Rise of the Terran Empire Page 11

  "Aye, madam." In a corner of herself, Sandra felt sorry for the captain. He was a young man, really, striving to be cool and efficient in the face of ruin. He repeated her instructions and his image vanished.

  "Oh, no," Eric groaned. "What can we do?"

  "Very little, I'm afraid," Sandra admitted. "Let me be, please. I have to think." She leaned back and closed her eyes.

  An hour passed. From time to time, relayed information hauled her mind briefly out of the circle around which it struggled. The Baburites were holding course at moderate pseudospeed. Their complacency was almost an insult. Finally one ship left formation and angled off to meet the oncoming Hermetian. A while later, signals began to go back and forth, modulations imposed on hyperdrive oscillations: We wish to communicate—We will communicate. The calls were stereotyped, an on-off code, the rate of conveyance of meaning tormentingly slow: for the uncertainty principle is quick to make chaos of space-pulses. Not until vessels are within a few thousand kilometers of each other is there enough coherence for voice transmission. Pictures require more proximity than that.

  Which is why we can't send messages directly between the stars, crossed Sandra's head, relic of a lesson in physics when she was young. Nobody could position that many relay stations. Nor would they stay positioned. So we must use couriers, and hell can come to a boil someplace before we know aught has gone wrong.

  Instruments accumulated ever better data, computers analyzed, until it was clear that the strange craft was approximately the size of Alpha, surely as well armed. At last the captain's face reappeared. He was pale. "Madame, we've received a vocal communication. It goes . . . goes . . . quote, 'You will come no nearer, but will match hypervelocity to ours and stand by for orders.' Close quote. That's how it goes."

  Eric reddened. Sandra peeled lips back from teeth and said, "We'll go along. However, phrase your acknowledgment, hm, 'We will do as you request.'"

  "Thank you, Your Grace!" The captain's whole being registered an appreciation that should spread through the crew . . . though doubtless the Anglic nuance would quite go by the Baburites.

  Still the viewscreens held only stars. Sandra could imagine the foreign ship, a spheroid like hers, never meant to land on a planet, studded with gun emplacements, missile launchers, energy projectors, armored in forcefields and steel, magazines bearing the death of half a continent. She would not see it in reality. Even if they fought, she probably never would. The flesh aboard it and the flesh aboard Alpha would not touch, would not witness each other's perishing nor hear the anguish of the wounded. The abstractness was nightmarish. Peter Asmundsen, Nicholas van Rijn, she herself had ever been in the middle of their own doings: a danger dared, a blow struck or taken, a word spoken, a hand clasped, all in the living presence of the doers. Is our time past? Is the whole wild, happy age of the pioneers? Are we today crossing the threshold of the future?

  Preliminaries must have taken place before the captain announced, "Lady Sandra Tamarin-Asmundsen, Grand Duchess of Hermes; the delegate of the Imperial Siseman Naval Command."

  The sound of the vocalizer was emotionless and blurred by irregularities in the carrier wave. Yet did a roughness come through? "Greeting, Grand Duchess. Why are you here?"

  She dismissed her despair and cast back, "Greeting, Admiral, or whatever you want to be called. We're naturally curious about your purpose, too. You're no nearer home than we are."

  "Our mission is to take possession of Mirkheim for the Autarchy of United Babur."

  A part of her wished that the ships were close enough together for picture transmission. Somehow it would have helped to look into four little eyes in an unhuman visage. It would have felt less like contending with a ghost,

  But the determination is as solid as yonder invisible sun, she thought, and so are the weapons which back it. She said with care, "Is't not obvious why we Hermetians have come? Our objective is simply to . . . to take charge, to act as caretakers, while a settlement is worked out. Being neither Commonwealth nor Babur nor League, we hoped we could make all sides stay their hands, think twice, and avoid a war. Admiral, 'tis not too late for that."

  "It is," said the artificial voice. When it added its stunning news, was there the least hint of sardonicism? "We do not refer to the fact that the Imperial Band does not desire your interference, but to the fact, established by scouts of ours, that the Commonwealth already has a fleet at Mirkheim. We are coming to oust it. Hermetians will be well advised to withdraw before combat begins."

  "Son of a bitch—" she heard Eric gasp, and herself whisper, "Merciful Jesus!"

  "Rejoin your flotilla and take it home," said the Baburite. "Once action has commenced, we will attack every human vessel we encounter."

  "No, wait, wait!" Sandra cried, half rising. No response came. After a minute her captain told her: "The alien is moving off, madam, back toward its companion units."

  "Battle stations," Sandra directed. "Full speed on a course to intercept ours."

  Stars streamed across viewscreens as Alpha swung about. The pulse of the engines strengthened.

  "Was that crawler lying?" Eric roared.

  As if in reply, the captain described readings, numerous hyperdrives activated in the neighborhood of the planet. Obviously somebody was present who had now detected the newest invaders. Who could that be but a Solar task force?

  "Curse the cosmos, what a kloodge of amateurs we are." Pain stretched Eric's mouth wide as he spoke. "The Baburites kept watch on Mirkheim. They knew when the Earthlings arrived. We, we plowed ahead like a bull with a fever."

