He almost ran into the girl before he noticed her. Obviously she was the one who had brought the Admiral word of the Yards; the usual Navy rumors had been circulated about her, but Pendred felt that her beauty surpassed all of them. The women of the Dresau Islands tended to be hardy, weather-beaten types, as were their men—heavy of intellect and of limb was the rule, although certain members of the industrial and naval elite violated it quite delightfully. But she was more delicate than any that Pendred had seen.
The Crystal Queen,
Pendred thought, remembering a story he had not heard since childhood.
The two years of hard traveling and the rough attentions of her supposed guardian had hurt her remarkably little. The skin, once so white, had now taken on a slight tan, accenting her large olive eyes all the more. Her hair, turned a deeper gold by the sun, was combed straight, but its sheer richness curved gently around her face to run down her back like a stream of silken threads. Kyandra's winds stirred it and the evening stars gave her a crown to go with the titles that Pendred was silently conferring.
She was wearing a long white dress with a high neck and long, tight sleeves as was the current fashion on Guthrun; it was embroidered with small navy and turquoise blossoms.
He stood looking at her for a minute before it occurred to him that he might introduce himself. He did and was received with surprising politeness. But after the usual courtesies were exchanged the girl returned to her seaward gazing and the man to his fumbling for words.
"Has your Admiral decided to do anything about the
Victory
?" So she did love it, as Radlov had said.
He answered honestly: "He plans to mount an expedition against it."
Her face saddened noticeably. She murmured something indistinct and looked inland where the stars were getting thicker and more brilliant. "Really for the better, I suppose. Still, it could have been so grand, so wonderfully grand. . . . Must you really do it?"
Pendred told her why and she nodded as if she had secretly guessed it all along, but could not admit it to herself. She smiled, not out of any joy or happiness, but from a tender sorrow that Pendred would have thought impossible to express.
Again quiet. Then Pendred offered to show her the
Havengore.
She said that she had seen enough of killing machines in the past several years, but consented.
Pendred's regular launch was waiting further down the quay. The launch threaded its way through the glut of wind ships until a narrow canal was reached. Cast up on the tidal flats that flanked the channel on either side, there lay the dead remnants of the Fleet: burned and twisted wrecks that had come home to die and give up their steel to rebuild their still-living sisters. There was no moon, but the profusion of stars and the clarity of the air provided just enough light to see by, not enough to show the rust-covered wounds of the rotting hulks.
The canal widened until the boat was sailing in another, larger harbor than the Kingsgate: the Stormgate, the anchorage of the Dresau Fleet. All along the far, hill-ringed shores, Pendred said that only a twentieth of it was operational, the rest serving as a parts depot.
To the starboard, two sleek black forms could be seen sparkling in the crystal light. "The frigates
Blackthorne
and
Frostfire.
" Pendred pointed to them. "If you went by the dates on their launching plaques, they would each be over four hundred years old. But, of course, each has been rebuilt so many times that just about the
only
things left over from their first launching are those plaques." They moved closer to the two ships; the white starlight made them look like pieces of sculpture shaped from ebony and edged with silver. The light winds stirred the surface of the Stormgate and the water too was of dark, beaten silver. The girl was quiet, taken up with it all; she could not help but remark on the quiet, powerful beauty of the sleeping machines.
Hearing this, Pendred remarked, "Some day, if you will consent, I think that I shall take you out on the
Frostfire,
the fastest of the three. Forty knots through the cobalt Sea, white spray flying at every hand and all her silken flags unfurled to the winds. Look at her, my lady, look at both of them and see them running out of the Kingsgate, reviving the old legends, all the old greatness and glories. And the
Havengore
steaming after them like a great castle set afloat, crashing through the waves toward . . . "
"Toward the destruction of the
Victory
and themselves."
Pendred fell silent.
Presently another silhouette detached itself from the darkness of the hills. The
Havengore.
