The Star Fox

He didn’t believe he was lying. A few thoughts had crossed his mind, but they were not unduly painful to bury. That Madelon had lived gladly, that she still lived, was enough.

“You have that from us all,” Irribarne said heartily. “Now tell me more before we return to the festival. I hear you are a private raider commissioned by France. But why has the Navy been so slow? When do they come?”

God help me, Heim thought. I wanted to spare them till tomorrow.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Nom d’un chien!” Irribarne sat bolt upright. “What is it that you say?”

Slowly, Heim dragged the tale from himself: how it came about that the Deepspace Fleet lay chained and muzzled while Parliament wrangled, and quite possibly nothing except Fox’s buccaneering preventing a resumption of those talks which to Alerion were only a more effective kind of war.

“Mais … mais … mais … vous—cette astronef—” Irribarne checked his stutter, caught breath, and said carefully, “This ship has ranged in the Auroran System. Have you, yourself, taken no proof we live?”

“I tried,” Heim said. Back and forth he paced, smoke fuming, heels banging, big useless hands clasped behind his back till the nails stood white. “The prisoners who went home with my prizes, they could have been interrogated. Not easily; Aleriona don’t respond like humans; but somebody could’ve ripped the truth from them! I guess nobody did. “I also made a pass by New Europe. Not hard to do, if you’re quick. Most of their defense satellites still aren’t equipped, and we detected no warships too dose to outrun. So I got photographs, nice clear ones, showing plainly that only Coeur d’Yvonne was destroyed, that there never had been a firestorm across Garance. Sent them back to Earth. I suppose they convinced some people, but evidently not the right ones. Don’t forget, by now a lot of political careers are bound up with the peace issue. And even a man who might confess he was wrong and resign, if it involved just himself, will hesitate to drag his party down with him.

“Oh, I’m sure sentiment has moved in our favor. It’d already begun to do so when I left. Not long after, at Staurn for munitions, I met some late-comers from Earth. They told me the will to fight was becoming quite respectable. But that was four months ago!”

He shifted his pipe, stopped his feet, and went on more evenly: “I can guess what the next line of argument has been for the appeasement faction. ‘Yes, yes,’ they say, ‘maybe the New Europeans still are alive. So isn’t the most important thing to rescue them? We won’t do that by war. Alerion can wipe them out any time she chooses. We have to trade their planet for their lives.’ That’s probably being said in Parliament tonight.”

Irribarne’s chin sank on his breast. “Un demi million d’hommes,” he mumbled. Abruptly: “But they will die all the same. Can one not see that? We have only a few more weeks.”

“What?” Heim bellowed. His heart jolted him. “Is the enemy fixing to burn you out?”

That could be done quite easily, he knew in horror. A thousand or so megatons exploded at satellite height on a clear day will set a good part of a continent afire. Madelon!

“No, no,” the colonist said. “They need for themselves the resources of the planet, in fortifying the system. A continental firestorm or a radioactive poisoning, that would make large trouble for them too. But the vitamin C.”

Piece by piece, the story came out. Never doubting Earth would hurry to their aid, the seaboard folk of Pays d’Espoir fled inland, to the mountains and forests of the Haute Garance. That nearly unmapped wilderness was as rich in game and edible vegetation as North America before the white man. With a high technology and no population pressure, the people were wealthy; hardly a one did not own hunting, fishing, and camping gear, as well as a flyer capable of going anywhere. Given a little camouflage and caution, fifty thousand scattered lodges and summer cottages were much too many for the Aleriona to find. On the rare occasions when they did find one, the inhabitants could resort to tent or cave or lean-to.

Portable chargers, equally able to use sunlight, wind, or running water, were also standard outdoor equipment, which kept up power cells. Ordinary miniature transceivers maintained a communications net. It did the enemy scant good to monitor. He had come with people that knew French, “but his own ossified culture had not allowed for provincial dialect, Louchébème, or Basque. The boldest men organized raids on him, the rest stayed hidden.

With little axial tilt, New Europe enjoys a mild and rainy winter in the temperate zone, even at fairly high altitudes. It seemed that the humans could hold out indefinitely.