Birthright

in the employ of all the warlords in Grath's heyday. Now things are different. They number between four

and five billion. Look at the map.” The two men turned their eyes to the illuminated spiral. “They've made huge inroads, absolutely huge. And since they haven't got anyone with Grath's talents, they're content to pick the Oligarchy to shreds, bit by bit, along the outskirts of the frontiers.” “Then why worry?” asked Quince. “It'll be eons before they turn their eyes toward Deluros.” “I doubt it.”

“Why?” asked Quince.

“Two reasons,” said Broder. “First, sooner or later they've got to realize what Grath knew all along: that the quickest way to conquer the Oligarchy is to conquer Deluros. And second, that the only other way to conquer the Oligarchy is to pick it to pieces, which means they'll be thirty generations removed from the warlords who finally land here.”

“Then you expect a strike on Deluros?”

Broder shrugged. “If it was me, yes, I'd buck the odds and attack. With them, who knows? Hell, they probably spend more time fighting among themselves than against the Navy. Still, they'll be coming one of these days.”

The conversation ambled on a little longer, and then Broder returned to his office. As second in command of the Navy's defense forces at Deluros, it was his job to keep troops and fleet in a state of preparedness ... and wait.

It had been a long wait. Grath had made it to within almost two thousand light-years before the Navy lowered the boom, and no warlord had had the temerity to come that close again. Sooner or later they'd try again, get a couple of light-years closer, and be repelled or destroyed again. And he, Admiral Ramos Broder, honor graduate from the Deluros Military Academy, author of two highly-praised volumes on the tactics of space war, former ambassador to Canphor VI, would grow old and die, awaiting the opportunity to prove his mettle in battle. On course, he thought with a tight grin, there was job security aplenty. But one of the problems with job security was that the men ahead of you also had it, and you weren't likely to advance until they died or retired. That was all right for men like Quince, but not for him: He wanted a position commensurate with his abilities, and he wouldn't be getting one unless and until those abilities were tested. At which time, he concluded, half the people above him would have been killed and he'd advance anyway. Neither the thoughts nor the frustrations were new to him. Far from it. He'd lived with them for years now, though the passage of time hadn't exactly mellowed him. Which was why he had agreed to see the man who was being ushered into his office. “Connough?” he asked, extending his hand. The man nodded. He was very tall, quite rangy, with large blue eyes that darted back and forth across the office, taking in windows, intercoms, and all the paraphernalia of bureaucracy. Broder turned to his aide. “No calls, no visitors, no communication of any sort and no monitoring. Understood?”