But the station itself vanished. And Vaynamo had only the capacity to build one such monster. The Chertkoian ships were free again.
“Admiral to all captains!” cried Golyev. “Admiral to all captains. Let the reports wait. Clear the lines. I want every man in the fleet to hear me. Stand by for message.
“Now hear this. This is Supreme Commander Bors Golyev. We just took a rough blow, boys. The enemy had an unsuspected weapon, and cost us a lot of casualties. But we’ve destroyed the thing. I repeat, we blew it out of the cosmos. And I say, well done! I say also, we still have a hundred times the strength of the enemy, and he’s shot his bolt. We’re going on in. We’re going to -”
“Alert! Condition red! Enemy boats returning. Enemy boats returning. Radial velocity circa 50 KPS, but acceleration circa 100 G.”
“What?”
Elva herself saw the Vaynamo an shooting stars come back into sight.
Golyev tried hard to shout down the panic of his officers. Would they stop running around like old women? The enemy had developed something else, some method of accelerating at unheard-of rates under gravitational thrust. But not by witchcraft! It would be an internal-stress compensator developed to ultimate efficiency, plus an adaptation of whatever principle was used in the attractor vortex. Or it could be a breakthrough, a totally new principle, maybe something intermediate between the agoratron and the ordinary interplanetary drive... "Never mind what, you morons! They’re still only a flock of splinters! Kill them!”
But the armada was roiling about in blind confusion. The detectors had given mere seconds of warning, which were lost in understanding that the warning was correct and in frantically seeking to rally men already shaken. Then the splinter fleet was in among the Chertkoians. It braked its furious relative velocity with a near-instantaneous quickness for which the Chertkoian gunners and gun computers had never been prepared. However, the Vaynamoan gunners were ready. And even a boat can carry torpedoes which will annihilate a battleship.
In a thousand fiery bursts, the armada died.
Not all of it. Unarmed craft were spared, if they would surrender. Vaynamoan boarding parties freed such of their countrymen as they found. The Askol, under Golyev’s personal command, stood off its attackers and move doggedly outward toward regions where it could use the agoratron to escape. The captain of a prize revealed that over a hundred Vaynamoans were aboard the flagship. So the attempt to blow it up was abandoned. Instead, a large number of boats shot dummy missiles, which kept the defense fully occupied. Meanwhile a companion force lay alongside, cut its way through the armor, and sent men in.
The Chertkoian crew resisted. But they were grossly outnumbered and outgunned. Most died under bullets and grenades, gas and flamethrowers. Certain holdouts, who fortified an apartment, were welded in from the outside and left to starve or capitulate, whichever they chose. Even so the Askol was so big that the boarding part took several hours to gain full possession.
The door opened. Elva stood up.
At first the half-dozen men who entered seemed foreign. In a minute — she was too tired and dazed to think clearly — she understood why. They were all in blue jackets and trousers, a uniform. She had never seen two Vaynamoans dressed exactly alike. But of course they would be, she thought in a vague fashion. We had to build a navy, didn’t we?
And they remained her own people: fair skin, straight hair, high cheekbones, tilted light eyes which gleamed all the brighter through the soot of battle. And, yes, they still walked like Vaynamoans, the swinging freeman's gait and the head held high, such as she had not seen for... for how long? So their clothes didn't matter, nor even the guns in their hands.
Slowly, through the ringing in her ears, she realized that the combat noise had stopped.
A young man in the lead took a step in her direction, “My lady — ”he began.
“Is that her for certain?” asked someone else, less gently. “Not a collaborator?”
A new man pushed his through the squad. He was grizzled, pale from lack of sun, wearing a sleazy prisoner's coverall. But a smile touched his lips, and his bow to Elva was deep.
“This is indeed my lady of Tervola,” he said. To her: “When these men released me, up in Section Fourteen, I told them we'd probably find you here. I am so glad.”
She needed a while to recognize him. “Oh. Yes.” Her head felt heavy. It was all she could do to nod. “Captain Ivalo. I hope you're all right.”
“I am, thanks to you, my lady. Someday we’ll know how many hundreds are alive and sane — and here! — because of you.”
The squad leader made another step forward, sheathed his machine pistol and lifted both hands toward her. He was a well-knit, good-looking man, blond of hair, a little older than she: in his mid-thirties, perhaps. He tried to speak, but no words came out. and then Ivalo drew him back.
“In a moment,” said the ex-captive, “Let's first take care of the unpleasant business.”
The leader hesitated, then, with a grimace, agreed. Two men shoved forward Bors Golyev. The admiral dripped blood from a dozen wounds and stumbled in his weariness. But when he saw Elva, he seemed to regain himself. “You weren't hurt,” he breathed, as if the words were holy. “I was so afraid...”
Ivalo said like steeclass="underline" “I've explained the facts of this case to the squad officer here, as well as his immediate superior. I’m sure you’ll join us in our wish not to be inhumane, my lady. And yet a criminal trial in the regular courts would publicize matters best forgotten and could only give him a limited punishment. So we, here and now, under the conditions of war and in view of your high services —”
The squad officer interrupted. He was white about the nostrils. “Anything you order, my lady,” he said. ‘You pass the sentence. Well execute it at once.”
“Elva,” whispered Golyev.
She stared at him, remembering fire and enslavements and a certain man dead on a barricade. But everything seemed distant, not quite real.
“There’s been too much suffering already,” she said.
She pondered a few seconds. “Just take him out and shoot him. ”
The officer looked relieved. He led his men forth. Golyev started to speak, but was hustled a way too fast.
Ivalo remained in the cabin. “My lady —” He began, slow and awkward.
“Yes?” As her weariness overwhelmed her, Elva sat down again on the bunk. She fumbled for a cigarette. There was no emotion in her. only a dull wish for sleep.
“I’ve wondered... Don’t answer this if you don’t want to. You’ve been through so much.”
“That’s all right,” she said mechanically. “The trouble is over now, isn’t it? I mean, we mustn’t let the past obsess us.”
“Of course. Uh, they tell me Vaynamo hasn’t changed much. The defense effort was bound to affect society somewhat, but they've tried to minimize that, and succeeded. Our culture has a built-in stability, you know, a negative feedback. To be sure, we must still take action about the home planet of those devils. Liberate their slave worlds and make certain they can’t ever try afresh. But that shouldn’t be difficult.
“As for you. I inquired very carefully on your behalf. Tervola remains in your family. The land and the people are as you remember.”
She closed her eyes, feeling the first thaw within herself. “Now I can sleep,” she told him.
Remembering, she looked up with a touch of startlement. “But you had a question for me, Ivalo?”
“Yes. All this time. I couldn’t help wondering. Why you stayed with the enemy. You could have escaped. Did you know all the time how great a service you were going to do?”
Her own smile was astonishing to her. “Well, I knew I couldn’t be much use on Vaynamo,” she said. “Could I? There was a chance I could help on Chertkoi. But I wasn’t being brave. The worst had already happened to me. Now I need only wait...a matter of months only, my time... and everything bad would be over. Whereas, well, if I’d escaped from the Second Expedition, I’d have lived most of my life in the shadow of the Third. Please don’t make a fuss about me. I was actually an awful coward.”