Karlsarm chuckled. “Do you really expect me to tell you?”
Ridenour made a rueful grin, but his eyes were troubled. “I don’t ask for military secrets. In general terms, however, what do you foresee?”
“A war of attrition,” Karlsarm said. “We don’t like that prospect either. It’ll taste especially sour to use biologicals against their damned agriculture. But if we must, we must. We have more land, more resources of the kind that count, more determination. And they can’t get at us. We’ll outgrind them.”
“Are you quite sure? Suppose you provoke them—or the Imperial Navy—into making a real effort. Imagine, say, one atomic bomb dropped into this lake.”
Anger laid tight bands around Karlsarm’s throat and chest, but he managed to answer levelly: “We have defenses. And means of retaliation. This is a keystone area for us. We won’t lose it without exacting a price—which I think they’ll find too heavy. Tell them that when you go home!”
“I shall. I don’t know if I’ll be believed. You appear to have no concept of the power that a single, minor-class spaceship can bring to bear. I beg you to make terms before it’s too late.”
“Do you aim to convince a thousand leaders like me and the entire society that elected us? I wish you luck, John Ridenour.” Karlsarm turned from the pleading gaze. “I’d better get busy. We’re still several kilometers short of our campsite.”
His brusqueness was caused mainly by doubt of his ability to dissemble much longer. What he, with some experience of Imperialists, sensed in this one’s manner, lent strong support to the intuitive suspicions that Evagail had voiced. Ridenour had more on his mind than the Terran admitted.
It was unwise to try getting the truth out of him with drugs. He might be immunized or counter-conditioned. Or his secret might turn out to be something harmless. In either, case, a potentially valuable spokesman would have been antagonized for nothing.
An aphrodite? She’d boil the ice water in his veins, for certain! And, while possessors of that Skill were rare, several were standing by at present in case they should be needed on some intelligence mission.
It might not work, either. But the odds were high that it would. Damned few men cared for anything but the girl—the woman—the hag—whatever her age, whatever her looks—once she had turned her pheromones loose on him. She could ask what she would as the price of her company. But Ridenour might belong to that small percentage who, otherwise normal, were so intensely inner-directed that it didn’t matter how far in love they fell; they’d stick by their duty. Should this prove the case he could not be allowed to leave and reveal the existence of that powerful a weapon. He must be killed, which was repugnant, or detained, which was a nuisance.
Karlsarm’s brain labored on, while he issued his orders and led the final march. Ridenour probably did not suspect that he was suspected. He likeliest interpreted Evagail’s avoidance of him as due to pique, despite what she had claimed. (And in some degree it no doubt is, Karlsarm snickered to himself.) Chances were he attributed the chief’s recent gruffness to preoccupation. He had circulated freely among the other wen and women of the force; but not having been told to doubt his good faith, they did not and he must realize it.
Hard to imagine what he might do. He surely did not plan on access to an aircar or a long-range radio transmitter! Doubtless he’d report anything, he had seen or heard that might have military significance. But he wouldn’t be reporting anything that made any difference. Well before he was conducted to the agrolands, the army would have left Moon Garnet again; and it would not return, because the lake was too precious to use for a permanent base. And all this had been made explicit to Ridenour at the outset.
Well, then, why not give him free rein and see what he did? Karlsarm weighed risks and gains for some time before he nodded to himself.
The encampment was large. A mere fraction of the Up-woods men had gone to Domkirk. Thousands stayed behind, training. They greeted their comrades with envious hilarity. Fires burned high that night, song and dance and clinking goblets alarmed the forest.
_ At sunset, Karlsarm and Evagail stood atop a rocky bluff, overlooking water and trees and a northward rise to the camp. Behind them was a cave, from which projected an Arulian howitzer. Several other heavy-duty weapons were placed about the area, and a rickety old war boat patrolled overhead. Here and there, a man flitted into view, bow or blade on shoulder, and vanished again into the brake. Voices could be heard, muted by leaves, and smoke drifted upward. But the signs of man were few, virtually lost in that enormous landscape. With the enemy hundreds of kilometers off, guns as well as picketposts were untended; trees divided the little groups of men from each other and hid them from shore or sky; the evening was mostly remote bird cries and long golden light.
“I wonder what our Terran thinks of this,” Karlsarm said. “We must look pretty sloppy to him.”
“He’s no fool. He doesn’t underrate us much. Maybe not at all.” Evagail shivered, though the air was yet warm. Her hand crept into his, her voice grew thin. “Could he be right? Could we really be foredoomed?”
“I don’t know,” Karlsarm said.
She started. The hazel eyes widened. “Loveling! You are always—”
“I can be honest with you,” he said.”Ridenour accused me today of not understanding what power the Imperialists command in a single combat unit. He was wrong.
I’ve seen them and I do understand. We can’t force terms on them. If they decide the Cities must prevail, well, we’ll give them a hard guerrilla war, but we’ll be hunted down in the end. Our aim has to be to convince them it isn’t worthwhile—that, at the least, their cheapest course of action is to arrange and enforce a status quo settlement between us and the Cities.” He laughed. “Whether or not they’ll agree remains to be seen. But we’ve got to try, don’t we?”
“Do we?”
“Either that or stop being the Free People.”
She leaned her head on his shoulder. “Let’s not spend the night in this hole,” she begged. “Not with that big ugly gun looming over us. Let’s take our bedrolls into the forest.”
“I’m sorry. I must stay here.”
“Why?”
“So Noach can find me… if his animals report anything.”
Karlsarm woke before the fingers had closed on his arm to shake him. He sat up. The cave was a murk, relieved by a faint sheen off the howitzer; but the entrance cut a blue-black starry circle in it. Noach crouched silhouetted. “He lay awake the whole night,” the handler breathed. “Now he’s sneaked off to one of the blaster cannon. He’s fooling around with it”
Karlsarrn heard Evagail gasp at his side. He slipped weapon belts and quiver strap over the clothes he had slept in, took his crossbow and glided forth. “We’ll see about that,” he said. Anger stood bleak within him. “Lead on?’ Silent though they were, slipping from shadow, he became aware of the woman at his back.
Selene was down, sunrise not far off, but the world still lay !lighted, sky powdered with stars and lake gleaming like a mirror. An uhu wailed, off in the bulk of the forest. The air was cold. ICarlsarrn glanced aloft.
Among the constellations crept that spark which had often haunted his thoughts. The orbit he estimated from angular speed was considerable. Therefore the thing was big. And if the Imperialists had erected some kind of space station, the, grapevine would have brought news from the Free People’s spies inside the Cities; therefore the thing was a spaceship—huge. Probably the light cruiser
Was it coincidence that she took her
The blaster cannon stood on a bare ridge, barrel etched gaunt across the Milky Way. His group crouched under the last tree and peered. One of Noach’s beasts could go unobserved among the scattered bushes, but not a man. And the beasts weren’t able to describe what went on at the controls of a machine.
—Could he—”
Karlsarm chopped off Evagail’s whisper with a hiss. The gun was in action. He saw the thing move through a
