“Now,” said the older officer, “sit down!”
Kurt slowly lowered himself into the chair and looked at the colonel through bemused eyes.
“Stop gawking!” said Colonel Harris. “You’re an officer now! When a man gets too big for his sandals, we give him a new pair—after we let him sweat a while!”
He suddenly grew serious. “Now that you’re one of the family, you have a right to know why I’m hushing up the matter of the tableland to the north. What I have to say won’t make much sense at first. Later I’m hoping it will. Tell me,” he said suddenly, “where did the battalion come from?”
“We’ve always been here, I guess,” said Kurt. “When I was a recruit, Granddad used to tell me stories about us being brought from some place else a long time ago by an iron bird, but it stands to reason that something that heavy can’t fly!”
A faraway look came into the colonel’s eyes. “Six generations,” he mused, “and history becomes legend. Another six and the legends themselves become tales for children. Yes, Kurt,” he said softly, “it stands to reason that something that heavy couldn’t fly so we’ll forget it for a while. We did come from some place else though. Once there was a great empire, so great that all the stars you see at night were only part of it. And then, as things do when age rests too heavily on them, it began to crumble. Commanders fell to fighting among themselves and the Emperor grew weak. The battalion was set down here to operate a forward maintenance station for his ships. We waited but no ships came. For five hundred years no ships have come,” said the colonel somberly. “Perhaps they tried to relieve us and couldn’t, perhaps the Empire fell with such a crash that we were lost in the wreckage. There are a thousand perhapses that a man can tick off in his mind when the nights are long and sleep comes hard! Lost… forgotten… who knows?”
Kurt stared at him with a blank expression on his face. Most of what the colonel had said made no sense at all. Wherever Imperial Headquarters was, it hadn’t forgotten them. The I.G. still made his inspection every year or so.
The colonel continued as if talking to himself. “But our operational orders said that we would stand by to give all necessary maintenance to Imperial warcraft until properly relieved, and stand by we have.”
The old officer’s voice seemed to be coming from a place far distant in time and space.
“I’m sorry, sir,” said Kurt, “but I don’t follow you. If all these things did happen, it was so long ago that they mean nothing to us now.”