He spun quickly, only to relax as he found himself gazing up into the silver eyes of one of the dragons. The towering alien regarded him for several long seconds and then waved at the carnage about them, pointed to the dead demon-jester, and cocked his head in unmistakable question. The baron followed the gesturing hand with his own eyes, then looked back up at his huge, alien ally, and grinned fiercely.
"Your folk may have been willing enough to die, Sir Dragon. Aye, and brave enough to do it, as well! But it isn't the English way to murder our own, and with this—" he raised the pendant "—we'll not need that piece of meat to take his precious ship, now will we? And with us to hunt the guildsmen, and your folk to hunt Hathori, well—"
His grin bared his teeth as he and the mute dragon stood eye to eye, and then, slowly, the dragon showed its own deadly-looking fangs in a hungry grin of its own and it gave a very human nod.
"Then let's be about it, my friend!" Sir George invited, reaching up to clap the huge alien on the back, and the two of them started down the platform stairs towards the waiting lander together.
-XI-
"So," Admiral Mugabi sighed. "It's official."
"Not quite," Admiral Stevenson replied with a tight smile. "What's official is my informing you that the Galactics are finally getting around to issuing their ultimatum. Of course, we're not supposed to know that, because the official note hasn't arrived yet. And the consensus is that even when it does, the exact consequences if it's rejected won't be precisely spelled out in it, anyway."
"Of course they won't," Mugabi snorted. "They're so damned sanctimonious that there's no way they're going to commit themselves in an official communique."
"I wouldn't bet on that," Stevenson said much more somberly. "The one thing we can be fairly certain of is that they didn't have this brainstorm overnight, whatever they may be trying to tell their citizenry. There had to be some pretty drastic horsetrading to get the Kulavo and Daerjek to sign off on their final position. Unless ONI is completely off base, one of the points the hardliners like the Saernai and Josuto will have insisted upon is that the Kulavo, at least, officially endorse their prescription for finally solving their little problem once and for all. After all, the Kulavo have been the `conscience' of the Council for so long that the faction that wants to smash us almost has to have the cover of their public agreement. So I'd guess that the final act in that little Kabuki play will be the presentation of an official note demanding that we hand the ship—and the Romans—over on pain of military action."
"But I'll bet you anything you care to name that they won't mention words like `genocide' in any official note," Mugabi shot back.
"You're probably right about that," Stevenson agreed. "Of course, they won't have to, either. After all, if we're so unreasonable as to provoke them into taking military steps in the first place, any little accidents, like a planet-buster that just happens to go off course, will be on our own primitive heads. They'll have warned us that we could get hurt, so their hands will be clean when the `accident' takes place on schedule. I mean, all they're really demanding is that we hand over to them a ship that's stolen private property and the crew—who are also private property, under the Federation's laws—who stole it and murdered their legal owners in the process. If we're so unreasonable, stupid, and primitive that we're unwilling to hand such bloodthirsty, mutinous criminals over to the appropriate authorities, then certainly no law-abiding government like the Federation could possibly just stand by and see its fundamental legal principles flouted. Obviously they have to take steps, and if those steps just coincidentally end up with a star system full of aborigines getting mashed in the gears, well, maintaining the rule of law sometimes requires unpleasant actions."
"Sure it does," Mugabi growled.
It wasn't the best growl he'd ever produced. In fact, it wasn't even close. The men and women of the Solarian Navy were only too familiar with the subterranean rumble the bearlike admiral normally produced in moments of intense displeasure, but he was too tired to do justice by it this time... and not just physically.
He cocked back the chair behind his desk and let his body sag around his bones for just a moment while he scrubbed his black, broad-cheekboned face. Then he let his hands fall back to the old-fashioned blotter and turned his head to gaze out the armored viewport set into the outer hull of the huge space station.
It was a spectacular view. Under normal circumstances, it exercised a perpetual fascination and spawned an almost childlike sense of delight deep within him. But not even the view could lighten the crushing sense of despair which loomed over him today.
The planet about which the station orbited was a cloud-swirled sapphire, breathtakingly beautiful as it floated against the soot black of space and the pinprick diamonds of the stars. The white disk of its moon was visible around its flank, and the clutter and cluster of hundreds of spacecraft glittered like scattered gems of reflected sunlight as they went about their business. One of the Navy's main construction docks dominated the scene, and Mugabi could just make out the bright, color-coded vacuum suits of the yard workers as they hovered about the mile-long hull of what would have been a new battlecruiser. The ship was perhaps three-quarters completed, with most of the hull plating in place. Probably her powerplant was pressurized and on-line, since he could see that three of her five main drive nacelles had already been closed up. But even under the best of circumstances, she was still at least six months from completion... and even under Mugabi's most optimistic estimate, there was no way she could be finished and worked up for duty before the hammer came down.
He closed his eyes and scrubbed his face again, feeling the responsibility which accompanied his despair and wondering which was truly the greater burden. He'd given the Solarian Navy forty-three years of his life, from the heady days as an ensign, when he'd truly believed that humanity might be able to build a fleet strong enough to protect its world against the Galactics, until today. Along the way, he and the rest of the human race had learned too much about the crushing power of the Federation for him to cling to any false hope that the Navy could successfully defend the Solar System, yet he'd continued to hope—or to tell himself that he did, at any rate—that they could at least put up sufficient fight to convince the self-serving Galactics that humanity's threat was too slight to justify the losses they might take to eliminate it. But all of those false hopes were gone now, exposed for the pipe dreams they had been. The Federation's Council had decided to call the human bluff, and no one knew better than he how threadbare that bluff truly was. Yet even now, even knowing how futile it would be, the high rank and the duties he had spent half his lifetime earning remained. Hopeless though it might be, the responsibility to defend humanity against its foes was still his, and if it would have been so seductively easy to pass that responsibility on to someone else, that was an act of which he was constitutionally incapable. Besides, it wasn't as if it would really have mattered in the end.
"Has the President decided how she'll respond to the Galactics yet?" he asked finally.
"No," Stevenson replied. "Or if she has, she's keeping the final call confidential so far. There hasn't been any official demand for her to respond to yet. In fact, I doubt very much that the Galactics have the least suspicion that we know what they're up to. They're not very good at that part of this," he added with monumental understatement.