The Long Night

The Star Plunderer

They were closing in now. The leader was a gray bulk filling my sight scope, and every time I glanced over the wall a spanging sleet of bullets brought my head jerking down again. I had some shelter from behind which to shoot in a fragment of wall looming higher than the rest, like a single tooth left in a dead man’s jaw, but I had to squeeze the trigger and then duck fast. Once in awhile one of their slugs would burst on my helmet and the gas would be sickly-sweet in my nostrils. I felt ill and dizzy with it.

Kathryn was reloading her own rifle, I heard her swearing as the cartridge clip jammed in the rusty old weapon. I’d have given her my own, except that it wasn’t much better. It’s no fun fighting with arms that are likely to blow up in your face but it was all we had—all that poor devastated Terra had after the Baldics had sacked her twice in fifteen years.

I fired a burst and saw the big gray barbarian spin on his heels, stagger and scream with all four hands clutching his belly, and sink slowly to his knees. The creatures behind him howled, but he only let out a deep-throated curse. He’d be a long time dying. I’d blown a hole clear through him, but those Gorzuni were tough.

The slugs wailed around us as I got myself down under the wall, hugging the long grass which had grown up around the shattered fragments of the house. There was a fresh wind blowing, rustling the grass and the big war-scarred trees, sailing clouds across a sunny summer sky, so the gas concentration was never enough to put us out. But Jonsson and Hokusai were sprawled like corpses there against the broken wall. They’d taken direct hits and they’d sleep for hours.

Kathryn knelt beside me, the ragged, dirty coverall like a queen’s robe on her tall young form, a few dark curls falling from under her helmet for the wind to play with ‘If we get them mad enough,” she said, “they’ll call for the artillery or send a boat overhead to blow, us to the Black Planet.”

“Maybe,” I grunted. “Though they’re usually pretty eager for slaves.”

“John—” She crouched there a moment, the tiny frown I knew so well darkening her blue eyes. I watched the way leaf-shadows played across her thin brown face. There was a grease smudge on the snub nose, hiding the little freckles. But she still looked good, really good, she and green Terra and life and freedom and all that I’d never have again.

“John,” she said at last, “maybe we should save them the trouble. Maybe we should make our own exit.”

“It’s a thought,” I muttered, risking a glance above the wall.

The Gorzuni were more cautious now, creeping through the trampled gardens toward the shattered outbuilding we defended. Behind them, the main estate, last knot of our unit’s resistance, lay smashed and burning. Gorzuni were swarming around us, dragging out such humans as survived and looting whatever treasure was left. I was tempted to shoot at those big furry bodies but I had to save ammunition for the detail closing, in on us.

“I don’t fancy life as the slave of a barbarian outworlder,” I said. “Though humans with technical training are much in demand and usually fairly well treated. But for a woman—” The words trailed off. I couldn’t say them.

“I might trade on my own mechanical knowledge,” she said. “And then again, I might not. Is it worth the risk, John, my dearest?”

We were both conditioned against suicide, of course. Everyone in the broken Commonwealth navy was, except bearers of secret information. The idea was to sell our lives or liberty as exorbitantly as possible, fighting to the last moment. It was a stupid policy, typical of the blundering leadership that had helped lose us our wars. A human slave with knowledge of science and machinery was worth more to the barbarians than the few extra soldiers he could kill out of their hordes by staying alive till captured.

But the implanted inhibition could be broken by a person of strong will. I looked at Kathryn for a moment, there in the tumbled ruins of the house, and her eyes sought mine and rested, deep-blue and grave with a tremble of tears behind the long silky lashes.

“Well—” I said helplessly, and then I kissed her.

That was our big mistake. The Gorzuni had moved closer than I realized and in Terra’s gravity—about half of their home planet’s—they could move like a sun-bound comet.

One of them came soaring over the wall behind me, landing on his clawed splay feet with a crash that shivered in the ground.

A wild “Whoo-oo-oo-oo!” was hardly out of his mouth before I’d blown the horned head off his shoulders. But there was a gray mass swarming behind him, and-Kathryn yelled and fired into the thick of another attack from our rear.

Something stung me, a bright sharp pain and then a bomb exploding in my head and a whirling sick spiral down into blackness. The next thing I saw was Kathryn, caught in the hairy arms of a soldier. He was half again as tall as she, he’d twisted the barrel off her weapon as he wrenched it from her hands, but she was giving him a good fight. A hell of good fight. Then I didn’t see anything else for some time.

They herded us aboard a tender after dark. It was like a scene from some ancient hell—night overhead and around, lit by many score of burning houses like uneasy torches out there in the dark, and the long, weary line of humans stumbling toward the tender with kicks and blows from the guards to hurry them along.

One house was aflame not far off, soaring blue and yellow fire glancing off the metal of the ship, picking a haggard face from below, glimmering in human tears and in unhuman eyes. The shadows wove in and out, hiding us from each other save when a gust of wind blew up the fire. Then we felt a puff of heat and looked away from each other’s misery.

Kathryn was not to be seen in that weaving line. I groped along with my wrists tied behind me, now and then jarred by a gunbutt as one of the looming figures grew impatient. I could hear the sobbing of women and the groaning of men in the dark, before me, behind me, around me as they forced us into the boat.

“Jimmy. Where are you, Jimmy?”

“They killed him. He’s lying there dead in the ruins.”

“O God, what have we done?”

“My baby. Has anyone seen my baby? I had a baby and they took him away from me.”

“Help, help, help, help, help—”

A mumbled and bitter curse, a scream, a whine, a rattling gasp of breath, and always the slow shuffle of feet and the sobbing of the women and the children.

We were the conquered. They had scattered our armies. They had ravaged our cities. They had hunted us through the streets and the hills and the great deeps of space, and we could only snarl and snap at them and hope that the remnants of our navy might pull a miracle. But miracles are hard to come by.

