It became a joke, which seemed excruciatingly funny at the time.
Nobody saw all the battle, or even a considerable part. There was a period when the Liberty, alone, fought like the deadliest of gadflies. It appeared in the middle of a Mekinese sub-formation, loosed missiles and vanished before anything could be intercepted. There was no target for Mekinese bombs to home on when they got to where the Liberty had been.
Then the fleet of Kandar appeared. It broke out in single ships and in pairs, and then in groups of fives and tens. The general order for the Mekinese fleet had been picked up, and the fleet of Kandar seemed to have gone mad.
The flagship tried to fight in orthodox fashion, for a time. It depended on the attraction its missiles had for Mekinese to keep it in space. But presently it was alone, and the battle was raging confusion scattered over light-minutes, and somebody went down in to the engine room and brazed in a low-power overdrive unit—providentially made by a junior officer—and the flagship of the Kandarian fleet waded in erratically, never knowing where it would come out, but rarely failing to find a Mekinese ship to launch at.
The third phase of the battle was much more of an open fight, ship against ship, except that more and more Kandarian ships were using low-power overdrive—clumsily and inefficiently, but to the very great detriment of Mekin's grand fleet. The Mekinese officers could not quite grasp that their antagonists were doing the impossible. They became confused.
The fourth phase of the battle consisted of mopping-up operations in which individual ships were hunted down and destroyed by the simple process of a Kandarian ship seeming to materialize from nowhere a mile or half a mile from an enemy, launching one missile and seeming to dematerialize again and vanish.
Very few Mekinese ships went into overdrive. Probably most of them didn't believe what was happening. Perhaps four ships, out of the entire grand fleet, escaped.
Later, of course, there was embarrassment all around. King Humphrey the Eighth landed on Kandar to assure his people that they were no longer in danger. He was embarrassed because he was a victor in spite of himself. The fleet officers were embarrassed because Bors had been forced out of the fleet, and had literally tricked them into battle.
Bors, too, was embarrassed. There was the admiration displayed by junior officers of the fleet. He had become, very unwillingly, a model for young space-navy officers. They tried to pattern themselves after him in all ways, even to the angle at which they wore their hats. He squirmed when they looked at him with shining-eyed respect.