  "No, remember, we relied on Nadi's patrol to come give us warning of aught untoward," Sandra reminded him mechanically. "No doubt the Earthlings captured them—he had nothing particularly fast or powerful—captured them with some idea of preserving surprise. But meanwhile the Baburites had high-speed observers in the vicinity." She grimaced. "It seems the worst amateurs are in the Commonwealth Admiralty."

  They've never had to fight a war. Skills, doctrine, the military style of thinking evaporated generations ago.

  Such things must needs be relearned in the time that is upon us.

  Tidings continued to arrive. The fleet ahead was leaving Mirkheim, deploying in what looked like combat formation. It was considerably inferior to the armada from Babur. The sensible act would have been to cut and run. But no doubt its commander had his orders from the politicians back home: "Don't give up easily. We're sure those bugs will just attempt a bluff. They can't be serious about fighting us."

  They sure can be, Sandra thought. They are.

  Eric stopped in his tracks. It was as if a flame kindled in him, though he spoke low. "Mother . . . Mother, if we joined the Commonwealthers—our fellow humans, after all—"

  She shook her head. "Not. 'Twould make slim difference, save to get Hermetians killed and ships wrecked that we'll want for home defense. I'm about to tell all other units of ours to sheer off and start back immediately."

  He divined her intention. "We, though? Alpha Cygni?"

  "We'll continue to Mirkheim. Belike the whole Solar strength will be gone by the time we get there, off to meet the Baburites. In any event, this is too formidable a craft for anybody to tangle with casually. We do have a duty to help Nadi's folk get free if possible. They're our allies, after a fashion. Including technicians on the ground." Sandra achieved a smile of sorts. "And since the news first broke about it, I've been curious to see Mirkheim."

  * * *

  No guard was at the planet. The Supermetals patrol vessels orbited empty. A quick radio exchange confirmed that their crews had been ferried down to the mining base, as deep an oubliette as ever was. The battleship took a circling station of her own. Boats sprang from her sides to evacuate the personnel below. Sandra left a protesting Eric behind, nominally in charge, and herself rode in one of the auxiliaries.

  Mirkheim loomed monstrous ahead. The wanly glowing ashes of its sun were unseeable at its distance, and it might almost have been a rogue
world which had never belonged to any star, drifting eternally among winter-bright constellations. Almost, not quite. No snows of frozen atmosphere decked it from pole to pole; its gleam was of metal, hard, in places nearly mirrorlike. Mountains and chasms made rough shadows. Regions of dark iron sketched a troll's face.

  Soon the boat neared the surface and leveled off. Behind Sandra stretched a plain, on and on to a horizon so far off that a dread of being alone in limitless emptiness awoke in the soul of the onlooker. The ground was not cratered and dust-covered like that of a normal airless body; it was blank, dimly shining, here and there corrugated in fantastic ridges where moltenness had congealed. Its darkness cut sharply across the Milky Way. To right and left, the plain was pocked by digging. Incredibly—no, understandably—work went on; a robot tractor was hauling a train of ore cars. Ahead bulked a scarp, upthrown by some ancient convulsion through the crust of metals left by the supernova, a black wall beneath which the domes and cubes and towers of the compound huddled as if crushed, on whose heights a radio mast seemed to have been spun by spiders.

  The scene tilted and appeared to leap upward as the boat descended. Landing jacks made a contact that vibrated through hull and crew. Engine purr died away. Silence pressed inward.

  Sandra broke it. "I'm bound out," she said, leaving her seat.

  "Madame?" her pilot protested. "But the drag's more than five gees!"

  "I'm reasonably strong."

  "We—you know, you ordered yourself—we'll simply take them directly aboard and scramble."

  "I doubt not we'll hit complications even in that. I want to be on the spot to help cope, not at the end of a phone beam." And I can hardly say it aloud, but I feel a need to . . . to experience, however briefly, this thing for which so many sacrifices have been made, for which so much blood may soon be spilled. I need for Mirkheim to become real to me.

  A pair of crewmen accompanied her, checking out her spacesuit with more than usual care and flanking her when she cycled through the airlock and stepped forth. That was well. Caught by the gravitation as she left the boat's interior field, she would have crashed to a bone-breaking fall had the men not supported her. The three of them hastily activated their impellers to hold them up, as if suspended in a harness. That let them shuffle forward across the steely soil, forcing leaden ribs to draw air in and out of them, staring past sagging lids with eyeballs whose weight sent blurs and blotches floating across vision. Unseen, unfelt, radioactive emanation sleeted through them, enough to kill in a matter of weeks.

  And workers have been coming here for eighteen years, Sandra remembered. Do I love my own kind that much?

  They were emerging from a dome. Despite their variegated suits, she recognized their races from past contact or from reading and pictures. Nadi the Wodenite led them, of course. Near him came two raven-featured Ikranankans, a four-armed shaggy-headed Gorzuni, a leonine Ivanhoan, a faintly saurian-looking Vanessan, two Cynthians (from societies less advanced than the spacefaring one, which had shown no desire to help them progress), and four humans (from colony planets where existence could become much easier if an adequate capital investment be made; but Technic capital was attracted to more lucrative things). In the middle of barrenness, they were like grotesque symbols of life; Vigeland might have sculptured them.

