"One moment."
The quiet voice from off to one side stopped DiFalco in mid-sentence, and caused every head to turn to where Varien sat under one of the trees that were the evolutionary equivalent of Earthly conifers but looked altogether different. At the precise moment when he had their maximum attention, he rose and walked slowly to the center of the gathering. Spontaneously, they all formed a ragged circle around him. When he spoke, it was in the same mild tone.
"You are quite correct, Colonel." (It was still the only title DiFalco allowed himself.) "We have delayed far longer than I had originally contemplated, and the those in the Tareil system who anticipated my return must have despaired of ever seeing me again. Without the hope of outside deliverance to sustain it, the resistance I worked to prepare will inevitably wither and die. We must move on Tareil soon, or we will not be able to count on finding help there. I only hope we still can." He paused, thoughts momentarily wandering a hundred light-years to the son who might still live. Then he blinked, and resumed more briskly.
"Now, as to our immediate problem. I"ve been keeping this to myself because I wasn't entirely certain about it; but I see the time has come when we cannot wait for certainty. As a few of you know, I have been exploring the possibility of increasing fusion powerplant efficiency by supplementing the electromagnetic containment fields with a gravitic component. Our recent work in developing the deflector shield has resulted in a . . . spinoff? Yes, that's it. At any rate, I now believe we can, in a matter of a few months, modify the powerplants of our major Raehaniv combattant ships, enabling them to attain a continuous-displacement performance comparable to the present capabilities of our courier ships."
For a moment, everyone was silent, eyes riveted on the old man at the center of the circle. DiFalco realized anew that, however much of the time Varien seemed to fit comfortably into the world of human ordinariness, there would always be moments like this one, when the old Raehaniv's true home seemed either the far future or some old, enchanted country, with none of the present in him at all.
Aelanni broke the spell. "So we could reach Tareil from here in less than five months?"
"Closer to six," Varien admitted. "I calculate that one enroute refuelling would be required. But there is a system almost on the direct straight-line route where . . ."
"Wait a minute, Varien," Traylor broke in. "Did I understand you to say you could do this with the
Raehaniv
ships?"
"Yes, yes," Varien replied, nodding. "I wouldn't dream of trying this modification on the scratch-built fusion plants of the American and Russian ships, with their lower-technology components. Also, there's the matter of resource allocation; we haven't the industrial plant to perform this enhancement
and
install deflector generators on all our ships simultaneously. It would double our preparation time.
"So," he hurried on, "I propose that we equip the Terran ships with deflectors and reconfigure the Raehaniv ships' powerplants, which we
can
do at the same time."
"But, Varien," DiFalco began hesitantly, "then the Terran ships won't be able to make it to Tareil in any useful length of time, any more than they can now."
"No, but they can proceed to Seivra as per our original plan, timing the attack so that by the time they secure Seivra the Raehaniv ships will have reached Tareil! Then," Varien continued with the enthusiasm of a civilian who thinks he has had a brilliant military insight, "at a prearranged moment which allows the Korvaasha time to concentrate defenses at the displacement point connecting the two systems, we can attack through that displacement point while, simultaneously, the Raehaniv ships take them in the rear!"
"Wait a minute, Varien . . ."
"Think of it! We can trap the defending fleet and wipe it out at a single crushing blow! We can . . ."
"Wait!
Wait!
WAIT!" With Varien's excited flow finally stemmed, DiFalco took a deep breath. "Look, Varien, haven't you ever heard of . . . but no, of course you haven't. But
you
have!" He turned rather desperately to Miralann. "Remember the Battle of Leyte Gulf from our history? Tell him!"
Miralann nodded slowly. "Yes. Varien, what Colonel DiFalco is trying to say is that military history teaches us to beware of complex battle plans that require precise coordination of widely separated elements. In particular, the folly of attempting a rendezvous in the presence of the enemy is a cardinal principle. Our own distant past is replete with similar instances."
