Ensign Flandry Read online

  There was a buzz in the air as the castle stirred to wakefulness, a clatter, a bugle call, a hail and a bit of song. The wind smelled of woodsmoke. From this terrace the River Oiss was not visible, but its cataracts rang loud. Hard to imagine how, a bare two hundred kilometers west, that stream began to flow through lands which had become one huge city, from foothills to the Wilwidh Ocean. Or, for that matter, hard to picture those towns, mines, factories, ranches which covered the plains east of the Hun range.

  Yet they were his too—no, not his; the Vach Ynvory’s, himself no more than the Hand for a few decades before he gave back this flesh to the soil and this mind to the God. Dhangodhan they had preserved little changed, because here was the country from which they sprang, long ago. But their real work today was in Ardaig and Tridaig, the capitals, where Brechdan presided over the Grand Council. And beyond this planet, beyond Korych itself, out to the stars.

  Brechdan drew a deep breath. The sense of power coursed in his veins. But that was a familiar wine; today he awaited a joy more gentle.

  It did not show upon him. He was too long schooled in chieftainship. Big, austere in a black robe, brow seamed with an old battle scar which he disdained to have biosculped away, he turned to the world only the face of Brechdan Ironrede, who stood second to none but the Roidhun.

  A footfall sounded. Brechdan turned. Chwioch, his bailiff, approached, in red tunic and green trousers and modishly highcollared cape. He wasn’t called “the Dandy” for nothing. But he was loyal and able and an Ynvory born. Brechdan exchanged kin-salutes, right hand to left shoulder.

  “Word from Shwylt Shipsbane, Protector,” Chwioch reported. “His business in the Gwelloch will not detain him after all and he will come here this afternoon as you desired.”

  “Good.” Brechdan was, in fact, elated. Shwylt’s counsel would be most helpful, balancing Lifrith’s impatience and Priadwyr’s over-reliance on computer technology. Though they were fine males, each in his own way, those three Hands of their respective Vachs. Brechdan depended on them for ideas as much as for the support they gave to help him control the Council. He would need them more and more in the next few years, as events on Starkad were maneuvered toward their climax.

  A thunderclap cut the sky. Looking up, Brechdan saw a flitter descend with reckless haste. Scalloped fins identified it as Ynvory common-property. “Your son, Protector!” Chwioch cried with jubilation.

  “No doubt.” Brechdan must not unbend, not even when Elwych returned after three years.

  “Ah … shall I cancel your morning audience, Protector?”

  “Certainly not,” Brechdan said. “Our client folk have their right to be heard. I am too much absent from them.”

  But we can have an hour for our own.

  “I shall meet Heir Elwych and tell him where you are, Protector.” Chwioch hurried off.

  Brechdan waited. The sun began to warm him through his robe. He wished Elwych’s mother were still alive. The wives remaining to him were good females, of course, thrifty, trustworthy, cultivated, as females should be. But Nodhia had been—well, yes, he might as well use a Terran concept—she had been fun. Elwych was Brechdan’s dearest child, not because he was the oldest now when two others lay dead on remote planets, but because he was Nodhia’s. May the earth lie light upon her.

  The gardener’s shears clattered to the flagstones. “Heir! Welcome home!” It was not ceremonial for the old fellow to kneel and embrace the newcomer’s tail, but Brechdan didn’t feel that any reproof was called for.

  Elwych the Swift strode toward his father in the black and silver of the Navy. A captain’s dragon was sewn to his sleeve, the banners of Dhangodhan flamed over his head. He stopped four paces off and gave a service salute. “Greeting, Protector.”

  “Greeting, swordarm.” Brechdan wanted to hug that body to him. Their eyes met. The youngster winked and grinned. And that was nigh as good.

  “Are the kindred well?” Elwych asked: superfluously, as he had called from the inner moon the moment his ship arrived for furlough.

  “Indeed,” Brechdan said.

  They might then have gone to the gynaeceum for family reunion. But the guard watched. Hand and Heir could set him an example by talking first of things which concerned the race. They need not be too solemn, however.

  “Had you a good trip home?” Brechdan inquired.

