ng for a troopship. I think that's enough. You'll remain
here on Gimli, in any case, admiral; as soon as the other ships come
in, you'll follow to Marduk with them. I am now holding a meeting
aboard the Tanith flagship _Nemesis_. I want your four ship-commanders
aboard immediately. I am not including you because you're remaining
here to bring up the late comers and as soon as this meeting is over
we are spacing out."

Actually, they spaced out sooner; the meeting lasted the whole three
hundred and fifty hours to Abaddon. A ship's captain, if he has a
good exec, as all of them had, needs only sit at his command-desk
and look important while the ship is going into and emerging from
a long jump; the rest of the time he can study ancient history or
whatever his shipboard hobby is. Rather than waste three hundred and
fifty hours of precious time, each captain turned his ship over to
his exec and remained aboard the _Nemesis_; even on so spacious a
craft the officers' country north of the engine rooms was crowded
like a tourist hotel in mid-season. One of the four Mardukans was
the Captain Garravay who had smuggled Bentrik's wife and son off
Marduk, and the other three were just as pro-Bentrik, pro-Tanith,
and anti-Makann. They were, on general principles, also anti-Bargham.
There must be something wrong with any fleet admiral who remained
in his command after Zaspar Makann came to power.

So, as soon as they spaced out, there was a party. After that,
they settled down to planning the Battle of Abaddon.

* * * * *

There was no Battle of Abaddon.

It was a dead planet, one side in night and the other in dim
twilight from the little speck of a sun three and a half billion
miles away, jagged mountains rising out of the snow that covered it
from pole to pole. The snow on top would be frozen CO_2; according
to the thermocouples, the surface temperature was well below
minus-100 Centigrade. No ships on orbit circled it; there was
a little faint radiation, which could have been from naturally
radioactive minerals; there was no electrical discharge detectable.

There was considerable bad language in the command room of the
_Nemesis_. The captains of the other ships were screening in,
wanting to know what to do.

"Go on in," Trask told them. "Englobe the planet, and go down to
within a mile if necessary. They could be hiding somewhere on it."

"Well, they're not hiding at the bottom of any ocea