Rise of the Terran Empire Read online

  Thus the safety of this crew was a prime criterion—not to speak of Coya, Juanita, and the child unborn. Nevertheless, here sentient beings were dead, dying, mutilated, in mortal peril; and the horror would go on. To skulk in the deeps before slinking home had a foul taste.

  And—"We haven't accomplished such an everlovin' lot so far, have we?" Falkayn muttered. "Blundered into captivity and out again, getting a man killed in the process."

  "Do not feel guilty about that, Davy," Adzel counseled. "It was tragic, true, but Wyler was collaborating with the enemy."

  "The uselessness of it, though!" Knuckles stood white on the human's fists.

  "You both ought to discipline those consciences of yours," Chee said. "They squeam at you too much." Her carnivore instincts awakened, she bounded onto the console and stood white against blackness, stars, the distant firebursts where ships perished. "We can do active, not passive intelligence collection," she declared eagerly. "Why are we dithering? Let's make for Mirkheim."

  "Is there any point in our landing?" Adzel replied. They had talked about the rescue of Supermetals personnel stranded on the planet; but they could only take a few without overloading their life support system.

  "Probably not," Chee said. "However, that course will bring us near the thick of action. Who knows what might turn up? Come on!"

  Inward bound, they received a laser-borne message. That meant it was directed specifically at them; they had been detected. The code was Commonwealth. Falkayn knew this from having compared different signals they acquired. He could not read it, but the meaning was plain: Identify yourself or we attack.

  Muddlehead reeled off data analysis. The other craft was most likely a Continent-class destroyer. Her position, velocity, and acceleration were more definite. She could not draw near enough on this pass ever to show to the unaided eye as a black blade drawn over the Milky Way. But her weapons could span the gap. And both were too close to the dead sun to enter hyperdrive.

  "Evade," Falkayn ordered. He sent back a voice transmission in Anglic: "We are not your enemy, we happen to be here from Earth."

  A minute later, Muddlehead reported a missile launched toward him. He was not surprised. The men in yonder hull must be dazed with weariness and strangled terror, stress had worn them down till they were nothing but duty machines, and if he failed to reply in code then he must be a Baburite attempting a ruse.

  At such a distance, a ray would be too attenuated to do harm. A ship as small as his could not carry a forcefield generator sufficiently strong to ward off a hard-driven warhead. Nor, despite her low mass, should she have the potential of running from a killer that homed on her engine output.

  But Muddlin' Through had power for twice her size and spent none of it on energy screens. The heavens wheeled crazily around Falkayn's head as her computer sent her through an arc that would have torn the guts out of an ordinary vessel. Sliding clear of the torpedo, she opened fire on it. It blew apart in a rain of flames and incandescent gobbets. She swung about again and resumed her original course. The Terrestrial ship receded without making a second assault.

  Briefly before Falkayn stood the idea of a man aboard that destroyer. He came from—where?—Japan, say, and always in him dwelt a memory of those beautiful islands, old high-curved roofs, cherry trees in bloom under the pure steeps of Fuji, a garden where gardener and bonsai worked together through a lifetime's love, temple bells cool at evening when he walked forth with a certain girl at his side. This day he sat webbed in place before the idiot faces of instruments while engines droned through his bones; thirst thickened his tongue, he had sweated too much in his tension, his garments stank, salt stung his eyes and lay bitter on his lips. Hour crept by hour, the waiting, the waiting, the waiting, until reality shrank to this and home was a half-forgotten fever dream: then alarms yammered, creatures that he had never seen even in his nightmares were somewhere on the far side of a bulkhead, or so the instruments said, and he ordered the launch parameters computed for a missile, sent it forth, sat waiting once more to know if he had slain or they would slay him, hoped wildly that his death would be quick and clean, not a shrieking with his skin seared off and his eyeballs melted, and perhaps through him there flitted a wondering whether those monsters he fired at also remembered a beautiful home.

  Where had Sheldon Wyler come from?

  Falkayn spoke harshly at the intercom pickup: "We seem to've gone free this time."

  The incident would have sent most crews scuttling immediately toward safety. Instead, it hatched a goblin of an idea in Chee. Adzel heard her out, pondered, and agreed the possible gain was worth the hazard. Falkayn argued for a while, then assented, the part of him that was Coya's husband outvoted by a part he had imagined lay buried with his youth.

  Not that they had any chance to pull off a swift, gleeful exploit. Time drained away while the ship moved cautiously about, detectors straining, Muddlehead sifting and discarding. Falkayn puffed on his pipe till his raw tongue could not taste the food he made himself swallow. Chee worked on a statuette, attacking the clay as if it threatened her life. Adzel meditated and slept.

  Endlessness finally had an end. "A Solar vessel has demolished a Baburite," the computer announced, and recited coordinates.

  Falkayn jerked out of half a doze where he sat. "Are you sure?" He sprang to his feet.

  "The characteristic flash of a detonation has been followed by a cessation of neutrino emission from one of two sources. The other source is departing, and would be unable to return at any available acceleration for a period of more than a standard day."

  "Not that she'll want to—"

  "We can lie alongside the wreck in a period I calculate to be three-point-seven hours plus or minus approximately forty minutes."