  “Not exactly,” Elwych replied. “Our main fire-control computer developed some kind of bellyache. I thought best we put in at Vorida for repairs. The interimperial situation, you know; it just might have exploded, and then a Terran unit just might have chanced near us.”

  “Vorida? I don’t recall—”

  “No reason why you should. Too hooting many planets in the universe. A rogue in the Betelguese sector. We keep a base—What’s wrong?”

  Elwych alone noticed the signs of his father being taken aback. “Nothing,” Brechdan said. “I assume the Terrans don’t know about this orb.”

  Elwych laughed. “How could they?”

  How, in truth? There are so many rogues, they are so little and dark, space is so vast.

  Consider: To an approximation, the size of bodies which condensed out of the primordial gas is inversely proportional to the frequency of their occurrence. At one end of the scale, hydrogen atoms fill the galaxy, about one per cubic centimeter. At the other end, you can count the monstrous O-type suns by yourself. (You may extend the scale in both directions, from quanta to quasars; but no matter.) There are about ten times as many M-type red dwarfs as there are G-type stars like Korych or Sol. Your spaceship is a thousand times more likely to be struck by a one-gram pebble than by a one-kilogram rock. And so, sunless planets are more common than suns. They usually travel in clusters; nevertheless they are for most practical purposes unobservable before you are nearly on top of them. They pose no special hazard—whatever their number, the odds against one of them passing through any particular point in space are literally astronomical—and those whose paths are known can make useful harbors.

  Brechdan felt he must correct an incomplete answer. “The instantaneous vibrations of a ship under hyperdrive are detectable within a light-year,” he said. “A Terran or Betelgeusean could happen that close to your Vorida.”

  Elwych flushed. “And supposing one of our ships happened to be in the vicinity, what would detection prove except that there was another ship?”

  He had been given the wristslap of being told what any cub knew; he had responded with the slap of telling what any cub should be able to reason out for himself. Brechdan could not but smile. Elwych responded. A blow can also be an act of love.

  “I capitulate,” Brechdan said. “Tell me somewhat of your tour of duty. We got far too few letters, especially in the last months.”

  “Where I was then, writing was a little difficult,” Elwych said. “I can tell you now, though. Saxo V.”

  “Starkad?” Brechdan exclaimed. “You, a line officer?”

  “Was this way. My ship was making a courtesy call on the Betelgeuseans—or showing them the flag, whichever way they chose to take it—when a courier from Fodaich Runei arrived. Somehow the Terrans had learned about a submarine base he was having built off an archipelago. The whole thing was simple, primitive, so the seafolk could operate the units themselves, but it would have served to wreck landfolk commerce in that area. Nobody knows how the Terrans got the information, but Runei says they have a fiendishly good Intelligence chief. At any rate, they gave some landfolk chemical depth bombs and told them where to sail and drop them. And by evil luck, the explosions killed several key technicians of ours who were supervising construction. Which threw everything into chaos. Our mission there is scandalously short-handed. Runei sent to Betelgeuse as well as Merseia, in the hope of finding someone like us who could substitute until proper replacements arrived. So I put my engineers in a civilian boat. And since that immobilized our ship as a fighting unit, I must go
too.”

  Brechdan nodded. An Ynvory did not send personnel into danger and himself stay behind without higher duties.

  He knew about the disaster already, of course. Best not tell Elwych that. Time was unripe for the galaxy to know how serious an interest Merseia had in Starkad. His son was discreet. But what he did not know, he could not tell if the Terrans caught and hypnoprobed him.

  “You must have had an adventurous time,” Brechdan said.

  “Well … yes. Occasional sport. And an interesting planet.” The anger still in Elwych flared: “I tell you, though, our people are being betrayed.”

  “How?”

  “Not enough of them. Not enough equipment. Not a single armed spaceship. Why don’t we support them properly?”

  “Then the Terrans will support their mission properly,” Brechdan said.

  Elwych gazed long at his father. The waterfall noise seemed to louder behind Dhangodhan’s ramparts. “Are we going to make a real fight for Starkad?” he murmured. “Or do we scuttle away?”