Since it was almost three times as long as the two frigates that they had just passed, Pendred thought that it might have extracted some measure of awe from the girl; then he remembered that she had helped build a ship which could carry a hundred
Havengore
s in its hold.
The launch luffed up beside a boarding ladder and the two ratings held it fast. They climbed up onto the deck and Pendred showed the way to the bridge, reciting the history of the cruiser as they went. "She was built more than five hundred years ago from the parts of seven older craft. She's seven hundred feet long and can make more than thirty-five knots should circumstances warrant. She is, probably, outside of the Dresau Islands themselves, the largest single, living relic of the First World." They had reached the bridge by now. "And like the Islands, she is dying.
"Look around you and what do you see? A mighty ship designed to defeat nations and humble nature, all guns and gray steel. But in the sunlight, in the light of the World, you can see the rust, the gun tubs that once housed missiles and now carry muzzle-loading cannon, the main battery of nine eight-inch guns crusted with preservative grease—they haven't been fired in almost half a century—radar display casings that now hold astrolabes and sextants."
"And with this you hope to destroy the
Victory.
"
"I think that the only thing that we will really destroy will be ourselves. And why not? What is the fault in dying when your world died a thousand years before your own birth?" Pendred's eyes looked to the stars, but he realized that he had really been staring into the reflected light of the girl's eyes. His brutal, doomed world became warmer and the grim destiny that Radlov had charted for the Fleet had become tinged with her own quiet sorrow. He spoke strangely, for certainly his mind in its proper state would have never dared to say such things. "It has become my wish—since Radlov told me of this adventure—that my grandson should be on board my
Havengore
when she last leaves the Stormgate." He took her hand and led her to the commander's sea cabin.
Pendred was literally enchanted with the girl and the two sailed to the
Havengore
almost every night for a month. Only the launch's ratings knew of it—Pendred's circle of friends was decidedly limited—and their loyalty and discretion was unquestioned.
The Navy and the demands of his command had forced him to forget the fantasies and dreams of elfin, crystal queens, soft voices speaking of nothing greater than quiet and light. Now they all flooded back on him; Radlov's projected Armageddon faded into comparative insignificance. The girl was everything that he had ever desired; her unworldly cast only helped him forget the reality of the
Havengore
's guns and travel to places that could only exist in the company of a person like her.
But gradually the feelings changed; while she still talked of her dreams and journeys, Pendred became less and less a part of them. Where once the wild speculation had been made lightly, finding their greatest value simply in their telling, they were now personal monologues from which Pendred was almost entirely excluded. If they happened out on deck, she gazed progressively more fixedly at the stars and at what Pendred knew must be Home; the promise of the
Victory
could have never been obliterated by his small dreamings and the depressing future of his ship. Sometimes he tried with an embarrassing desperation to recapture her imagination with childish visions of Guthrun's wild mountain lands or of the lush forests on Kyandra; every wonder or delight that the Islands might have held were instantly compared to the impossible assets of Home.
He realized that further effort was worthless. "I fear that any son that might have come of this will never set foot upon my poor old
Havengore
," he said absently one night.
"Ah, no," she replied, staring up at the welkin. "He'll sail upon a much finer ship."
"One without a voyage such as Radlov has planned for her, one with no worries of Armageddons." Pendred wondered if she was even listening.
"I guess, although it's not quite like that."
"An end as opposed to a beginning. That it?"
She smiled at him. "You could come with me, you know."
"I could no more go to your ship than you could stay here, with mine." He ran his hand lightly through her hair. "So I will give up trying to make my Islands another Home . . . even for such a prize.
"There is an armed schooner leaving three days from now for the Maritime Republics. From there you can board a coaster and, at Enador, join a caravan along the Donnigol Trace. That will take you, eventually, to the Caroline and from there to the Tyne delta." The girl moved her lips in thanks; Pendred heard only the sandy growl of the surf around the Stormgate.