  It thrilled in Falkayn. "And I suppose we've a fifty-fifty chance she'll be Baburite."

  "No, that is positive. I have conducted statistical studies of emission patterns from thermonuclear reactors in both fleets. This ship that was defeated showed a distinctly Baburite spectrum."

  Falkayn nodded. Fusion engines built to operate under subjovian conditions would not radiate quite like those which worked for oxygen breathers. He'd been aware of that, but had not been aware enough data would come in to make the mathematics reliable. "Bully for you, Muddlehead," he said. "You keep surprising me, the amount of initiative you show."

  "I have also invented three new wild card games," the computer told him . . . hopefully?

  "Never mind," Chee snapped. "You make for that cockering wreck!"

  Drive pulses intensified. "We fared more happily the first time we cruised this part of space," Adzel mused. "But then, we were younger, eighteen Earth-years ago." Was he being tactful? The span was not so great a part of his life expectancy as it was of a human's or a Cynthian's.

  "We were proud," Falkayn said. "Our discovery, that was going to give a dozen races the chance they needed. Now—" His voice died away.

  Adzel laid a hand on his shoulder. He must consciously stiffen himself against the gee-field to support such a weight. "Feel no blame that this is being fought over, Davy," the Wodenite urged. "What we gave was good. It may be yet again."

  "We knew the secret couldn't last," Chee added. "It was sheer luck that the first person to repeat our reasoning was Old Nick, and we could talk him into keeping quiet. Sooner or later, a nasty scramble was bound to happen."

  "Sure, sure," Falkayn answered. "But war—I'd thought civilization had evolved beyond war."

  "The Shenna hadn't, the Baburites haven't," Chee snorted. "You needn't accuse the Technic societies because outsiders have bad manners. That notion of symmetrical sinfulness is a strange tendency in your species."

  "Somehow I can't see the cases as being parallel," Falkayn argued. "Damnation, it made a contorted kind of sense for the Shenna to plot an assault on us. But the Baburites—why should they arm as they did, never foreseeing a Mirkheim to fight over? And why should they ever fight, anyway? If they could buy the tools
and technology they needed to build the kind of navy they have, why, they could buy all the supermetals they'd require for a fraction of the cost. I have this gnawing notion that something in us, in Technic culture, is responsible."

  "Wyler might have given us a hint or three if he'd lived. I wish you'd stop moping about him, Davy. He wasn't a nice man."

  "Who can afford to be, these days? . . . Oh, to hell with this." Falkayn flung himself back into his chair.

  "Agreed. To hell by express. Me, I'm going to do some more modeling." Chee left the bridge.

  "Perhaps I, at least, could play cards with you, Muddlehead, if you want diversion," Adzel offered. "We have little else to occupy us until we arrive."

  Except sit and wish nothing we can't handle will home on us, Falkayn thought.

  "—Fear and trembling Hope,

  Silence and Foresight; Death the Skeleton

  And Time the Shadow . . . ."

  Spacesuited, he gave himself a touch of impeller thrust and drifted across a hundred meters of void between his own craft and the ruin.

  Stars and stillness enfolded him. Here he saw no trace of the battle; all that agony was lost in the hollow reaches of space, save for a twisted shape that tumbled before him among lesser metal shards. He dared not think how many lives were gone—surely Baburites rejoiced to see their sun, even as he did his—but bent his attention wholly, dryly to the task ahead.

  The ship had been more or less cruiser size. A missile had gotten past her defenses and shattered her. Without a surrounding atmosphere, concussion had been insufficient to blow her entirely to fragments. Survivors, if any, had found an undamaged lifeboat, in a section built to break away upon impact, and fled. The largest remnant of the hull was bigger than Muddlin' Through and ought to contain plenty of apparatus, not too badly damaged for study. A gauge on his wrist told him that the level of radioactivity was tolerable.

  He felt and heard the thud as his bootsoles touched plates and gripped fast. Chee poised nearby; Adzel was a gigantic silhouette farther off against heaven. "You two stay put while I take a look around," he directed them, and plodded off. It felt a little like walking upside down, for he was weightless and the dead vessel was slowly spinning. Constellations streamed by, blacknesses flickered around the shapes of turrets and housings. His breath sounded loud in his ears.

  When he reached an edge where the hull had been torn apart, he picked his way cautiously through a tangle of projecting, knotted girders. A body was caught between two of them. He stood for a minute gazing at it by the light of his flashlamp. Undiffused in airlessness, a wan puddle of luminance draped itself over a form that was too alien to seem hideous, as human corpses usually did after a violent death; the Baburite looked pitifully small and frail. I'm wasting time, which I still have though he no longer does, Falkayn realized, and went onward, around the verge, into the cavity of the derelict.

  Star-gleam and his flash picked out surrealistically intricate masses half submerged in darkness. A bleak pleasure jumped in him. Good luck for us! This seems to've been the main drive room. Which means control units, too, if their craft are laid out along roughly the same lines as ours.

  It could be the fulfillment of the hope which had led to his and his companions' search. So little was known about the race which built the invading armada. Who could tell what clues might lie in their engineering?

