Young Flandry Read online

  "You will have work," Brechdan said. "In truth you will. I know not what as yet. You may even be asked to burgle the envoy's ship in orbit. For a beginning, however, I think we must plan a program against our friend Abrams. He will expect the usual devices; you may give him a surprise. If you do, you shall not go unhonored."

  Dwyr the Hook waited to hear further.

  Brechdan could not forebear taking a minute for plain fleshly comradeship. "How were you hurt?" he asked.

  "In the conquest of Janair, Hand. A nuclear blast. The field hospital kept me alive and sent me to base for regeneration. But the surgeons there found that the radiation had too much deranged my cellular chemistry. At that point I requested death. They explained that techniques newly learned from Gorrazan gave hope of an alternative, which might make my service quite precious. They were correct."

  Brechdan was momentarily startled. This didn't sound right—Well, he was no biomedic.

  His spirits darkened. Why pretend pity? You can't be friends with the dead. And Dwyr was dead, in bone, sinew, glands, gonads, guts, everything but a brain which had nothing left except the single-mindedness of a machine. So, use him. That was what machines were for.

  Brechdan took a turn around the room, hands behind back, tail unrestful, scar throbbing. "Good," he said. "Let us discuss procedure."

  Chapter Eleven

  "Oh, no," Abrams had said. "I thank most humbly the government of his Supremacy for this generous offer, but would not dream of causing such needless trouble and expense. True, the Embassy cannot spare me an airboat. However, the ship we came in, Dronning Margrete, has a number of auxiliaries now idle. I can use one of them."

  "The Commander's courtesy is appreciated," bowed the official at the other end of the vidiphone line. "Regrettably, though, law permits no one not of Merseian race to operate within the Korychan System a vessel possessing hyperdrive capabilities. The Commander will remember that a Merseian pilot and engineer boarded his Lordship's vessel for the last sublight leg of the journey here. Is my information correct that the auxiliaries of his Lordship's so impressive vessel possess hyperdrives in addition to gravitics?"

  "They do, distinguished colleague. But the two largest carry an airboat apiece as their own auxiliaries. I am sure Lord Hauksberg won't mind lending me one of those for my personal transportation. There is no reason to bother your department."

  "But there is!" The Merseian threw up his hands in quite a manlike gesture of horror. "The Commander, no less than his Lordship, is a guest of his Supremacy. We cannot disgrace his Supremacy by failing to show what hospitality lies within our power. A vessel will arrive tomorrow for the Commander's personal use. The delay is merely so that it may be furnished comfortably for Terrans and the controls modified to a Terran pattern. The boat can sleep six, and we will stock its galley with whatever is desired and available here. It has full aerial capability, has been checked out for orbital use, and could no doubt reach the outermost moon at need. I beg for the Commander's acceptance."

  "Distinguished colleague, I in turn beg that you, under his Supremacy, accept my sincerest thanks," Abrams beamed.

  The beam turned into a guffaw as soon as he had cut the circuit. Of course the Merseians weren't going to let him travel around unescorted—not unless they could bug his transportation. And of course they would expect him to look for eavesdropping gimmicks and find any of the usual sorts. Therefore he really needn't conduct that tedious search.

  Nonetheless, he did. Negligence would have been out of character. To those who delivered his beautiful new flier he explained that he set technicians swarming through her to make certain that everything was understood about her operation; different cultures, different engineering, don't y'know. The routine disclaimer was met by the routine pretense of believing it. The airboat carried no spy gadgets apart from the one he had been hoping for. He found this by the simple expedient of waiting till he was alone aboard and then asking. The method of its concealment filled him with admiration.

  But thereafter he ran into a stone wall—or, rather, a pot of glue. Days came and went, the long thirty-seven-hour days of Merseia. He lost one after another by being summoned to the chamber in Castle Afon where Hauksberg and staff conferred with Brechdan's puppets. Usually the summons was at the request of a Merseian, who wanted elucidation of some utterly trivial question about Starkad. Having explained, Abrams couldn't leave. Protocol forbade. He must sit there while talk droned on, inquiries, harangues, haggles over points which a child could see were unessential—oh, yes, these greenskins had a fine art of making negotiations interminable.

