battleoid. The suit’s servos whined at full power and still the Praetor found it difficult to move through the corridor, as the intense Gs made every step miserable.
The ship’s engines had burned at ninety-seven percent capacity for days. One of the dwindling crew had died because of it. Radiation had caused an embolism in his brain. The Highborn had bled to death before anyone discovered the problem.
In the corridor, the Praetor breathed heavily as he slid another armored foot forward. Sweat bathed him even as the suit’s conditioner blasted his flesh with cold. In such a battleoid-suit, he could have made one hundred-meter leaps on Earth. With such a suit, he could have taken out a company of SU soldiers or a squad of cybertanks. In the gut-wrenching, decelerating ship, with the murderous Gs pummeling him, the suit could barely move.
The Praetor yearned to halt and rest. His lungs labored for air and his side ached horribly.
“You have three minutes and forty-three seconds to overload,” a harsh, Highborn voice said in his ears.
The Praetor snarled, blinking sweat out of his eyes. He wasn’t going to have made it to Uranus and back to die as an unsung hero in the Jovian System. Grand Admiral Cassius had thought to trick him, to sweep him from the board like a pawn. He—the Praetor—had won the Third Battle for Mars, launching the missile strike that had opened the way for the Doom Stars. Now he was going to conquer the Jupiter System with a single warship—and a badly crippled ship at that. It was going to be the greatest military exploit in the annals of war. Only Francisco Pizarro of Old Spain would have done something in league with what he planned.
The Praetor wasn’t a historical expert like the Grand Admiral, but he recalled his lessens from the creche- school. Even for a Highborn, he had a phenomenal memory. He’d climbed to Fourth Rank for a reason.
The Praetor laughed madly and wheezed, utterly exhausted. His throbbing limbs threatened to rebel. He would soon be reduced to a quivering lump, unable to move. Then he would die as a loser. Grand Admiral Cassius would have defeated him. Cassius would have won.
“Never,” the Praetor whispered, as he forced another foot forward.
The Praetor concentrated until his mind became like a ball of energy. He willed his legs to shuffle forward. He clamped down on the pain, on the exhaustion.
“I am the Praetor,” he whispered. “I will conquer the Jupiter System.”
He remembered a lesson from his creche-school. It had thrilled him with its daring, with its sheer ruthlessness. In his strange state of mind, which was like a feverish dream induced by the constant declaration and his straining effort to cross the ship, the Praetor hallucinated. For a time, he believed he was Francisco Pizarro.
Pizarro had been a Spanish Conquistador, perhaps the greatest of that daring breed. In 1531, Pizarro had set out on the most improbable conquest of history.
Luckily, Pizarro had Hernan Cortez’s fabulous conquest of Aztec Mexico before him as a guide. Pizarro knew that Spanish swords, gunpowder-propelled arquebuses and horses combined with Spanish courage could triumph over the hordes of Indian warriors with their stone-edged swords and hatchets. On first sighting horses and their riders, many Aztec and Incas had believed that the horsemen were some odd creature like centaurs. Thus, the horsemen had fiercely intimidated the natives. That didn’t mean the Indian nations were primitive in a quantitative sense, at least not compared to the conquistadors. The golden city of Mexico had awed Cortez and his men with its beauty, its teeming population and cleanliness, being bigger and more orderly than any Spanish city of that time. The same held true in the case of the Inca cities and for Pizarro’s expedition.
Pizarro had heard wondrous stories about a vast empire in the interior mountains. For years, Pizarro searched for this elusive empire. Then in the fateful year of 1531, he landed at Tumbes, what was now the smoldering ruin of San Miguel. From there, Pizarro marched with a minuscule army into the towering Andes Range. He set off with one hundred and two infantry, sixty-two horsemen, two cannons and a pack of savage mastiffs. He marched toward the Inca Empire, which boasted a standing army of over a hundred thousand veteran warriors.
The Inca Empire was the largest that primitive humanity had ever constructed at such a high elevation. They had gold-laden cities on mountaintop locations, richly cultivated fields on the mountainsides, rope bridges spanning amazing gorges and a powerful veteran host of victorious warriors.