So far the Baldic League had actually occupied only the outer planets. The inner worlds were nominally under Commonwealth rule but the government was hiding or nonexistent. Only fragments of the navy fought on without authority or plan or hope, and Terra was the happy hunting ground of looters and slave raiders. Before long, I supposed bitterly, the outworlders would come in force, break the last resistance, and incorporate all the Solar System into their savage empire. Then the only free humans would be the extrasolar colonists, and a lot of them were barbaric themselves and had joined the Baldic League against the mother world.

The captives were herded into cells aboard the tender, crammed together till there was barely room to stand.

Kathryn wasn’t in my cell either. I lapsed into dull apathy.

When everyone was aboard, the deckplates quivered under our feet and acceleration jammed us cruelly against each other. Several humans died in that press. I had all I could do to keep the surging mass from crushing in my chest but of course the Gorzuni didn’t care. There were plenty more where we came from.

The boat was an antiquated and rust-eaten wreck, with half its archaic gadgetry broken and useless. They weren’t technicians, those Baldics. They were barbarians who had learned too soon how to build and handle spaceships and firearms, and a score of their planets united by a military genius had gone forth to overrun the civilized Commonwealth.

But their knowledge was usually by rote; I have known many a Baldic “engineer” who made sacrifices to his converter, many a general who depended on astrologers or haruspices for major decisions. So trained humans were in considerable demand as slaves. Having a degree in nuclear engineering myself, I could look for a halfway decent berth, though of course there was always the possibility of my being sold to someone who would flay me or blind me or let me break my heart in his mines.

Untrained humans hadn’t much chance. They were just flesh-and-blood machines doing work that the barbarians didn’t have automatics for, rarely surviving ten years of slavery. Women were the luxury trade, sold at high prices to the human renegades and rebels. I groaned at that thought and tried desperately to assure myself that Kathryn’s technical knowledge would keep her in the possession of a nonhuman.

We were taken up to a ship orbiting just above the atmosphere. Airlocks were joined, so I didn’t get a look at her from outside, but as soon as we entered I saw that she was a big interstellar transport of the Thurnogan class, used primarily for carrying troops to Sol and slaves back, but armed for war. A formidable fighting ship when properly handled.

Guards were leaning on their rifles, all of Gorzuni race, their harness worn any way they pleased and no formality between officers and men. The barbarian armies’ sloppy discipline had blinded our spit-andpolish command to their reckless courage and their savage gunnery. Now the fine-feathered Commonwealth navy was a ragged handful of hunted, desperate men and the despised outworlders were harrying them through the Galaxy.

This ship was worse than usual, though. I saw rust and mold on the unpainted plates. The fluoros were dim and in places burned out. There was a faint pulse in the gravity generators. They had long ago been stripped and refurnished with skins, stolen hold goods, cooking pots, and weapons. The Gorzuni were all as dirty and unkempt as their ship. They lounged about gnawing chunks of meat, drinking, dicing, and looking up now and then to grin at us.

A barbarian who spoke some Anglic bellowed at us to strip. Those who hesitated were cuffed so the teeth rattled in their heads. We threw the clothes in a heap and moved forward slowly past a table where a drunken Gorzuni and a very sober human sat. Medical inspection.

The barbarian “doctor” gave each of us the most cursory glance. Most were passed on. Now and then he would look blearily at someone and say, “Sickly. Never make trip alive. Kill.”

The man or woman or child would scream as he picked up a sword and chopped off the head with one expert sweep.

The human sat halfway on the table swinging one leg and whistling softly. Now and again the Gorzuni medic would look at him in doubt over some slave. The human would look closer. Usually he shoved them on. One or two he tapped for killing.

I got a close look at him as I walked by. He was below medium height, stockily built, dark and heavy-faced and beak-nosed, but his eyes were large and blue-gray, the coldest eyes I have ever seen on a human. He wore a loose colorful shirt and trousers of rich material probably stolen from some Terran villa.

“You filthy bastard,” I muttered.

He shrugged, indicating the iron collar welded about his neck. “I only work here, Lieutenant,” he said mildly. He must have noticed my uniform before I shed it.

Beyond the desk, a Gorzuni played a hose on us, washing off blood and grime. And then we were herded down the lone corridors and by way of wooden ladders (the drop-shafts and elevators weren’t working, it seemed) to the cells. Here they separated men and women. We went into adjoining compartments, huge echoing caverns of metal with bunks tiered along the wall, food troughs, and sanitary facilities the only furnishings.

Dust was thick on the corroded floor, and the air was cold and had a metallic reek. There must have been about five hundred men swarming hopelessly around after the barred door clanged shut on us.

Windows existed between the two great cells. We made a rush for them, crying out, pushing and crowding and snarling at each other for first chance to see if our women still lived.

I was large and strong. I shouldered my way through the mob up to the nearest window. A man was there already, flattened against the wall by the sweating bodies behind, reaching through the bars to the three hundred women who swarmed on the other side.

“Agnes!” he shrieked. “Agnes, are you there? Are you alive?”

I grabbed his shoulder and pulled him away. He turned with a curse, and I fed him a mouthful of knuckles and sent him lurching back into the uneasy press of men. “Kathryn!” I howled.

The echoes, rolled and boomed in the hollow metal caves, crying voices, prayers and curses and sobs of despair thrown back by the sardonic echoes till our heads shivered with it. “Kathryn! Kathryn!”

Somehow she found me. She came to me and the kiss through those bars dissolved ship and slavery and all the world for that moment. “Oh, John, John, John, you’re alive, you’re here. Oh, my darling—”

And then she looked around the metal-gleaming dimness and said quickly, urgently: “We’ll have a riot on our hands, John, if these people don’t calm down. See what you can do with the men. I’ll tackle the women.”

It was like her. She was the most gallant soul that ever. walked under Terran skies, and she had a mind which flashed in an instant to that which must be done. I wondered myself what point there was in stopping a murderous panic. Those who were killed would be better off, wouldn’t they? But Kathryn never surrendered, so I couldn’t either.

We turned back into our crowds, and shouted and pummeled and bullied, and slowly others came to our aid until there was a sobbing quiet in the belly of the slave ship. Then we organized turns at the windows. Kathryn and I both looked away from those reunions, or from the people who found no one. It isn’t decent to look at a naked soul.

