more trouble than the Navy. Once, years ago, he had arranged a meeting between them in the hope of presenting a united military front to the Oligarchy, but nothing had come of it. Their vision was too small, too short-sighted. They merely wanted a piece of the action; he wanted it all. He had started out with nothing but forty-three followers and one ship. Two years of piracy had increased his personal navy to seventeen ships and more than six thousand men. Piracy was lucrative, and he could easily have continued such an existence indefinitely, but his dreams were grander than the accumulation of mere wealth; and to his gnawing hunger for power he added a shrewd military mind and a forcefulness of character that commanded instant, unquestioning obedience. It was after his first successful clash with the Navy that he began to think in terms of conquest rather than mere looting. True, the odds had all favored his side, but that was inconsequential; it was the first time the Navy had lost even a minor skirmish in more than three centuries, and it shattered the myth of invincibility that had grown up about the forces of the Oligarchy. He next staked out a small area well out on the galactic Rim. Its boundaries encompassed 376 stars which included some 550 planets, about 35 of them inhabited. He allowed himself half a year to become the total master of the area, and beat his self-imposed deadline with more than a month to spare. From there his empire expanded, always on the Rim, always far from the supply bases of the Oligarchic Navy. He avoided any confrontation with the Navy for almost five years, moving slowly, carefully, securing each new addition before moving out once again. Other would-be warlords learned from his successes, and soon they, too, were staking out territorial claims. Some of them, giddy with power, moved too soon against the Navy and were demolished; others tried to pry loose some of Grath's possessions, with a similar lack of success. Grath always executed the leaders; those underlings who were willing to join him were assimilated into his ranks, and those with exceptional abilities were given better treatment than they had known under their former commanders. At last it was economics that forced him to move against the Oligarchy. He had almost five million men to feed, and was acutely aware of the increased rate of defections among those soldiers stationed on the habitable planets in his domain. The Rim had been all but taken, and no single system, or group of systems, could stand up to his military might. There had been one surrender after another, and his men had grown bored with these bloodless victories. He felt they needed to have a purpose once again, and the only goal remaining that could fire their imaginations and appeal to their lust was the Oligarchy itself. He took his eyes from the stars and turned back to his associates, who were awaiting his orders. “Gentlemen,” he said, “the first blow must be a telling one. To attack a poorly-manned outpost or a small convoy of Navy ships would offer no test to our strength, and would probably not even cause a ripple of concern on Deluros.”
“And what's wrong with having Deluros slumber on while we go for its throat?” asked one of his subcommanders.
“Because, ironic as it seems,” said Grath, “a slumbering Deluros is impregnable. The only way we can get within striking distance is to lure the Navy out from the core of the Oligarchy. If they fear us, if they mobilize the bulk of their forces, then we've got a chance. The trick is never to let them know our true size and strength, to make them nervous enough to seek us out but not smart enough to realize that we've got almost half a million ships.”
He paused, looking slowly about the table. “In order to accomplish this, we shall make a massive strike
upon Altair VII.”
