"We'll go out in a couple of tin cans," said Bors fiercely, "and try this out with dummy warheads!"
Gwenlyn said quickly, "Marvelous! Marvelous, Logan!"
But it was a very great deal. Bors, impatient to try it out, nevertheless realized that Logan hadn't made the suggestion out of a brilliant perception of a solution to a problem in ballistics, but because he thought in terms of mathematical processes. He didn't think of a new missile operation, but a new kind of computation. And he reveled in the fact that he had showed off his brilliance.
In the ground-car on the way to the fleet, Bors said helplessly to Gwenlyn, "I'm not the right man to be the liaison with you people. But this might make us a pretty costly conquest for Mekin! With luck, we may trade them ship for ship! They won't miss the ships they lose, but it'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."
"When necessary," Bors told her. "Kandar shouldn't surrender even though there will be at least ten Mekinese to one Kandarian."
"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!"
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....