Varien looked uncharacteristically crestfallen. "Perhaps I underestimated the difficulties involved. I am more than willing to leave the details of implementation to the military professionals. But, Colonel," he continued, holding DiFalco's eyes with his own, "I must ask you a question you once put to me: can you suggest a viable alternative?"
DiFalco thought hard. Could he? No. Half-baked as Varien's plan might be, at least he had offered them a way out of the dilemma they had been trapped in, a way to change the equation. It would be risky as hell, however much they fine-tuned it—but at least it made them a little more the masters of their own fate than the plans they had come up with so far, all of which had violated an even more basic military maxim by depending on good luck.
"Something else you haven't mentioned, father," Aelanni said, frowning. "The Raehaniv ships will enter the Tareil system without deflectors."
"Well, yes," Varien admitted. "They will have to do without that advantage. They will have to rely on the element of surprise, on the overall superiority of Raehaniv technology . . . and on the fact that it is their own home they are fighting to free."
Aelanni nodded slowly, and her eyes met Varien's in a moment of understanding from which all who were not Raehaniv—even her husband and his son-in-law—were excluded. And DiFalco, looking at her, suddenly knew who would lead those Raehaniv ships into battle with the greatest military machine known to exist in the universe.
The sun began to dip below the mountains, and it grew cold.
The sullen red sun his people had named Seivra rose over the edge of the gas-giant planet. Aelador hle'Terull, gazing at it through the faceplate of his heavy-duty vac suit, hated the sight, for it was visible evidence of the passage of time as this station swung in another of its sterile orbits around the gas giant. So it was like the face that gazed back at him from the mirror in all its haggardness as he aged at a rate the Raehaniv hadn't experienced since primitive times. It was incontrovertible proof that time truly was passing and that his life was draining away, however much it might sometimes seem that he was suspended in a timeless bubble of misery in which even the periodic punishments had begun to dull.
The Korvaasha had brought him and the others from Raehan to replace their own crude and inefficient grav scanners with state-of-the-art Raehaniv ones. They had all been highly-paid specialists before the war, and it had taken some of them a long time to adjust to slavery—the gruelling labor, the squalid quarters, the tasteless food paste eaten from a common trough. It had taken some of them too long; the human mind and body could only absorb so much of the torment of discipline by direct neural stimulation, and some had found the refuge of death or madness. The Korvaasha didn't care—they had factored in a certain rate of attrition. They had much experience in such things, although more experience with the human species would doubtless allow them to refine their parameters.
Aelador was one of the unlucky ones . . . the survivors. And so he now labored on the outer skin of the station, performing repairs to one of the exterior components. He was not under guard; there was no need. His suit had internal contact points through which the Korvaasha could invade his body with agony if he deviated from his instructions in the least. And they all knew the consequences of any attempt at sabotage; the Korvaasha had demonstrated them early on, using a human chosen at random.
He was almost finished when the tinny pseudo-voice of Uftscha, Seventh Level Embodiment of the Unity and commander of the station, sounded in his helmet.
"Attention! All personnel and inferior beings on outside duty return inboard at once. An anamoly has appeared in the scanner readings."
Aelador knew what awaited him if the anamoly involved any of the equipment for which he was responsible. He discovered that even terror had lost its power to impart the sensation of being alive.
"Coming up on the mass limit, Colonel," Terry Farrell reported. It was the label they had assigned—despite Varien's complaints that it was meaningless—to the distance from any given star within which continuous-displacement drive was unuseable due to a kind of harmonics it set up with the star's gravity. It varied depending on the strength of that gravity, and for a M3v red star like Seivra it was close in. DiFalco had no desire to go to reaction drive until he had to, and since they were approaching Seivra from a region of space nowhere near either of the system's two displacement points there was no reason why they should be picked up on grav scanners. The Korvaasha would have scanners trained on this stretch of nothingness only by sheer chance—for example, as part of a test of new scanners. And how likely was that?
