y did to Kandar!"

He clicked off. His fists clenched. He paced back and forth in the
control room. He almost did not wait to make sure. Almost. But he had
never seen a Mekinese fighting man face to face. He'd gone into exile
with his uncle when that unhappily reasonable man let Tralee surrender
rather than be bombed to depopulation. He'd served in the Kandarian navy
without ever managing to be in any port when a Mekinese ship was in.
He'd fought in the battle off Kandar, he'd destroyed a Mekinese cruiser
off Tralee, another in the Mekinese system itself and a squadron off
Meriden. But he had never seen a Mekinese fighting-man face to face.
Filled with such hatred as he felt, he meant to do so now.

A space-boat came up from the ground. The _Horus_ trained weapons on it.
Bors painstakingly arranged for its occupants to board the _Horus_ in
space-suits, which could not conceal bombs.

There were six men in the space-boat. They came into the _Horus's_
control room and he saw that they were young, almost boys. When they
learned that he was Captain Bors, they looked at him with shining,
admiring, worshipping eyes. It could not be a trick. It could not be a
trap. He was incredulous.

The message from the ground was true.

Chapter 11

The news as Bors got it from the men of Deccan was remarkable for two
reasons: that so much of it was true, and that all of it was glamorized
and romanticized and garbled. It was astonishing to find any relation at
all between such fabulously romantic tales and the facts, because there
was no way for news to travel between solar systems except on ships, and
no ships had carried stories like these!

Here on Deccan, the shining-eyed young men _knew_ that Bors had landed
on Tralee and on Garen. They _knew_ that there was a fleet in being
which had fought and annihilated a Mekinese task-force many times its
size.

To the Captain, their knowledge was undiluted catastrophe!

They admired Bors because they believed he commanded that fleet, which
he now had in hiding while he flashed splendidly about the subjugated
worlds, performing prodigious feats of valor and destruction, half
pirate and half hero. The story had it that he'd been driven from his
native Tralee by the invaders, and that now he fought Mekin in
magnificent knight-errantry, and that it was _he_ who'd set alight the
flame of rebellion on so many worlds.

Bors listened, and was numbed. He heard references to the fight o