  Abrams said as much to Hauksberg, once when they were back at the Embassy. "I know," the viscount snapped. He was turning gaunt and hollow-eyed. "They're so suspicious of us. Well, we're partly to blame for that, eh? Got to show good faith. While we talk, we don't fight."

  "They fight on Starkad," Abrams grumbled around his cigar. "Terra won't wait on Brechdan's comma-counting forever."

  "I'll dispatch a courier presently, to report and explain. We are gettin' somewhere, don't forget. They're definitely int'rested in establishin' a system for continuous medium-level conference between the governments."

  "Yah. A great big gorgeous idea which'll give political leverage to our accommodationists at home for as many years as Brechdan feels like carrying on discussions about it. I thought we came here to settle the Starkad issue."

  "I thought I was the head of this mission," Hauksberg retorted. "That'll do, Commander." He yawned and stretched stiffly. "One more drink and ho for bed. Lord Emp'ror, but I'm tired!"

  On days when he was not immobilized, Abrams ground through his library research and his interviews. The Merseians were most courteous and helpful. They flooded him with books and periodicals. Officers and officials would talk to him for hours on end. That was the trouble. Aside from whatever feel he might be getting for the basic setup, he learned precisely nothing of value.

  Which was a kind of indicator too, he admitted. The lack of hard information about early Merseian journeys to the Saxo region might be due to sloppiness about record keeping as Brechdan had said. But a check of other planets showed that they were, as a rule, better documented. Starkad appeared to have some secret importance. So what else is new?

  At first Abrams had Flandry to help out. Then an invitation arrived. In the cause of better understanding between races, as well as hospitality, would Ensign Flandry like to tour the planet in company with some young Merseians whose rank corresponded more or less to his?

  "Would you?" Abrams asked.

  "Why—" Flandry straightened at his desk. "Hell, yes. Right now I feel as if every library in the universe should be bombed. But you need me here . . . I suppose."

  "I do. This is a baldpated ruse to cripple me still worse. However, you can go."

  "You mean that?" Flandry gasped.

  "Sure. We're stalled here. You just might discover something."

  "Thank you, sir!" Flandry rocketed out of his chair.

  "Whoa there, son. Won't be any vacation for you. You've got to play the decadent Terran nogoodnik. Mustn't disappoint their expectations. Besides, it improves your chances. Keep your eyes and ears open, sure, but forget the rule about keeping your mouth shut. Babble. Ask questions. Foolish ones, mainly; and be damned sure not to get so inquisitive they suspect you of playing spy."

  Flandry frowned. "Uh . . . sir, I'd look odd if I didn't grab after information. Thing to do, I should guess, is be clumsy and obvious about it."

  "Good. You catch on fast. I wish you were experienced, but—Nu, everybody has to start sometime, and I'm afraid you will not run into anything too big for a pup to handle. So go get yourself some experience."

  Abrams watched the boy bustle off, and a sigh gusted from him. By and large, after winking at a few things, he felt he'd have been proud to have Dominic Flandry for a son. Though not likely to hit any pay dirt, this trip would further test the ensign's competence. If he proved out well, then probably h
e must be thrown to the wolves by Abrams' own hand.

  Because events could not be left on dead zero as long as Brechdan wished. The situation right now carried potentials which only a traitor would fail to exploit. Nonetheless, the way matters had developed, with the mission detained on Merseia for an indefinite period, Abrams could not exploit them as he had originally schemed. The classically neat operation he had had in mind must be turned into an explosion.

  And Flandry was the fuse.

  Like almost every intelligent species, the Merseians had in their past evolved thousands of languages and cultures, Finally, as in the case of Terra, one came to dominate the others and slowly absorb them into itself. But the process had not gone as far on Merseia. The laws and customs of the lands bordering the Wilwidh Ocean were still a mere overlay on some parts of the planet. Eriau was the common tongue, but there were still those who were less at home in it than in the languages they had learned from their mothers.

  Perhaps this was why Lannawar Belgis had never risen above yqan—CPO, Flandry translated—and was at the moment a sort of batman to the group. He couldn't even pronounce his rating correctly. The sound rendered by q, approximately kdh where dh = th as in "the," gave him almost as much trouble as it did an Anglic speaker. Or perhaps he just wasn't ambitious. For certainly he was able, as his huge fund of stories from his years in space attested. He was also a likeable old chap.