They had cautiously scouted this system several times during the years of preparation at Terranova, and they knew in general what to expect. The Korvaasha had put a fortress/fuel refinery into orbit around the gas-giant second planet, and Varien had assured them that it was a standard design, built around a core which had come through the displacement points behind the conquering Korvaash fleets and whose minimal fusion drives had since been cannibalized to provide station-keeping capability—it could not maneuver. The mobile force-level varied, but a squadron of five small combatants was permanently stationed here. And, of course, there were the virtually-unarmed pickets at the two displacement points. It should, DiFalco thought, be a cakewalk. The real test would come at Tareil.
Belatedly, he realized that thinking of Tareil was a mistake. As he watched the ruddy ember of Seivra grow in the view-forward, his mind went back almost four months to his last night on Terranova with Aelanni . . . .
Jason had gone to sleep, and they had bundled up and braved the cold to walk under the stars and the ring and one frost-rimmed moon. It hadn't been too bad; the dead of winter was past, and this hemisphere would soon enter into a spring which, if somewhat lacking in color on a planet where evolution hadn't yet put forth flowering plants, at least held the promise of relief from the cold.
Wordlessly, they had gazed upward at the little cluster of lights that drifted in orbit: Kurganov Station and the ships of their fleet, including those which Aelanni would, on the morrow, lead out of this system.
She had finally broken the silence, smiling bravely, her breath frosting in the moonlight. "Haven't we had a farewell like this before?"
"Yes," he had lied, "when you left for Altair." It wasn't really the same at all. She hadn't been going into battle then, and they hadn't yet belonged to each other and to Jason. But the two departures had had one thing in common: her buried, unwilling eagerness. Before, she had quested for new horizons; now she sought the homeworld she had not seen in almost ten of the years of distant Earth. And, even more, she sought the deaths of that world's rapists.
He had taken her in his arms. "Aelanni, whatever happens, I want this to be our last farewell. I'm no damned good at it! And besides . . . we'll have given enough."
She had looked at him gravely. "You're right, Eric. We'll meet on Raehan, where"—a flash of the sudden impishness he knew so well—"I'll show you some great beaches!
Warm
beaches! And you can show me your Earth. And after that, we'll have to begin forging an alliance between Raehan and your people to face the Korvaasha . . . but whatever we have to face we'll face together. No more farewells!"
They had held each other until the cold had begun to seep through to their flesh, and then gone inside.
The next day she had departed for the outer system where the mass limit lay, and then vanished into the strange state of continuous-displacement travel, outrunning any possible attempt to communicate with her. For the next month DiFalco had lost himself in the hectic toil of final preparations for the American and Russian ships' departure for Seivra. At last the day had arrived and they had left Terranova behind, with the noncombatants left there to care for the children (he had sternly ordered himself not to think of Jason) and maintain a colony of which, win or lose, the Korvaasha would not learn.
They had set out in two waves. First were the seven heavily armed and extensively modified cruisers, and three personnel transports which had been converted into carriers for Thompson's ground-assault force. Behind had come the cargo carriers which had been fitted out to serve as a fleet train (the goddamned ex-Navy types again!) with supplies and mobile repair facilities whose personnel travelled aboard other transports—transports which also carried one other . . .
Varien had been adamant: he would not wait on Terranova. Aelanni had been equally unyielding about taking him along to share the extraordinary risks involved in the Raehaniv ships' part of the plan. So he had resigned himself with no good grace to the primitivism of the transport
Irkutsk
, for DiFalco wasn't about to let him expose himself to the hazards of space combat aboard one of the cruisers of the first wave. At least he had spent more than his share of the two-and-a-half-month journey in the cryogenic hibernation in which they had all taken turns. Officially, this was a concession to his advanced years; in fact, DiFalco had wanted to minimize the old coot's opportunities to exercise his talent—verging on genius—for exasperating people.
And so they had proceeded to Seivra, occupying themselves with the operational readiness exercises that DiFalco had laid on for the purpose of keeping them busy and which almost succeeded in keeping nerves from stretching to nearly the snapping point.