Having finished his meal, Corson rose. He made for the exit, but glanced back at Antonella before leaving.
“I’m going to take a turn around the camp and see if Colonel Veran’s principles of site defense agree with what I was taught. Maybe my experience will be useful to him. Don’t leave this tent on any account. Don’t show yourself, even. Don’t turn in before I get back. The—ah—necessary conveniences are under the bunks. I won’t be gone for more than an hour.”
She looked at him without speaking. He tried to read from her expression whether she had mistaken his intentions. He failed. If she was pretending, then she deserved an acting prize.
As though they had been waiting for him, the two soldiers were standing by the exit. He stepped forward and let the flap fall without provoking the least reaction.
“I’m going to tour the campsite,” he said in an arrogant tone.
Instantly one of the soldiers clicked his heels and fell in at his side. Discipline was plainly well in force among Veran’s men. That reassured him about Antonella’s immediate fate. This camp was on a war footing and the commander would not let his control slacken by a single notch. He had acted sensibly in forbidding Antonella to move around the camp and leaving her in Corson’s charge. He had other concerns than erecting a prison for a single captive. Besides, the sight of a woman might cause trouble with the rank and file. If he hadn’t hoped to make use of her, Veran would have liquidated Antonella right away. Later, when the camp was properly secure and the men were off duty, it would be a different matter.
Corson drove away that unpleasant thought and looked about him. The blackened soil of the clearing formed a circle several hundred meters across. Around the perimeter soldiers were hammering in stakes and linking them together with a glittering wire. An alarm system? Corson decided not. The men who were unreeling the wire wore heavy insulated clothing. So it must be a defensive barrier, then—and, despite its apparent fragility, no doubt a formidable one.
About a hundred tents occupied most of the space this enclosed. Corson searched with his eyes for a tent larger than the rest, or flying a command pennant, but in vain. Veran’s headquarters post was indistinguishable from the tents of his men.
A little farther on, a dull vibration made the soles of his feet tingle. Veran must be digging out an underground refuge. No doubt of it: this man knew his job.
On the far side of the clearing Corson counted twenty-seven pegasones. Judging by the number of tents, Veran had about six hundred men with him. If the rank of colonel was to be taken in the same sense as it had been in Corson’s time, at the start of his campaign Veran would have had a force of between ten and a hundred thousand. Aergistal must really have been a disaster. The 623rd Cavalry Regiment of the Ptar of Murphy must have been virtually wiped out. Veran must have displayed inhuman determination to reestablish control over the survivors and make them set up this camp as though nothing had happened. And he must be possessed of phenomenal ambition—to say nothing of limitless arrogance—if he thought of continuing the fight.
The fact that he was letting Corson inspect his defenses unhindered indicated pretty clearly the type of man he was. So did his expressed intention to muster a million men and enlist them in his phantom army. Was he bluffing? Perhaps. Unless he had unsuspected resources. Which brought Corson to a question he was astonished at having neglected for so long.
Whom had Veran been fighting against at Aergistal?
Chapter 12
The pegasones were not hobbled, but they remained so absolutely still that from a short distance they could have been mistaken for the stumps of enormous multicolored trees. Their six great paws, each ending in six fingers, looked like roots. The eyes which encircled their bodies halfway up, a little above Corson’s head, shone only with a wan and fleeting light. Now and then one of them uttered a little plaintive cry, followed by a grunt like a pig’s. One might have thought that they were chewing the cud. They had nothing in common with the wild beast which Corson had been trying to study before the destruction of the Archimedes. On their flanks, a complicated harness had left deep scars, as though a hot iron had been seared into tree bark.
How could they be mounted? At first sight no part of their bodies seemed adapted for a saddle. And how many men could each of them carry? Veran’s demands suggested a rough guide: a million men, two hundred thousand pegasones… So one of these beasts could cany at least four men and their equipment. And what part would they play in combat? Up to now it hadn’t occurred to Corson to think of any other function except that of assault vehicles. Their mobility and their primitive ferocity would make them ideal for a ground battle. Their ability to foresee the immediate future and to move a second away in time would make them targets almost impossible to hit. But these pegasones which Corson was looking at scarcely seemed to be fierce. He would have sworn, too, that they were completely without intelligence, the reverse of the wild specimen wandering the forests of this planet in search of an ideal spot to reproduce.
The use of a living steed in warfare was not an idea unknown to Corson. During the Earth-Uria war, on worlds that were being fought over, he had run across barbarian allies of the Terrestrials who rode reptiles, hippogriffs, or even giant spiders. But he was himself more accustomed to a mechanized army. What surprised him here was the coexistence of an advanced technology and animal steeds. What sort of terrain had they fought over at Aergistal?
He couldn’t imagine. If only planets had names which described them! Perhaps this mysterious world was rocky, a place of peaks and precipices bathed in a steely light. But it could just as well be a planet of green and smiling valleys. For a brief moment he had wondered whether the name might simply designate another part of Uria itself, but both Antonella and Floria had insisted that no war had even involved Uria for a thousand-odd years, let alone been fought on its surface.
No, the battle where Veran had lost the majority of his forces must have taken place on some other world. For better or worse he must have embarked the remnant of his command on a cruiser and gone in search of a world where he could rebuild his army. He had picked on Uria, landed his men and their beasts, and sent his cruiser back to space for fear it might be trapped on the ground.
But—No, wait a moment!
Veran must be fresh from his battle. His men had still been in full combat rig when they intercepted Corson. They were dirty and exhausted. No matter how close Aergistal might be, no matter how fast Veran’s cruiser, it would have taken hours or days to cover an interstellar distance. He tried to recall the map of the Urian system. There were only two other planets in it, and both were gas giants which would not provide a battlefield… at least not for humans. How about their moons? No: Antonella had spoken of taking a transmatter to one of the local moons; therefore they must be at peace. And this sector of space was thinly populated with stars. Aergistal must be located at least six light-years from Uria. Probably a lot more. The idea of a starship which could cross light-years in a few minutes seemed ridiculous. On the other hand…
Corson was the sole survivor of a universe six thousand years in the past. In sixty centuries a lot of new discoveries must have been made. Even what he had seen at Dyoto exceeded his powers of comprehension. A starship capable of almost Ultimate Velocity was scarcely harder to believe in than a society without a government or a city built entirely on antigrav.
While Corson was contemplating the warlike activity of the camp, a faint nostalgia overcame him. Although he had never been particularly bellicose himself, he felt at home again in this environment of taut efficiency. He followed with his eyes the man who was marching sentry go in front of the pegasones, his gun slung at an easy angle. He glanced at his bodyguard. The man did not seem to be concerned about the vast problems disturbing the universe. He must have lost friends in the battle of Aergistal, but one could not have deduced it from his attitude. Two days earlier, Corson had been like him. Strange, what two days could do to a man. Two days—and six thousand years. No, Corson corrected himself bitterly. Two days, six thousand years… and two women.