  He sat relaxed with the Terran and Tachwyr the Dark, whose rank of mei answered somewhat to lieutenant j.g. Flandry was getting used to the interplay of formality and ease between officers and enlisted personnel in the Merseian service. Instead of the mutual aloofness on Terran ships, there was an intimacy which the seniors led but did not rigidly control, a sort of perpetual dance.

  "Aye, foreseers," Lannawar rumbled, "yon was a strange orb and glad I was to see the last of it. Yet somehow, I know not, ours was never a lucky ship afterward. Nothing went ever wholly right, you track me? Speaking naught against captain nor crew, I was glad for transfer to the Bedh-Ivrich. Her skipper was Runei the Wanderer, and far did he take us on explores."

  Tachwyr's tailtip jerked and he opened his mouth. Someone was always around to keep a brake on Lannawar's garrulousness. Flandry, who had sat half drowsing, surged to alertness. He beat Tachwyr by a millisecond in exclaiming: "Runei? The same who is now Fodaich on Starkad?"

  "Why . . . aye, believe so, foreseer." Eyes squinched in the tattooed face across the table. A green hand scratched the paunch where the undress tunic bulged open. "Not as I know much. Heard naught of Starkad ere they told me why you Terrans is come."

  Flandry's mind went into such furious action that he felt each of the several levels on which it was operating. He had to grab whatever lead chance had offered him after so many fruitless days; he must fend off Tachwyr's efforts to wrench the lead away from him, for a minute or two anyhow; at the same time, he must maintain his role. (Decadent, as Abrams had suggested, and this he had enjoyed living up to whenever his escorts took him to some place of amusement. But not fatuous; he had quickly seen that he'd get further if they respected him a little and were not bored by his company. He was naive, wide-eyed, pathetically hoping to accomplish something for Mother Terra, simultaneously impressed by what he saw here. In wry moments he admitted to himself that this was hardly a faked character.) On lower levels of consciousness, excitement opened the sensory floodgates.

  Once more he noticed the background. They sat, with a bench for him, in a marble pergola intricately arabesqued and onion-domed. Tankards of bitter ale stood before them. Merseian food and drink were nourishing to a Terran, and often tasty. They had entered this hilltop restaurant (which was also a shrine, run by the devotees of a very ancient faith) for the view and for a rest after walking around in Dalgorad. That community nestled below them, half hidden by lambent flowers and deep-green fronds, a few small modern buildings and many hollowed-out trees which had housed untold generations of a civilized society. Past the airport lay a beach of red sand. An ocean so blue it was nearly black cast breakers ashore; their booming drifted faint to Flandry on a wind that smelled cinnamon. Korych shone overhead with subtropical fierceness, but the moons Wythna and Lythyr were discernible, like ghosts.

  Interior sensations: muscles drawn tight in thighs and belly, bloodbeat in the eardrums, chill in the palms. No feeling of excess weight; Merseian gravity was only a few percent above Terra's. Merseian air, water, biochemistry, animal and plant life, were close parallels to what man had evolved among. By the standards of either world, the other was beautiful.

  Which made the two races enemies. They wanted the same kind of real estate.

  "So Runei himself was not concerned with the original missions to Starkad?" Flandry asked.

  "No, foreseer. We surveyed beyond Rigel." Lannawar reached for his tankard.

  "I imagine, though," Flandry prompted, "from time to time when space explorers got together, as it might be in a tavern, you'd swap yarns?"

  "Aye, aye. What else? 'Cept when we was told to keep our hatches dogged about where we'd been. Not easy, foreseer, believe you me 'tis not, when you could outbrag the crew of 'em save 'tis a Naval secret."

  "You must have heard a lot about the Betelgeuse region, regardless."

  Lannawar raised his tankard. Thereby he missed noticing Tachwyr's frown. But he did break the thread, and the officer caught the raveled end deftly.

  "Are you really interested in anecdotes, Ensign? I fear that our good Yqan has nothing else to give you."

