Kana felt as if he had been whirled through space without benefit of a ship. If someone would just explain everything from the beginning, carefully, and in words simple enough for his reeling mind to gather in, he would be happier.
"You'd like a few facts, wouldn't you?" Commander Matthias might have been reading his thoughts. "Well, this set-up isn't so simple that it can be explained in a couple of sentences. The whole project reaches back into our past — three hundred years back. You know — if you asked an Ageratan or a Rassami what he thought of a Terran, he'd paint you a mighty crude picture of a simple-minded barbarian. That has been our shield all along, and we have fostered the idea that we are rude savages of limited intelligence. It inflates the ego of the enemy and doesn't bother us at all.
"In reality Terra for at least two hundred and fifty years has been a double world — though that fact is known to a relatively small number of her inhabitants. One Terra and one Prime was fitted quickly and neatly into the pattern Central Control demanded and is a law-abiding member of their lesser confederacy, content with the role of third-class citizenship.
"But in the past hundred years one troop transport in every twenty which lifted from this planet was no troop transport at all, but a pioneer carrier. Men and women selected for certain qualities of mind and body — survivor types — went out in deep sleep to settle on planets our mercenaries had explored. On some of those worlds the native races had dwindled and retrogressed until civilization had faded almost to extinction, others were bare of intelligent life, or had dominant races, young, vigorous and humanoid with whom we could interbreed. There is even reason to believe that the latter may be descendents of the passengers of those legendary starships which left this world during the nuclear wars — though the people have long since forgotten their origin.
"So Terrans have been planted secretly on almost a thousand worlds now. On thirty our colonies could not take root, native diseases, adverse climatic changes, malignant life forms blotted them out. On six more they are still fighting a war for survival. On the rest they flourish and spread.
"Central Control has noted the decline in our planet birth rate, the fact that our race, which might have challenged the rule of the older groups, seems to be on the wane. They believe that this is due to their wise plans of the past, that as mercenaries we are bleeding our species out of existence. Only very recently have they had any hints as to what is really occurring. They may or may not have discovered that Terran Combatants, almost always hired to serve on backward, frontier planets, know of hidden colonies of their own kind — that our casualty lists often cover men who remain on the earth there and not in it when their Horde or Legion returns to base.
"We are leaving Terra for the stars just as we planned from our first Galactic flight. And now that Central Control suspects that, she is going to move against us. But she will discover that she is perhaps ten generations too late. One cannot move against colonies on almost a thousand different worlds, not and keep up the fiction of justice to all which must be maintained to preserve their carefully guarded balance of power."
"You are forgetting our allies," Hansu pointed out.
"The man in the field does right to correct the desk merchant at home," Matthias conceded. "Yes, several other young and vigorous races have fallen under the same ban against exploration and colonization which C.C. attempted to force upon us. And when these discriminated against X-Tees learned what we were doing — usually from our AL men sent to explain it in detail — they copied our methods all the way. There are about twenty of these worlds now following our pattern. This trouble on Fronn — the bald design of crediting a massacre of Patrolmen to an outlawed Horde, the betrayal of Yorke and his officers — is a blow back at us and may bring the whole scheme into the open. If so, we don't really care too much, we've been preparing lately for such an eventuality and we have our case far better organized for a general hearing than they suspect — too much of their planning won't bear the light of day. In the meantime — " He nodded to Hansu as if suggesting that it was now time for the Blademaster to take over.
"In the meantime operations shall continue as usual, both here and out in space. And as an AL man you're going to labor all right — just as you were sentenced to do."
Kana took it all in at last.
"I'll accept that sentence gladly, sir. When and where do I begin?"
Hansu crossed to the wall and pulled down the map hanging there — and the Galaxy was spread out for their viewing.
"They've tried to keep a guard on the stars and they have failed. No race or species has the power to do that, ever! You have a wide choice of operations, son. The whole of space is free!"