'll be a lot of satisfaction to us!"

"You expect to be killed," Gwenlyn said flatly.

"My uncle," explained Bors, "considers that he should have gotten killed
when Mekin took over Tralee. It would have set a good example. Since we
didn't do it for Tralee, we'll do it for Kandar. The king's going along
too. After all, that's one of the things kings are for."

"To get killed?"

"When necessary," Bors told her. "Kandar shouldn't surrender even though
there will be at least ten Mekinese to one Kandarian."

She smiled at him, very oddly.

"I suspect," she said, "that not everybody on the fleet will be killed.
I'm sure of it. In fact, as my father would say, that's Talents,
Incorporated information!"

Bors frowned worriedly.

The fleet of Mekin continued in overdrive, heading for Kandar. Each
second it traversed a distance equal to the span of a solar system, out
to its remotest planet. A heartbeat that would begin where a pulsing
Cepheid, had it been possible to see, would have seemed at its greatest
brilliance, and would end where the light from that same giant star
seemed dimmed almost to extinction. Of course no such observation could
be made from any ship in overdrive. Each one of the many, many ugly
war-machines was sealed in its own cocoon of overdrive-stressed space.
Even in the armed transports that carried officials and bureaucrats and
experienced police organizers to set up a puppet government on Kandar,
there was not the faintest hint of anything that happened outside the
individual ship. But, what might be termed the position of the fleet,
changed with remarkable swiftness. It traveled light-hours between
breaths. Light-days between sentences. Light-months and light-years....

But it would not arrive on Kandar for a long while yet. Not for three
whole days.

Chapter 4

The small fighting ship lifted swiftly from the surface of Kandar. As it
rose, the sky turned dark and the sun's brilliant disk, far too bright
to be looked at with unshielded eyes, became a blazing furnace that
could roast unshielded flesh. Stars appeared, shining myriads despite
the sun, with every one vivid against a background of black. The
planet's surface became a half-ball, of which a part lay in darkness.

"_Co-o-ntact!_" said a voice through many speakers placed throughout the
fighting ship's hull.

There was the rushing sound of compartment doors closing. Then a
cushioned silence everywhere, save for the faint, st