Inca scouts watched the pitifully small Spanish force wind its way through the mountains. The Inca, the Emperor Atahualpa, scoffed at any noble who told him to fear such a weak force of white men. At any time, it was obvious, hardy warriors could ambush the Spaniards and annihilate them.
So Emperor Atahualpa allowed Pizarro to march to Cajamarca, where he waited with an army of over 40,000 warriors. Pizarro and his seemingly frightened men huddled in a walled village, surrounded by the seething mass of highly decorated warriors.
A day passed, and Emperor decided to go see these strange men with white skin and shining armor. He entered the walled compound with five thousand Incas armed only with ceremonial axes. They bore him on a litter into an empty square.
All the Spaniards waited in the buildings, gripping their swords and priming their clumsy arquebuses. Each gun weighed ten to fifteen pounds, the gunner needing to rest the barrel on a hooked stick in order to fire. Finally, a Spanish priest walked alone to face the Inca. With an outstretched Bible in hand, the priest demanded the Inca surrender to them. When the Emperor was given the Bible, he threw it down in disgust. The priest backed away horrified, and with a shout, he gave the signal.
The Spanish erupted from their buildings. On horse and using lances, the cavalry waded into the masses of Inca nobles. The swordsmen hurried after them. The two cannons boomed and the savage mastiffs tore into Indian flesh.
The astounded Incas died as they tried to defend their emperor. The Spanish went berserk, filled with terror at the numbers of their enemies and filled with greed because of promised treasure.
The only Spanish blood spilled that day occurred when Pizarro grabbed a Spanish sword that slashed at the Emperor. It cut Pizarro’s palm, but it saved Atahualpa’s life. With the emperor’s capture and hustling into captivity, Pizarro paralyzed the massive host waiting outside the walled village. As in the Aztec Empire, the Inca or Emperor was considered semi-divine and his person sacrosanct.
The shrewd Spaniards understood this to a nicety. And that spelled the end for the Inca Empire, which had effectively fallen to the gold-crazed, God-besotted and glory-mad conquistadors of Spain.
Francisco Pizarro had conquered an empire of over ten million with sixty-two horsemen, one hundred and two infantry, two cannons, a pack of savage mastiffs and inspired daring.
What a mere preman could do among his fellow subhumans, a Highborn could outdo. The Praetor was absolutely certain of this. First, however, he must survive. Second, he had to end the terrible velocity that had nearly sent him to an inglorious oblivion in the void. The Praetor returned to reality then and realized that he had been standing still in his battleoid-suit for several long seconds.
“One minute and thirty-one seconds,” a Highborn said in his ears.
The Praetor hissed a litany of curses as he struck the hatch before him. The battleoid armor supplied him with exoskeleton power. The open palm caused steel to crumple and the hatch to tear from its moorings. It clanged in the conversion chamber as a fierce red glow bathed the Praetor’s ten-foot battleoid suit.
Covered in sweat, trembling from exhaustion but driven by a greater will than Francisco Pizarro had ever possessed, the Praetor entered the deadly chamber. Radiation bathed him. He heard the clicks in his suit and knew what it meant, too many rads, far too many. He would have to endure a chemical bath later and ingest many anti- radiation pills. He still might die. But unless someone came in here and fixed the malfunction, they were all doomed.
“I am the Praetor,” he whispered.
He shuffled ten more meters and then he un-shouldered the welding unit. Groaning, he sagged to his knees. It was hard to see, and his skin prickled horribly. The warning clicks nearly drove him to despair.
As the missile-ship decelerated, the Praetor began to work on the malfunction, his welder’s blue arc the only hope against the glowing red that meant death.
“Twenty-seven seconds until overload,” the voice said.
“Sixty-two horsemen,” the Praetor whispered, “one hundred and two infantry, two cannons—”
“Lord, are you well?” the voice asked.
“One missile-ship,” the Praetor said, “that’s all I need to win the Jovian System.”
“He’s raving,” Canus said.
Perhaps Canus was right. The blue arc continued to burn as the seconds reached zero and beyond. Still, the