The engines began to thrum. Under way, outward bound to the ice mountains of Gorzun, no more to see blue skies and green grass, no clean salt smell of ocean and roar of wind in tall trees. Now we were slaves and had nothing to do but wait.

There was no time aboard the ship. The few dim fluoros kept our hold forever in its uneasy twilight. The Gorzuni swilled us at such irregular intervals as they thought of it, and we heard only the throb of the engines and the asthmatic sigh of the ventilators. The twice-normal gravity kept most of us too weary even to talk much. But I think it was about forty-eight hours after leaving Terra, when the ship had gone into secondary drive and was leaving the Solar System altogether, that the man with the iron collar came down to us.

He entered with an escort of armed and wary Gorzuni who kept their rifles lifted. We looked up dull-eyed at the short stocky figure. His voice was almost lost in the booming vastness of the hold.

“I’m here to classify you. Come one at a time and tell me your name and training, if any. I warn you that the penalty for claiming training you haven’t got is torture, and you’ll be tested if you do make such claims.”

We shuffled past. A Gorzuni, the drunken doctor, had a tattoo needle set up and scribbled a number on the palm of each man. This went into the human’s notebook, together with name, age, and profession. Those without technical skills, by far the majority, were shoved roughly back. The fifty or so who claimed valuable education went over into a corner.

The needle burned my palm and I sucked the breath between my teeth. The impersonal voice was dim in my ears: “Name?”

“John Henry Reeves, age twenty-five, lieutenant in the Commonwealth navy and nuclear engineer before the wars.” I snapped the answers out, my throat harsh and a bitter taste in my mouth. The taste of defeat.

“Hmmm.” I grew aware that the pale chill eyes were resting on me with an odd regard. Suddenly the man’s thick lips twisted in a smile. It was a strangely charming smile, it lit his whole dark face with a brief radiance of merriment. “Oh, yes, I remember you, Lieutenant Reeves. You called.me, I believe, a filthy bastard.”

“I did,” I almost snarled. My hand throbbed and stung. I was unwashed and naked and sick with my own helplessness.

“You may be right at that,” he nodded. “But I’m in bad need of a couple of assistants. This ship is a wreck, She may never make Gorzun without someone to nurse the engines. Care to help me?”

“No,” I said.

“Be reasonable. By refusing you only get yourself locked in the special cell we’re keeping for trained slaves. It’ll be a long voyage, the monotony will do more to break your spirit than any number of lashings. As my assistant you’ll have proper quarters and a chance to move around and use your hands.”

I stood thinking. “Did you say you needed two assistants?” I asked.

“Yes. Two who can do something with this ruin of a ship.”

“I’ll be one,” I said, “if I can name the other.”

He scowled. “Getting pretty big for the britches you don’t have, aren’t you?”

“Take it or leave it,” I shrugged. “But this person is a hell of a good technician.”

“Well, nominate him, then, and I’ll see.”

“It’s a her. My fiancee, Kathryn O’Donnell.”

“No.” He shook his dark curly head. “No woman.”

“No man, then.” I grinned at him without mirth. Anger flamed coldly in his eyes. “I can’t have a woman around my neck like another millstone.”

“She’ll carry her own weight and more. She was a j.g. in my own ship, and she fought right there beside me till the end.”

The temper was gone without leaving a ripple. Not a stir of expression’in the strong, ugly, olive-skinned face that looked up at me. His voice was as flat. “Why didn’t you say so before? All right, then, Lieutenant. But the gods help you if you aren’t both as advertised!”

It was hard to believe it about clothes—the difference they made after being just another penned and naked animal. And a meal of stew and coffee, however ill prepared, scrounged at the galley after the warriors had messed, surged in veins and bellies which had grown used to swilling from a pig trough.

I realized bleakly that the man in the iron collar was right. Not many humans could have remained free of soul on the long, heart-cracking voyage to Gorzun. Add the eternal weariness of double weight, the chill dark grimness of our destination planet, utter remoteness from home, blank hopelessness, perhaps a touch of the whip and branding iron, and men became tame animals trudging meekly at the heels of their masters.

“How long have you been a slave?” I asked our new boss.

He strode beside us as arrogantly as if the ship were his. He was not a tall man, for even Kathryn topped him by perhaps five centimeters, and his round-skulled head barely reached my shoulder. But he had thick muscular arms, a gorilla breadth of chest, and the gravity didn’t seem to bother him at all.

“Going on four years,” he replied shortly. “My name, by the way, is Manuel Argos, and we might as well be on first name terms from the start.”

A couple of Gorzuni came stalking down the corridor, clanking with metal. We stood aside for the giants, of course, but there was no cringing in Manuel’s attitude. His strange eyes followed them speculatively.

We had a cabin near the stern, a tiny cubbyhole with four bunks, bleak and bare but its scrubbed cleanliness was like a breath of home after the filth of the cell. Wordlessly, Manuel took one of the sleazy blankets and hung it across a bed as a sort of curtain. “It’s the best privacy I can offer you, Kathryn,” he said.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

He sat down on his own bunk and looked up at us. I loomed over him, a blond giant against his squatness. My family had been old and cultured and wealthy before the wars, and he was the nameless sweeping of a hundred slums and spaceports, but from the first there was never any doubt of who was the leader.

“Here’s the story,” he said in his curt way. “I knew enough practical engineering in spite of having no formal education to get myself a fairly decent master in whose factories I learned more. Two years ago he sold me to the captain of this ship. I got rid of the so-called chief engineer they had then. It wasn’t hard to stir up a murderous quarrel between him and a jealous subordinate. But his successor is a drunken bum one generation removed from the forests.

“In effect, I’m the engineer of this ship. I’ve also managed to introduce my master, Captain Venjain, to marijuana. It hits a Gorzuni harder than it does a human, and he’s a hopeless addict by now. It’s partly responsible for the condition of this ship and the laxness among the crew. Poor leadership, poor organization. That’s a truism.”

I stared at him with a sudden chill along my spine. But it was Kathryn who whispered the question: “Why?”

