual borders. But the day the first Vilkan females and pups die will be the day the entire horde forgets everything but the preservation of the communal hearth.
“We shall then see,” he added drily, “which among all our heroes of the Grand Farlan Starfleet are merely men.”
“I’ve been thinking along much the same lines,” Henlo agreed.
Miranid nodded. “A happy faculty.”
And again, Henlo could not determine within himself just how the admiral had intended the comment to be taken.
“Did you know, Henlo, that certain eminent military tacticians have proved to my satisfaction that war in space is impossible?”
Henlo arched the fur over his eyes. “I haven’t heard the theory.”
“No, I didn’t think you had,” Miranid said in a rambling tone of voice. “However, our present situation is a splendid example.
“Consider. If you picture the present Vilkan holdings as a solid sphere in space, bristling with weapons pointed outward, and our own fleet as a hollow sphere designed to contain and crush it, then you must allow that all Farla with half the Galaxy to help it could not supply us with enough strength to keep our sphere impenetrable from the inside at all points. With the further problem of uncertain ship detection in hyperspace we could not prevent repeated breakthroughs from the inside.
“Once our hollow sphere is broken it is caught between two fires, and gradually decimated if it does not withdraw into a larger, and even more porous, sphere—which can again be broken. Thus, stalemate, eventual disgust, and, finally inconclusive peace at an inconclusive price.
“Now, since we are not going to be foolish enough to form such a sphere the only alternative is to attempt an attack by a knife-like method. We can spit, split, slice, or whittle.