  The scar throbbed on Brechdan’s forehead. “Who serve the Roidhun do not scuttle. But they may strike bargains, when such appears good for the race.”

  “So.” Elwych stared past him, across the valley mists. Scorn freighted his voice. “I see. The whole operation is a bargaining counter, to win something from Terra. Runei told me they’ll send a negotiator here.”

  “Yes, he is expected soon.” Because the matter was great, touching as it did on honor, Brechdan allowed himself to grasp the shoulders of his son. Their eyes met. “Elwych,” Brechdan said gently, “you are young and perhaps do not understand. But you must. Service to the race calls for more than courage, more even than intelligence. It calls for wisdom.

  “Because we Merseians have such instincts that most of us actively enjoy combat, we tend to look on combat as an end in itself. And such is not true. That way lies destruction. Combat is a means to an end—the hegemony of our race. And that in turn is but a means to the highest end of all-absolute freedom for our race, to make of the galaxy what they will.

  “But we cannot merely fight for our goal. We must work. We must have patience. You will not see us masters of the galaxy. It is too big. We may need a million years. On that time scale, individual pride is a small sacrifice to offer, when it happens that compromise or retreat serves us best.”

  Elwych swallowed. “Retreat from Terra?”

  “I trust not. Terra is the immediate obstacle. The duty of your generation is to remove it.”

  “I don’t understand,” Elwych protested. “What is the Terran Empire? A clot of stars. An old, sated, corrupt people who want nothing except to keep what their fathers won for them. Why pay them any heed whatsoever? Why not expand away from them—around them—until they’re engulfed?”

  “Precisely because Terra’s objective is the preservation of the status quo,” Brechdan said. “You are forgetting the political theory that was supposed to be part of your training. Terra cannot permit us to become more powerful than she. Therefore she is bound to resist our every attempt to grow. And do not underestimate her. That race still bears the chromosomes of conquerors. There are still brave men in the Empire, devoted men, shrewd men … with the experience of a history longer than ours to guide them. If they see doom before them, they’ll fight like demons. So, until we have sapped their strength, we move carefully. Do you comprehend?”

  “Yes, my father,” Elwych yielded. “I hope so.”

  Brechdan eased. They had been serious for as long as their roles demanded. “Come.” His face cracked in another smile; he took his son’s arm. “Let us go greet your kin.”

  They walked down corridors hung with the shields of their ancestors and the trophies of hunts on more than one planet. A gravshaft lifted them to the gynaeceum level.

  The whole tribe waited, Elwych’s stepmothers, sisters and their husbands and cubs, younger brothers. Everything dissolved in shouts, laughter, pounding of backs, twining of tails, music from a record player and a ringdance over the floor.

  One cry interrupted. Brechdan bent above the cradle of his newest grandcub. I should speak about marriage to Elwych, he thought. High time he begot an Heir’s Heir. The small being who lay on the furs wrapped a fist around the gnarled finger that stroked him. Brechdan Ironrede melted within himself. “You shall have stars for toys,” he crooned. “Wudda, wudda, wudda.”

  4

  Ensign Dominic Flandry, Imperial Naval Flight Corps, did not know whether he was alive through luck or management. At the age of nineteen, with the encoding molecules hardly settled down on your commission, it was natural to think the latter. But had a single one of the factors he had used to save himself been absent—He didn’t care to dwell on that.

  Besides, his troubles were far from over. As a merchant ship belonging to the Sisterhood of Kursoviki, the Archer had been given a radio by the helpful Terrans. But it was crap-out; some thumblewit had exercised some Iron Age notion of maintenance. Dragoika had agreed to put back for her home. But with a foul wind, they’d be days at sea in this damned wallowing bathtub before they were even likely to speak a boat with a transmitter in working order. That wasn’t fatal per se. Flandry could shovel local rations through the chowlock of his helmet; Starkadian biochemistry was sufficiently like Terran that most foods wouldn’t poison him, and he carried vitamin supplements. The taste, though, my God, the taste!