“Waiting my chance,” he snapped. “I’m the one who made junk out of the engines and equipment. I tell them it’s old and poorly designed. They think that only my constant work holds the ship together at all: but I could have her humming in a week if I cared to. I can’t wait too much longer. Sooner or later someone else is going to look at that machinery and tell them it’s been deliberately haywired. So I’ve been waiting for a couple of assistants with technical training and a will to fight. I hope you two fit the bill. If not—” He shrugged. “Go ahead and tell on me. It won’t free you. But if you want to risk lives that won’t be very long or pleasant on Gorzun, you can help me take over the ship?”

I stood for some time looking at him. It was uncanny, the way he had sized us up from a glance and a word. Certainly the prospect was frightening. I could feel sweat on my face. My hands were cold. But I’d follow him. Before God, I’d follow him!

Still—“Three of us?” I jeered. “Three of us against a couple of hundred warriors?”

“There’ll be more on our side,” he said impassively. After a moment’s silence he went on: “Naturally, we’ll have to watch ourselves. Only two or three of them know Anglic. I’ll point them out to you. And of course our work is under surveillance. But the watchers are ignorant. I think you have the brains to fool them.”

“I—” Kathryn stood, reaching for words. “I can’t believe it,” she said at last. “A naval vessel in this condition—”

“Things were better under the old Baldic conquerors,” admitted Manuel. “The kings who forged the. League out of a hundred planets still in barbaric night, savages who’d learned to build spaceships and man atomblasts and little else. But even they succeeded only because there was no real opposition. The Commonwealth society was rotten, corrupt, torn apart by civil wars, its leadership a petrified bureaucracy, its military forces scattered over a thousand restless planets, its people ready to buy peace rather than fight. No wonder the League drove everything before it!

“But after the first sack of Terra fifteen years ago, the barbarians split up. The forceful early rulers were dead, and their sons were warring over an inheritance they didn’t know how to rule. The League is divided into two hostile regions now, and I don’t know how many splinter groups. Their old organization is shot to hell.

“Sol didn’t rally in time. It was still under the decadent Commonwealth government. So one branch of the Baldics has now managed to conquer our big planets. But the fact that they’ve been content to raid and loot the inner worlds instead of occupying them and administering them decently shows the decay of their own society. Given the leadership, we could still throw them out of the Solar System and go on to overrun their home territories. Only the leadership hasn’t been forthcoming.”

It was a harsh, angry lecture, and I winced and felt resentment within myself. “Damn it, we’ve fought,” I said.

“And been driven back and scattered.” His heavy mouth lifted in a sneer. “Because there .hasn’t been a chief who understood strategy and organization, and who could put heart into his men.”

“I suppose,” I said sarcastically, “that you’re that chief.”

His answer was flat and calm and utterly assured. “Yes.”

In the days the followed I got to know more about Manuel Argos. He was never loath to talk about himself.

His race, I suppose, was primarily Mediterranean-Anatolian, with more than a hint of Negro and Oriental, but I think there must have been some forgotten Nordic ancestor who looked out of those ice-blue eyes. A blend of all humanity, such as was not uncommon these days.

His mother had been a day laborer on Venus. His father, though he was never sure, had been a space prospector who died young and never saw his child. When he was thirteen he shipped out for Sirius and had not been in the Solar System since. Now, at forty, he had been spaceman, miner, dock walloper, soldier in the civil wars and against the Baldics, small-time politician on the colony planets, hunter; machinist, and a number of darker things.

Somewhere along the line, he had found time to do an astonishing amount of varied reading, but his reliance was always more on his own senses and reason and intuition than on books. He had been captured four years ago in a Gorzuni raid on Alpha Centauri, and had set himself to study his captors as cold-bloodedly as he had studied his own race.

Yes, I learned a good deal about him but nothing of him. I don’t think any living creature ever did. He was not one to open his heart. He went wrapped in loneliness and dreams all his days. Whether the chill of his manner went into his soul, and the rare warmth was only a mask, or whether he was indeed a yearning tenderness sheathed in armor of indifference, no one will ever be sure. And he made a weapon out of that uncertainty. A man never knew what to await from him and was thus forever strained in his presence, open to his will.

“He’s a strange sort,” said Kathryn once, when we were alone. “I haven’t decided whether he’s crazy or a genius.”

“Maybe both, darling,” I suggested, a little irritably. I didn’t like to be dominated.

“Maybe. But what is sanity, then?” She shivered and crept close to me. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

The ship wallowed on her way, through a bleak glory of stars, alone in light-years of emptiness with her cargo of hate and fear and misery and dreams. We worked, and waited, and the slow days passed.

—The laboring old engines had to be fixed. Some show had to be made for the gray-furred giants who watched us in the flickering gloom of the power chambers. We wired and, welded and bolted, tested and tore down and rebuilt, sweltering in the heat of bursting atoms that rolled from the radiation shields, deafened by the whine of generators and thud of misadjusted turbines and, the deep uneven drone of the great converters. We fixed Manuel’s sabotage until the ship ran almost smoothly. Later we would on some pretext throw the whole thing out of kilter again. “Penelope’s tapestry,” said Manuel, and I wondered that a space tramp could make the classical allusion.

“What are we waiting for?” I asked him once. The din of the generator we were overhauling smothered our words. “When do we start our mutiny?”

He glanced up at me. The light of our trouble lamp gleamed off the sweat on his ugly pockmarked face. “At the proper time,” he said coldly. “For one thing, it’ll be while the captain is on his next dope jag.”

Meanwhile two of the slaves had tried a revolt of their own. When an incautious guard came too near the door of the mens’ cell one of them reached out and snatched his gun from the holster and shot him down. Then he tried to blast the lock off the bars. When the Gorzuni came down to gas him his fellow battled them with fists and teeth till the rebels were knocked out. Both were flayed living in the presence of the other captives.

Kathryn couldn’t help crying after we were back in our cabin. She buried her face against my breast and wept till I thought she would never stop weeping. I held her close and mumbled whatever foolish words came to me.

“They had it coming,” said Manuel. There was contempt in his voice. “The fools. The blind stupid fools! They could at least have held the guard as a hostage and tried to bargain. No, they had to be heroes. They had to shoot him down. Now the example has frightened all of the others. Those men deserved being skinned.”

