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“Yes, Exalted Fleetlord,” the interpreter said. “It may be so. But what shall I tell the creature here?”
“I don’t know.” Atvar felt befouled at even contemplating speech with anyone, no matter how alien, who was involved in impericide-a crime whose existence he had not thought of until this moment. All at once, cratering the whole world of Tosev 3 with nuclear weapons looked much more attractive than it had. But the fleet had only a limited number of them-against the sort of fight the Tosevites were expected to put up, even a few would have been more than necessary. And with Tosev 3’s land surface so limited, ruining any of it went against his grain.
He gathered himself. “Tell this Molotov that what he and his bandits did before the Race arrived will not concern us unless they refuse to yield and thereby force us to take notice of it. But if need be, we will avenge their murdered emperor.” Thinking of a murdered emperor, the fleetlord knew the first pity he’d felt for any Tosevite.
If his threat frightened Molotov, the Big Ugly gave no sign of it; the native truly was as frozen of countenance as anyone of the Race. He said, “It is true, then, that when you speak of an empire, you mean it in the exact and literal sense of the word, with an emperor and a court and all the trappings of the outworn past?”
“Of course that is true,” Atvar answered. “How else would we mean it?”
“The enlightened people of the SSSR have cast the rule of despots onto the ash-heap of history,” Molotov said.
Atvar laughed in his flat face. “The Race has flourished under its Emperors for a hundred thousand years. What do you know of history, when you were savages the last time we looked over your miserable pest-hole of a planet?” The fleetlord heartily wished the Tosevites had stayed savages, too.
“History may be slow, but it is certain,” Molotov said stubbornly. “One day the inevitable revolution will come to your people, too, when their economic conditions dictate its necessity. I think that day will be soon. You are imperialists, and imperialism is the last phase of capitalism, as Marx and Lenin have shown.”
The interpreter stumbled through the translation of that last sentence, and added, “I have trouble rendering the natives’ religious terms into our language, Exalted Fleetlord. Marx and Lenin are gods or prophets in the SSSR.” He spoke briefly with Molotov, then said, “Prophets. Vyacheslav Mikhailovich knew this Lenin himself.”
Molotov said, “Lenin led the revolution which overthrew our emperor and established the rule of the people and workers of the SSSR. I am proud to say I assisted in this worthy task.”
Atvar stared at the Tosevite in disgust. He spoke to the interpreter: “Tell the bandit I have nothing further to say to him. If he and his murderers will not yield themselves to us, their punishment shall only be the harsher.”
The interpreter slowly, haltingly, turned the crisp words into the mushy native language. Molotov answered with one word. “Nyet.” The fleetlord glanced with one quick flick of an eye at the interpreter to see if that meant what he thought. It did.
“Get him off this ship,” Atvar snapped. “I am sorry he comes here under truce, or I would treat him as he deserves.” The idea of wantonly slaughtering an emperor-even a Tosevite emperor-gave him an atavistic urge to bite something: Molotov by choice, though the Big Ugly looked anything but appetizing.
The doorway out of Atvar’s office hissed open. The interpreter pushed off from the chair whose back he’d been holding and shot through it. Molotov followed more awkwardly, the graceless garments he wore flapping about him. As soon as he was gone, Atvar shut the door behind him. The rather sharp smell of his body remained, like a bad memory. The fleetlord turned up the air scrubbers to make it go away.
While it still lingered, he phoned Kirel. When the shiplord’s face appeared in his screen, he said, “You will come to my quarters immediately.”
“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord.” Kirel blanked the screen. He was as good as his word. When he chimed for admittance, Atvar let him in, then closed the door again. Kirel asked, “How fare the talks with the Tosevites, Exalted Fleetlord?”
“Less well than I had hoped.” Atvar let his breath hiss out in a long, frustrated sigh. “All their greatest empires still refuse to acknowledge the glory of the Emperor.” He cast his eyes down in the ritual gesture. He would not tell Kirel what he’d learned from Molotov, not yet; his own pain remained too raw to permit it.
