over his left eye. "But the timing is so desperately close. If our forces strike too soon, or too late, it can be ruinous."

"I don't worry about that, Dominic," said Gunli. "You know how to arrange these things."

"I've never handled an empire before, my beautiful. The next several days will be touch and go. And that's why I want you to leave Scotha now. Take a ship and some trusty guards and go to Alagan or Gimli or some other out-of-the-way planet." He smiled with one corner of his mouth. "It would be a bitter victory if you died in it, Gunli."

Her voice was haunted. "I should die. I've betrayed my lord—I am dishonored—"

"You've saved your people—your own southerners, and ultimately all Scotha."

"But the broken oaths—" She began to weep, quietly and hopelessly.

"An oath is only a means to an end. Don't let the means override the end."

"An oath is an oath. But Dominic—it was a choice of standing by Penda or by—you—"

He comforted her as well as he could. And he reflected grimly that he had never before felt himself so thoroughly a skunk.

V

The battle in space was, to the naked eye, hardly visible—brief flashes of radiation among the swarming stars, occasionally the dark form of a ship slipping by and occulting a wisp of the Milky Way. But Admiral Walton smiled with cold satisfaction at the totality of reports given him by the semantic integrator.

"We're mopping them up," he said. "Our task force has twice their strength, and they're disorganized and demoralized anyway."

"Whom are we fighting?" wondered Chang, the executive officer.

"Don't know for sure. They've split into so many factions you can never tell who it is. But from Flandry's report, I'd say it was—what was that outlandish name now?—Duke Markagrav's fleet. He holds this sector, and is a royalist. But it might be Kelry, who's also anti-Terrestrial—but at war with Markagrav and in revolt against the king."

"Suns and comets and little green asteroids!" breathed Chang. "This Scothanian hegemony seems just to have disintegrated. Chaos! Everybody at war 

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