After a moment, he added thoughtfully, “Still, if the fear-emotion aroused in these slaves can be turned to hate it may prove useful. The shock has at least jarred them from their apathy.”

“You’re a heartless bastard,” I said tonelessly.

“I have to be, seeing that everyone else chooses to be brainless. These aren’t times for the tender-minded, you. This is an age of dissolution and chaos, such as has often happened in history, and only a person who first accepts the realities of the situation can hope to do much about them. We don’t live in a cosmos where perfection is possible or even desirable, We have to make our compromises and settle for the goals we have some chance of attaining.” To Kathryn, sharply: “Now stop that snuffling. I have to think.”

She gave him a wide-eyed tear-blurred look.

“It gives you a hell of an appearance.” He grinned nastily. “Nose red, face swollen, a bad case of hiccoughs. Nothing pretty about crying, you.”

She drew a shuddering breath and there was anger flushing her cheeks. Gulping back the sobs, she drew away from me and turned her back on him.

“But I stopped her,” whispered Manuel to me with a brief impishness.

The endless, meaningless days had worn into a timelessness where I wondered if this ship were not the Flying Dutchman, outward bound forever with a crew of devils and the damned. It was no use trying to hurry Manuel, I gave that up and slipped into the round of work and waiting. Now I think that part of his delay was on purpose, that he wanted to grind the last hope out of the slaves and leave only a hollow yearning for vengeance. They’d fight better that way.

I hadn’t much chance to be alone with Kathryn. A brief stolen kiss, a whispered word in the dimness of the engine room, eyes and hands touching lightly across a rusty, greasy machine. That was all. When we returned to our cabin we were too tired, generally, to do much except sleep.

I did once notice Manuel exchange a few words in the slave pen with Ensign Hokusai, who had been captured with Kathryn and myself. Someone had to lead the humans, and Hokusai was the best man for that job. But how had Manuel known? It was part of his genius for understanding.

The end came suddenly. Manuel shook me awake. I blinked wearily at the hated walls around me, feeling the irregular throb of the gravity field that was misbehaving again. More work for us. “All right, all right,” I grumbled. “I’m coming.”

When he flicked the curtain from Kathryn’s bunk and aroused her, I protested. “We can handle it. Let her rest.”

“Not now!” he answered. Teeth gleamed white in the darkness of his face. “The captain’s off in never-never land. I heard two of the Gorzuni talking about it.”

That brought me bolt awake, sitting up with an eerie chill along my spine. “Now—?”

“Take it easy,” said Manuel. “Lots of time.”

We threw on our clothes and went down the long corridors. The ship was still. Under the heavy shuddering drone of the engines, there was only the whisper of our shoes and the harsh rasp of the breath in my lungs. Kathryn was white-faced, her eyes enormous in the gloom. But she didn’t huddle against me. She walked between the two of us and a remoteness was over her that I couldn’t quite understand. Now and then we passed a Gorzuni warrior on some errand of his own, and shrank aside as became slaves. But I saw the bitter triumph in Manuel’s gaze as he looked after the titans.

In the power chamber where the machines loomed in a flickering red twilight like heathen gods. We found three Gorzuni standing there, armed engineers who snarled at us. One of them tried to cuff Manuel. He dodged without seeming to notice and bent over the gravity generator and signaled me to help him lift the cover.

I could see that there was a short circuit in one of the field coils, inducing a harmonic that imposed a flutter on the spacewarping current. It wouldn’t have taken long to fix. But Manuel scratched his head, and glanced back at the ignorant giants who loomed over our shoulders. He began tracing wires with elaborate puzzlement.

He said to me: “We’ll work up to the auxiliary atom-converter. I’ve fixed that to do what I want.”

I knew the Gorzuni couldn’t understand us, and that human expressions were meaningless to them, but an uncontrollable shiver ran along my nerves.

Slowly we fumbled to the squat engine which was the power source for the ship’s internal machinery. Manuel hooked in an oscilloscope and studied the trace as if it meant something. “Ah-hah!” he said.

We unbolted the antiradiation shield, exposing the outlet valve. I knew that the angry, blood-red light streaming from it was harmless, that baffles cut off most of the radioactivity, but I couldn’t help shrinking from it. When a converter is flushed through the valve, you wear armor.

Manuel went over to a workbench and took a gadget from it which he’d made. I knew it was of no use for repair but he’d pretended to make a tool of it in previous jobs. It was a lead-plated flexible hose springing from a magnetronic pump, with a lot of meters and switches haywired on for pure effect. “Give me a hand, John,” he said quietly.

We fixed the pump over the outlet valve and, hooked up the two or three controls that really meant something. I heard Kathryn gasp behind me, and the dreadful realization burst into my own brain and numbed my hands. There wasn’t even a gasket.

The Gorzuni engineer strode up to us, rumbling a question in his harsh language, his fellows behind him. Manuel answered readily, not taking his gaze off the wildly swinging fake meters.

He turned to me, and I saw the dark laughter in his eyes. “I told them the converter is overdue for a flushing out of waste products,” he said in Anglic. “As a matter of fact, the whole ship is.”

He took the hose in one hand and the other rested on a switch of the engine. “Don’t look, Kathryn,” he said tonelessly. Then he threw the switch.

I heard the baffle plates clank down. Manuel had shorted out the automatic, safety controls which kept them up when the atoms were burning. I threw a hand over my own eyes and crouched.

The flame that sprang forth was like a bit of the sun. It sheeted from the hose and across the room. I felt my skin shriveling from incandescence and heard the roar of cloven air. In less than a second, Manuel had thrown the baffles back into place but his improvised blaster had torn away the heads of the three Gorzuni and melted the farther wall. Metal glowed white as I looked again, and the angry thunders boomed and echoed and shivered deep in my bones till my skull rang with it.

Dropping the hose, Manuel stepped over to the dead giants and yanked the guns from their holsters. “One for each of us,” he said.

Turning to Kathryn: “Get on a suit of armor and wait down here. The radioactivity is bad, but I don’t think it’ll prove harmful in the time we need. Shoot anyone who comes in.”

