It was too much — even for senior officers. A babble of voice burst out around the table all at once. Donal paid no attention. He had opened a drawer at his end of the table and produced a thick sheaf of documents, which he tossed on the table before him.
“We will take over Ceta, gentlemen,” he said. “By, in a twenty-four hour period, replacing all her local troops, all her police, all her garrisons and militia and law enforcement bodies and arms, with our own men.”
He pointed to the sheaf of documents.
“We will take them over piecemeal, independently, and simultaneously. So that when the populace wakes up the following-morning they will find themselves guarded, policed and held, not by their own authorities, but by us. The details as to targets and assignments are in this stack, gentlemen. Shall we go to work?”
They went to work. Ceta, large, low-gravity planet that it was, had huge virgin areas. Its civilized part could be broken down into thirty-eight major cities, and intervening agricultural and residential areas. There were so many military installations, so many police stations, so many armories, so many garrisons of troops — the details fell apart like the parts of a well-engineered mechanism, and were fitted together again with corresponding units of the military force under Donal’s command. It was a masterpiece of combat preplanning.
“Now,” said Donal, when they were done. “Go out and brief your troops.”
He watched them all leave the conference room — all, with the exception of Ian, whom he had detained; and Lee, for whom he had just rung. When the others were gone, he turned to the two still with him.
“Lee,” he said, “in six hours every man in the fleet will know what we intend to do. I want you to go out and find a man — not one of the officers — who doesn’t think it’ll work. Ian” — he looked over at his uncle — “when Lee finds such a man and reports to you, I want you to see that the man is sent up to see me, right away. Is that clear?”
The other two nodded; and went out, to do each his own job in his own fashion. So it was that a disgruntled Groupman from a particular landing force had a surprising meeting and surprisingly cordial chat with his commander in chief, and that they went out together, half an hour later, arm-in-arm, to the control room of the flagship, where Donal requested, and got, a voice-and-picture hookup to all ships.
“All of you,” Donal said, smiling at them out of their screens after he had been connected, “have by this time been informed about the impending action. It’s the result of a number of years of top-level planning and the best intelligence service we have been lucky enough to have. However, one of you has come to me with the natural fear that we may be biting off more than we can chew. Therefore, since this is an entirely new type of operation and because I believe firmly in the rights of the individual professional soldier not to be mishandled, I’m taking the unprecedented step of putting the coming assault on Ceta to a vote. You will vote as ships, and the results will be forwarded by your captain, as for or against, to the Flagship here. Gentlemen” — Donal reached out an arm and brought the man Lee had discovered into the screen area with him — “I want you to meet Groupman Theiss, who had the courage to stand up like a free man and ask questions.”
Caught unawares, and dazzled by the sudden limelight into which he had been thrust, the Groupman licked his lips and grinned a little foolishly.
“I leave the decision to all of you,” added Donal, and signaled for the viewing eyes to be cut off.
Three hours later, Groupman Theiss was back on his own ship, astounding his fellow soldiers with an account of what had happened to him; and the votes were in.
“Almost unanimous,” reported Lludrow, “in favor of the attack. Only three ships — none of the first line, and none troop carriers — voting against.”
“I want those three ships held out of the attack,” said Donal. “And a note made of their names and captains. Remind me about that after this is over. All right.” He got up from the float where he had been sitting in the Flagship Lounge. “Give the necessary orders, commander. We’re going in.”
They went in. Ceta had never taken the thought of enemy attack too seriously. Isolated in her position as the single inhabitable planet, as yet largely unexplored and unexploited, that circled her G8 type sun of Tau Ceti; and secure in the midst of an interstellar maze of commitments that made every other planetary government to some extent dependent upon her good will, she had only a few ships in permanent defensive orbit about her.
These ships, their position and movement fully scouted by Donal’s intelligence service, were boxed and destroyed by Donal’s emerging fleet almost before they could give warning. And what warning they did give fell on flabbergasted and hardly-believing ears.
But by that time the asault troops were falling planetward, dropping down on city and military installation and police station behind the curtain of night as it swung around the big, but swiftly-turning world.
They came down in most cases almost on top of their targets, for the ships that had sowed them in the sky above had not been hampered in that action by enemy harassment. And the reaction of those on the ground was largely what might have been expected, when veteran troops, fully armed and armored, move in on local police, untried soldiers in training, and men relaxed in garrison. Here and there, there was sharp and bitter fighting where an assault unit found itself opposed to leased troops as trained in war as they. But in that case, reinforcements were speedily brought in to end the action.
Donal himself went down with the fourth wave; and when the sun rose the following morning large and yellow on the horizon, the planet was secured. Two hours later, an orderly brought him word that William himself had been located — in his own residence outside the city of Whitetown, some fifteen hundred kilometers distant.
“I’ll go there,” said Donal. He glanced around him. His officers were busy, and Ian was off somewhere with an arm of his field troops. He turned to Lee. “Come on, Lee,” he said.
They took a four-man platform and made the trip, with the orderly as guide. Coming down in the garden of the residence, Donal left the orderly with the platform, motioned Lee to accompany him, and entered the house.
He walked through silent rooms, inhabited only by furniture. All the residents of the house seemed to have vanished. After some little time, he began to think that perhaps the report had been in error; and that William was gone, too. And then he passed through an archway into a little anteroom and found himself facing Anea.
She met his gaze with a pale but composed face.
“Where is he?” asked Donal.
She turned and indicated a door on the far side of the room.
“It’s locked,” she said. “He was in there when your men started to land; and he’s never come out. Nobody else would stay here with him. I… I couldn’t leave.”
“Yes,” said Donal, somberly. He examined the locked door from across the room. “It wouldn’t have been easy — for him.”
“You care about him?” Her voice brought his head up sharply. He looked at her, seeking some note of mockery in her expression. But there was none. She was honestly questioning.
“I care somewhat for every man,” he said. He walked across the room to the door and laid his hand upon it on a sudden impulse, he put his thumb into the finger-lock — and the door swung open.
A sudden coldness blossomed inside him.
“Stay with her,” he threw over his shoulder to Lee. He pushed open the door, found himself faced by another, heavier door — but one which also opened to his touch — and went in.