The air force had only a few hundred planes, since oil to make fuel for the jets was rare and expensive. The antigravity devices which drove the spaceships were much too big and heavy to put into combat aircraft.
The soldiers had good weapons, but most of them were people who couldn't get any other job. They got little training, so they were heavy-footed and sometimes half-witted in the field. Without their air support, they would be much less of a menace.
In spite of these flaws, Chard's armed forces were strong enough to harry what was left of his opponents. Defections and defeats had driven them underground until Chard could probably have left the survivors to starve in the wilderness.
«He will not do this,» said Riyannah. «He keeps the planes and men raiding to train them for the conquest of Kanan.»
Blade frowned. Loyun Chard sounded like an ambitious, ruthless man, but hardly a raving maniac. It would take a maniac to plan the conquest of Kanan, if Riyannah's home planet was as she'd described it.
«Are you sure you aren't worrying unnecessarily?» he asked Riyannah. «How do you know he's planning to attack your world?»
Riyannah's voice was level. «He told us so himself.»
Loyun Chard was getting his space program nicely underway when the Kananites and the Menel discovered Targa. The Targans reacted quite calmly to the arrival of visitors from outer space, and the Kananites couldn't help wondering why.
«The Menel flew into a panic when we first appeared in their skies,» said Riyannah. «So why weren't the Targans doing the same? We soon found out. Loyun Chard was telling them that the conquest of Kanan would be an easy way to win the riches they hoped for.»
«Did you make the same offer of scientific help you'd made to the Menel?» asked Blade.
«Yes. The Targans rejected it. Loyun Chard said that we were wretched, cowardly creatures who could not defend what we had. We were making our offer only out of fear, and perhaps in the hope of making Targa dependent on us. The true Targans, the destined master people, would never permit themselves to be dependent upon anyone. They would stride like giants across the stars, taking whatever they wanted from whoever held it.»
«You're quoting him?» Loyun Chard's rhetoric had an unpleasantly familiar ring. It reminded Blade of Adolf Hitler's ravings. The ravings of a madman-but Hitler had developed the resources to make those ravings into a terrible reality. Apparently Loyun Chard was doing the same.
Once Chard was sure he had his people behind him, Targan policy was shoot first and ask any necessary questions afterward. The two ships in orbit around Targa were captured, the Menel killed, and the Kananites taken down to the planet. They were tortured into revealing the location of Kanan, then publicly executed, and that was just the beginning.
The Kananites hadn't faced anything like this crisis since the first contact with the Menel, two hundred years before the oldest living Kananite was born. They not only didn't have any real knowledge of war, they weren't even sure how to go about acquiring that knowledge.
Eventually they decided to negotiate with the underground opposition to Chard, while Menel spaceships kept watch on the Targan space program. Not a bad plan, in theory. In practice, it ran into a few unexpected difficulties.
The opposition to Chard hated him as much as ever, since every one of them had friends and relatives to avenge. Unfortunately they were scattered and not well-armed. They were also more than a bit skeptical of the generosity of the Kananites with their technology.
«At times we thought we were still talking to Chard's men,» Riyannah said wearily. «They wanted to know why-why-why we were giving them anything?»
«What did you tell them?»
«We said that with the knowledge we could give them, there would be no need to go out into space and loot other planets. They could do anything they needed with the resources of their own system.»
«Perhaps that's true-«began Blade, but Riyannah interrupted him.
«Perhaps? You know it's true! Just for a start, they could make enough antigravity generators to put in all their planes, and then-«
«Yes, I know,» said Blade patiently. «But are you sure they don't share Loyun Chard's dream of going out to the stars, even if they don't share his plans for what to do out there?»
Riyannah ignored Blade as if he hadn't spoken the last words and rushed on with her list of complaints against the Targan underground. Blade sighed. The Kananites not only needed to learn about war, they needed to learn about the fears and hopes of people who'd been fighting one for a generation. The underground had to be hard bargainers, suspicious of treachery and reluctant to be treated as poor relations. It sounded as if the Kananites were off on the wrong foot with them.
In any case, the Targan underground agreed in principle to aid Kanan against Chard in return for Kanan's energy technology. Like most agreements made «in principle,» there were still a few dozen details to be worked out. Riyannah was a member of a delegation sent to cope with those details.
Meanwhile, Menel ships swooped low over Targa, trying to locate important targets. It quickly turned out that Menel spaceships couldn't survive against Chard's air force, let alone his spaceships. The Menel were brave enough and the hurd-ray was deadly, but Chard's pilots were far more skilled and their lasers and rockets more than good enough. At least twenty Menel ships were lost before the scouting flights stopped.
This was serious. The Kananites and the Menel only had about fifty armed spaceships, most of them small interplanetary patrol craft. All the rest of their ships were about as dangerous as a herd of dairy cows.
Eventually the Kananites and the Menel gave up trying to keep any sort of close watch on Targa. They set up a hidden base in the Targan system's asteroid belt and settled down to see what happened.
«I hope both your people and the Menel are at least building warships and training soldiers as fast as you can.»
«I think we are converting a few ships for war. The Menel are doing the same. I do not know how many, though. The Menel are divided into Gorani-I do not know what your word is. Each Goran has a special task, and only the War Goran can fight or fly armed ships.»
«Can't other Gorani of the Menel learn to fight?»
«No. It is not just a matter of law or custom. It is the way the Menel are raised from the time they are hatched. One who is hatched and raised in one Goran cannot learn to do the work of another.»
«I see.» Blade didn't like what he saw but there was no point in mentioning it to Riyannah, The Menel seemed to be divided into a series of rigid classes. They were going to be seriously handicapped in a war with the more adaptable Targans.
«As for soldiers,» Riyannah continued, «I cannot see how we will need them. If we can meet the Targans in space and keep them on their own planet, that will be enough. We don't need to conquer Targa. We don't even want to!» Her voice was almost shrill.
«I believe you, Riyannah,» said Blade. «But you seem to have a problem with making your Targan friends believe it.»
Riyannah sighed. «We certainly do.»
Everything that could go wrong went wrong when Riyannah and five other Kananites came to Targa to negotiate with the underground. They were attacked from the air soon after leaving their spaceship in its hiding place. The leader of the delegation was badly hurt. Two others, including Riyannah, suffered head injuries sufficient to destroy their implanted knowledge of the Targan language.
«The Teacher Globes will teach you almost anything, including a language,» she said. «But the knowledge does not go deeply into the brain. If you are drugged or hit on the head, you often forget what you've learned.»