  Would the Commonwealth admiral get the same thought, and order a salvage operation for intelligence purposes? Probably not. His fleet was too hard pressed. Besides, its entire management bespoke idiocy—well, be charitable and say ignorance—at the highest levels of government.

  And assuming that relics nevertheless did get back to Earth, the government would scarcely share them with van Rijn. Falkayn was not simply being loyal to his patron; he feared that the old man was the last competent thinker left in the Solar System. Van Rijn might be able to make something of a bit of evidence that was meaningless to everybody else.

  Not that we can do any serious work here, Falkayn knew. We haven't the facilities. Also, it's too bloody dangerous to linger very long. But we can spend a few hours investigating, and we can carry off selected items for closer examination. Maybe we'll make a marginally useful discovery. Maybe.

  Move! He crept toward the nearest of the forms which towered before him.

  IX

  The evening before he left, Bayard Story invited Nicholas van Rijn to join him for dinner. The Council of the League had dissolved in dissonance, and the delegates must now see to their own affairs as best they could.

  The Saturn Room of the Hotel Universe was nearly full, though thanks to widely spaced tables and discreet lighting it did not seem so. Perhaps, when rumors of war hissed everywhere about them, friends and lovers were seizing whatever enjoyment they might while the chance lasted; or perhaps not. The Solar System had been without direct experience of armed conflict for so long that it was hard to guess how anybody would behave. Couples held each other close while they moved about on the dance floor. Was there really a wistful note in the music of the live orchestra? Overhead lifted the vast half-circles of the rings, tinted more subtly than rainbows in a violet sky where four moons were presently visible. Sparks of light flickered in the streaming arcs and meteors clove the heavens. Where a tiny sun was setting, dimmed by thick air, clouds lay tawny and rosy.

  "The place is more suitable for romance than for a pair of tired businessmen," Story remarked with a slight smile.

  "Well, any notion we can agree is plenty romantic," grunted van Rijn from the depths of the menu. His free hand brought to his mouth alternate slurps of akvavit and gulps of beer. Story sipped a champagne and rum. "Let me see—dood en ondergang, please to let me see, this place is dim like a bureaucrat's brain!—I begin with a dozen Limfjord oysters, Limfjord, mind you, waiter, the chilled crab legs and asparagus tips, and fifty grams of Strasbourg paté. Then while I eat my appetizer you can fill me a nice bowl of onion soup à la Ansa. You do not want to miss that, Story, it uses spices we maybe do not get any more if comes something as stupid as a war. For a wine with the soup—" He went on for several minutes.

  "Oh, bring me the tournedos on the regular dinner, medium rare," Story laughed. "And, all right, I will have the onion soup, since it's recommended."

  "You should pay better attention to what you eat, boy," van Rijn said.

  Story shrugged. "I don't make a god of my stomach."

  "You think I do, ha? No, by damn, I make my stomach work for me, like a slave it works. My palate, that is what I pay attention to. And what is wrong with that? Who is harmed? The very first miracle Our Lord did was turning water into wine, and a select vintage it was, too." Van Rijn shook his head; the ringlets swirled across his brocade jacket. "The troublemakers, they are those what are not contented with God's gifts of good food, drink, music, women, profit. No, they bring on misery because they must play at being God themselves, they will be our Saviors with a capital ass."

  Story grew grave. "Are you sure you're not the self-righteous one? What you were advocating at the Council could have, almost certainly would have gotten the League into war."

  Van Rijn's hedge of eyebrows twisted together in a scowl. "I think not. League and Commonwealth together would be too much for Babur. It would retreat."

  "Maybe—if the Commonwealth were willing to go along with putting Mirkheim under League administration. But you know the Home Companies would never agree to that. Commonwealth—government—trusteeship will mean that they dispose of the supermetals. It'll be their entry into space on a scale of operations grand enough to threaten the Seven and the independents with being driven to the wall."

  "So by keeping us deadlocked, you pest-bespattered Seven guaranteed the united League does nothing, does not even exist."

  "The League will stay neutral, you mean. Do you actually want an open, irrevocable breach in it? As is, the Seven keeping on reasonably good terms with Babur, whichever side wins, the League as a whole will have a voice. In
fact, when I'm back in my headquarters, I'm going to see if the Seven can lend their good offices toward a settlement." Story lifted a finger. "That's why I wanted to see you tonight, Freeman van Rijn. A last appeal. If you'd cooperate with us, and try to get the independents to join you—"

  "Cooperate?" Van Rijn took out his snuffbox and brought a pinch to his nose. "What would that amount to? Doing whatever you tell? (Hrrromp!)"

  "Well, of course we'd have to have a central strategy. It would involve an embargo, declared or undeclared, on trade with either side. We could plead hazard, to be diplomatic about it. Both would soon start hurting for materials, including military materials, and be more ready to accept League mediation."

  "Not the League's," van Rijn said. "Not the whole League's. How would the Home Companies fit in? They and the Commonwealth government is two sides of the same counterfeit coin, by damn. They been that way more and more for—how long?—ever since the Council of Hiawatha, I think."