“I—” Her voice was faint and thin under the rolling echoes. “I don’t want to hide—”

“Damn it, you’ll be our guard. We can’t let those monsters recapture the engine room. Now, null gravity!” And Manuel switched off the generator.

Free fall yanked me with a hideous nausea. I fought down my outraged stomach and grabbed a post to get myself back down to the deck. Down—no. There was no up and down now. We were floating free. Manuel had nullified the gravity advantage of the Gorzuni.

“All right, John, let’s go!” he snapped.

I had time only to clasp Kathryn’s hand. Then we were pushing off and soaring out the door and into the corridor beyond. Praise all gods, the Commonwealth navy had at least given its personnel free-fall training. But ‘I wondered how many of the slaves would know how to handle themselves.

The ship roared around us. Two Gorzurd burst from a side cabin, guns in hand. Manuel burned them as they appeared, snatched their weapons, and swung on toward the slave pens.

The lights went out. I swam in a darkness alive with the rage of the enemy. “What the hell—” I gasped.

Manuel’s answer came dryly out of blackness: “Kathryn knows what to do. I told her a few days ago.”

At the moment I had no time to realize the emptiness within me from knowing that those two had been talking without me. There was too much else to do. The Gorzuni were firing blind. Blaster bolts crashed down the halls. Riot was breaking loose. Twice a lightning flash sizzled within centimeters of me. Manuel fired back at isolated giants, killing them and collecting their guns. Shielded by the dark, we groped our way to the slave pens.

No guards were there. When Manuel began to melt down the locks with low-power blasting I could dimly see the tangle of free-floating naked bodies churning and screaming in the vast gloom. A scene from an ancient hell. The fall of the rebel angels. Man, child of God, had, stormed the stars and been condemned to Hell for it.

And now he was going to burst out!

Hokusai’s flat eager face pressed against the bars. “Get us out,” he muttered fiercely.

“How many can you trust?” asked Manuel.

“About a hundred. They’re keeping their heads, see them waiting over there? And maybe fifty of the women.”

“All right. Bring out your followers. Let the rest riot for a while. We can’t do anything to help them.” The men came out, grimly and silently, hung there while I opened the females’ cage. Manuel passed out such few guns as we had. His voice lifted in the pulsing dark.

“All right. We hold the engine room. I want six with guns to go there now and help Kathryn O’Donnellthold it for us. Otherwise the Gorzuni will recapture it. The rest of us will make for the arsenal.”

“How about the bridge?” I asked.

“It’ll keep. Right now the Gorzuni are panicked. It’s part of their nature. They’re worse than humans when it comes to mass stampedes. But it won’t last and we have to, take advantage of it. Come on!”

Hokusai led the engine room party—his naval training told him where the chamber would be—and I followed Manuel, leading the others out. There were only three or four guns between us but at least we knew where we were going. And by now few of the humans expected to live or cared about much of anything except killing Gorzuni. Manuel had timed it right.

We fumbled through a livid darkness, exchanging shots with warriors who prowled the ship firing at everything that moved. We lost men but we gained weapons. Now and again we found dead aliens, killed in the rioting, and stripped them too. We stopped briefly to release the technicians from their special cage and then shoved violently for the arsenal.

The Gorzuni all had private arms, but the ship’s, collection; was not small. A group of sentries remained at the door, defending it against all corners. They had a portable shield against blaster bolts. I saw our flames splatter off it and saw men die as their fire raked back at us.

“We need a direct charge to draw their attention, while a few of us use the zero gravity to soar ‘overhead’ and come down on them from ‘above,’ ” said Manuel’s cold voice. It was clear, even in that wild lightning-cloven gloom. “John, lead the main attack.”

“Like hell!” I gasped. It would be murder. We’d be hewed down as a woodsman hews saplings. And Kathryn was waiting—Then I swallowed rage and fear and lifted a shout to the men. I’m no braver than anyone else but there is an exaltation in battle, and Manuel used it as calculatingly as he used everything else.

We poured against them in a wall of flesh, a wall that they ripped apart and sent lurching back in tattered fragments, It was only an instant of flame and thunder, then Manuel’s flying attack was on the defenders, burning them down, and it was over. I realized vaguely that I had a seared patch on my leg. It didn’t hurt just then, and I wondered at the minor miracle which had kept me alive.

Manuel fused the door and the remnants of us swarmed in and fell on the racked weapons with a terrible fierceness. Before we had them all loaded a Gorzuni party charged us but we beat, them off.

There were flashlights too. We had illumination in the seething dark. Manuel’s face leaped out of that night as he gave his crisp, swift orders. A gargoyle face, heavy and powerful and ugly, but men jumped at his bidding. A party was assigned to go back to the slave pens and pass out weapons to the other humans and bring them back here.

Reinforcements were sent to the engine room. Mortars and small antigrav cannon were assembled and loaded. The Gorzuni were calming too. Someone had taken charge and was rallying them. We’d have a fight on our hands.

We did!

I don’t remember much of those fire-shot hours. We lost heavily in spite of having superior armament. Some three hundred humans survived the battle. Many of them were badly wounded. But we took the ship. We hunted down the last Gorzuni and flamed those who tried to surrender. There was no mercy in us. The Gorzuni had beaten it out, and now they faced the monster they had created. When the lights went on again three hundred weary humans lived and held the ship.

We held a conference in the largest room we could-find. Everyone was there, packed together in sweaty silence and staring at the man who had freed them. Theoretically it was a democratic assembly called to decide our next move. In practice Manuel Argos gave orders.

“First, of course,” he said, his soft voice somehow carrying through the whole great chamber, “we have to make repairs, both of battle damage and of the deliberately mishandled machinery. It’ll take a week, I imagine, but then we’ll have us a sweet ship. By that time, too, you’ll have shaken down into a crew. Lieutenant Reeves and Ensign Hokusai will give combat instruction. We’re not through fighting yet.”

“You mean—” A man stood up in the crowd. “You mean, sir, that we’ll have opposition on our return to Sol? I should think we could just sneak in. A planet’s, too big for blockade, you know, even if the Baldics cared to try.”

