the feel of ashes in his throat, "I'll
track it down so it can join the fleet."

He could not bring himself to tell these confident and admiring young
men that there was no hope and never had been; that the tales of his
achievements were only partly true and that they had popped into
people's minds because a very fat woman far away indulged in daydreams
and fantasies.

They wouldn't have understood. If they had, they wouldn't have believed.
He found that he savagely resisted the conviction himself. But there was
no other way for such garbled tales with such a substratum of fact to be
spread among the stars. And whoever spread them knew of events up to the
last news sent back by Bors, but nothing after that. Undoubtedly,
Talents, Incorporated's Department for Disseminating Truthful Seditious
Rumors had been at work on Mekin, but the damage done elsewhere was a
thousand times greater than any benefit done there.

It was too late to repair the damage, here or anywhere else. This planet
and all the rest were too far committed to rebellion ever to be forgiven
by Mekin. Mekin would take revenge. It was not pleasant to think about.

So the _Horus_ departed, and traveled in high-speed overdrive for
ship-days seemingly without end, toward Glamis. It knew nothing that
happened outside its own cocoon of overdrive field. It knew nothing of
any of the thousands of myriads of stars, whose planetary systems
offered unlimited room for humanity to live in freedom and without fear.

During the journey Bors only endured being alive. All this disaster was
ultimately his fault. The fleet's survival was due to his work with
Talents, Incorporated. The raids of a single ship--which now would have
such disastrous results--were the fruits of his suggestion, the
consequence of his actions.

Talents, Incorporated was involved, to be sure, but only because he'd
allowed it to be. He should have realized that Madame Porvis would work
havoc if her talent was as described. No mere romantic daydreamer would
fashion fantasies with military secrecy in mind and security as a
principle. Everything was betrayed. Everything was ruined. And if he,
Bors, had only been properly skeptical, the fleet would have been
destroyed and Kandar now occupied by the Mekinese--doomed to servitude
but not necessarily to annihilation--and other worlds would also be
safely servile. They'd still be resentful and they'd bitterly hate
Mekin, but they would not have before t