  It was not surprising that they were so few. Environment made short the periods during which any sophont could work here, and forced him to stay mostly indoors. Flesh and blood were present chiefly to perform certain maintenance and communication tasks, and to make decisions which were not routine. Otherwise, machines dwelt on Mirkheim. They prospected, mined, transported, refined, loaded, did the brute labor and most of the delicate. Some were slaved to others which had self-programming computers, while the central computer at the base was of consciousness level. The entire operation was a miracle of technological ingenuity—and still more, Sandra thought, of sisu, esprit, indomitability, selflessness.

  A man toiled ahead of the rest. The visage behind the vitryl of his helmet was battered and worn. "My lady from Hermes?" he began in accented Anglic. "I'm Henry Kittredge from Vixen, superintendent of this particular gang."

  "I'm . . . happy to meet you . . . ." she replied between breaths.

  His smile was bleak. "I dunno 'bout that, lady. These aren't exactly happy circumstances, are they? But, uh, I do want to say how grateful we are. We've already overstayed our time, should've been relieved many days ago. If we'd had to stay much longer, working outdoors as often as usual, we'd've gotten a dangerous dosage. After a while, we'd've died."

  "Couldn't you have kept indoors?"

  "Maybe the Earthlings would've let us. I doubt the Baburites would. Why should they care? And we'd've been wanted to show them how to run these digs."

  Sandra nodded, though it was an effort to pull her head back up again. "You've had years of accumulated experience, sometimes at the cost of lives, not?" she said. "That's a good strategic reason for evacuating you. Without your help, anybody else will be a long, expensive time about resuming exploitation. You—you and your co-workers, wherever they live, you might just prove to be a valuable bargaining counter."

  "Yes, we've talked about that 'mong ourselves. Listen." Eagerness awoke in the tired voice. "Let's take some of the key equipment with us. Or if you don't want to delay that long, let's sabotage it. Huh?"

  Sandra hesitated. She hadn't considered that possibility, and now the choice was thrust upon her. Dared she linger for extra hours?

  She did. The fleets would not likely end their strife soon. "We'll remove the stuff," she said, and wondered if she was being wise or merely spiteful.

  VIII

  "We're too late."

  The words seemed to hang for a moment in the murmurous quiet of the bridge. Any of three, Adzel, Chee Lan, David Falkayn, might have spoken them, out of shared pain and anger. All of three stared emptily forth into darkness and uncaring suns. There fire had blossomed, tiny at its remove but still a dreadful glory.

  Another spark winked, and another. Nuclear warheads were exploding throughout the space near Mirkheim.

  Chee reached for the hyperwave receiver controls. As she turned them past different settings, the speaker buzzed, chattered, crackled, gobbled: coded messages from ship to ship, across distances that light would take hours to bridge. The frontrunners of either fleet had begun engagement—gone into normal state, moving at true speeds of kilometers per second and true accelerations of a few gravities, reaching for each other with missiles, energy beams, shells, meteor boats.

  Adzel studied instruments, held a soft colloquy with Muddlehead, and announced: "The battle cannot be very old as yet. Else we would observe more traces of fusion bursts, more complicated neutrino patterns left by engines, than we do. We have missed a beforehand arrival by an ironically small margin."

  "I wonder if our warning would have made much difference," Falkayn sighed. "Judging by these data"—he swept his hand across a row of meters—"the Commonwealth fleet came first, defied the Baburites in hopes they'd back down, found that wasn't the case, and will be fighting for bare survival."

  "Why doesn't it simply flee?"

  Falkayn shrugged, as if the fact were not gall in his throat. "Orders, no doubt—to inflict maximum damage if combat should erupt—orders issued by politicians safe at home, who've always held the theory and practice of war is too wicked a subject for civilized men to study."

  Fighting could go on for days before the Commonwealth admiral decides he must retreat, he thought. Ships will accelerate, decelerate, orbit freely over millions of kilometers, seeking an opponent, meeting him, firing in an orgasm of violence, then both of them drawn apart by their velocities till they can come about for a new encounter, probably each with a new foe.

  "We had to try, of course," he went on dully. "The question is what we try next."

  They had ransacked their minds for plans, contingency after contingency, while Muddlin' Through sped from Babur toward Mirkheim. "Not con
tact," Adzel said. They might rendezvous with a Solar vessel and, through her, get in touch with the admiral. But they had nothing left to offer him, and the risk involved was considerable.

  "Hang around?" Chee asked—wait with power systems throttled down, nearly undetectable, on the fringes of war, till they had seen what happened. But surely survivors would bring that news to Earth.

  Yet it was no longer certain, as it once had been, that the Commonwealth government would be frank with the people; and van Rijn needed a full account.

  It was not even sure that he would receive the dispatch they had sent him in a courier torpedo after their escape. When the thing entered the Solar System and broadcast its signal, the Space Service that retrieved it might not forward the written contents. Falkayn doubted the cipher could be broken in reasonable time; still, van Rijn would remain in the dark.