“I mean,”—said Manuel calmly, “that we’re going on to Gorzun.”

It would have meant a riot if everyone hadn’t been so tired. As it was, the murmur that ran through the assembly was ominous.

“Look, you,” said Manuel patiently, “we’ll have us a first-class fighting ship by the time we get there, which none of the enemy has. We’ll be an expected vessel, one of their own, and in no case do’ they expect a raid on their home planet. It’s a chance to give them a body blow. The Gorzuni don’t name their ships, so I propose we christen ours now—the Revenge.”

It was sheer oratory. His voice was like an organ. His words were those of a wrathful angel. He argued and pleaded and bullied and threatened and then blew the trumpets for us. At the end they stood up and cheered for him. Even my own heart lifted and Kathryn’s eyes were wide and shining. Oh, he was cold and harsh and overbearing, but he made us proud to be human.

In the end, it was agreed, and the Solar ship Revenge, Captain Manuel Argos, First Mate John Henry Reeves, resumed her way to Gorzun.

In the days and weeks that followed, Manuel talked much of his plans. A devastating raid on Gorzun would shake the barbarian confidence and bring many of their outworld ships swarming back to defend the mother world. Probably the rival half of the Baldic League would seize its chance and fall on a suddenly weakened enemy. The Revenge would return to Sol, by that time possessed of the best crew in the known universe, and rally mankind’s scattered forces. The war would go on until the System was cleared.

“—and then, of course, continue till all the barbarians have been conquered,” said Manuel.

“Why?” I demanded. “Interstellar imperialism can’t be made to pay. It does for the barbarians because they haven’t the technical facilities to produce at home what they can steal elsewhere. But Sol would only be taking on a burden.”

“For defense,” said Manuel. “You don’t think I’d let a defeated enemy go off to lick his wounds and prepare a new attack, do you? No, everyone but Sol must be disarmed, and the only way to enforce such a peace is for Sol to be the unquestioned ruler.” He added thoughtfully: “Oh, the empire won’t have to expand forever. Just till it’s big enough to defend itself against all comers. And a bit of economic readjustment could make it a paying proposition, too. We could collect tribute, you know.”

“An empire—?” asked Kathryn. “But the Commonwealth is democratic—”

“Was democratic!” he snapped. “Now it’s rotted away. Too bad, but you can’t revive the dead. This is an age in history such as has often occurred before when the enforced peace of Caesarism is the only solution. Maybe not a good solution but better than the devastation we’re suffering now When there’s been a long enough period of peace and unity it may be time to think of reinstating the old republicanism. But that time is many centuries in, the future, if it ever comes. Just now the socio-economic conditions aren’t right for it.”

He took a restless turn about the bridge. A million stars of space in the viewport blazed like a chill crown over his head. “It’ll be an empire in fact,” he said, “and therefore it should be an empire in name. People will fight and sacrifice and die for a gaudy symbol when the demands of reality don’t touch them. We need a hereditary aristocracy to put on a good show. It’s always effective, and the archaism is especially valuable to Sol just now. It’ll recall the good old glamorous days before space travel. It’ll be even more of a symbol now than it was in its own age, Yes, an empire, Kathryn, the Empire of Sol. Peace, ye underlings!”

“Aristocracies decay,” I argued. “Despotism is all right as long as you have an able despot but sooner or later a meathead will be born—”

“Not if the dynasty starts with strong men and women, and continues to choose good breeding stock, and raises the sons in the same hard school as the fathers. Then it can last for centuries. Especially in these days of gerontology and hundred-year active life-spans.”

I laughed at him. “One ship, and you’re planning an empire in the Galaxy!” I jeered. “And you yourself, I suppose, will be the first emperor?”

His eyes were expressionless. “Yes,” he said “Unless I find a better man, which I doubt.”

Kathryn bit her lip. “I don’t like it,” she said. “It’s—cruel.”

“This is a cruel age, my dear,” he said gently.

Gorzun rolled black and huge against a wilderness of stars. The redly illuminated hemisphere was like a sickle of blood as we swept out of secondary drive and rode our gravbeams down toward the night side.

Once only were we challenged. A harsh gabble of words came over the transonic communicator. Manuel answered smoothly in the native language, explaining that our vision set was out of order, and gave the recognition signals contained in the codebook. The warship let us pass.

Down and down and down, the darkened surface swelling beneath us, mountains reaching hungry peaks to rip the vessel’s belly out, snow and glaciers and a churning sea lit by three hurtling moons. Blackness and cold and desolation.

Manuel’s voice rolled over the intercom: “Look below, men of Sol. Look out the viewports. This is where they were taking us!”

A snarl of pure hatred answered him. That crew would have died to the last human if they could drag Gorzun to oblivion with them. God help me, I felt that way myself.

It had been a long, hard voyage even after our liberation, and the weariness in me was only lifted by the prospect of battle. I’d been working around the clock, training men, organizing the hundred units a modern warcraft needs. Manuel, with Kathryn for secretary and general assistant, had been driving himself even more fiercely, but I hadn’t seen much of either of them. We’d all been too busy.

Now the three of us sat on the bridge watching Gorzun shrieking up to meet us. Kathryn was white and still, the hand that rested on mine was cold. I felt a tension within myself that thrummed near the breaking point. My orders to my gun crews were strained. Manuel alone seemed as chill and unruffled as always. There was steel in him. I sometimes wondered if he really was human.

Atmosphere screamed and thundered behind us. We roared over the sea, racing the dawn, and under its cold colorless streaks of light we saw Gorzun’s capital city rise from the edge of the world.

I had a dizzying glimpse of squat stone towers, narrow canyons of streets, and the gigantic loom of spaceships on the rim of the city. Then Manuel nodded and I gave my firing orders.

Flame and ruin exploded beneath us. Spaceships burst open and toppled to crush buildings under their huge mass. Stone and metal fused, ran in lava between crumbling walls. The ground opened and swallowed half the town. A blue-white hell of atomic fire winked through the sudden roil of smoke. And the city died.