  "Well, yes, Mei, I am interested in anything about the Betelgeuse sector," Flandry said. "After all, it borders on our Empire. I've already served there, on Starkad, and I daresay I will again. So I'd be grateful for whatever you care to tell me." Lannawar came up for air. "If you yourself, Yqan, were never there, perhaps you know someone who was. I ask for no secrets, of course, only stories."

  "Khr-r-r-." Lannawar wiped foam off his chin. "Not many about. Not many what have fared yonderways. They're either back in space, or they've died. Was old Ralgo Tamuar, my barracks friend in training days. He was there aplenty. How he could lie! But he retired to one of the colonies, let me see now, which one?"

  "Yqan Belgis." Tachwyr spoke quietly, with no special inflection, but Lannawar stiffened. "I think best we leave this subject. The Starkadian situation is an unfortunate one. We are trying to be friends with our guest, and I hope we are succeeding, but to dwell on the dispute makes a needless obstacle." To Flandry, with sardonicism: "I trust the ensign agrees?"

  "As you wish," the Terran mumbled.

  Damn, damn, and damn to the power of hell! He'd been on a scent. He could swear he'd been. He felt nauseated with frustration.

  Some draughts of ale soothed him. He'd never been idiot enough to imagine himself making any spectacular discoveries or pulling off any dazzling coups on this junket. (Well, certain daydreams, but you couldn't really count that.) What he had obtained now was—a hint which tended to confirm that the early Merseian expeditions to Starkad had found a big and strange thing. As a result, secrecy had come down like a candlesnuffer. Officers and crews who knew, or might suspect, the truth were snatched from sight. Murdered? No, surely not. The Merseians were not the antlike monsters which Terran propaganda depicted. They'd never have come as far as this, or be as dangerous as they were, had that been the case. To shut a spacefarer's mouth, you reassigned him or retired him to an exile which might well be comfortable and which he himself might never realize was an exile.

  Even for the post of Starkadian commandant, Brechdan had been careful to pick an officer who knew nothing beforehand about his post, and could not since have been told the hidden truth. Why . . . aside from those exploratory personnel who no longer counted, perhaps only half a dozen beings in the universe knew!

  Obviously Tachwyr didn't. He and his fellows had simply been ordered to keep Flandry off certain topics.

  The Terran believed they were honest, most of them, in their friendliness toward him and their
expressed wish that today's discord could be resolved. They were good chaps. He felt more akin to them than to many humans.

  In spite of which, they served the enemy, the real enemy. Brechdan Ironrede and his Grand Council, who had put something monstrous in motion. Wind and surfbeat sounded all at once like the noise of an oncoming machine.

  I haven't found anything Abrams doesn't already suspect, Flandry thought. But I have got for him a bit more proof. God! Four days to go before I can get back and give it to him.

  His mouth still felt dry. "How about another round?" he said.

  "We're going for a ride," Abrams said.

  "Sir?" Flandry blinked.

  "Little pleasure trip. Don't you think I deserve one too? A run to Gethwyd Forest, say, that's an unrestricted area."

  Flandry looked past his boss's burly form, out the window to the compound. A garden robot whickered among the roses, struggling to maintain the microecology they required. A secretary on the diplomatic staff stood outside one of the residence bubbles, flirting boredly with the assistant naval attaché's wife. Beyond them, Ardaig's modern towers shouldered brutally skyward. The afternoon was hot and quiet.

  "Uh . . . sir—" Flandry hesitated.

  "When you 'sir' me in private these days, you want something," Abrams said. "Carry on."

  "Well, uh, could we invite Donna d'Io?" Beneath those crow's-footed eyes, Flandry felt himself blush. He tried to control it, which made matters worse. "She, uh, must be rather lonesome when his Lordship and aides are out of town."

  Abrams grinned. "What, I'm not decorative enough for you? Sorry. It wouldn't look right. Let's go."

  Flandry stared at him. He knew the man by now. At least, he could spot when something unadmitted lurked under the skin. His spine tingled. Having reported on his trip, he'd expected a return to desk work, dullness occasionally relieved after dark. But action must be starting at last. However much he had grumbled, however sarcastic he had waxed about the glamorous life in romantic alien capitals, he wasn't sure he liked the change.