Five years after the girl left, Pendred married. His wife was also of a delicate manner, coming from the naval aristocracy, and at times reminded him too much of the girl. He loved his second wife and lavished all the care and attention he could upon her and, later, upon his son and grandson; but it is understandable that when the
Havengore
was out on an extended patrol in foreign waters, and the bridge was deserted save Pendred and the helmsmen, and his sea cabin twenty feet behind him, he thought of his crystal queen, so perfect and fair and so remote from him and his world.
Ten years after the girl left, Admiral Radlov died and Pendred moved from the cruiser's bridge to Navy House in Duncarin.
When Pendred assumed the post of Admiral of the Fleet, he found that he had inherited Radlov's plan for the mobilization of the First World for its final battle.
The plan comprised seven hundred pages of closely typed print plus another three hundred pages of supporting graphs, charts, and tables to back it up. As a military man, Pendred was hypnotized by the incredible scope of the plan. Radlov had called for the opening of more than thirty Black Libraries—the fact that this might involve the Islands in several minor wars was taken for granted. Embassies were to be sent to the twenty-nine nations which supposedly still had some of the First World's essence in them. An expeditionary force was to capture the Grayfields in as inconspicuous a manner as possible; there they would, by cannibalizing wrecked aircraft, attempt to produce the first air fleet since the battle at the Tyne delta. Out of the estimated ten thousand planes that Radlov thought had landed there after the Tyne Battle, a total of twenty heavy and thirty light aircraft might be put into flying condition. Confronted by such an overwhelming collection of raw power, on paper at least, Pendred could not help but feel optimistic in his later years. It was in one of these brighter moods that the Admiral composed an addition to Radlov's end-ofthe-First-World hypothesis. The battle would be joined, but from it would spring not only spiritual victory, but total physical victory. Confronted by such a mighty host, Pendred conceived, the Dark Powers would be crushed in the battle for their gigantic toy. With the enormous booty that would follow such a triumph, the true and honest reconstruction of the World might begin. And he would be remembered as the ultimate fountainhead of it all; some credit would be given to Radlov, of course, but he was such a defeatist.
Immediately after the end of the Grand Revolution, or the One Week's War as it was known in the south, Coral was elected Chancellor of the Caroline by acclamation.
Coral's first official act of any note was the suppression of those Technos who had chosen to fight on. There were two groups. The first was centered in the mining lands northwest of the Yards, in the mountains. Using the big trucks and equipment and the crude but serviceable weapons that the Armories had distributed to the People's militia, Coral quickly (and sometimes quite literally) crushed the rebels. Within two weeks of the battle at the Yards, high grade ore was again pouring into the smelters around Gateway.
The second band proved a little more tenacious. When the defensive perimeter around the Ship had broken, a number of the Technos had the presence of mind to gather up what weapons they could and retreat within the
Victory.
For two and a half months the surviving Technos put up a heroic fight, admittedly totally hopeless, but possessing a quixotic charm so absent in the days of the World. They were led by a short little man named Christof Khallerhand.
While only partially complete, the
Victory
's hull still contained several cubic miles of complex, hidden, compartmented space. And it was Khallerhand and his group who used this labyrinth to its best advantage. The forests surrounding Blackwood's Bay could not have hidden men better.
Coral ordered work resumed on the Ship as soon as the mess around her had been cleared away. But progress was predictably slow, what with Khallerhand jumping out of hatches or drifting through a maze of scaffolding. The very incompleteness of the Ship made hiding easy and pursuit impossible.
Although it is doubtful that more than a handful remember it, there is a little song that commemorates the high point of the resistance; quite catchy and most stirring—which is why Coral personally ordered its repression—it tells of the surrealistic battle that took place in the forward areas of the Ship. The exact lyrics are forgotten, but one can well imagine the story they depicted: tanks rumbling through corridors sixty feet square, phosphorous grenades doing their terrible work, explosions that left compartments coated with the transparent slime that such actions reduce the human body to. The musical pinging of bullets bouncing off the steel could be heard all over the Yards along with the muffled screams of the dying.