We slewed skyward, every ‘girder protesting, and raced for the next great spaceport. There was a ship riding above it. Perhaps they had been alarmed already. We never knew. We opened up, and she fired back, and while we maneuvered in the heavens the Revenge dropped her bombs. We took a pounding, but our force-screens held and theirs didn’t. The burning ship smashed half the city when it fell.

On to the next site shown by our captured maps. This time we met a cloud of space interceptors. Ground missiles went arcing up against us. The Revenge shuddered under the blows. I could almost see our gravity generator smoking as it tried to compensate for our crazy spins and twists and lurchings. We fought them, like a bear fighting a dog pack, and scattered them and laid the base waste.

“All right,” said Manuel. “Let’s get out of here.” Space became a blazing night around us as we climbed above the atmosphere. Warships would be thundering on their way not to smash us. But how could they locate a single ship in the enormousness between the worlds? We went into secondary drive, a tricky thing to do so near a sun, but we’d tightened the engines and trained the crew well. In minutes we were at the next planet, also habitable. Only three colonies were there. We smashed them all!

The men were cheering. It was more like the yelp of a wolf pack. The snarl died from my own face and I felt a little sick with the ruin. Our enemies, yes. But there were many dead. Kathryn wept, slow silent tears running down her face, shoulders shaking.

Manuel reached over and took her hand. “It’s done, Kathryn,” he said quietly. “We can go home now.”

He added after a moment, as if to himself: “Hate is a useful means to an end but damned dangerous. We’ll have to get the racist complex out of mankind. We can’t conquer anyone, even the Gorzuni, and keep them as inferiors and hope to have a stable empire. All races must be equal.” He rubbed his strong square chin. “I think I’ll borrow a leaf from the old Romans. All worthy individuals, of any race, can become terrestrial citizens. It’ll be a stabilizing factor.”

“You,” I said, with a harshness in my throat, “are a megalomaniac.” But I wasn’t sure any longer.

It was winter in Earth’s northern hemisphere when the Revenge came home. I walked out into snow that crunched under my feet and watched my breath smoking white against the clear pale blue of the sky. A few others had come out with me. They fell on their knees in the snow and kissed it. They were a wild-looking gang, clad in whatever tatters of garment they could find, the men bearded and long-haired, but they were the finest, deadliest fighting crew in the Galaxy now. They stood there looking at the gentle sweep of hills, at blue sky and ice-flashing trees and a single crow hovering far overhead, and tears froze in their beards.

Home.

We had signalled other units of the Navy. Some would come along to pick us up soon and guide us to the secret base on. Mercury, and there the fight would go on. But now, just now in this eternal instant we were home.

I felt weariness like an ache in my bones. I wanted to crawl bear-like into some cave by a murmuring river, under the dear tall trees of Earth, and sleep till spring woke up the world again. But as I stood there with the thin winter wind like a cleansing bath around me, the tiredness dropped off. My body responded to the world which two billion years of evolution had shaped it for and I laughed aloud with the joy of it.

We couldn’t fail. We were the freemen of Terra fighting for our own hearthfires and the deep ancient strength of the planet was in us. Victory and the stars lay in our hands, even now, even now.

I turned and saw Kathryn coming down the airlock gangway. My heart stumbled and then began to race. It had been so long, so terribly long. We’d had so little time but now we were home, and she was singing.

Her face was grave as she approached me. There was something remote about her and a strange blending of pain with the joy that must be in her too. The frost crackled in her dark unbound hair, and when she took my hands her own were cold.

“Kathryn, we’re home,” I whispered. “We’re home, and free, and alive. O Kathryn, I love you!”

She said nothing, but stood looking at me forever and forever until Manuel Argos came to join us. The little stocky man seemed embarrassed—the first and only time I ever saw him quail, even faintly.

“John,” he said, “I’ve got to tell you something.”

“It’ll keep,” I answered. “You’re the captain of the ship. You have authority to perform marriages. I want you to marry Kathryn and me, here, now, on Earth.”

She looked at me unwaveringly, but her eyes were blind with tears. “That’s it, John,” she said, so low I could barely hear her. “It won’t be. I’m going to marry Manuel.”

I stood there, not saying anything, not even feeling it yet.

“It happened on the voyage,” she said, tonelessly. “I tried to fight myself, I couldn’t. I love him, John. I love him even more than I love you, and I didn’t think that was possible.”

“She will be the mother of kings,” said Manuel, but his arrogant words were almost defensive. “I couldn’t have made a better choice.”

“Do you love her too,” I asked slowly, “or do you consider her good breeding stock?” Then: “Never mind. Your answer would only be the most expedient. We’ll never know the truth.”

It was instinct, I thought with a great resurgence of weariness. A strong and vital woman would pick the most suitable mate. She couldn’t help herself. It was the race within her and there was nothing I could do about it.

“Bless you, my children,” I said.

They walked away after awhile, hand in hand under the high trees that glittered with ice and sun. I stood watching them until they were out of sight. Even then, with a long and desperate struggle yet to come, I think I knew that those were the parents of the Empire and the glorious Argolid dynasty, that they carried the future within them.

And I didn’t give a damn.

Thus Manuel Argos, a hero as unconventional as van Rijn, traded the iron cellar of slavery for the vitryl ring of mastery. He found the imperial signet a perfect fit for his heavy hand.

The. Terran Empire he proclaimed was eagerly welcomed as a force for interstellar peace. Both ravaged worlds and those that had escaped harm chose to join the new imperium. Terra’s protection brought security without loss of local autonomy. At its zenith, the Empire ruled 100,000 inhabited systems within a sphere four hundred light-years in diameter.

But size and complexity could not avert the doom that ultimately faces any human enterprise. The original worthy goal of security became a crippling obsession, especially after Terra collided with, furiously ambitious Merseia. Worries about foes without masked decadence within. Knaves and fools sought to preserve their threatened authority by unjust means. To many thirty-first century citizens, the vaunted Pax Terrena had become a Pax Tyrannica.

Yet despite the impossible odds against them, the stub bornly independent settlers of Freehold vowed that Terra would not make of their world a desert, and call it peace.