XIV
Lieutenant Colonel Blick, acting commander of the 427th Light Maintenance Battalion of the Imperial Space Marines, stood at his office window and scowled down upon the whole civilized world, all twenty-six square kilometers of it. It had been a hard day. Three separate delegations of mothers had descended upon him demanding that he reopen the Tech Schools for the sake of their sanity. The recruits had been roaming the company streets in bands composed of equal numbers of small boys and large dogs creating havoc wherever they went. He tried to cheer himself up by thinking of his forthcoming triumph when he in the guise of the Inspector General would float magnificently down from the skies and once and for all put the seal of final authority upon the new order. The only trouble was that he was beginning to have a sneaking suspicion that maybe that new order wasn’t all that he had planned it to be. As he thought of his own six banshees screaming through quarters, his suspicion deepened almost to certainty.
He wandered back to his desk and slumped behind it gloomily. He couldn’t backwater now, his pride was at stake. He glanced at the water clock on his desk, and then rose reluctantly and started toward the door. It was time to get into battle armor and get ready for the inspection.
As he reached the door, there was a sudden slap of running sandals down the hall. A second later, Major Kane burst into the office, his face white and terrified.
“Colonel,” he gasped, “the I.G.’s here!”
“Nonsense,” said Blick. “I’m the I.G. now!”
“Oh yeah?” whimpered Kane. “Go look out the window. He’s here, and he’s brought the whole Imperial fleet with him!”
Blick dashed to the window and looked up. High above, so high that he could see them only as silver specks, hung hundreds of ships.
“Headquarters does exist!” he gasped.
He stood stunned. What to do… what to do… what to do— The question swirled around in his brain until he was dizzy. He looked to Kane for advice, but the other was as bewildered as he was.
“Don’t stand there, man,” he stormed. “Do something!”
“Yes, sir,” said Kane. “What?”
Blick thought for a long, silent moment. The answer was obvious, but there was a short, fierce inner struggle before he could bring himself to accept it.
“Get Colonel Harris up here at once. He’ll know what we should do.”
A stubborn look came across Kane’s face. “We’re running things now,” he said angrily.
Blick’s face hardened and he let out a roar that shook the walls. “Listen, you pup, when you get an order, you follow it. Now get!”
Forty seconds later, Colonel Harris stormed into the office. “What kind of a mess have you got us into this time?” he demanded.
“Look up there, sir,” said Blick leading him to the window.
Colonel Harris snapped back into command as if he’d never left it.
“Major Kane!” he shouted.
Kane popped into the office like a frightened rabbit.
“Evacuate the garrison at once! I want everyone off the plateau and into the jungle immediately. Get litters for the sick and the veterans who can’t walk and take them to the hunting camps. Start the rest moving north as soon as you can.”
“Really, sir,” protested Kane, looking to Blick for a cue.
“You heard the colonel,” barked Blick. “On your way!” Kane bolted.
Colonel Harris turned to Blick and said in a frosty voice: “I appreciate your help, colonel, but I feel perfectly competent to enforce my own orders.”
“Sorry, sir,” said the other meekly. “It won’t happen again.”
Harris smiled. “O.K., Jimmie,” he said, “let’s forget it. We’ve got work to do!”
XV
It seemed to Kurt as if time was standing still. His nerves were screwed up to the breaking point and although he maintained an air of outward composure for the benefit of those in the control room of the flagship, it took all his will power to keep the hand that was resting over the firing stud from quivering. One slip and they’d be on him. Actually it was only a matter of minutes between the time the scout was dispatched to the garrison below and the time it returned, but to him it seemed as if hours had passed before the familiar form of his commanding officer strode briskly into the control room.
Colonel Harris came to a halt just inside the door and swept the room with a keen penetrating gaze.
“What’s up, son?” he asked Kurt.
“I’m not quite sure. All that I know is that they’re here to blast the garrison. As long as I’ve got control of this,” he indicated the firing stud, “I’m top dog, but you’d better work something out in a hurry.”
The look of strain on Kurt’s face was enough for the colonel.
“Who’s in command here?” he demanded.
Krogson stepped forward and bowed stiffly. “Commander Conrad Krogson of War Base Three of the Galactic Protectorate.”
“Colonel Marcus Harris, 427th Light Maintenance Battalion of the Imperial Space Marines,” replied the other briskly. “Now that the formalities are out of the way, let’s get to work. Is there some place here where we can talk?”
Krogson gestured toward a small cubicle that opened off the control room. The two men entered and shut the door behind them.
A half hour went by without agreement. “There may be an answer somewhere,” Colonel Harris said finally, “but I can’t find it. We can’t surrender to you, and we can’t afford to have you surrender to us. We haven’t the food, facilities, or anything else to keep fifty thousand men under guard. If we turn you loose, there’s nothing to keep you from coming back to blast us—except your word, that is, and since it would obviously be given under duress, I’m afraid that we couldn’t attach much weight to it. It’s a nice problem. I wish we had more time to spend on it, but unless you can come up with something workable during the next five minutes, I’m going to give Kurt orders to blow the fleet.”
Krogson’s mind was operating at a furious pace. One by one he snatched at possible solutions, and one by one he gave them up as he realized that they would never stand up under the scrutiny of the razor-sharp mind that sat opposite him.
“Look,” he burst out finally, “your empire is dead and our protectorate is about to fall apart. Give us a chance to come down and join you and we’ll chuck the past. We need each other and you know it!”
“I know we do,” said the colonel soberly, “and I rather think you are being honest with me. But we just can’t take the chance. There are too many of you for us to digest and if you should change your mind—” He threw up his hands in a helpless gesture.
“But I wouldn’t,” protested Krogson. “You’ve told me what your life is like down there and you know what kind of a rat race I’ve been caught up in. I’d welcome the chance to get out of it. All of us would!”
“You might to begin with,” said Harris, “but then you might start thinking what your Lord Protector would give to get his hands on several hundred trained technicians. No, commander,” he said, “we just couldn’t chance it.” He stretched his hand out to Krogson and the other after a second’s hesitation took it.
Commander Krogson had reached the end of the road and he knew it. The odd thing about it was that now he found himself there, he didn’t particularly mind. He sat and watched his own reactions with a sense of vague bewilderment. The strong drive for self-preservation that had kept him struggling ahead for so long was petering out and there was nothing to take its place. He was immersed in a strange feeling of emptiness and though a faint something within him said that he should go out fighting, it seemed pointless and without reason.