Birthright

He paused, looking slowly about the table. “In order to accomplish this, we shall make a massive strike

upon Altair VII.”

“You certainly don't believe in easy objectives, do you?” said an aide. “There are a million easy objectives in this galaxy,” replied Grath, “and not one of them—or all of them put together, for that matter—would do us the slightest bit of good. The Oligarchy controls almost two million worlds; they control five-sixths of the galaxy's economy and they have a Navy of more than fifty million warships with an average crew of two hundred men per ship, not to mention billions of other soldiers and mercenaries on those planets that are under martial control. To make any kind of dent in the Oligarchy at all, we've got to hit something big, something vital. Do you think they really give a damn about what we do here on the Rim? We're so far away from the core of things that we don't even count as a minor irritant yet. We've wasted enough time seeking after loot; if we're ever to achieve empire, we're going to have to get on with it. Time is our greatest enemy. It's a big galaxy, big enough to take even our fastest ship more than a year to cross it unopposed. To cross it when we're outnumbered by more than a hundred to one, when we have precious little ability or opportunity to replace ships or men ... that, gentlemen, is the situation. We're going to have to do in a handful of years what is rightfully a task for generations. And we shall begin,” he concluded, “with Altair VII.” Altair VII was the political and economic center of an area almost 725 light-years across. It was the farthest from Deluros VIII of all the major Oligarchic worlds, and hence was the coordinating ruling body of tens of thousands of frontier worlds reaching out to the Rim. As such, it was considered to be of vital importance in the Oligarchy's scheme of things, and merited a fleet of almost 35,000 Navy ships for its protection (and its occasional forays against insubordinate frontier worlds). Altair VII held very little strategic value to any military force other than the Oligarchy itself. It was too far from Deluros VIII to make a useful base of operations, and it required three farming worlds to supply it with its needs. Its sole value lay in its complex and highly efficient bureaucracy. Almost six billion humans, practically all of them employed by the government in one form or another, worked in the huge, endless, glass-enclosed buildings, living out their lives amid file cabinets, computers, and fear of demotion or termination.

And yet power lay here too, the power to move unruly worlds into line, to expand Man's domination to a planet here or a system there; and, unstated but never forgotten, there was the greatest power of all—that of the Oligarchy.

The battle of the Altair system was brief, as space battles went in those days. Grath had made his plans well, feeding the coordinates of the star, its capital planet, and every ship of his own armada into scores of computers. Distances were established, times computed, the minute curvature of space accounted for, and eventually flight plans were programmed into every vessel. They did not all take off at once, nor at the same speed, nor even in the same direction. But each was programmed to reach the Altair system within seconds of all the others.

To the naked eye, the arrival of Grath's fleet would have seemed like magic: one instant the system was empty, the next it was alive with almost half a million ships braking to sub-light speeds. But the technology of spatial conflict had long since ceased to rely on the naked eye, and the Oligarchy's Navy was not totally unprepared.

A number of Garth's ships overshot the Altair system by light-years, some plunged into the sun, and a few crashed into the largest of the system's sixteen planets. But the bulk of the fleet arrived when and where they were supposed to, and after a brief flurry which saw relatively heavy casualties on both sides,