“You certainly don't believe in easy objectives, do you?” said an aide. “There are a million easy objectives in this galaxy,” replied Grath, “and not one of them—or all of them put together, for that matter—would do us the slightest bit of good. The Oligarchy controls almost two million worlds; they control five-sixths of the galaxy's economy and they have a Navy of more than fifty million warships with an average crew of two hundred men per ship, not to mention billions of other soldiers and mercenaries on those planets that are under martial control. To make any kind of dent in the Oligarchy at all, we've got to hit something big, something vital. Do you think they really give a damn about what we do here on the Rim? We're so far away from the core of things that we don't even count as a minor irritant yet. We've wasted enough time seeking after loot; if we're ever to achieve empire, we're going to have to get on with it. Time is our greatest enemy. It's a big galaxy, big enough to take even our fastest ship more than a year to cross it unopposed. To cross it when we're outnumbered by more than a hundred to one, when we have precious little ability or opportunity to replace ships or men ... that, gentlemen, is the situation. We're going to have to do in a handful of years what is rightfully a task for generations. And we shall begin,” he concluded, “with Altair VII.” Altair VII was the political and economic center of an area almost 725 light-years across. It was the farthest from Deluros VIII of all the major Oligarchic worlds, and hence was the coordinating ruling body of tens of thousands of frontier worlds reaching out to the Rim. As such, it was considered to be of vital importance in the Oligarchy's scheme of things, and merited a fleet of almost 35,000 Navy ships for its protection (and its occasional forays against insubordinate frontier worlds). Altair VII held very little strategic value to any military force other than the Oligarchy itself. It was too far from Deluros VIII to make a useful base of operations, and it required three farming worlds to supply it with its needs. Its sole value lay in its complex and highly efficient bureaucracy. Almost six billion humans, practically all of them employed by the government in one form or another, worked in the huge, endless, glass-enclosed buildings, living out their lives amid file cabinets, computers, and fear of demotion or termination.
And yet power lay here too, the power to move unruly worlds into line, to expand Man's domination to a planet here or a system there; and, unstated but never forgotten, there was the greatest power of all—that of the Oligarchy.
The battle of the Altair system was brief, as space battles went in those days. Grath had made his plans well, feeding the coordinates of the star, its capital planet, and every ship of his own armada into scores of computers. Distances were established, times computed, the minute curvature of space accounted for, and eventually flight plans were programmed into every vessel. They did not all take off at once, nor at the same speed, nor even in the same direction. But each was programmed to reach the Altair system within seconds of all the others.
To the naked eye, the arrival of Grath's fleet would have seemed like magic: one instant the system was empty, the next it was alive with almost half a million ships braking to sub- light speeds. But the technology of spatial conflict had long since ceased to rely on the naked eye, and the Oligarchy's Navy was not totally unprepared.
A number of Garth's ships overshot the Altair system by light-years, some plunged into the sun, and a few crashed into the largest of the system's sixteen planets. But the bulk of the fleet arrived when and where they were supposed to, and after a brief flurry which saw relatively heavy casualties on both sides,
the battle settled down—as such battles usually do—to a series of manipulations, englobements,
three-dimensional phalanxes, and all the complex military formations that the most sophisticated computers and minds in the galaxy could conceive. It took almost three weeks, weeks of long and intricate maneuverings broken by short, unbelievably violent clashes. At the end of it, Altair VII, and indeed the entire Altair system, was Grath's. It had cost him twenty-one days and 46,000 ships. He spent the next few months regrouping his forces, reestablishing what meager supply lines he had created, and waiting for a reaction from the Oligarchy. There was none. “Our next target,” he announced one evening, “is Valleux II. It's a mining world specializing in platinum, and it's about a thousand light-years closer to the core than Altair. Also, I've decided to give up our Rim bases for good.”
“But why?” asked an aide. “We're almost impregnable here.” “Precisely,” said Grath. “It's possible they felt we had some grievance against Altair, but once we hit Valleux they'll know we mean business. Now, if I were commanding the Navy, my first thought would be to contain my enemy until I knew the size and strength of his forces and could mobilize against him; and the most obvious place to contain him would be on the farthest reaches of the Rim, where he feels least vulnerable. Also, if I knew his base, I could decimate him every time he returned from a strike. No, gentlemen, from this day forth, until we land on Deluros VIII itself, our only base will be our armada. And now,” he concluded, “I think it's about time to check with the computers and coordinate our attack on Valleux.”
The Navy forces protecting Valleux II were considerably smaller than those that had been in the Altair system, and the battle, though furious on both sides, didn't last as long. Counting the regrouping interim, Valleux II cost Grath 126 days and 12,450 ships. In rapid order his forces took Ballion X, Hesperite III, and Quantos IX. They cost him 152 days and 16,050 ships.
He
