Due to atmospheric disturbances, the ship's landing was several hundred
miles from the point the commander had originally picked for the
debarkation of his troops. That meant a long, forced march along the
coast and then inland, but there was no help for it; the ship simply
wasn't built for atmospheric navigation.
That didn't deter the commander any. The orders rang through the ship:
"All troops and carriers prepare for landing!"
Half an hour later, they were assembled outside the ship, fully armed
and armored, and with full field gear. The sun, a yellow G-O star, hung
hotly just above the towering mountains to the east. The alien air
smelled odd in the men's nostrils, and the weird foliage seemed to
rustle menacingly. In the distance, the shrieks of alien fauna
occasionally echoed through the air.
A hundred and eighty-odd men and some thirty carriers stood under the
tropic blaze for forty-five minutes while the commander checked over
their equipment with minute precision. Nothing faulty or sloppy was
going into that jungle with him if he could prevent it.
When his hard eyes had inspected every bit of equipment, when he had
either passed or ordered changes in the manner of its carrying or its
condition, when he was fully satisfied that every weapon was in
order--then, and only then, did he turn his attention to the men
themselves.
He climbed atop a little hillock and surveyed them carefully, letting
his penetrating gaze pass over each man in turn. He stood there, his
fists on his hips, with the sunlight gleaming from his burnished armor,
for nearly a full minute before he spoke.
Then his powerful voice rang out over the assembled adventurers.
"My comrades-at-arms! We have before us a world that is ours for the
taking! It contains more riches than any man on Earth ever dreamed
existed, and those riches, too, are ours for the taking. It isn't going
to be a picnic, and we all knew that when we came. There are dangers on
every side--from the natives, from the animals and plants, and from the
climate.
"But there is not one of these that cannot be overcome by the onslaught
of brave, courageous, and determined men!
"Ahead of us, we will find the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse arrayed
against our coming--Famine, Pestilence, War, and Death. Each and all of
these we must meet and conquer as brave men should, for at their end we
will find wealth and glory!"
A cheer filled the air, startling the animals in the forest into
momentary silence.
The commander stilled it instantly with a raised hand.
"Some of you know this country from our previous expeditions together.
Most of you will find it utterly strange. And not one of you knows it as
well as I do.
"In order to survive, you must--and _will_--follow my orders to the
letter--and beyond.
"First, as to your weapons. We don't have an unlimited supply of charges
for them, so there will be no firing of any power weapons unless
absolutely necessary. You have your swords and your pikes--use them."
Several of the men unconsciously gripped the hafts of the long steel
blades at their sides as he spoke the words, but their eyes never left
the commanding figure on the hummock.
"As for food," he continued, "we'll live off the land. You'll find that
most of the animals are edible, but stay away from the plants unless I
give the O.K.
"We have a long way to go, but, by Heaven, I'm going to get us there
alive! Are you with me?"
A hearty cheer rang from the throats of the men. They shouted the
commander's name with enthusiasm.
"All right!" he bellowed. "There is one more thing! Anyone who wants to
stay with the ship can do so; anyone who feels too ill to make it should
consider it his duty to stay behind, because sick men will simply hold
us up and weaken us more than if they'd been left behind. Remember,
we're not going to turn back as a body, and an individual would never
make it alone." He paused.
"Well?"
Not a man moved. The commander grinned--not with humor, but with
satisfaction. "All right, then: let's move out."
V
Of them all, only a handful, including the commander, had any real
knowledge of what lay ahead of them, and that knowledge only pertained
to the periphery of the area the intrepid band of adventurers were
entering. They knew that the aliens possessed a rudimentary
civilization--they did not, at that time, realize they were entering the
outposts of a powerful barbaric empire--an empire almost as
well-organized and well-armed as that of First Century Rome, and, if
anything, even more savage and ruthless.
It was an empire ruled by a single family who called themselves the
Great Nobles; at their head was the Greatest Noble--the Child of the Sun
Himself. It has since been conjectured that the Great Nobles were
mutants in the true sense of the word; a race apart from their subjects.
It is impossible to be absolutely sure at this late date, and the
commander's expedition, lacking any qualified geneticists or genetic
engineers, had no way of determining--and, indeed, no real _interest_ in
determining--whether this was or was not true. None the less, historical
evidence seems to indicate the validity of the hypothesis.
Never before--not even in ancient Egypt--had the historians ever seen a
culture like it. It was an absolute monarchy that would have made any
Medieval king except the most saintly look upon it in awe and envy. The
Russians and the Germans never even approached it. The Japanese tried to
approximate it at one time in their history, but they failed.
Secure in the knowledge that theirs was the only civilizing force on the
face of the planet, the race of the Great Nobles spread over the length
of a great continent, conquering the lesser races as they went.
Physically, the Great Nobles and their lesser subjects were quite
similar. They were, like the commander and his men, human in every sense
of the word. That this argues some ancient, prehistoric migration across
the empty gulfs that separate the worlds cannot be denied, but when and
how that migration took place are data lost in the mists of time.
However it may have happened, the fact remains that these people _were_
human. As someone observed in one of the reports written up by one of
the officers: "They could pass for Indians, except their skins are of a
decidedly redder hue."
The race of the Great Nobles held their conquered subjects in check by
the exercise of two powerful forces: religion and physical power of
arms. Like the feudal organizations of Medieval Europe, the Nobles had
the power of life and death over their subjects, and to a much greater
extent than the European nobles had. Each family lived on an allotted
parcel of land and did a given job. Travel was restricted to a radius of
a few miles. There was no money; there was no necessity for it, since
the government of the Great Nobles took all produce and portioned it out
again according to need. It was communism on a vast and--incomprehensible
as it may seem to the modern mind--_workable_ scale. Their minds were as
different from ours as their bodies were similar; the concept "freedom"
would have been totally incomprehensible to them.
[Illustration]
They were sun-worshipers, and the Greatest Noble was the Child of the
Sun, a godling subordinate only to the Sun Himself. Directly under him
were the lesser Great Nobles, also Children of the Sun, but to a lesser
extent. They exercised absolute power over the conquered peoples, but
even they had no concept of freedom, since they were as tied to the
people as the people were tied to them. It was a benevolent
dictatorship of a kind never seen before or since.
At the periphery of the Empire of the Sun-Child lived still unconquered
savage tribes, which the Imperial forces were in the process of slowly
taking over. During the centuries, tribe after tribe had fallen before
the brilliant leadership of the Great Nobles and the territory of the
Empire had slowly expanded until, at the time the invading Earthmen
came, it covered almost as much territory as had the Roman Empire at its
peak.
The Imperial Army, consisting of upwards of fifty thousand troops, was
extremely mobile in spite of the handicap of having no form of
transportation except their own legs. They had no cavalry; the only
beast of burden known to them--the flame-beasts--were too small to carry
more than a hundred pounds, in spite of their endurance. But the wide,
smooth roads that ran the length and breadth of the Empire enabled a
marching army to make good time, and messages carried by runners in
relays could traverse the Empire in a matter of days, not weeks.
And into this tight-knit, well-organized, powerful barbaric world
marched Commander Frank with less than two hundred men and thirty
carriers.