Donal and she shook hands.

“Well, shall we get on?” asked Andresen. They toured the rest of the ship and ended up before the door of Donal’s stateroom in Officer’s Country.

“Sorry,” said Andresen. “But we’re short of bunk space. Full complement under battle conditions. So we had to put your orderly in with you. If you’ve no objection—”

“Not at all,” said Donal.

“Good,” Andresen looked relieved. “That’s why I like the Dorsai. They’re so sensible.” He clapped Donal on the shoulder, and went hurriedly off back to his duties of getting his ship and crew ready for action.

Entering his stateroom, Donal found Lee had already set up both their gear, including a harness hammock for himself to supplement the single bunk that would be Donal’s.

“All set?” asked Donal.

“All set,” answered Lee. He still chronically forgot the “sir”; but Donal, having already had some experience with the fanatic literal-mindedness with which the man carried out any command given him, had refrained from making an issue of it. “You settle my contract, yet?”

“I haven’t had time,” said Donal. “It can’t be done in a day. You knew that, didn’t you?”

“No,” said Lee. “All I ever did was hand it over. And then, later on when I was through my term of service they gave it back to me; and the money I had coming.”

“Well, it usually takes a number of weeks or months,” Donal said. He explained what it had never occurred to him that anyone should fail to know, that the contracts are owned entirely by the individual’s home community or world, and that a contract agreement was a matter for settlement between the employer and the employee’s home government. The object was not to provide the individual so much with a job and a living wage, as to provide the home government with favorable monetary and “contractual” balances which would enable them to hire, in their turn, the trained specialists they needed. In the case of Lee’s contract, since Donal was a private employer and had money to offer, but no contractual credits, the matter of Lee’s employment had to be cleared with the Dorsai authorities, as well as the authorities on Coby, where Lee came from.

“That’s more of a formality than anything else, though,” Donal assured him. “I’m allowed an orderly, since I’ve been commandant rank. And the intent to hire’s been registered. That means your home government won’t draft you for any special service some place else.”

Lee nodded, which was almost his utmost expression of relief.

“…Signal!” chimed the annunciator in the stateroom wall by the door, suddenly. “Signal for Staff Liaison Graeme. Report to Flagship, immediately. Staff Liaison Graeme report to Flagship immediately.”

Donal cautioned Lee to keep from under the feet of the ship’s regular crew; and left.

The Flagship of the Battle made up by the Red and Green Patrols of the Freilander Space Force was, like the Class 4J Donal had just left, already in temporary loose orbit around Oriente. It took him some forty minutes to reach her; and when he entered her lock reception room and gave his name and rank, he was assigned a guide who took him to a briefing room in the ship’s interior.

The room was filled by some twenty-odd other Staff Liaisons.

They ranged in rank from Warrant Couriers to a Sub-Patrol Chief in his fifties. They were already seated facing a platform; and, as Donal entered — he was, apparently, the last to arrive — a Senior Captain of flag rank entered, followed closely by Blue Patrol Chief Lludrow.

“All right, gentlemen,” said the Senior Captain; and the room came to order. “Here’s the situation.” He waved a hand and the wall behind him dissolved to reveal an artist’s extrapolation of the coming bat-tie. Oriente floated in black space, surrounded by a number of ships in various patterns. The size of the ships had been grossly exaggerated in order to make them visible in comparison with the planet which was roughly two-thirds the diameter of Mars. The largest of these, the Patrol Class — long cylindrical interstellar warships — were in varying orbit eighty to five hundred kilometers above the planet’s surface, so that the integration of their pattern enclosed Oriente in web of shifting movement. A cloud of smaller craft, C4Js, A (subclass) 9s, courier ships, firing platforms, and individual and two-man gnat class boats, held position out beyond and planetward of them, right down into the atmosphere.

“We think,” said the Senior Captain, “that the enemy, at effective speed and already braking, will come into phase about here—” a cloud of assault ships winked into existence abruptly, a half million kilometers sunward of Oriente, and in the sun’s eye. They fell rapidly toward the planet, swelling visibly in size. As they approached, they swung into a circular landing orbit about the planet. The smaller craft closed in, and the two fleets came together in a myriad of patterns whose individual motions the eye could not follow all at once. Then the attacking fleet emerged below the mass of the defenders, spewing a sudden cloud of tiny objects that were the assault troops. These drifted down, attacked by the smaller craft, while the majority of the assault ships from Newton and Cassida began to disappear like blown-out candles as they sought safety in a phase shift that would place them light-years from the scene of battle.

To Donal’s fine-trained professional mind it was both beautifully thrilling — and completely false. No battle since time began had ever gone off with such ballet grace and balance and none ever would. This was only an imaginative guess at how the battle would take place, and it had no place in it for the inevitable issuance of wrong orders, the individual hesitations, the underestimation of an opponent, the navigational errors that resulted in collisions, or firing upon a sister ship. These all remained for the actual event, like harpies roosting upon the yet-unblasted limbs of a tree, as dawn steals like some gray thief onto the field where men are going to fight. In the coming action off Oriente there would be good actions and bad, wise decisions, and stupid ones — and none of them would matter. Only their total at the end of the day.

“…Well, gentlemen,” the Senior Captain was saying, “there you have it as Staff sees it. Your job — yours personally, as Staff Liaisons — is to observe. We want to know anything you can see, anything you can discover, anything you can, or think you can, deduce. And of course” — he hesitated, with a wry smile — “there’s nothing we’d appreciate quite so much as a prisoner.”

There was a ripple of general laughter at this, as all men there knew the fantastic odds against being able to scoop up a man from an already broken-open enemy ship under the velocities and other conditions of a space battle — and find him still alive, even if you succeeded.

“That’s all,” said the Senior Captain. The Staff Liaisons rose and began to crowd out the door.

“Just a minute, Graeme!”

Donal turned. The voice was the voice of Lludrow. The Patrol Chief had come down from the platform and was approaching him. Donal turned back to meet him.

“I’d like to speak to you for a moment,” said Lludrow. “Wait until the others are out of the room.” They stood together in silence until the last of the Staff Liaisons had left, and the Senior Captain had disappeared.

“Yes, sir?” said Donal.

“I’m interested in something you said — or maybe were about to say the other day — when I met you at Marshal Galt’s in the process of assessing this Oriente business. You said something that seemed to imply doubt about the conclusions we came to. But I never did hear what it was you had in mind. Care to tell me now?”

“Why, nothing, sir,” said Donal. “Staff and the marshal undoubtedly know what they’re doing.”

“It isn’t possible, then, you saw something in the situation that we didn’t?” Donal hesitated.