  Most ominous was the fact that he had been shot down, and at no large distance from here. Perhaps the Seatrolls, and Merseians, would let this Tigery craft alone. If they weren’t yet ready to show their hand, they probably would. However, his misfortune indicated their preparations were more or less complete. When he chanced to pass above their latest kettle of mischief, they’d felt so confident they opened fire.

  “And then the Outside Folk attacked you?” Ferok prodded. His voice came as a purr through whistle of wind, rush and smack of waves, creak of rigging, all intensified and distorted by the thick air.

  “Yes,” Flandry said. He groped for words. They’d given him an electronic cram in the language and customs of Kursovikian civilization while the transport bore him from Terra. But some things are hard to explain in pre-industrial terms. “A type of vessel which can both submerge and fly rose from the water. Its radio shout drowned my call and its firebeams wrecked my craft before mine could pierce its thicker armor. I barely escaped my hull as it sank, and kept submerged until the enemy went away. Then I flew off in search of help. The small engine which lifted me was nigh exhausted when I came upon your ship.”

  Truly his gravity impeller wouldn’t lug him much further until the capacitors were recharged. He didn’t plan to use it again. What power remained in the pack on his shoulders must be saved to operate the pump and reduction valve in the vitryl globe which sealed off his head. A man couldn’t breathe Starkadian sea-level air and survive. Such an oxygen concentration would burn out his lungs faster than nitrogen narcosis and carbon dioxide acidosis could kill him.

  He remembered how Lieutenant Danielson had gigged him for leaving off the helmet. “Ensign, I don’t give a ball of fertilizer how uncomfortable the thing is, when you might be enjoying your nice Terra-conditioned cockpit. Nor do I weep at the invasion of privacy involved in taping your every action in flight. The purpose is to make sure that pups like you, who know so much more than a thousand years of astronautics could possibly teach them, obey regulations. The next offense will earn you thirty seconds of nerve-lash. Dismissed.”

  So you saved my life, Flandry grumbled. You’re still a snot-nosed bastard.

  Nobody was to blame for his absent blaster. It was torn from the holster in those wild seconds of scrambling clear. He had kept the regulation knife and pouchful of oddments. He had boots and gray coverall, sadly stained and in no case to be compared with the glamorous dress uniform. And that was just about the lot.

  Ferok lowered the plumy thermosensor tendrils abo
ve his eyes: a frown. “If the vaz-Siravo search what’s left of your flier, down below, and don’t find your body, they may guess what you did and come looking for you,” he said.

  “Yes,” Flandry agreed, “they may.”

  He braced himself against pitch and roll and looked outward—tall, the lankiness of adolescence still with him; brown hair, gray eyes, a rather long and regular face which Saxo had burned dark. Before him danced and shimmered a greenish ocean, sun-flecks and whitecaps on waves that marched faster, in Starkadian gravity, than on Terra. The sky was pale blue. Clouds banked gigantic on the horizon, but in a dense atmosphere they did not portend storm. A winged thing cruised, a sea animal broached and dove again. At its distance, Saxo was only a third as broad as Sol is to Terra and gave half the illumination. The adaptable human vision perceived this as normal, but the sun was merciless white, so brilliant that one dared not look anywhere near. The short day stood at late afternoon, and the temperature, never very high in these middle northern latitudes, was dropping. Flandry shivered.

  Ferok made a contrast to him. The land Starkadian, Tigery, Toborko, or whatever you wanted to call him, was built not unlike a short man with disproportionately long legs. His hands were four-fingered, his feet large and clawed, he flaunted a stubby tail. The head was less anthropoid, round, with flat face tapering to a narrow chin. The eyes were big, slanted, scarlet in the iris, beneath his fronded tendrils. The nose, what there was of it, had a single slit nostril. The mouth was wide and carnivore-toothed. The ears were likewise big, outer edges elaborated till they almost resembled bat wings. Sleek fur covered his skin, black-striped orange that shaded into white at the throat.

  He wore only a beaded pouch, kept from flapping by thigh straps, and a curved sword scabbarded across his back. By profession he was the boatswain, a high rank for a male on a Kursovikian ship; as such, he was no doubt among Dragoika’s lovers. By nature he was impetuous, quarrelsome, and dog-loyal to his allegiances. Flandry liked him.