“This is altogether a more difficult task than we looked for when we set out from Home,” Kirel said. The shiplord had tact. He forbore to remind Atvar that he had urged a surrender demand before actual ground combat got under way. After a moment, he went on, “It has been too many generations since the Race fought a real war.”
“What do you mean?” Atvar tried to hold sudden suspicion from his voice. Tactful or not, Kirel coveted the ornate body paint the fleetlord wore. Atvar continued, “We are trained for this mission as well as we could possibly be.”
“Indeed we are,” Kirel agreed gravely, which only made Atvar more suspicious. “But the Tosevites are not merely trained; they are experienced. Weapon for weapon, we far surpass them. In craft on the battlefield, though, they exceed us. That has hurt us, again and again.”
“I know. They are worse foes than I expected them to be even after we learned of their abnormal technological growth. Not only are they wily, as you say, they are stubborn. I was confident they would break when they realized the advantages we enjoyed over them. But they keep fighting, as best they can.”
“It is so,” Kirel said. “Perhaps already being locked in combat among themselves has given them the discipline they need to carry on against us. Along with being stubborn, they are well-trained and skilled. We can continue to smash them for a long time yet; one of our landcruisers, one of our aircraft, is worth anywhere from ten to twenty-five of theirs. But we have only so many munitions. If we cannot overawe them, we may face difficulties. In my coldest dreams, I see our last missile wrecking a clumsy Tosevite landcruiser-while another such landcruiser rolls out of a factory and toward us.”
Of themselves, Atvar’s clawed hands twitched as if to tear a foe in front of him. “That is a cold dream. You should have left it in your coffin when you awoke. We have set down our factory ships here and there, you know. As we gain raw materials, we shall be able to increase our stocks.”
“As you say, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel answered. He did not say-presumably because he knew Atvar knew it as well as himself-that the factories, even at top output, could not produce in a day more than a small part of the supplies the Race’s armed forces used during that day. Back on Home, no one had reckoned that the armada would use as much as it had.
As if to turn away from that unpleasant reflection,
Atvar said, “For all the bluster the Big Ugly envoys show, they may yet prove tractable. The male from the empire called Deutschland, despite his sickness, showed some comprehension of our might.” All at once, he remembered that Molotov had said Deutschland was a not-empire. He wondered queasily if its emperor had been murdered, too.
Shiplord Kirel said, “Deutschland? Interesting. May I use your screen to show you an image a reconnaissance satellite caught for us yesterday?” Atvar opened, his hands wide to show assent. Kirel punched commands in the 127th Emperor Hetto’s data storage system.
The screen lit to show green land and grayish sea. A spot of fire appeared in one corner of the land, not far from a clump of big wood buildings. The fire suddenly spread and got brighter, then went out more slowly. “One of our bombing runs?” Atvar asked.
“No. Let me show it to you again, this time in slow motion with maximum magnification and image processing.”
The amplified image came up on the screen. Atvar stared at it, then at Kirel. “That is a missile he said accusingly as if it were the shiplord’s fault. He did not want to believe what he had just seen.
But Kirel said, “Yes, Exalted Fleetlord, this is a missile, or at least was intended to be one. Since it exploded on its launching pad, we are unable to gain estimates of its range or guidance system, if any, but to judge from its size, it appears more likely to be strategic than tactical.”
“I presume we have eradicated this site,” Atvar said.
“It was done, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel agreed.
The shiplord’s doleful voice told Atvar what he already knew: even though this site was gone, the Race had no sure way of telling how many others the Deutsche possessed-until a missile roared toward them. And swatting missiles out of, the sky was an order of magnitude harder than dealing with these slow, clumsy Tosevite airplanes. Even the airplanes were hurting his forces now and again, because the Big Uglies kept sending them out no matter how many got knocked down. As Kirel bad said, their courage and skill went some of the way toward making up for their poor technology.
